Author: Paul O

After posting the amazing story, The Othering, we peppered P. R. O’Leary with our writing questions. There may be minor spoilers ahead for th tale so we recommend you read it first.

Q1. I love how this story isn’t a typical short story. We have three narrators in such a short space. How did you decide upon that and how difficult was it to manage?   

The initial idea was pulled from real cases of the Capgras delusion. I liked the idea of a simple opening where a wife wakes up and thinks her husband has been replaced by an imposter. I tend to figure out where a story is going while writing it, and from that opening, the concept of the three narrators emerged pretty quickly.

Structurally, each character having their own short section actually made it a lot easier to write! The first one sets up a premise. The second one sets up the hook. The third one resolves it all.

Q2. What the hell did the kid give the parents??

Ha! One joy of writing fiction is that you can make up whatever you want. The real unvarnished answer is that I have no idea what he gave them. Is there a recreational drug that exists in real life that might cause the same symptoms? Probably! That’s all I needed for the story to make sense to me. Hopefully that is enough for the audience as well!

Q3. One of the things that impressed me the most was the musicality of the story. It repeats itself and establishes a nice rhythm. Did you spend a lot of time thinking of this, or did it all come out naturally?   

That’s nice to hear! The half-truth is that the style of the story came about naturally. The real truth is that the published version is the result of many rounds of editing.

The concept of how the prose should feel was there in the first draft. It felt like the right way to tell the story, and I wrote it pretty quickly. That draft had all the core ideas: the first-person POV, the repeated motifs, the mirroring between sections, etc.

However, an idea and a way to tell it are just parts of a whole. There was a fair amount of adjustment done during editing to get to where the story is now. There may be writers who bang out perfect first drafts. I’m not one of them!

Q4. How much of your time do you spend writing short stories versus other projects?

Short stories were my go-to when I first started writing. They were a good way to hone the craft and, maybe more importantly, finish projects. I love it when a project is complete and out of my head!

Now my heart lies with the novel. Most of my writing time is spent working on longer fiction. However, ideas for stories continue to pop up. A writing session or two with a short story gives me a chance to have some fun with a weird idea, and finishing something, no matter how short, helps to keep the work spiritually fulfilling.

The Othering is one of those weird ideas, and I’m glad there are still places for shorts like this to get published.

Q5. What other works do you have on the go? Anything you’d like to promote?

I am currently seeking representation for my newest novel Crowds in Dark Rooms. It is a dark but humorous mystery about a film festival attendee who thinks that someone, or something, is causing people to disappear when the theater lights go down.

Otherwise, I have several short stories on the road to publication. You can find more info about me and my projects on my LinkTree.

https://linktr.ee/proleary

 

The village of despair lay in a fold of tree-shrouded hills. Its name shall not be spoken, neither shall its nationality be told. There are those among us whose curiosity knows no restraint; others who are magnetically drawn by the dreadful. One must tell the tale in manner calculated to protect the foolish from their follies or not tell it at all. Suffice to say that the village was placed far off the beaten track even of foot-walking tourists, and its brooding inhabitants did not speak English on those rare occasions when they spoke at all.

There were sixty houses in the village, one-third of them straggling alongside the cattle-track which served as its main road, the rest climbing the heights behind and lurking half-hidden in a welter of pines, firs and mountain ash. All these abodes were of timber, highly ornamented, and would have been considered picturesque had they not oozed an elusive but easily sensed aura of overwhelming sadness.

Quiet, slow-moving folk lived in this forgotten hamlet, passing each other silently in the course of their daily tasks, fix-faced, fix-eyed, unemotional in the manner of those long emptied of human passions. Spiritual wells run dry forever. Shadow-people almost without substance.

I found this place by veritable accident. A plane crashed amid pines close behind the ruined castle of the Giant Ghormandel. Flung headlong into flexible pine which caught me, waved me to and fro before it dropped me into a bed of ferns, I was the sole survivor.

The plane crackled and spat and flared furiously a little lower down the hill. Adjacent tree trunks exploded like cannon under pressure of boiling sap and resin. Ferns withered, turned brown and paperlike, became flames. Rabbits scuttled in all directions, weasels with them. Birds whirred away squawking. Smoke poured cloud-high. Blackened bodies posed roasting in the fuselage, and the pilot still in his cockpit sat with bowed and steaming head. It was terrible.

To tell the truth, the scene sickened me far more than did the narrowness of my own escape. That sudden, unwanted cremation amid the trees, with the castle ruins grinning like rotten teeth, and the dark, unfriendly green of the hills, the scowling skies all made a scene such as one carries for the remainder of one’s life. It was a picture of death, red and rampant.

There was nothing I could do to help anyone, nothing at all. The plane’s complement already was far beyond human assistance. Somewhat bruised and considerably shocked, but otherwise unharmed, I made my way down the hillside and found a tiny brook which I followed as it meandered through a thickly forested area that still sloped, though gradually. The atmosphere grew heavier, more morbid as I descended. By the time the village was near the air had become thick, oppressive and lay like a weight upon my mind. It created that unpleasant sensation of an impending headache that never manages to arrive.

A smell of wood-smoke came from the village although no chimney was visibly active. Not the pleasing, aromatic scent which greets one in wood-burning communities, but rather an acrid odour suggesting the combustion of rotting bark and dried fungi.

Four people saw me as I came by the end pair of houses. Two men, two women, all middle-aged. Their attire was well cared for in the matter of stitching and patching but the colours had long faded toward dark browns and greys. It was sartorial companionship for the colours of their souls, all browns and greys. The two men bore shepherds’ crooks; the women carried brass-bound wooden buckets. All four looked at me with the subdued surprise of those who have not registered a true emotion for countless years.

As I came up to them, the elder man said swiftly to the others, speaking in a language I could understand, ‘Something has gone wrong. Leave this to me.’ He took a step towards me, lifting his brows inquiringly.

I told him about the plane, pointing to the castle of the Giant Ghormandel and the pale, thin wisp of smoke creeping upward behind it. My speech was swift, rather incoherent, and made with complete disregard of grammatical rules of a language which was not my own. Nevertheless, he got the gist of it. Events must have tried me more than I’d realized, for immediately it was evident that he understood, I felt weak in the pit of my stomach and sat in the cattle-track to beat myself to the fall. The world commenced whirling as he bent to support me, stooping over me like a mighty ghost.

Later, it could not have been much later, I found myself in bed staring at a row of copper pots lined upon the mantelshelf, and a religious picture on the wall. The pots were dull but not dusty. The picture was faded, a little spotty. The window curtains had been darned but not dyed; they swayed in a slight draught, old and colourless. Even the wallpaper had been carefully stuck down where it tended to curl but was so aged that it should have been replaced years before. The general impression was not one of extreme poverty, but rather of tidiness which has been brought to its minimum in terms of bare necessity, a natural neatness which has been deprived of heart by causes unknown.

Presently the man to whom I had spoken came in. Let him be called Hansi because that was not his name. He came to my bed, blank-faced as a wooden image, and addressed me in tones devoid of vibrancy. It was like hearing the mechanical voice of an automaton.

‘You are feeling better?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, thank you            .’

‘That is good.’ He hesitated, went on. ‘Had you any friends or relations in that machine?’

‘None.’

If he was surprised he did not show it. His eyes turned toward me, turned away. He thought awhile.

‘We have sent a party to recover the bodies. The authorities will be notified as soon as possible.’

‘You could telephone them,’ I suggested.

‘There is no telephone. There is no car. There is nothing.’ He said it in a dull monotone.

‘Then how do you—?’

‘We walk. Did not the good God give us legs with which to walk? So we walk along eighteen miles of tracks and woodland trails and across two rope bridges to the nearest telephone. No vehicle can get here. The bodies will have to be carried out.’ His eyes came back again. ‘As you will have to be carried if you cannot walk.’

‘I can walk,’ I told him.

‘Eighteen miles?’ His eyebrows rose a little.

‘Well… well-‘ I hesitated.

‘It is a pity the hour is so late,’ he continued, staring at the window as if it framed something pertaining to his remark. ‘Night comes upon us very soon. If you had been here earlier we might have got you away before the fall of darkness.’ But now he shook his head slowly. ‘It is impossible. You must stay one night.’ He repeated it, making it significant. ‘One night.’

‘I don’t mind,’ I assured.

‘We do!’

I sat up, putting my legs out of bed and pressing my feet on the floor to feel the firmness of it. ‘Why?’

‘There are reasons,’ he evaded. Going to the window, he peered out. Then he closed the window, doing it with considerable care, making sure that it latched tightly and that the latch was firmly home. Finally he fastened the latch with a strong padlock. It was now impossible to open the casement, while its panes were far too small to permit escape after the glass had been removed. Patting the pocket in which he had put the key, he remarked, ‘That is that!’

After watching this performance I had a deep and frightening sense of imprisonment. It must have shown in my features, but he chose to ignore it.

Facing me, he asked, ‘Do you like music?’

‘Some,’ I admitted.

His lips thinned, drew back to expose white teeth, and he said with a sudden and surprising venom that shocked me, ‘I hate music! We all hate music!’

This contrast with his previous impassiveness lent a terrible emphasis to his words. It was an uncontrolled burst of passion from a source I’d mistakenly thought dried up. It had all the elements of the unexpected, unnerving the listener as if he had heard and seen a marble statue part its lips and curse loudly.

‘I hate music! We all hate music!!’

Without saying more, he went away.

#

Some ten or fifteen minutes afterward I decided that boredom served only to enhance hunger. The recent disaster still affected me, the thick, cloying atmosphere weighed heavily upon me. I needed something to eat and I yearned for company other than that of my own thoughts. Putting on shoes, I pulled open the only door and left the room.

Going slowly down an ornate but unpolished wooden staircase, I reached a small hall. A dull fire glowed at one end, gave off the acrid smell noticed earlier. Nearby, a crudely wrought table was covered with a grey cloth. The walls were panelled, without picture or ornament of any kind. A book case full of dusty, seldom-used tomes stood at one side.

There had been time only to survey all this when a woman appeared through an archway at the other end. She was forty or thereabouts, tall, slender and as sad-faced as any yet seen. Though her features remained set, a most peculiar expression lurked within her eyes as she looked at me, a sort of hunger, an intense yearning tempered and held in check by horror.

All she said was, ‘You wish for food?’ and her eyes tried to draw me to her while, at the same time, thrusting me away.

‘Yes, lady,’ I admitted, watching her and wondering what lay behind that peculiar gaze. Her desire for me was in no way embarrassing. Indeed, I felt within me that it was clean, decent, but pitiful because of its thwarting.

Without another word she turned, went in to the kitchen beyond the arch, came back with black bread, heather-honey and fresh milk. I sat at the table and enjoyed my meal as best I could despite that she spent the whole time standing near the fire and eating me with her eyes. She did not speak again until I had finished.

‘If you go outside you must be back before dark, well before dark.’

‘All right, lady.’ Anything to please her. Inwardly, I could conceive no prospect more dismal than that of wandering around this village after dark. It was dispiriting enough in broad daylight.

For some time, I don’t know how long since I did not possess a watch, I explored the hamlet, studied its houses, its people. The longer I looked at them the more depressed I felt. Their abodes were strangely devoid of joy. The folk were quite uncommunicative without being openly unsociable. None spoke to me, though several women looked with the same hungry horror displayed by the one in Hansi’s house. It was almost as if they desired something long forbidden and triply accursed, something of which I was the living witness, therefore to be both wanted and feared.

My own uneasiness grew toward twilight. It was the accumulative effect of all this unnaturalness plus the gradual realization that the village was lacking in certain respects. It had vacuums other than spiritual ones. Certain features normal to village life were missing; I could feel them missing without being able to decide what they were.

Not until dusk began to spread and I reached the door of Hansi’s house did it come to my mind that no truly domestic animals had been visible. The place was devoid of them. I had seen a small herd of cattle and a few mountain goats, but not one cat, not one dog.

A moment later it struck me with awful force that neither had I seen a child. That was what was wrong- not a child!

Indoors, the tall woman gave me supper, early though the hour. As before, she hung around pathetically wanting and not-wanting. Once she patted my shoulder as if to say. ” There! There’ then hurriedly whipped her hand away. My mind concocted a scary notion of her quandary; that to give comfort was to pass sentence of death. It frightened me. How foolish it is to frighten oneself.

Soon after total darkness Hansi came in, glanced at me, asked the woman, ‘Are the casements fastened? All of them?’

‘Yes, I have seen to them myself.’

It did not satisfy him. Methodically he went around trying the lot, upstairs and downstairs. The woman seemed to approve rather than resent this implied slur upon her capabilities. After testing each and every latch and lock Hansi departed without another word.

Selecting a couple of books from the case, I bore them up to my room, closed the door, examined the window. The latch had been so shaped as to fit into a hasp, and the padlock linking the two was far beyond my strength to force open. So far as could be told, all other windows were secured in similar manner.

The place was a prison. Or perhaps a madhouse. Did they secretly consider me insane? Could it be that they had not actually gone to the wrecked plane because they thought my story a lunatic’s fancy? Or, conversely, were they themselves not of sound mind? Had fate plunged me into some sort of national reservation for people who were unbalanced? If so, when – and how – was I going to escape?

#

Beyond my window ran a footpath edging the gloomy firs and pines that mounted to the top of a hill. The woods were thick, the path narrow and shadowy, but a rising moon gradually illuminated the lot until one could see clearly. It was there, right outside my window, that I saw what will remain in my worst dreams forever.

The books had amused me for three hours with a compost of outlandish stories and simply expressed folk-tales of such a style that evidently they were intended for juveniles. Tiring, I turned down the oil-lamp, had a last look out of the window before going to bed.

The two men were strolling along the path, one bearing a thick cudgel held ready on his shoulder, the other carrying a gun. Opposite my window they paused, looked into the trees. Their attitudes suggested expectancy, wariness and stubborn challenge. Nothing happened.

Continuing their patrol, they went three or four paces, stopped. One of them felt in his pocket, bent down and appeared to be fumbling around the region of his own boots. I had my cheek close against the cold glass as I strove to see what he was doing. A moment later I discovered that he was feeding a small rat which was sitting on its haunches and taking his offerings in paws shaped like tiny hands.

They walked on. The rat followed, gambolling behind them, its eyes gleaming fitfully in the moonlight and resembling little red beads. Just as the two men passed out of my sight several more rats emerged from the undergrowth and ran eagerly in the same direction.

Sneaking out of the door, I crossed a passage, entered the front room which was furnished but unoccupied. This room’s windows overlooked the cattle-truck which formed the main stem. In due time the two men returned to view, complete with cudgel and gun. They had the wary bearing of an armed patrol performing a regular and essential duty.

Eight rats, all small and crimson-eyed, followed very close upon their heels.

As they neared my vantage point a woman came out of the house right opposite, seated herself on its step and tossed titbits from a large bag on her lap. Rats swarmed around her, scuttling grey shapes that came from the shadows and darker places.

I could not hear their excited squeaking; the casement was too close-fitting for that. The woman reached out her hand and petted one or two and they responded by fawning upon her. If only the light had been stronger I am sure it would have revealed her formerly pale, wan face now glowing with love… love for the rats.

Daytime surliness, secret fear, a mixed desire and revulsion for the lonely stranger, night-time affection for rats what did all these things mean? It was too much for me. I had nothing in common with isolated mountain folk such as these. Tomorrow, at all costs, I must get away.

By this time the patrolling men had passed on and the woman was alone with her rodents. Returning to my own room, I had another look at the path, saw nothing other than a solitary rat which ran across as if anxious to join its fellows in the village. The moon was a little higher, its light a little stronger. Dark conifers posed file on file, a silent army awaiting the order to descend the hill.

I went to bed, lay there full of puzzled, apprehensive thoughts, and let me confess it – nervous, uneasy, too restless to sleep. As the night-hours crawled tediously on and the moonbeams strengthened, the air grew lighter, colder, less oppressive, more invigorating.

This peculiarity of the atmosphere waxed so greatly that it created a strange tenseness within me, an inexplicable feeling of expecting something grave and imminent. So powerful did this sensation become that eventually I found myself sitting up in bed, cold and jumpy, ears straining for they knew not what, eyes upon the brilliant window which at any moment might frame a face like none seen before in this or any other world.

That such pointless but wideawake anxiety was silly, I knew full well, yet I could not help it, could not control it. I strove to divert my mind by wondering whether that woman was still bestowing love upon her rats, and by listening for the passing footsteps of the patrol.

Then, as my eyes remained fixed upon the casement, something came through as easily as did the moonbeams. One moment there was the utter silence of a waiting world; the next, it was through the window and in the room with me.

It was nothing that I could see. It could only be heard and then not with the ears. Insidiously it penetrated the locked timber frame and tight panes of the casement, pierced the very walls of the house, passed through the bones of my skull and registered deep within my mind. A thin, reedy fluting which sounded sweet and low.

So soft and surreptitious was the sound that at first I mistook it for a figment of the imagination; but as I sat and stared at the window the music persisted and gradually swelled as if its source were creeping nearer, nearer.

Presently it was quite loud though still within my mind and completely unhearable with my ears. It waxed and waned, joyful and plaintive by turns, sobbing down the scale and chuckling up it, weeping a little and laughing a lot. An outlandish theme ran through its trills and flourishes as a cord runs through a string of pearls. There was a weird rhythm beating steadily within the tones and half-tones, a haunting off-beat, fascinating, mind-trapping and beckoning, continually beckoning.

Somehow I knew that it was for my mind alone, that others in the village would not hear what I could hear. It went on and on, calling me, summoning me, and its spasms of laughter drove away all fear until I wanted to laugh with it, carefree and joyously. So powerful was its attraction that it drew me from bed, towards the window where I stood and stared into the moonlight. There was nothing voluntary about that action. My bemused mind obeyed the urge without previous thought; my legs responded to my mind and bore me to the window got there with no remembrance of the going. I merely arrived.

The pines and firs still stood in close array. The path was clearly lit and completely empty. Not a soul was to be seen, yet the eerie music continued without let or pause and the whole world seemed to be waiting, waiting for some unguessable culmination.

My face was pressed close against the glass, almost trying to push through it and get me nearer, if only an inch nearer, to that glorified flood of notes. The lilt chimed and tinkled like fairy bells within my brain, and as it repeated again and again its quality of attraction grew progressively stronger. It was a case of familiarity breeding desire where, had I only known the truth, there would have been unutterable horror and a mighty fear.

At moments the tonal sequences suggested speech though I could hear no actual words. But words came with them into my mind from I knew not where, insinuated with wondrous cunning beyond my capacity to understand. It was as if certain ecstatic chords conjured parallel phrases, creating a dreadful dreampoetry which percolated through the night.

Oh come and tread the lazy leaves

And dance through scented heather,

Play hide and seek amid the sheaves,

Or vault the hills together.

Cast care away before the dawn;

With me for everlasting

Run free while mothers sit and mourn

A little rat…

I lost the run of words just then because a brief glimpse of colour showed between the standing trees while the music grew enormously both in volume and enticement. My whole attention remained riveted upon the trees until shortly a being stepped forth and posed full in the light of the moon.

Tall and terribly thin, he wore a bi-coloured jerkin of lurid yellow and red with a peaked and feathered cap to match. Even his up-pointed slippers were coloured, one yellow, one red. A slender flute was in his hands, one end to his mobile lips, the other aimed straight at my window. His long, supple fingers moved with marvellous dexterity as he subjected me to a musical stream of irresistible invitation.

His face I looked upon it and did not cease to look upon it all the time I tore at the casement’s latch, heaved upon its chain, struggled desperately to burst the lock asunder. I wanted to get out, how madly, insanely I wanted to get out, to run free beneath the moon, to dance and prance, to mope and mow, to gabble and gesticulate and vault the hills while mothers mourned.

Unknown to me, my own voice alternately moaned my mortification and shouted my rage at being thwarted while I lugged and tugged in crazy endeavour to tear the window wide open. My ears were incapable of hearing my own noises, or any others for that matter. I was concentrating tremendously and exclusively upon that magnetic tune coming from outside and the moonlit visage of him who was producing it. A pane of glass broke into a hundred shards and blood flowed on my hand, yet I saw nothing but the face, heard nothing but its song.

It was an idiot face with enormous laughing eyes. A drooling, drooping, loose-hung, imbecilic countenance in which the optics shone with clownish merriment. It was the face of my friend, my brother, my mother, my boon companion, my comrade of the night, my only joyful ally in this sullen hostile world. The face of him without whom I would be utterly alone, in ghastly solitude, for ever and ever, to the very end of time. I wanted him. Heavens, how hungrily I wanted him! Beating at the window, I screamed my desperate need for him.

There were feet moving below somewhere within the house, and heavy feet coming upstairs, hurriedly, responding to a sudden urgency. If my ears heard them they did not tell me. I stood in the full, cold glare of moonlight and hammered futilely at my prison bars and drank in that idiot face still uttering its piping call to come away and play.

Just as someone pushed open my bedroom door the flute-player made one swift and graceful step backwards into the trees. At the same moment there came from the side of the house to my left a tremendous crash like that of an ancient and overloaded blunderbuss. Leaves, twigs and bits of branches sprang away from the trees and showered over the yellow-red figure.

The music ceased at once. To me its ending was as awful as the loss of the sun, leaving a world swamped in darkness. Verily a light-o’-laughter had become extinguished and there was nothing around me but the grey-brown souls of the immeasurably sad.

I clawed and scrabbled at the casement in futile effort to bring back the magic notes, but while the torn leaves still were drifting the fluter receded farther into the shadows and was gone. Once, twice there was a gleam of colour, yellow and red, in the tree gaps higher up the hill. After that, no other sign. He had escaped to a haunt unknown; he had gone with his calling pipe and his sloppy face and his great grinning eyes.

Hansi came behind me, snatched me away from the window threw me on the bed. His big chest was heaving but his features were as though set in stone. Having reached its extreme my emotional pendulum was now on its back-swing, a revulsion was making itself felt. I offered no resistance to Hansi, made no protest, but lay on the bed and watched him while my mind incubated a terrible fear born of the narrowness of my escape.

Moving a heavy, wheel-back chair near to the window, Hansi sat himself in it, showed clearly that he was there for the remainder of the night. He did not say a word. His bearing was that of one whose only weapon against powers of darkness is an uncompromising stubbornness.

Increasing coldness persuaded me to pull the bedcovers over myself. I lay flat on my back, perspiring freely and shivering at the same time, and vaguely sensing the stickiness of partially congealed blood on one hand. Sounds from outside came clearly through the broken pane; a dull snapping of trodden twigs, stamping of boots, mutter of voices as hunters sought in vain for the body of the hunted.

Soon I went to sleep, exhausted with a surfeit of nervous strain. Dreams came to me, some muddled and inconsequential, one topical and horribly vivid. In that one I was blissfully running at the heels of a prancing imbecile, drinking in his never ending song and following him through dell and thicket, across moonlit glades and streams, climbing higher always higher until we reached Ghormandel’s shattered walls. And there he turned and looked at me, still piping. I was small, very small- and had a thin, hairless tail.

#

They rushed me away with the morning. I had breakfast in a hurry, set off with Hansi and a solemn, lantern-jawed man named Klaus. A few women stood at their doorways and watched me go, their eyes yearning and spurning precisely as they had done before. I felt that they regretted my departure and yet were glad, immensely glad. One waved to me and I waved back. No other responded. The sadness of the village deepened as we left, deepened to an awful sorrow too soul searing to forget.

One hour’s march, fifteen minutes’ rest; one hours’ march, fifteen minutes’ rest. At a steady pace of three miles an hour the trip was easy. By the fourth rest-period the giant’s castle had shrunk to no more than a faintly discernible excrescence upon a distant rise. I sat on a stone, watched the nearest trees and listened with my mind.

‘Hansi, who was it that came in the night?’

‘Forget him,’ he advised curtly.

I persisted, ‘Does he belong to the ruined castle?’

‘In a way.’ He got up, prepared to move on. ‘Forget him — it is best.’

We continued on our way. I noticed that neither man eyed the trees as I eyed them, nor listened as I listened. They progressed in stolid silence, following the path, looking neither to the right nor left. It seemed to be accepted that by day they were free from that which was to be feared by night.

Mid-afternoon, footsore but not tired, we arrived at a small country town. It may have been sleepy and backward, but by my standards it was full of vivacity and sophistication. One could not help but contrast its bustling liveliness with the dreary, anaemic place from which I had come.

Hansi had a long talk with the police who made several telephone calls, gave me a meal, filled up forms which Hansi signed. They issued me with a train-ticket. Hansi accompanied me to the station. There, I used half an hour’s wait to pester him again.

‘Who was it? Tell me!’

He gave in reluctantly, speaking like one forced to discuss a highly distasteful subject. ‘He is the son of his father and the son of his mother.’

‘Of course,’ I scoffed. ‘What else could he be?’

Ignoring me, he went on, ‘Long ago his mother used her evil arts to kill his father Ghormandel. From then on she ruled the roost by fire, bell, candle and incantation – until our reckless forefathers had had enough of her.’ He paused a moment, stared dully at the sky. ‘Whereupon they trapped her by trickery and burned her for the foul old witch she was.’

‘Oh!’ I felt a cold shiver on me.

‘And then they hunted her son, her only child, who was half. wizard, half-witch, but he escaped. Hiding in a place afar, he developed his dark talents and bided his time for vengeance.’

‘Go on,’ I urged as he showed signs of leaving it at that.

‘When he was ready, he tested his powers in a distant town. They worked perfectly. So he came back to us… and took away our children.’

‘What?’

‘He charmed them away,’ said Hansi, grim and bitter. ‘Every one but those able only to crawl and even those strove to squirm from us. From that day to this he has slunk around like a beast in the night, waiting, always waiting. Most of our women are afraid to have children. The few who dare have to send them to distant relatives until they reach adulthood or, alternatively, lock them in the kinderhaus between every dusk and dawn.’ He glanced at me. ‘Where I was locked for many years. Where you were locked last night.’

‘Only at night?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘There is no peril by day. Why, I do not know. But always he is ready by night, ready to take a child- and give us back another rat!’

‘You mean… he changes them?’

‘We cannot say for certain. We suspect it. We fear it.’ His big hand clenched into a knotted fist. A vein stood out on his forehead. ‘Children have gone, fix-eyed, with outreaching hands, like blind ones feeling their way-and rats have come back, tame, playful, wanting food and mother-love.’ His voice deepened, became harsh. ‘Some day we shall deal with him as our forefathers dealt with the witch who bore him. If the people of that distant town had killed him when he was in their hands—’

‘What town?’

He said, briefly but devastatingly, ‘Hamelin.’

Then the train came in.

#

At this date I often wonder whether the stones of the Giant Ghormandel’s castle still rot upon that fateful hill; whether far beneath them lies that accursed village in which it is dangerous to be born. I wonder, too, whether that long, lean shape in red and yellow yet roams light-footed beneath the moon, laughing and gibbering and piping its terrible invitation.

So far, I have had no desire to return and see for myself. The elements of dread are stronger than curiosity despite the fact that the passage of years has made it safe for me to go. It was anything but safe when I was there. Then, I had needed the watchful protection of the sad ones at a mere nine years of age.

We sat down and peppered Nathan after posting his Lovecraftian tale, Lillywhite End. We recommend you read the story first as there may be some spoilers ahead.

Q1. How did you come up with the idea for this story (and how much Lovecraft do you read)?

I read a ton of Lovecraft, and I think it shows here! I love the horror trope that sometimes things just… vanish… suddenly, our poor Nigel finds himself in a place that could almost be said to resemble Innsmouth, especially with the horrible footfalls Nigel hears getting closer and closer from the water!

Q2. This is going to sound twisted, but I love how hopeful this story is at the start and then everything is ripped away. It leaves us feeling deeply unsettled, which is so effective. Was that your aim with this?

Poor Nigel, after a difficult period in his life, is finally getting back to a stable place. He’s just starting to relax. Then, suddenly, everything he knows is gone and he’s thrust into this strange street, Lillywhite End. I find disorientation is a very frightening state, and by having this fall upon Nigel, I feel it made for a great tense situation with heightened drama as he realizes that everything he knows is gone.

Q3. For me reading this, it very much has mental health as a theme in the story. Did you have this in mind when writing it?

Like so many others, I’ve faced challenges with my own mental health. I’m very lucky to have a great support network and I’m doing well! I do enjoy that Nigel’s instability adds a question mark to his situation, without trying to take away any legitimacy. He’s not hallucinating or edging into a breakdown, and this is illustrated by Carmen’s inability to find him in such a wide-open space.

Q4. How much of your time do you spend writing short stories versus other projects?

As an ‘emerging writer’, I find that the short story market is a good place to break into publishing. I’ve always wanted to be a novelist, and I do have one finished and edited novel entitled Still Pond. I work on that intermittently, and hope to focus primarily on novel-length works in the future, but I do enjoy a good short story too! I’ll always have one or two on the go no matter what!

Q5. What other works do you have on the go? Anything you’d like to promote?

I do have an upcoming publication (“this year”, but not more specific) entitled The Hole Behind The Barn. It’s coming out through Black Hare Press as part of their Short Reads series! It’s a weird tale about a farmer who discovers a ‘hole’ which is how he refers to a portal of sorts, and the lengths he goes to in protecting his young son from it.

I also have Still Pond 95% ready to be queried to agents, and I hope you’ll all be able to read it soon! It’s mostly a folk horror story, set in an old mansion in a rural area that’s almost completely unsettled. There are creepy kids, strange energies, and a weird hallway to nowhere that’s in the cellar… sometimes. It’s going to be great!

 

Darkness chased the last light of day into the west as they came out of the cinema, laughing and smiling. The street outside was a murmur of happy people, couples walking hand in hand as Nigel and Carmen mixed into the crowd. The sound of people and the music in the air carried them along like a living whisper. It was the first time in a long time they’d been to the pictures, but Carmen had reasoned that it might let them relax and unwind for a couple of hours.

And it did. Nigel noticed that he’d lost himself in the film for a bit, and it had been relaxing. It had been good to sit and think about something else, to be in a crowd, laughing, transported. When the film ended, there was a pleasant murmur of conversation among the moviegoers, and Nigel realized he was, in fact, relaxed.

Across the street from the cinema there was a line of restaurants and bistros and bars, all open to the warm, early summer night. Their patios, forests of tall chairs grouped around circular tables, were full of people and bustling. The happy sounds of the patrons echoed into the street, different musics playing underneath the mirth and the burble of conversations. From the same places, the warm smell of various foods drifted out, carried on the lovely breeze.

 Carmen held his hand as they walked along. He looked over at her, smiling. “This was a good idea,” he said. “Thank you for suggesting it.”

“Did you like the movie?”

“Sure, but who cares?” he asked with a soft laugh. “It was just nice to get out. I really do feel a bit better.”

“Good,” she said, squeezing his hand and kissing him on the cheek. “You haven’t had the best month, so I’m glad we got your mind off things for a while.”

“Me too.”

She was right. It hadn’t been a good little while. A month, or so, where just nothing seemed to go right, according to plan. Stress building on stress, at work, at home, and then finally, he just had enough. He came home at noon one day, not due until close to five, and immediately called the doctor and made an appointment. Dr. Hernandez saw him the next day and recommended some time off and gave him a prescription. Walking with Carmen, he could feel the small, transparent orange bottle of pills in his overcoat pocket. Touching the plastic container made Nigel feel a little better.

They walked along the promenade and he could feel the breeze gently rolling off the lake. It was chilly, a soft reminder that spring was not completely gone. Summer loomed around the corner, but spring kept a tenuous grip. Carmen tugged her scarf, looped loosely around her neck, a little tighter.

“Do you want to go down by the water?” he asked.

“Sure. We’re not in any rush to go home, right?”

“Nope. The fresh air is helping, I think.”

Carmen tucked herself in closer to him. “If it’s helping, then we’ll walk as much as you want.”

It had started a while ago, really. The sickness. His office job was mundane, nothing to brag about, but it paid well enough and he was decently happy at work. Then there was a big corporate merger, way above Nigel’s pay grade, and all of a sudden, the office became hectic. People rushing around waving papers, frantically typing. All the water cooler chat, gone. Everyone buried in their work.

Just little things, at first. Nigel could have sworn, on multiple occasions, that he saw a cat in the office. A cat or something like it, anyway. Just out of the corner of his eye, always disappearing. Under a desk, into a side room. Whenever he would actually look to see it, it was gone. He chalked it up to stress and tried to relax a bit more on the weekends.

Then it started growing, spreading to other things. People who weren’t there calling his name. Mumbled words that weren’t actually being spoken, only heard. More stress. Then a colleague from a few desks over came to Nigel asking about a document. As he spoke, holding out the paper to Nigel, his shirt began to move. It was as if a snake was coiling its oily way around the man, constricting him. Nigel didn’t hear much of what he’d said, fixated on the squirming motions.

The elevator lights glowing red instead of white, and Nigel feeling an insane temperature change as if descending into a Dante-style interpretation of hell. The door opening into the lobby completely normal, and the others in the elevator car unnoticing.

He hadn’t told Carmen. He didn’t want to worry her. All he said was he was really feeling the stress ever since the merger.

It was worst at work, but it happened at home too, and outside in the world. The last straw, the one that sent him to Dr. Hernandez, was working steadily away and casually glancing downward to see his tie writhing and slashing around as if it were alive. His eyes opened wide at the sight, and even knowing that it wasn’t really there, he was terrified. He pushed himself back from the desk and turned off his computer. He undid the tie quickly and stuffed it into his briefcase. It had felt normal, thin silk, but even after it was in the case, he could hear faint thumps as if it were still moving and trying to get out.

The pills helped. They had a long name, a generic brand of something. These will help, Dr. Hernandez had told him. They’re good for hallucinations and paranoia. He also printed Nigel a referral for a therapist. He hadn’t done therapy, but the pills seemed to be working. After about a week, he noticed that the strange things he’d been seeing and hearing were still there, but easier to ignore. They had gradually faded, but he was much better at handling them. He’d been taking the unpronounceable pills for a month and things were finally starting to calm down.

They walked down to the boardwalk. More restaurants open to the night, more people. To the left, Dauphin Lake. Lac Dauphin, Carmen always corrected him. It was named by the French settlers here. In the dark it was a field of black with peaking and diving reflections of the lights on the water. At the water side of the boardwalk, cement posts supported rounded steel rails, and a ribbon of old-style streetlamps ran along the edge of the grassy strip, into the distance.

There was a green flash out over the lake. Nigel saw it, mostly in his peripheral vision, and turned to look. “Did you see that?” he asked Carmen.

“A flash,” she said. “Maybe some sheet lightning.”

Good, he thought. She saw it too. A moment later, another flash. Green again.

“Another one,” he said. He reached his hand farther into his pocket, picking up the pill bottle and rolling it in his fingers. They’re good for hallucinations and paranoia, he heard the memory of Dr. Hernandez say.

“That was a little weird,” Carmen said. They stopped, looking out over the lake.

“Did that look… green to you?”

“Green?” she asked hesitantly. “I don’t know. Maybe a little?”

“No, that was definitely green. Strange.”

They stood together looking out over Lac Dauphin. Nigel noticed it had gotten quieter in the general sounds of the restaurants and the other people in the area. A lot of them were looking out over the water as well.

“I’m sure it’s just lightning. Maybe a storm coming in.” Carmen said. Her hand loosened in his.

“Could be lots of things. Could be some reflection, maybe, or something environmental—”

Another flash. Brighter still, that same glowing emerald green. Nigel raised his arm against the brightness of it.

He looked to his side.

Carmen was gone.

Nigel felt a rush of panic. She was just right there.

He looked behind at the row of restaurants. The people, all gone. The smell of food and the music playing through the open doors and windows, still there. Everyone, gone in a blink.

“Carmen?” he called. “Car? Where are you?” No reply.

His hand, still in his pocket, tightened around his bottle of pills. They’re good for hallucinations and paranoia. He whipped around, looking for anyone, any sign of life. Nothing.

“This isn’t happening,” he said into the night air. “This isn’t real. A hallucination.”

How long since he’d taken a pill? It had been light out, well before the movie. He tried to work his way backwards in time, counting the hours since he’d had a pill. He pulled the bottle out of his pocket. Take one tablet every four to six hours, it read. “Close enough,” Nigel said. He popped the bottle open and shook one small yellow pill into his palm. He threw it quickly into his mouth and swallowed it dry.

He took a deep breath and looked around. Everything seemed to be the same, but he was alone. He walked over to the restaurant, looking at the tables outside on the little patios. There were place settings, plates of food half eaten. On the ground near the tables, dropped silverware. He reached down and picked up a piece of steak on an abandoned plate. He sniffed it closely, and it seemed to be real meat. Cloth napkins sat on chairs or had floated to the ground when everyone disappeared. Nigel bent and picked one up, wiping his hands on it.

“Not happening,” Nigel reminded himself. “The pill will kick in soon and everything will be back to normal.”

He turned from the restaurant and the abandoned tables and walked out close to the water. Lac Dauphin still sloshed up rhythmically against the boardwalk, the lights flickering across its moving face. He stared out into the deep darkness over the water. Nothingness. He knew it wasn’t actually nothingness – or is it? – but it was just a field of black.

“The green flashes,” he mused aloud. “What were those? Does this have anything to do with them?”

He looked down the boardwalk, remembering the little telescopes. You could look out at the lake and there were usually a handful of tourists looking through them at any given moment. Nigel jogged down to the nearest telescope.

Still, no one in sight as he arrived at the telescope. What the hell was going on? He’d never had a hallucination like this before. The pills had seemed to be working well, but now? This was so real, so vivid. But it’s not real, he reminded himself. Don’t forget that. It is not real.

He stooped and peered through the little telescope. Others like it dotted the edge of the boardwalk every hundred yards or so, these little moveable binocular things – peepers, Carmen had always called them – where you could see the boats or the waves or whatever it was people were looking at. Nigel looked through, tilting the thing around, side to side, up and down. The lake was almost all entirely black.

Then, he noticed a difference. The water was reflecting back tiny little sparkles of light, from the electric lights on the boardwalk, the moon, tiny twinkling stars. Then it suddenly stopped. Just a dead zone. He stood up straight and looked with just his eyes, hardly believing what he was seeing.

Out over the water there was an enormous fog bank rolling in.

There had been no fog in the forecast, he remembered. It was supposed to be a clear night with a nice waxing moon. But now this huge bank was coming, as if the lake itself was pulling this enormous wall of fog over it like a blanket. It was hard to see in the darkness, but Nigel noticed that the stars were disappearing behind the behemoth cloud.

“Jesus,” he said, nearly breathless. He’d seen fog over the lake, usually really early, a thin mist that would burn off by mid-morning. This fog towered into the sky itself, huge and thick. From what little he could see it looked like a hundred million tons of cotton batting rolling in. He looked around, wondering what to do. He went back to the eyepieces of the little telescope, trying to pick up more detail.

It was so hard to tell in the darkness, but Nigel could swear that he saw shapes in the oncoming rush of fog. Vaguely, but not quite, human silhouettes, just barely picked up from the light along the shoreline boardwalk.

His mind raced. What to do, where to go? If there were things in that godawful fog heading his way…

Help! Help! The word flashed repeatedly in his mind.

I’ve got to get out of here, he thought, and began to run. Away from the water, the rolling bank of fog, the strange shadows. He pounded past the row of restaurants and behind, cutting into a side street. Another. Blindly, panicking, he ran.

He ran until he was out of breath. His legs felt like warm rubber and a burning stitch throbbed in his side. He leaned against a building, unsure of what it was or where he was. He could no longer feel the breeze from the lake, having run a few blocks away. He tried to calm his breathing, swallowing hard around it, to listen.

Glancing upwards, tendrils of fog were rolling over the street. It was thickening as he watched, like something alive, something that stalked.

He could hear a rumble of wet, slapping footsteps. An army of them. He ran again, taking any way he thought got him away from Lac Dauphin.

He stopped, seeing a narrow street with cobblestones snaking away from one of the main streets he ran on. He recognized the pub, Smalley’s, where he and Carmen came regularly for their anniversaries. Their place, their favorite spot. But somehow he’d never noticed the little street, lane, alley, beside it. There was a small sign bolted to the side of the pub that read Lillywhite End, and faint light down the small space.

Another glance over his shoulder and the huge, all-encompassing fog was still rolling after him. Stars continued disappearing behind it, and those strange footsteps were gaining on him. What the hell was coming for him? He thought he heard voices from behind, from the… things attached to the feet making those horrible, wet sounds.

Still winded and with the stitch continuing to burn his side, he ran down Lillywhite End. His legs throbbed and his lungs burned with every breath, and shortly the street widened, with a streetlamp in the center of a small court. Nigel slowed from a jog and leaned against the lamp, ragged breaths searing him. He felt like he was being burned alive from the waist up, but the feeling ebbed as he stood, slumped against the lamp, his weak legs gaining back some of their strength.

Moments passed. He looked up at the sky and nothing seemed out of place. No fog, thank God, and the stars were out and shining. Slowly, his breathing returned to normal, and he tried to focus his hearing. There were murmuring voices somewhere… where? He could hear them if he really concentrated but not enough to make out what they were saying. He closed his eyes trying to block out any distractions, but the sounds would not coalesce into words.

Looking around the court, Nigel realized he was in a small circle of shops. Another street wound off, continuing the way he’d come, and he looked at the small place he was in now. There were a series of small shops, by the look, with apartments upstairs. Signs hung from a couple of the businesses, and Nigel tried to read them but found he couldn’t. The lettering on the signs was unrecognizable. It was close to normal English writing, but it wasn’t at the same time. They looked like they were written by someone who’s never seen English letters before.

Leaving the support of the lamp post, Nigel went to the nearest shop. There was a candle flickering somewhere inside, with shadows dancing behind the glass. He put his hand on it, trying to lean in and see the interior. Nothing inside moved other than the jittery shadows, Nigel noticed, and his heart sank.

The shopfront was false.

Just a panel, perfectly flat and painted to look like a shop. Completely smooth as he ran his hand over it. What the hell is this? he thought, standing back. And how is that candle flame moving?

He looked around. The shops all looked so lifelike. His heart began to beat faster again, fear rising. He went to the next shop – another flat surface! He ran his hands over it and there was absolutely no depth to it, to anything, just flatness. The doorknob, so realistic, was just painted on. No way in. Another unintelligible sign over the false door.

“Oh, come on!” Nigel screamed into the night. He looked up again, and the stars and moon were gone. The fog from Lac Dauphin had caught up to him! His back, chest and hands felt quivery and unstable. He reached down into his overcoat pocket again, feeling that onset of a panic attack, and pulled out the bottle of pills.

They’re good for hallucinations and paranoia.

Surely that’s what this was, some sort of intense hallucination unlike anything he’d ever had before. Dissociating, he thought. Maybe something happened and I passed out. Dreaming.

He shook a yellow pill out of the bottle and downed it. Think, man, think! Try and focus!

He went back to the lamp post, the only thing in this bizarre court that seemed real. “I came that way,” he said, pointing to the outlet of Lillywhite End. “So I have to go that way.” He turned and made for the other street leaving the court.

“NO!!!” he yelled, realizing that the street leaving the court was also just a false front. Trap, it’s a trap. However, the image was put there it was incredibly realistic, but his hand upon it, was just another perfectly flat surface. No way out, his mind flashed at him, red creeping into the edges of his vision. Go back. Gotta go back.

He turned again and ran back to Lillywhite End, the small street he’d come in from. He stopped short and reached his hand out, and it was indeed a real street. Not just a painted fakery. He felt the quivery tingle start to slip off his head, relieved to be out of that strange court. He stepped into Lillywhite End and headed back towards Smalley’s and the places he knew.

Ahead of him, around the bend of the street, he heard more of those awful wet footsteps. He stopped cold in his tracks. No escape, no escape! His shadow darkened most of the light from the streetlamp in the sealed court at the end of Lillywhite End. In his shadows, something began to move. The wet steps were louder, innumerable, and from around the bend came those strange indecipherable voices. Low, guttural. Inhuman.

Then, they emerged from the darkness.

Nigel felt his heart seize at the sight of them. Something hideously alien. They came from the Lac, was all he had time to think before they were on him.

#

“So, he just ran away?” the police officer asked Carmen. Her cheeks were damp and eyes ringed with tear-streaked mascara.

“He was with me,” she said. “We were standing right here. One second he was fine, the next he was running around, up in the restaurant, down there, calling my name. I couldn’t grab him, but I was screaming at him that I was here. Nothing would stop him.”

“Any idea what might have caused it?” The policeman was professional and calm. He’d gotten a description of him, and had also spoken to some of the restaurant diners who had him practically in their laps, including the one whose steak he had picked up and sniffed.

“There were a couple lightning flashes,” she said, considering. “That seemed to spook him for some reason. He’s… been a bit delicate.” The officer raised an eyebrow. “He’s started taking medication recently,” Carmen admitted. “Things have been rough for him. Stress, you know?”

“What kind of medication? What is he being treated for?”

“Hallucinations and paranoia,” she said, almost an admission of guilt. “But it’s nothing like this. I’ve never seen him like that. Ever. You have to find him.”

“Okay, is there anywhere he might go? You said he ran off that way?”

“I wonder about Smalley’s,” she said. “It’s kind of our spot. He might have gone there.”

“That’s not far. Come on, let’s go over and see if he’s about.” They began to walk together. Carmen was glad to be getting away from the people who had witnessed Nigel’s… moment. “I bet you a dollar, he’s sitting there at the bar.”

“I hope you’re right. Although I don’t have a dollar on me.”

“You can owe me.”

Smalley’s was exactly the same as she’d always remembered, she realized as she and the policeman walked up the main street towards it. Directly behind it, as it had always been, there was no indication of any side street. Smalley’s backed directly onto a squat warehouse. Without so much as a glance, they went straight past the brick wall in the same spot that Nigel had earlier turned and run down. They went into the pub, sure that they would find him inside.

They couldn’t hear Nigel’s screams of terror from Lillywhite End.

Editor’s Note

Some Lovecraftian / Cosmic vibes from this one. I loved the way it all came together and the sheer dread by the end of the tale.

 

Everyone who has travelled over Eastern England knows the smaller country-houses with which it is studded — the rather dank little buildings, usually in the Italian style, surrounded with parks of some eighty to a hundred acres. For me they have always had a very strong attraction, with the grey paling of split oak, the noble trees, the meres with their reed-beds, and the line of distant woods. Then, I like the pillared portico — perhaps stuck on to a red-brick Queen Anne house which has been faced with stucco to bring it into line with the ‘Grecian’ taste of the end of the eighteenth century; the hall inside, going up to the roof, which hall ought always to be provided with a gallery and a small organ. I like the library, too, where you may find anything from a Psalter of the thirteenth century to a Shakespeare quarto. I like the pictures, of course; and perhaps most of all I like fancying what life in such a house was when it was first built, and in the piping times of landlords’ prosperity, and not least now, when, if money is not so plentiful, taste is more varied and life quite as interesting. I wish to have one of these houses, and enough money to keep it together and entertain my friends in it modestly.

But this is a digression. I have to tell you of a curious series of events which happened in such a house as I have tried to describe. It is Castringham Hall in Suffolk. I think a good deal has been done to the building since the period of my story, but the essential features I have sketched are still there — Italian portico, square block of white house, older inside than out, park with fringe of woods, and mere. The one feature that marked out the house from a score of others is gone. As you looked at it from the park, you saw on the right a great old ash-tree growing within half a dozen yards of the wall, and almost or quite touching the building with its branches. I suppose it had stood there ever since Castringham ceased to be a fortified place, and since the moat was filled in and the Elizabethan dwelling-house built. At any rate, it had well-nigh attained its full dimensions in the year 1690.

In that year the district in which the Hall is situated was the scene of a number of witch-trials. It will be long, I think, before we arrive at a just estimate of the amount of solid reason — if there was any — which lay at the root of the universal fear of witches in old times. Whether the persons accused of this offence really did imagine that they were possessed of unusual power of any kind; or whether they had the will at least, if not the power, of doing mischief to their neighbours; or whether all the confessions, of which there are so many, were extorted by the cruelty of the witch-finders — these are questions which are not, I fancy, yet solved. And the present narrative gives me pause. I cannot altogether sweep it away as mere invention. The reader must judge for himself.

Castringham contributed a victim to the auto-da-fé. Mrs Mothersole was her name, and she differed from the ordinary run of village witches only in being rather better off and in a more influential position. Efforts were made to save her by several reputable farmers of the parish. They did their best to testify to her character, and showed considerable anxiety as to the verdict of the jury.

But what seems to have been fatal to the woman was the evidence of the then proprietor of Castringham Hall — Sir Matthew Fell. He deposed to having watched her on three different occasions from his window, at the full of the moon, gathering sprigs ‘from the ash-tree near my house’. She had climbed into the branches, clad only in her shift, and was cutting off small twigs with a peculiarly curved knife, and as she did so she seemed to be talking to herself. On each occasion Sir Matthew had done his best to capture the woman, but she had always taken alarm at some accidental noise he had made, and all he could see when he got down to the garden was a hare running across the path in the direction of the village.

On the third night he had been at the pains to follow at his best speed, and had gone straight to Mrs Mothersole’s house; but he had had to wait a quarter of an hour battering at her door, and then she had come out very cross, and apparently very sleepy, as if just out of bed; and he had no good explanation to offer of his visit.

Mainly on this evidence, though there was much more of a less striking and unusual kind from other parishioners, Mrs Mothersole was found guilty and condemned to die. She was hanged a week after the trial, with five or six more unhappy creatures, at Bury St Edmunds.

Sir Matthew Fell, then Deputy-Sheriff, was present at the execution. It was a damp, drizzly March morning when the cart made its way up the rough grass hill outside Northgate, where the gallows stood. The other victims were apathetic or broken down with misery; but Mrs Mothersole was, as in life so in death, of a very different temper. Her ‘poysonous Rage’, as a reporter of the time puts it, ‘did so work upon the Bystanders — yea, even upon the Hangman — that it was constantly affirmed of all that saw her that she presented the living Aspect of a mad Divell. Yet she offer’d no Resistance to the Officers of the Law; onely she looked upon those that laid Hands upon her with so direfull and venomous an Aspect that — as one of them afterwards assured me — the meer Thought of it preyed inwardly upon his Mind for six Months after.’

However, all that she is reported to have said were the seemingly meaningless words: ‘There will be guests at the Hall.’ Which she repeated more than once in an undertone.

Sir Matthew Fell was not unimpressed by the bearing of the woman. He had some talk upon the matter with the Vicar of his parish, with whom he travelled home after the assize business was over. His evidence at the trial had not been very willingly given; he was not specially infected with the witch-finding mania, but he declared, then and afterwards, that he could not give any other account of the matter than that he had given, and that he could not possibly have been mistaken as to what he saw. The whole transaction had been repugnant to him, for he was a man who liked to be on pleasant terms with those about him; but he saw a duty to be done in this business, and he had done it. That seems to have been the gist of his sentiments, and the Vicar applauded it, as any reasonable man must have done.

A few weeks after, when the moon of May was at the full, Vicar and Squire met again in the park, and walked to the Hall together. Lady Fell was with her mother, who was dangerously ill, and Sir Matthew was alone at home; so the Vicar, Mr Crome, was easily persuaded to take a late supper at the Hall.

Sir Matthew was not very good company this evening. The talk ran chiefly on family and parish matters, and, as luck would have it, Sir Matthew made a memorandum in writing of certain wishes or intentions of his regarding his estates, which afterwards proved exceedingly useful.

When Mr Crome thought of starting for home, about half past nine o’clock, Sir Matthew and he took a preliminary turn on the gravelled walk at the back of the house. The only incident that struck Mr Crome was this: they were in sight of the ash-tree which I described as growing near the windows of the building, when Sir Matthew stopped and said:

‘What is that that runs up and down the stem of the ash? It is never a squirrel? They will all be in their nests by now.’

The Vicar looked and saw the moving creature, but he could make nothing of its colour in the moonlight. The sharp outline, however, seen for an instant, was imprinted on his brain, and he could have sworn, he said, though it sounded foolish, that, squirrel or not, it had more than four legs.

Still, not much was to be made of the momentary vision, and the two men parted. They may have met since then, but it was not for a score of years.

Next day Sir Matthew Fell was not downstairs at six in the morning, as was his custom, nor at seven, nor yet at eight. Hereupon the servants went and knocked at his chamber door. I need not prolong the description of their anxious listenings and renewed batterings on the panels. The door was opened at last from the outside, and they found their master dead and black. So much you have guessed. That there were any marks of violence did not at the moment appear; but the window was open.

One of the men went to fetch the parson, and then by his directions rode on to give notice to the coroner. Mr Crome himself went as quick as he might to the Hall, and was shown to the room where the dead man lay. He has left some notes among his papers which show how genuine a respect and sorrow was felt for Sir Matthew, and there is also this passage, which I transcribe for the sake of the light it throws upon the course of events, and also upon the common beliefs of the time:

‘There was not any the least Trace of an Entrance having been forc’d to the Chamber: but the Casement stood open, as my poor Friend would always have it in this Season. He had his Evening Drink of small Ale in a silver vessel of about a pint measure, and tonight had not drunk it out. This Drink was examined by the Physician from Bury, a Mr Hodgkins, who could not, however, as he afterwards declar’d upon his Oath, before the Coroner’s quest, discover that any matter of a venomous kind was present in it. For, as was natural, in the great Swelling and Blackness of the Corpse, there was talk made among the Neighbours of Poyson. The Body was very much Disorder’d as it laid in the Bed, being twisted after so extream a sort as gave too probable Conjecture that my worthy Friend and Patron had expir’d in great Pain and Agony. And what is as yet unexplain’d, and to myself the Argument of some Horrid and Artfull Designe in the Perpetrators of this Barbarous Murther, was this, that the Women which were entrusted with the laying-out of the Corpse and washing it, being both sad Pearsons and very well Respected in their Mournfull Profession, came to me in a great Pain and Distress both of Mind and Body, saying, what was indeed confirmed upon the first View, that they had no sooner touch’d the Breast of the Corpse with their naked Hands than they were sensible of a more than ordinary violent Smart and Acheing in their Palms, which, with their whole Forearms, in no long time swell’d so immoderately, the Pain still continuing, that, as afterwards proved, during many weeks they were forc’d to lay by the exercise of their Calling; and yet no mark seen on the Skin.

‘Upon hearing this, I sent for the Physician, who was still in the House, and we made as carefull a Proof as we were able by the Help of a small Magnifying Lens of Crystal of the condition of the Skinn on this Part of the Body: but could not detect with the Instrument we had any Matter of Importance beyond a couple of small Punctures or Pricks, which we then concluded were the Spotts by which the Poyson might be introduced, remembering that Ring of Pope Borgia, with other known Specimens of the Horrid Art of the Italian Poysoners of the last age.

‘So much is to be said of the Symptoms seen on the Corpse. As to what I am to add, it is meerly my own Experiment, and to be left to Posterity to judge whether there be anything of Value therein. There was on the Table by the Beddside a Bible of the small size, in which my Friend — punctuall as in Matters of less Moment, so in this more weighty one — used nightly, and upon his First Rising, to read a sett Portion. And I taking it up — not without a Tear duly paid to him wich from the Study of this poorer Adumbration was now pass’d to the contemplation of its great Originall — it came into my Thoughts, as at such moments of Helplessness we are prone to catch at any the least Glimmer that makes promise of Light, to make trial of that old and by many accounted Superstitious Practice of drawing the Sortes; of which a Principall Instance, in the case of his late Sacred Majesty the Blessed Martyr King Charles and my Lord Falkland, was now much talked of. I must needs admit that by my Trial not much Assistance was afforded me: yet, as the Cause and Origin of these Dreadfull Events may hereafter be search’d out, I set down the Results, in the case it may be found that they pointed the true Quarter of the Mischief to a quicker Intelligence than my own.

‘I made, then, three trials, opening the Book and placing my Finger upon certain Words: which gave in the first these words, from Luke xiii. 7, Cut it down; in the second, Isaiah xiii. 20, It shall never be inhabited; and upon the third Experiment, Job xxxix. 30, Her young ones also suck up blood.’

This is all that need be quoted from Mr Crome’s papers. Sir Matthew Fell was duly coffined and laid into the earth, and his funeral sermon, preached by Mr Crome on the following Sunday, has been printed under the title of ‘The Unsearchable Way; or, England’s Danger and the Malicious Dealings of Antichrist’, it being the Vicar’s view, as well as that most commonly held in the neighbourhood, that the Squire was the victim of a recrudescence of the Popish Plot.

His son, Sir Matthew the second, succeeded to the title and estates. And so ends the first act of the Castringham tragedy. It is to be mentioned, though the fact is not surprising, that the new Baronet did not occupy the room in which his father had died. Nor, indeed, was it slept in by anyone but an occasional visitor during the whole of his occupation. He died in 1735, and I do not find that anything particular marked his reign, save a curiously constant mortality among his cattle and live-stock in general, which showed a tendency to increase slightly as time went on.

Those who are interested in the details will find a statistical account in a letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1772, which draws the facts from the Baronet’s own papers. He put an end to it at last by a very simple expedient, that of shutting up all his beasts in sheds at night, and keeping no sheep in his park. For he had noticed that nothing was ever attacked that spent the night indoors. After that the disorder confined itself to wild birds, and beasts of chase. But as we have no good account of the symptoms, and as all-night watching was quite unproductive of any clue, I do not dwell on what the Suffolk farmers called the ‘Castringham sickness’.

The second Sir Matthew died in 1735, as I said, and was duly succeeded by his son, Sir Richard. It was in his time that the great family pew was built out on the north side of the parish church. So large were the Squire’s ideas that several of the graves on that unhallowed side of the building had to be disturbed to satisfy his requirements. Among them was that of Mrs Mothersole, the position of which was accurately known, thanks to a note on a plan of the church and yard, both made by Mr Crome.

A certain amount of interest was excited in the village when it was known that the famous witch, who was still remembered by a few, was to be exhumed. And the feeling of surprise, and indeed disquiet, was very strong when it was found that, though her coffin was fairly sound and unbroken, there was no trace whatever inside it of body, bones, or dust. Indeed, it is a curious phenomenon, for at the time of her burying no such things were dreamt of as resurrection-men, and it is difficult to conceive any rational motive for stealing a body otherwise than for the uses of the dissecting-room.

The incident revived for a time all the stories of witch-trials and of the exploits of the witches, dormant for forty years, and Sir Richard’s orders that the coffin should be burnt were thought by a good many to be rather foolhardy, though they were duly carried out.

Sir Richard was a pestilent innovator, it is certain. Before his time the Hall had been a fine block of the mellowest red brick; but Sir Richard had travelled in Italy and become infected with the Italian taste, and, having more money than his predecessors, he determined to leave an Italian palace where he had found an English house. So stucco and ashlar masked the brick; some indifferent Roman marbles were planted about in the entrance-hall and gardens; a reproduction of the Sibyl’s temple at Tivoli was erected on the opposite bank of the mere; and Castringham took on an entirely new, and, I must say, a less engaging, aspect. But it was much admired, and served as a model to a good many of the neighbouring gentry in after-years.

* * * *

One morning (it was in 1754) Sir Richard woke after a night of discomfort. It had been windy, and his chimney had smoked persistently, and yet it was so cold that he must keep up a fire. Also something had so rattled about the window that no man could get a moment’s peace. Further, there was the prospect of several guests of position arriving in the course of the day, who would expect sport of some kind, and the inroads of the distemper (which continued among his game) had been lately so serious that he was afraid for his reputation as a game-preserver. But what really touched him most nearly was the other matter of his sleepless night. He could certainly not sleep in that room again.

That was the chief subject of his meditations at breakfast, and after it he began a systematic examination of the rooms to see which would suit his notions best. It was long before he found one. This had a window with an eastern aspect and that with a northern; this door the servants would be always passing, and he did not like the bedstead in that. No, he must have a room with a western look-out, so that the sun could not wake him early, and it must be out of the way of the business of the house. The housekeeper was at the end of her resources.

‘Well, Sir Richard,’ she said, ‘you know that there is but the one room like that in the house.’

‘Which may that be?’ said Sir Richard.

‘And that is Sir Matthew’s — the West Chamber.’

‘Well, put me in there, for there I’ll lie tonight,’ said her master. ‘Which way is it? Here, to be sure’; and he hurried off.

‘Oh, Sir Richard, but no one has slept there these forty years. The air has hardly been changed since Sir Matthew died there.’

Thus she spoke, and rustled after him.

‘Come, open the door, Mrs Chiddock. I’ll see the chamber, at least.’

So it was opened, and, indeed, the smell was very close and earthy. Sir Richard crossed to the window, and, impatiently, as was his wont, threw the shutters back, and flung open the casement. For this end of the house was one which the alterations had barely touched, grown up as it was with the great ash-tree, and being otherwise concealed from view.

‘Air it, Mrs Chiddock, all today, and move my bed-furniture in in the afternoon. Put the Bishop of Kilmore in my old room.’

‘Pray, Sir Richard,’ said a new voice, breaking in on this speech, ‘might I have the favour of a moment’s interview?’

Sir Richard turned round and saw a man in black in the doorway, who bowed.

‘I must ask your indulgence for this intrusion, Sir Richard. You will, perhaps, hardly remember me. My name is William Crome, and my grandfather was Vicar in your grandfather’s time.’

‘Well, sir,’ said Sir Richard, ‘the name of Crome is always a passport to Castringham. I am glad to renew a friendship of two generations’ standing. In what can I serve you? for your hour of calling — and, if I do not mistake you, your bearing — shows you to be in some haste.’

‘That is no more than the truth, sir. I am riding from Norwich to Bury St Edmunds with what haste I can make, and I have called in on my way to leave with you some papers which we have but just come upon in looking over what my grandfather left at his death. It is thought you may find some matters of family interest in them.’

‘You are mighty obliging, Mr Crome, and, if you will be so good as to follow me to the parlour, and drink a glass of wine, we will take a first look at these same papers together. And you, Mrs Chiddock, as I said, be about airing this chamber…. Yes, it is here my grandfather died…. Yes, the tree, perhaps, does make the place a little dampish…. No; I do not wish to listen to any more. Make no difficulties, I beg. You have your orders — go. Will you follow me, sir?’

They went to the study. The packet which young Mr Crome had brought — he was then just become a Fellow of Clare Hall in Cambridge, I may say, and subsequently brought out a respectable edition of Polyaenus — contained among other things the notes which the old Vicar had made upon the occasion of Sir Matthew Fell’s death. And for the first time Sir Richard was confronted with the enigmatical Sortes Biblicae which you have heard. They amused him a good deal.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘my grandfather’s Bible gave one prudent piece of advice — Cut it down. If that stands for the ash-tree, he may rest assured I shall not neglect it. Such a nest of catarrhs and agues was never seen.’

The parlour contained the family books, which, pending the arrival of a collection which Sir Richard had made in Italy, and the building of a proper room to receive them, were not many in number.

Sir Richard looked up from the paper to the bookcase.

‘I wonder,’ says he, ‘whether the old prophet is there yet? I fancy I see him.’

Crossing the room, he took out a dumpy Bible, which, sure enough, bore on the flyleaf the inscription: ‘To Matthew Fell, from his Loving Godmother, Anne Aldous, 2 September 1659.’

‘It would be no bad plan to test him again, Mr Crome. I will wager we get a couple of names in the Chronicles. H’m! what have we here? “Thou shalt seek me in the morning, and I shall not be.” Well, well! Your grandfather would have made a fine omen of that, hey? No more prophets for me! They are all in a tale. And now, Mr Crome, I am infinitely obliged to you for your packet. You will, I fear, be impatient to get on. Pray allow me — another glass.’

So with offers of hospitality, which were genuinely meant (for Sir Richard thought well of the young man’s address and manner), they parted.

In the afternoon came the guests — the Bishop of Kilmore, Lady Mary Hervey, Sir William Kentfield, etc. Dinner at five, wine, cards, supper, and dispersal to bed.

Next morning Sir Richard is disinclined to take his gun with the rest. He talks with the Bishop of Kilmore. This prelate, unlike a good many of the Irish Bishops of his day, had visited his see, and, indeed, resided there, for some considerable time. This morning, as the two were walking along the terrace and talking over the alterations and improvements in the house, the Bishop said, pointing to the window of the West Room:

‘You could never get one of my Irish flock to occupy that room, Sir Richard.’

‘Why is that, my lord? It is, in fact, my own.’

‘Well, our Irish peasantry will always have it that it brings the worst of luck to sleep near an ash-tree, and you have a fine growth of ash not two yards from your chamber window. Perhaps,’ the Bishop went on, with a smile, ‘it has given you a touch of its quality already, for you do not seem, if I may say it, so much the fresher for your night’s rest as your friends would like to see you.’

‘That, or something else, it is true, cost me my sleep from twelve to four, my lord. But the tree is to come down tomorrow, so I shall not hear much more from it.’

‘I applaud your determination. It can hardly be wholesome to have the air you breathe strained, as it were, through all that leafage.’

‘Your lordship is right there, I think. But I had not my window open last night. It was rather the noise that went on — no doubt from the twigs sweeping the glass — that kept me open-eyed.’

‘I think that can hardly be, Sir Richard. Here — you see it from this point. None of these nearest branches even can touch your casement unless there were a gale, and there was none of that last night. They miss the panes by a foot.’

‘No, sir, true. What, then, will it be, I wonder, that scratched and rustled so — ay, and covered the dust on my sill with lines and marks?’

At last they agreed that the rats must have come up through the ivy. That was the Bishop’s idea, and Sir Richard jumped at it.

So the day passed quietly, and night came, and the party dispersed to their rooms, and wished Sir Richard a better night.

And now we are in his bedroom, with the light out and the Squire in bed. The room is over the kitchen, and the night outside still and warm, so the window stands open.

There is very little light about the bedstead, but there is a strange movement there; it seems as if Sir Richard were moving his head rapidly to and fro with only the slightest possible sound. And now you would guess, so deceptive is the half-darkness, that he had several heads, round and brownish, which move back and forward, even as low as his chest. It is a horrible illusion. Is it nothing more? There! something drops off the bed with a soft plump, like a kitten, and is out of the window in a flash; another — four — and after that there is quiet again.

Thou shall seek me in the morning, and I shall not be.

As with Sir Matthew, so with Sir Richard — dead and black in his bed!

A pale and silent party of guests and servants gathered under the window when the news was known. Italian poisoners, Popish emissaries, infected air — all these and more guesses were hazarded, and the Bishop of Kilmore looked at the tree, in the fork of whose lower boughs a white tom-cat was crouching, looking down the hollow which years had gnawed in the trunk. It was watching something inside the tree with great interest.

Suddenly it got up and craned over the hole. Then a bit of the edge on which it stood gave way, and it went slithering in. Everyone looked up at the noise of the fall.

It is known to most of us that a cat can cry; but few of us have heard, I hope, such a yell as came out of the trunk of the great ash. Two or three screams there were — the witnesses are not sure which — and then a slight and muffled noise of some commotion or struggling was all that came. But Lady Mary Hervey fainted outright, and the housekeeper stopped her ears and fled till she fell on the terrace.

The Bishop of Kilmore and Sir William Kentfield stayed. Yet even they were daunted, though it was only at the cry of a cat; and Sir William swallowed once or twice before he could say:

‘There is something more than we know of in that tree, my lord. I am for an instant search.’

And this was agreed upon. A ladder was brought, and one of the gardeners went up, and, looking down the hollow, could detect nothing but a few dim indications of something moving. They got a lantern, and let it down by a rope.

‘We must get at the bottom of this. My life upon it, my lord, but the secret of these terrible deaths is there.’

Up went the gardener again with the lantern, and let it down the hole cautiously. They saw the yellow light upon his face as he bent over, and saw his face struck with an incredulous terror and loathing before he cried out in a dreadful voice and fell back from the ladder — where, happily, he was caught by two of the men — letting the lantern fall inside the tree.

He was in a dead faint, and it was some time before any word could be got from him.

By then they had something else to look at. The lantern must have broken at the bottom, and the light in it caught upon dry leaves and rubbish that lay there for in a few minutes a dense smoke began to come up, and then flame; and, to be short, the tree was in a blaze.

The bystanders made a ring at some yards’ distance, and Sir William and the Bishop sent men to get what weapons and tools they could; for, clearly, whatever might be using the tree as its lair would be forced out by the fire.

So it was. First, at the fork, they saw a round body covered with fire — the size of a man’s head — appear very suddenly, then seem to collapse and fall back. This, five or six times; then a similar ball leapt into the air and fell on the grass, where after a moment it lay still. The Bishop went as near as he dared to it, and saw — what but the remains of an enormous spider, veinous and seared! And, as the fire burned lower down, more terrible bodies like this began to break out from the trunk, and it was seen that these were covered with greyish hair.

All that day the ash burned, and until it fell to pieces the men stood about it, and from time to time killed the brutes as they darted out. At last there was a long interval when none appeared, and they cautiously closed in and examined the roots of the tree.

‘They found,’ says the Bishop of Kilmore, ‘below it a rounded hollow place in the earth, wherein were two or three bodies of these creatures that had plainly been smothered by the smoke; and, what is to me more curious, at the side of this den, against the wall, was crouching the anatomy or skeleton of a human being, with the skin dried upon the bones, having some remains of black hair, which was pronounced by those that examined it to be undoubtedly the body of a woman, and clearly dead for a period of fifty years.’

We posted Mason’s tense story, The Black Room. Afterwards, we peppered Mason with questions to get a look behind the scenes. There might be minor spoilers ahead…

Q1. Thanks for letting me reprint this story which was included in an anthology we both appeared in five years ago. Given how long ago it was, do you still think about this story? 

Wow, five years?! Hard to believe it’s been that long. And, absolutely. Very glad to be a part of this. Thank you for the opportunity.

To your question, I do think about this story from time to time, usually when I am in between stories and have no idea what to write next. The idea for “The Black Room” came to me in a dream, but I didn’t write it immediately. The timing didn’t feel right then. Eventually, years later, I decided to try a story, and it seemed to work out.

From conception to submission, this story took about ten years to develop. It’s a good reminder for me since I so often want to rush the process.

Q2. This is one of the most tense stories I’ve ever read. I love how we don’t get to see anything. It’s all carried in what might be in the Black Room. How much time did you spend on building the tension in this story?

I am glad to hear the tension worked for you. As I mentioned before, this idea came to me in a dream. As a kid (in the dream), I had to sit with my back to a doorway to this dark, dark room at various times of my childhood: while doing homework, while in “time-out,” etc. But I was told by my… “keeper?” I could not turn around and look at the doorway beyond a glance or two or something horrible would happen. I’d see something terrible, or something would come out and do something terrible to me.

And that memory follows the dream-me around later in life. The black room is always just behind me, urging me to turn around and finally see what terrible or inconceivable things have been waiting patiently in the room.

The idea of being followed or haunted by an overwhelming representation of the unknown felt so real, and I knew if I had that literal experience in waking life, the only way to truly overcome it would be to finally face the doorway. To go in the room even. But, hell, I wouldn’t want to do it alone!

Q3. It’s been great seeing what you’ve done over the course of the last few years. Do you have any advice for newer writers?  

Thank you! Well, I guess the first bit of advice would be for new writers to think about why it’s so hard for me to give advice, even after writing for so long. The more you learn the less you know, I guess.

But getting more pragmatic, I’d say to read as many stories and books as you can and write a lot of bad stories. Write them fast. Edit them slowly. Eventually, you’ll find what you’re after. The plot, the voice, the rhythm, etc. It never gets easy, but it does get easier, and more fun. It’s not so serious.

If you’re bad at grammar, read books and watch videos on the subject. Of course, reading more helps with that too. Try reading one or two books on writing. And allow yourself some time to be confused and frustrated. It can take years to hone and be comfortable with your ability and unique style.

Oh, and try starting with short stories specifically. I like to say that with short fiction, the light at the end of the tunnel is visible before you even start writing. Less pressure there.

Q4. How much of your time do you spend writing short stories versus other projects?

I don’t write short stories as much as I used to, but I try to do a few a year. And I still have quite a few crowning their growing rejection piles. Lately, I am writing and rewriting novels and novellas. There have been a few short films and screenplays. A few novellas.

But I am trying to focus more on novel-length projects.

Q5. What other works do you have on the go? Anything you’d like to promote?

Well, my story “Seein’ Red,” an off-beat vampire tale, is in the Books of Horror Community Anthology, Vol. 5, Part 1––the latest anthology from the Books of Horror Facebook group.

I have another story, The Pet, in Cloaked Press’s Nightmare Fuel 2025. No animal harm in that one, by the way.

I’d love for more people to check out my aquatic horror novella, Submerged (otherwise known as Sea Secrets). That one was a lot of fun to write, and the few people who have picked it up say it’s a lot of fun to read.

“Oh my god. Here it is.”

Maddie stepped into the large attic room. Her eyes hardly saw the dusty floor, the antique furniture, or the crumpled boxes. The twin bed in its usual corner spot, stripped of sheets and laden with bags of shapeless things like sleeping blobs. The once-decorative trunk frittering at the footboard, or the strange symbols on its now faded lid. The rack of her long-dead grandfather’s clothes. Rusty bicycles she never knew her grandmother owned resting under the eves. And she hardly noticed that the chair was gone––the one she’d been forced to sit in for hours, while the darkness breathed down her neck.

What Maddie saw was the door.

All other features of the room she noted out of obligation. A way to form the backdrop for what she really came up here to face. The attic was actually two rooms, divided by a wall. In the center of that wall was the door in question. Her eyes fixed on this door, the “it” she’d referred to when she walked in. It was closed. As she had prayed it would stay forever.

But she knew, as fear coldly caressed her spine, that it would soon open again.

Maddie’s husband, Beau, entered the room behind her.

“Whoa.” His eyes jumped around, landing on every dusty, decaying piece, wondering where a child could have possibly fit in. “You stayed in here?”

“It was slightly cleaner back then,” Maddie said faintly. She was just inches from the door now. Her fingers were now brushing the knob gently, testing its realness. Then she took hold of it, awkwardly, like a bad handshake. Too fast and too hard. Showing no intent to actually turn it. Instead, she clinched the knob as if to keep it from turning on its own.

Beau went straight for the window that looked upon the neighborhood. He crouched and peered out at the yard below and the street beyond, both still radiant with healthy, sane afternoon light. A mower droned from somewhere. The yard across the street was deserted, but there were toys littered about, waiting for a child to play with them or a grumbling parent to pick them up. The yard over was free of people and toys but held flower beds bursting with color. Tulips and poppies maybe.

“Wow, I bet this was something,” Beau said absently. When he turned back to Maddie, seeing her at the door, he flinched. “I mean, it could have been.”

He nervously wiped his mouth and went to her, assuming a graver posture. “This is the big, bad door, huh?”

Maddie didn’t look at him, but she nodded, reacting to something the door itself may have whispered to her. She lifted her hand and pressed two fingers into the striations of the wood. There was no yield whatsoever, and she appeared surprised by this. The door might as well have been stone.

Beau sighed and looked at her. “I still can’t believe your grandmother did that. What a terrible thing to do to a child.”

Maddie just nodded again. Beau turned and looked at the center of the room, the area directly across from the door. “There?” he said, pointing.

Maddie didn’t respond for a moment. Then she blinked and sniffed out of her torpor.

“What?”

“Was it there? That you had to sit?”

Maddie turned and regarded where he was pointing. She took a deep breath and nodded again. “Yep,” she said in a lighter tone. Her more casual response dissolved some of the tension in the room, and Beau relaxed his posture.

“If I left my toys out, that’s where I’d sit,” she said, her eyes spacey. “If I looked at her wrong or coughed wrong, that’s where I’d sit.” Suddenly, Maddie shifted and stepped back from the door. Beau noticed this, and watched the door a moment, waiting for it to fly open.

“How the hell did she ever dream of such a shitty thing? To tell a child, no less?” he said, shaking his head.

“Dream of it?” she asked, genuinely confused.

“Yeah. I mean, a room of complete nothing. Blackness. But from it comes what? Monsters, ghosts, demons? That’s so awful to tell a child.”

Maddie’s eyes narrowed as her brow creased.

“It was no dream or lie. It was real, Beau.” She looked at him as if he’d torn up something she’d drawn for him, or had spat in her face. She’d never looked at him that way, and he sucked in a breath, startled.

“Maddie,” was all he could say.

She wiped her eyes and laughed nervously. Realizing she’d lost herself for a moment.      “I’m sorry. It’s just this room. I haven’t been here in so long.”

Beau stepped forward and placed a hand on her back. “It’s okay. I know. When you’re ready, you can tell me what happened. We can talk about it.”

Maddie nodded and took a long, deep breath. Her eyes began to drift around the room again. They fell on the area across from them and she nodded toward it. “I think I’m ready now.’

 There were two objects across from them, by the bikes, objects made amorphous and ghostly by their sheet coverings. Beau had initially overlooked these upon coming in. By the shapes of them, they were either sheet-covered chairs or sheet-covered hands of giant monsters waiting to sink their claws into unwary asses. Maddie walked over to one and pulled off the sheet. Chair indeed. Beau did likewise. The chairs seemed to have been set out just for them. He smiled and then looked at her.

“You sure?”

She gave a tepid smile and blink-nodded a yes.

“But right here?” he asked.

She smiled brighter, the corners of her mouth twinkling with eagerness and sadness, and nodded fervently. “Where else?” She bent down and swept her palm over the seat of the chair, brushing away any dust that might have settled, and then sat down. “If we’re going to at least try to make this house work, I’ve got to face this.”

“But facing it is––“

“Talking about it. I know.” She smiled, but her eyes began to frost with anticipation and fear. She gazed at the door.

“Did she ever put you…in there?” he asked.

“No. It was never about going in. It was always about what might come out.”

Beau reached over and placed his hand on Maddie’s. Both of them gripped the armrests with their free hands.

“She called it ‘the Black Room.’” Maddie said, more to the room than to Beau. “Whenever I was bad. Or whenever she thought I was bad, up here is where I’d go. Here’s where I’d sit. Sometimes for no discernible reason. This wasn’t always my bedroom, you know. Just a regular attic, like this. Maybe not as full, a bit cleaner, but an attic just the same. And it was my punishment place. So she’d take me up here and I’d sit, with my back to the door. The chair wasn’t like these. It was a rickety wooden chair. I’d sit there, facing where we are now, away from the door, the Black Room.”

She paused, taking reassuring breaths and looking ahead. Maybe seeing the dark, innocent eyes of her younger self looking back at her from the hard, wooden chair. Wondering about the open door behind her. The things it held, the things it might release. Where all her innocence would be sucked inward to die.

 “Then what?”

“Then my Nan would crouch down close to me. Her eyes would go hard and sharp. And they’d jump from me to the room and back to me again, like to make sure something wasn’t creeping up behind her. Then she’d whisper in my ear, ‘The Black Room, the blackest of all, as deep and dark and endless as small. Don’t turn around, don’t let it see. The blackness of your eyes––open doors they be…’ I think that’s it. Then she’d open the door to the Black Room. She would hurry out of the attic. Then I’d be alone, with the open door behind me.”

It was silent as Beau processed what she’d just told him. He sat back in his chair, relieved for having finally heard the full story of Maddie’s traumatic experiences, as though he’d expected something more perverse and twisted. Still, his eyes held a curious, inquisitive sparkle. He turned to her with caution.

“So, after she’d leave?”

Maddie pulled her eyes from the door and met Beau’s gaze.

“Well, not much would happen at first. I thought she was just trying to scare me. Trying to add a nasty edge to time-out or something. But after a few minutes, when the afternoon light began dying out, something would change in this room. The air would become thin and chilled. I’d shiver, have trouble breathing. At first I thought I was just imagining things, but I could sense something. And before long, I could actually feel the darkness behind me. Its pull. Its depth. Its endlessness. Something like the end, but an end that led to so many horrible beginnings. I didn’t conceptualize all that then, obviously, but that was my kid interpretation. I just knew at any moment that dark would either suck me in… or let something nasty into this room with me. I would see some horrible monster, and my eyes would be like an open door for it to come in and…”

Maddie’s breathing began to quicken and she clinched her eyes shut.

“Jesus, look at me,” she said.

“It’s okay. We can move on.”

Maddie shook her head.

“No, I want to get through this.”

“Ok, so you’d experience that. What would actually happen?”

“I don’t really remember. I’d panic, and sometimes I’d black out.”

“Shit.”

“Call it relief, but that may have been the worst part, actually. After blacking out a few times, losing memory, I started to wonder if it was the actual darkness getting me somehow. Having its way with me. I don’t know.”

“Good Lord.” Beau squeezed Maddie’s hand. Then he let up, thinking he was squeezing too hard. “That’s pure psychological torture, like the cleanest kind.” Beau grunted and huffed like a beast as he turned his eye to the ground. “Your grandma was a real fucking witch.”

“She was ill, Beau.”

“Whatever.” He turned to her, looked over her face, then swept the walls and ceiling with his eyes. “You sure you want to keep this house?”

“I’ll be fine. I managed to sleep in here for god’s sake. The weight of it all didn’t hit till later. But I can actually think about it now without panicking. I’m not really afraid of the dark anymore. I even sat in our closet that entire time. I almost fell asleep.”

Beau snickered. “Just remind your doctor it was your idea and not mine.”

Maddie laughed. “Hell, she even suggested it. But coming up here was the last step. Really.”

They looked at one another, a long glance. Then Beau turned away and slapped his palms against the wooden armrests of his chair. “Well, in that case. It’s time.”

He pushed himself up out of the chair and glided towards the door to the Black Room. When his hand touched the knob, Maddie screamed. The sound was so strident and forceful, Beau felt as if something sharp had been driven into his ears, meeting his brain. He ripped his hand away from the knob and cupped his ears, cowering.

“What?!”

Maddie halted her scream. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth was open, though it was now covered by her hand. She looked even more shocked than Beau felt.

“I don’t know what hit me.”

“I was just going to…” Beau gestured toward the knob.

“Don’t!” She shot up from her chair but did not approach Beau.

Beau backed away from the door. “Okay. Okay. So maybe we still have a ways to go then?”

She shook her head fiercely. Then she looked at the window, through which a drape of dust-speckled afternoon sunlight hung. The light had waned since they arrived, but it still kept the shadows of night in the corners. Through that window was a world full of things, full of light. Dangers and surprises, no doubt, but only those that can be seen and felt and possibly understood and overcome with time. She turned back to Beau and the Black Room.

“It’s not me, Beau. It’s you I’m worried about.”

“Me?” Beau asked, his face wrinkled with puzzlement.

Maddie closed her eyes and her body tensed and rose with breath. “I said I never turned around. That I never saw the room. I lied about that.”

“What did you see?”

Maddie began rubbing her forehead, coaxing the memories loose. Then she opened her eyes, which were hollow as she peered into the deep, shadowy stacks of her mind. Then she turned to Beau and looked through him, through the door, into the other room.

“Only blackness. It really was…a black room.”

“You mean it was dark.”

Maddie shook her head. “No.” She walked forward toward Beau, still seeing beyond him. He shuffled out of the way to avoid a collision, but still she didn’t see him. Her gaze was locked. At the door she stopped and leaned in close enough that her ears almost touched the grain. She swallowed hard and cleared her throat of whatever fear had lodged itself there. But she didn’t move.

“I mean it was black. I got close enough to see in. It was a day like today, just as bright. Some of that light should have at least crossed the threshold, but it didn’t. The darkness remained, solid yet full of space. And it had a pull. I couldn’t tell if it was a physical suction or just my mind being drawn to something so beyond.”

She suddenly pulled away from the door.

“What? Did you hear something?”

“I got away that time. And I never looked in again. I knew that if I ever did, I’d be lost forever. And I know you would be too.” She turned back to Beau. “But yes, you can hear something. It’s more of a feeling maybe, but it’s there. Go ahead. Try.” She motioned for him to step forward and listen as she had done.

With reluctance, he stepped forward. Constraining him was both skepticism and fear. Either his wife was telling the truth, which would be bad enough, or she was not––by intentional deception or outright delusion. He put his ear to the door. What he heard was not surprising at first. There was a faint whir, the sound of gentle movements. Various natural forces running through the house’s interior, against the exterior. Gentle air currents moving and dancing through the room, eddying in its corners, sweeping across the door. Emptiness but not true emptiness.

But after a moment, that ordinary hollowness expanded and began to pulsate, becoming more of a feeling than an audible sensation. There was a deep breathing sound, not the breath of life but the breath of violent potential. The door seemed to vibrate, but it was a fine vibration. So fine it tickled the hairs of his face, his nose, and his eyelids. Then he heard the voices. An unintelligible, muffled mess of voices at first, but then they gelled and clarified.

And they spoke to him. Saying his name.

Then the voices shrunk to one voice. A tender, playful voice, full of softness and light and innocence. It was a child, calling for his brother to come and play. To hurry. There wasn’t much time. Because time was stupid and life ended way too soon. Beau’s little brother who drowned in the bathtub was calling for him to help him finally get out and dry off.

Beau gasped and pushed himself from the door. His eyes remained locked on the door’s grain, his mind still echoing traces of that strange, expansive breathing sound, and the lilting syllables of his dead brother’s call.

“Holy shit,” Beau said, out of breath.

“What?” Maddie said, going to him.

“I just thought I heard something. Just psyched out.” Beau turned to Maddie, wanting to see both the shock he felt and some kind of understanding. But all there was in Maddie’s face was stoney understanding, and traces of grief and fear. She nodded, her eyes becoming rheumy.

“And I heard my parents. That’s what got me to turn around, to go to it. But when you get close enough, it pulls you in for good.” Maddie’s voice had taken on the soft, childlike quality of the disembodied voice Beau had just heard. But with none of the cheer and innocence. She twitched her head as if she could sense herself regressing. Her voice emboldened. “I mean, that’s what it does. It draws you in by making you think it’s full of the things you miss, yearn for. Things you need. Things you want to do over again.”

Maddie’s brow wrinkled with thought. Then she turned to the chairs.

“I can’t face it. Not really. And neither can you. But we don’t have to see it to face it.” She said, going to the chairs. Beau watched her absently, incredulity and the echoes of what he’d heard warring in his mind.

“I don’t know. I’m not even sure I—”

“Do it for me?” Maddie said, her eyes pleading and sad, yet puckish.

Beau smiled, melting some of the shocked chill in his face. “Of course.”

They both grabbed their chairs and spun them around to face the eave of the attic opposite the door. Then they slid them back a foot or so, to where Maddie had sat as a child. She eyed the chairs and then the door for reference. After adjusting the chairs a couple inches forward, a few centimeters backward, she nodded in satisfaction.

“Okay,” she said, looking at Beau.

Beau made to sit in his chair, as did Maddie. Maddie halted before settling.

“Oh! Damn,” she said, snorting a laugh. She walked around the chair and approached the door. She put her hand on the knob and told Beau to turn around.

“I’m going to close my eyes and run to you.”

Sitting down and facing the other way, Beau’s lips rose in a half smile, one of anticipation and amusement flecked with fear. Imagining his wife clinching her eyes shut and scampering away from the scary door like a child playing a game. Or a child terrified of getting too close to the always reaching, always hungry dark.

The knob hissed as it turned. The door sighed and grunted as it opened. Maddie whisked back to her chair and dropped in it with a squelch. She opened her eyes.

“Just look ahead,” she said.

“Okay,” said Beau, suddenly feeling silly.

Maddie took a deep breath as the moment settled upon her.

“You okay?” he asked, turning his head and eyes just slightly.

“Shh! Yes,” she hissed. “Just wait.”

For a moment, Beau felt like a person sitting in an attic with his back to an open door. To a room that probably contained nothing more than shadows, dust, and forgotten junk. Maybe a skeleton or two. Maybe even actual skeletons. But then Maddie’s breathing began to accelerate, growing deeper and more rapid. It was the respiration of fear but also, oddly, of sexual anticipation. Though Beau didn’t feel the least bit aroused. And he noticed his own pulse, his own breath, quickening.

There was no sound, no sensations other than what they’d already experienced in the main attic. But Beau’s mind was suddenly being pulled toward the room. A room that could have held nothing or many things. Many benign and innocuous things or many grim and eldritch things. Terrible secrets. Or, as its namesake suggested, so much nothing a person’s mind might implode seeing it.

Still, he felt his consciousness drifting toward the room. Trying to conjure images of what could be in there but coming short. There were quick reels of an ordinary room, then a room not so ordinary but not at all preternatural, with bones or bloodied clothes and things that wanted to stay hidden. Then a room with nothing but blackness. A blackness that breathed eternal emptiness. That pulsed with the somethings that only nothing could become. Somethings monstrous. Somethings painfully, mournfully endless.

Suddenly, Beau was afraid. Terrified. He couldn’t tell Maddie’s hyperventilation from his own. And it didn’t matter. There could be a truly black room behind him. All kinds of terrible somethings or horrific nothings. Or maybe he was just disturbed to his core by sitting in the attic of a deceased, witchy woman, reliving his wife’s psychological abuse, with his back to an open room that held god-knew-what.

Then he heard his brother’s voice again, calling for him. Faint and breezy. Could have been a draft or his own wheezy breath. And for an instant, Beau wanted to fly from his chair and go to him, find him in all that blackness and tell him that he meant to save him, that he never wanted him to die, and really did like playing with him. To pull him from the engulfing dark to finally take that desperate breath.

Beau’s eyes opened, and his grip on the armrests tightened, readied to propel him upward. That’s when he realized the sound he heard was not his brother but his wife. Maddie was whimpering, uttering what sounded like words that wouldn’t fully materialize. Her eyes were closed and she was in some kind of a trance.

Beau turned completely to look at her, to see her face. A single tear rolled down her cheek, and he felt tears beginning in his own eyes. He could also see the room in his periphery. Though it was out of focus and the attic was shadowy, what he saw in his periphery was nothing short of a deep, rectangular black. A portal to nowhere. A nothing that wanted him. That wanted them both so, so much.

Maddie’s eyes flew open, and more tears rolled down her cheeks. But her eyes were bright with relief and maybe even joy. She was smiling.

“Babe, are you okay? We can stop this.”

“Don’t look,” she said, pushing his gaze away from her, away from the door behind them.

“Enough? Is this enough?”

“I’m just happy that you’re here. It feels just like it did when I was a kid. Just as terrible.” She paused and rested her hand on his arm. “Only this time, I’m not alone and that’s a good feeling.”

Beau took her hand, more deliberately this time. They both squeezed. With so much force their hands should’ve hurt but they didn’t. Then Beau let go and got up from the chair.

“Fuck this,” he said.

“No!”

“I’m going to the door and I’m looking in. And then I’m going in. This all has to end.”

“You mean you don’t believe me?”

“No, I do believe you.”

“Then prove it.”

***

Maddie and Beau stood before the open doorway of the Black Room. Its blackness, its endlessness, unseen beyond the darkness of their eyelids, which were closed tight. They both felt the room’s breath, its pull, and they heard its calls. But they did not back away from it.

“You ready?” Beau asked.

Maddie only nodded, but hard enough to send an affirming shudder through her body down to his hand.

They took deep breaths. And together they walked into the Black Room.

They felt no fear. Because whatever terrible somethings or endless nothings they might face, they would face together.

Editor’s Note

This story is one of the most tense stories I’ve ever read and uses the technique of Not Seeing the scary thing to great effect. What is in that room?

Mason is one of those writers who is on the rise. His novel work is every bit as good as his stories. Check him out.

There may be spoilers ahead, so we recommend you read Daniel’s The Bell in the Bog before joining us for the below.

Q1. How did you come up with the idea for this story? 

The image came first: a pristine new-build sitting in a landscape that still feels ancient. I’ve always been drawn to that clash, the confidence of modern architecture against something much older and less willing to be reshaped.

There’s been a lot of development near where I live, and you can feel the strain it puts on the landscape with wildlife shifts and the blurring of old boundaries. I started wondering what would happen if the land didn’t just absorb that change, but pushed back.

From there it became a story about ownership. We assume buying a house means the ground is ours. But peat bogs preserve what they take and hold history in a way that almost feels intentional. The bell felt like it was buried for a reason that modernity assumes it has the right to dig up.

Q2. As a fellow Scot, I love the inclusion of Scots dialect that rings off the page – how important is this to you? And how much Scottish is too much?

The Scots in the story isn’t there simply for texture. It helps mark a difference in perspective. Richard is in awe of the Highland landscape, but he doesn’t really engage with the people or history that shaped it. He admires it aesthetically, while the locals inhabit it.

The dialect reinforces that subtle divide. It carries continuity and shared understanding, and Richard can hear it without fully grasping what it means. The gap is important to the story.

In terms of how much is too much, I’m conscious of balance. I want the rhythm and flavour of Scottish speech feel natural and grounded, but not so dense that it pulls readers out of the story. It should suggest voice, not require translation.

Q3. I love how this feels almost like Cosmic horror – is that what you were shooting for?  

I wasn’t consciously trying to write cosmic horror in a Lovecraftian sense (despite being a huge fan of his work), but I was interested in resistance and scale. I wanted the land to feel sentient, but not in a human way. Not good or evil. Just operating on a timescale and logic far beyond us.

In the story, the bog isn’t a villain. It’s an ancient mechanism that continues whether we’re there or not. The bell hints that this isn’t the first time something has needed to be contained. I like the idea that it began as a human object and was gradually absorbed into something older. By digging it up, Richard doesn’t unleash anything new. He simply becomes part of a system that was already in place.

If that reads as cosmic horror, I’m happy with that. What unsettles me most isn’t a monster. It’s the idea that we aren’t as central or as in control as we think.

Q4. How much of your time do you spend writing short stories versus other projects?

I’ve been writing for a long time, but it’s only fairly recently that I’ve started to share my work. Joining a local writers’ group was a big part of that, along with having trusted readers to look at the work while it’s still rough. Having regular feedback and accountability helped me take the writing more seriously and trust it enough to submit.

At the moment, short fiction is my main focus. I’m drawn to the precision of it, especially in horror, where atmosphere and ideas can land hard in a small space. I’m also working on a novel that explores some similar themes to The Bell in the Bog, but short stories feel like the right form for me just now. They keep me sharp.

Q5. What other works do you have on the go? Anything you’d like to promote?

I’m currently working on a novel that explores similar themes of land, legacy and contemporary life. It’s still in its early days, but it’s a project I’m really excited about.

Alongside that, I’m continuing to write short fiction. I don’t always set out to write horror, but I’m often pulled in that direction because the themes I’m drawn to tend to take me there.

I’ve been fortunate to have other short fiction published recently, with more due out later this year.

 

The agent had called it a “generous rear aspect with potential.” From the kitchen window it looked unfinished: a strip of turf, two muddy beds, and the black patch at the back where the ground never dried.

“Bit boggy down there,” the agent said brightly. “Highland charm!”

The house is square and cream, shameless against the older cottages that crouched along the road like animals in a gale.

The builders left a stack of paving slabs by the back door and a note: “We’ll be back for these.” They never came back.

Now they are settled in, Richard tells Julia he’ll sort it himself. Raised beds. A line of decking along the edge, a place to sit with coffee and look at the hills. He buys timber from the DIY shop past the church and a new spade. The crofter over the fence watches him from a distance, dog at his heel, both of them still as stones.

“You’ll no’ get posts in that bit,” the old man says. “That’s the bog.”

“It’s a garden,” Richard says, friendly. “Just needs draining.”

The man looks past him at the house and then back at the ground. He says nothing more.

The first wheelbarrow of turf comes up easily. The second brings water. He presses a heel into the black patch; the skin gives, glistening. The smell lifts; cold, sweet, rotten. The spade goes down and down and hits something that is not earth.

Metal. A dull clang through wood and arm.

He kneels, scoops at the mud with both hands, clears a curve. The thing is not small. He works the spade under it, and the ground sucks at it like a mouth. When it loosens, it moves all at once and rolls against his shin with a weight that knocks him back on his behind.

It is a bell, knee-high when upright. Green-black with age, a clean crack running from the lip up into the shoulder. The mouth is stuffed with peat like a gag.

“Bloody hell,” he says, grinning. “Jules! Come look!”

“What is it?”

“A bell,” he says. “A church bell, maybe?”

He tips it to show the shape. He has the absurd sense that it looks at him.

“Get it away,” she says, and steps back. “You’re filthy.”

He huffs, amused, a little stung. He takes the hose and sluices the thing. Water darkens the green, runs black out of the crack. Under the algaed skin, there are marks. Not letters he recognises. Little notches and a line of something that might once have been a phrase in a language he does not know.

The crofter is closer now, at the fence, dog pressed to his leg.

“What’d I say?” the old man says, not looking at Richard, eyes on the bell. “That land’s no’ for turning.”

“It was buried,” Richard says, keeping it light. “I’m not turning, I’m… uncovering.” He smiles to show there’s no harm in him. “I’ll call the museum. They’ll love this.”

The crofter’s mouth works around a breath. “Put it back,” he says at last.

“Back?” Richard laughs, sure now that this is village theatre. “It’s history!”

“It kept it quiet,” the old man says. “That’s what it was for.”

“What what was for? Kept what quiet?”

The man’s eyes flick to the house, to Julia at the door, to the line of cloud dragging itself along the hill. “What was laid doon should bide doon.”

He walks away without waiting for a response.

#

The bell sits on the patio that evening, heavy and out of place. Richard goes at it with a stiff brush and a green pad, enjoying the work, the scrape and drag, the way the green gives under pressure to the dull, clean metal. A small cross near the shoulder; along the waist, a faint ring of letters, grown rather than carved.

He lifts it because that feels right, as though it might ring if he only holds it up to the light. It’s heavier than it looks. He thinks of art in loft apartments, raw materials turned into features. He pictures a timber frame in the corner of their new deck with the bell hung as a talking point, a wink at history. He thinks: the Sunday supplements would love this.

“Leave it,” Julia says from the door. “Please. It’s grim.”

“It’s a bell,” he says, and wants to add: and it was in our garden, and I dug it up with my hands, and that means something. He says nothing. He dries his hands on his t-shirt and goes inside to shower. The peat smell clings to his fingers, sweet and cold, like something that should be alive and is not.

#

In the night, he wakes to something he can’t name.

He lies still. The house is the house: wood ticking as it cools, a socket humming faintly, a fox in the lane, the wind at the gable. He tells himself it’s one of those. He almost sleeps again.

Then it comes once more. Not a hum. Not a tick.

A ring. Faint, like something carried from a long way off. For a moment, he thinks he’s still dreaming. The note is soft and flat, like metal struck under water.

He sits up. Julia sleeps, mouth ajar, ugly in the safe way only people you love can be. He listens hard. The sound doesn’t come again. Or if it does, it’s so low he can’t be sure.

He could wake her and ask, “Did you hear that?” He doesn’t.

In the morning, the back door sticks. He shoves with a shoulder to get it open, blames the weather, makes a mental note about sealant.

In the garden, the bell is wet though the night was dry. Two snail trails cross its flank. He wipes them with his sleeve and shudders at the feel.

When he lifts it to move it, the earth beneath shows a round patch darker than the rest, as though something had been pressing down on it.

#

At the village hall, a woman in a cardigan is sticking labels on raffle prizes for the upcoming coffee morning. He shows her the picture on his phone. The bell’s crack gleams.

“Must be the old kirk’s,” she says. “The one the bog swallowed in the rains.”

He waits.

She presses a label down flat, neat. “Nothing else out there it could belong to. You’ll be in the new house, then?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have Morag next door,” she says. “She’ll keep you right.”

When he is leaving, she says, almost to herself, “Should’ve left it.”

He pretends not to hear.

#

At the fence, the crofter waits, or seems to. He is not looking at Richard; he looks into the bog as if expecting someone to rise. His dog lifts a paw and sets it down again, restless.

“I went to the hall,” Richard says. Some childish part of him wants to report back, to show he has done his homework. “There was a church out there. It flooded. That’s all.”

“That’s all,” the old man repeats dryly. “You’ll put the bell back, then.”

“It’s an artefact,” Richard demands. “I’ll give it to the council. Or the museum. They can display it properly.”

The old man shakes his head. “It’s no’ for display.”

“It’s mine,” Richard says. He hears how that sounds. Something inside him hardens into a glare. “It was in my garden.”

The old man’s gaze lifts to the house again, to the line where its squared-off neatness meets the black scrub. “You’ll find that’s no’ your garden,” he says. “Not really.”

He goes. The dog looks back once and then follows.

#

The next day, he drives to Inverness and buys a tin of verdigris remover because the internet said so, along with a wire wheel for his drill.

By the time he gets home, Julia has thrown out two bags of bread and a tub of strawberries.

“They’ve gone mouldy,” she says. “Everything feels damp.”

“It’s Scotland,” he offers.

She frowns. “It smells wrong.”

He kisses her cheek. She leans away.

He takes the bell and places it on a pallet in the shed, then puts on ear defenders. The wire wheel whines. The brush jumps and bites, and the bell shudders in his hands. The green peels away in flakes that fall wet, as if shedding water as they go. Letters lift. The crack looks cleaner. The long, faint line along the waist of the bell shows itself. He leans close.

The words are not words he knows. He sees a B, a D, a cross, a line that might be an E that has softened as if someone pressed it with a thumb while it was still warm. He feels suddenly as if he’s interrupted a private act.

He switches the drill off. Silence slams into him. Through the wall, the land shifts: a faint, wet suck.

He leaves the shed door open and walks away.

#

At night, it rings clear.

Not the drowned ring. A bell, here, in this room, this house, this place. The first strike lifts the hair on his forearms. The second seems to come from the kitchen. The third from the garden, and he is out of bed before the fourth, the floor cold under his feet, the door stuck again, and then yielding with a groan like a voice.

The garden is pale in the moonlight. The shed is a black square. He stands with his arms at his sides, waiting for some ordinary cause.

The bell rings. It isn’t loud. Loud would be easier. It is small and perfect, a dinner bell in a cottage, a single call answered by nothing and then another and another. It comes from the shed, but when he opens its door, it is empty. The pallet is wet. Empty. He is certain he left the bell there. He remembers lining it up with the edge of the wood. He turns to leave the shed and kicks something solid. The impact jolts through his toes.

The bell rests against his boot. He stares at it, trying to find the missing moment: the lift, the step, the placing down. There is nothing there.

He reaches for it. The metal is cold enough to feel like heat. He snatches his hand back as a child would.

The bell tilts toward him almost politely.

He carries it into the garden and sets it by the black patch. He stands over it. “Ring,” he says, and waits.

The wind goes through the cypress and makes a noise like whispering. The bell offers nothing.

When he comes inside, Julia is sitting on the edge of the bed. The bedside lamp is on. Her face is white and her eyes are black. For a moment, he thinks she is a different person, someone who is here to tell him something he cannot bear. Then she says, low, “What is going on?”

“It’s the house,” he says, surprised by the steadiness of his voice. “It’s just a new house. They settle. It’s damp. We’ll get a dehumidifier.”

“I heard something,” she says. “Like a… It felt like it was in my chest.”

“A bell.”

She flinches. She stays a long time with her hands in her lap, thumbs pressed together so hard the tips blanch.

“I’m going to Mum’s for a few days,” she says at last.

It is not a request. He nods. He wants to say: I’ll come too. He wants to say: Don’t. Instead, he says nothing.

In the morning, she leaves. Her hug is dutiful and off-target. When her car has gone, he stands in the shower until the water runs warm to cold and back again, and he cannot say what any temperature is.

#

He builds the frame that day as a way of proving that time is real. He sinks posts where the ground lets him. At the bog edge, he cannot find purchase. The auger goes down to the handle and comes up with a soft sucking sound. He tells himself the right mix will make the ground behave. He sets a beam between two posts and clamps it so it will not fall. He cannot make a square. He cannot make anything true in this place.

He screws a bracket to the fence, then drills two neat holes in the bell’s crown with a bit meant for steel. The drill whines, bites, and the sound goes into the house through the brick and into the cupboards and his own teeth. The crack shakes. He runs a bolt through and hangs the bell from the bracket because anything is better than having it crouch at his feet, demanding notice.

He stands back and forces himself to admire it. From the kitchen window, he can tell himself it is handsome. It makes the fence look deliberate instead of a line marking where the builder gave up.

He waits for the crofter. He wants him to see. He wants him to approve, or be angry enough to make Richard feel real. The fence stays empty. The dog does not appear. In the afternoon, a thin rain falls sideways under the sun.

That night, the bell rings properly, like a bell should.

The sound is a knife’s clean edge. It hangs in the air and seems to lean on the house. The first strike is at 9pm. The second is at 9.02pm. The third does not wait two minutes. It comes at once, impatiently.

Richard stands in the back doorway and cannot make himself step out. He feels the sound move through him and knows that if he puts his foot on the patio, the note will go through the bones in a way that will change them.

He goes upstairs and lies on his back with his hands flat on the duvet. The bell rings each minute now. He thinks of clocks. He thinks of heart monitors. He tries to time it with his breath and fails. When it stops, he does not know when it stopped, and that is worse. The silence presses against him, close as skin.

He dreams of the ground rising into shapes trying at people. Shoulders and arms swelling from peat, faces half-formed and sinking again. They move as if in procession, collapsing and reforming, a line without end.

#

In the morning, the hallway floor is damp. Not wet, just damp, as if the house had a tongue. He lays a towel, and the towel goes dark and heavy. He calls a man about the damp. The man says, “I can do Tuesday.” In his voice is the sound of someone already knowing what he will find, and enjoying being right.

At the shop, Morag from next door is buying milk. Her hair is set in a cloud of spray, and her glasses have beads on a string. She smiles with her teeth pressed to her lip as if that will make the smile less dangerous.

“I hear you’ve found our bell,” she says, as if the two of them have been in on something all along.

“Your bell?” he says, lightly. “From your church?”

“From the place that was there first,” she says.

He laughs thinly. “Everyone’s poetic here.”

Morag leans close so the girl at the counter cannot hear. “What was laid doon,” she says, breath warm in his ear, “should bide doon.” She nods. “We say that because we learned it.”

“How?” he says. “Where did you learn it?”

She looks, for a moment, like a young woman inside her old face, someone who watched something happen and never told. “We listened,” she says. “It told us.”

“Who?”

She looks past him to the door and heads towards it. “Not who.”

#

He cannot stop himself polishing the bell that afternoon. It’s like worrying a loose tooth, rereading a hurtful message again and again. The letters along the waist have resolved into themselves. He still cannot read them though. It does not feel like English or Latin. The letters resolve into shapes that feel wrong in his mouth, as if they were never made for people to speak.

He takes a picture. The letters vanish in the image, the metal showing only blank. He puts a hand out and touches the bell as if to test himself for fever. It is colder than metal should be out in the sun. He puts his ear to the lip. He feels foolish and then not foolish at all as the cold climbs into the cartilage and the bone. From within the bell, he hears a sound that is not ringing. He hears a long breath.

He jerks back, banging his head against the bracket hard enough to see stars. He swears out loud and laughs, high and childish, to cancel the other noise. He goes inside, shuts the door, and locks it.

The key scrapes in the new barrel like a blade on bone.

#

On Tuesday, the damp man does not come. His van idles outside for a minute, exhaust spilling white into the air. Then it pulls away without anyone getting out.

Richard watches the van’s lights fade.

He puts on his boots and goes out. The bog edge gleams like an open mouth.

He feels the sound in his teeth before it rings, and the moment it strikes the pleasure is so intense he almost says thank you. It feels like the note has drawn a line for him, and he walks it, heel to toe, like a young boy on a wall.

The black ground moves under its skin. Not water. Water is bright. This is something that has decided for a very long time to be still, and could change its mind. His boot goes in an inch and then two and then not at all.

A second ring comes. It is not from the fence. It is farther, and beyond farther, and then very near. He cannot place it in space. He does not try.

He steps out onto the black.

It takes him, but not as a swallow. It accepts. The first impression is of comfort, the way a pillow remembers you and shapes itself around your ear. He breathes through his mouth and smells nothing, which is worse than rot. He takes another step and the ground holds him as if he weighs less than before. He breathes out once, almost a laugh, and keeps walking.

From the side there is a movement. He turns his head and, for a second, sees the outline of a wall under the surface, a curve of stone. He blinks and it’s gone. His boot knocks something solid, but when he looks down, the bog shows only his own warped reflection.

The bell rings.

The sound is inside his head. It is inside his chest. It is under his tongue as a taste of metal and something sweet. It feels like a memory that isn’t his, something pressed into him from before there were names for things. He takes another step because he cannot not.

There are shapes in the bog, low humps like shoulders just beneath the skin. There are holes the size of hands. He sees, for a second, the arch of a door made of nothing but a darker dark, then that is not there either. He thinks of the word sea on a map, too small for what it names.

A voice speaks, and he is so relieved he could cry. “Richard,” the voice says. It speaks in a voice that feels borrowed from his own blood. “Richard,” the voice says again, and he says “Yes,” without meaning to.

He knows it is not Julia. He knows it is not anyone. It is older than that. Older than the kirk, older than the people who cut peat here. Older than people. He feels himself nodding as though answering a master who has always been there, waiting.

He thinks of the crofter and his dog, weathered and ordinary. He thinks of the bell on the fence. He thinks of the word “bide” and sees it as a flat thing on paper, and then that slips as if the letters are slick.

He takes one more step because all the other steps made sense and this one must too. The ground lifts him and then lets him go as a mother might let a child’s hand when they are old enough to cross a road. He does not fall. Falling is a thing that ends. He goes down and down at the same speed as thinking, and there is no end to it.

When the bell rings next, it is not a sound. It is a lightless flash behind his eyes. He thinks, with a little interest, that he will not hear another. He is wrong. They go on, like a season turning, even after he stops counting, even after he stops needing to be a person who counts.

#

Julia comes back on the Thursday.

The door sticks, so she leans in with her shoulder, and the swollen frame gives, wood sighing as though it resents the push.

The hall smells wrong. Lilies, though she hasn’t brought any. The sort of smell that belongs to funerals, not kitchens.

“Richard?” she calls.

No answer.

Rooms sit untouched. A film coats the glass, as if the house has been breathing.

The back door is ajar. She steps out.

The bell hangs on the fence, tilted, green-black, crack down the side. The ground around it gleams though the week has been dry.

“You’re here,” she says when he comes out from the shed. Boots dark with mud, shirt clinging damp. His face is calm in a way she doesn’t recognise. His eyes fix on something just behind her.

“This smell,” she says. “You’ve not got it sorted at all.”

“It isn’t the house,” he says. His voice is low, almost fond. “It’s the land. It’s working again.”

“What on earth are you on about?”

He doesn’t answer. He only looks at her, gaze resting as though measuring where she fits.

“This has to go,” she says, nodding at the bell. “I mean it. Today.”

“It stays.”

“Richard–”

“It stays.” The words sound borrowed, pressed into his mouth.

She grips the bracket and yanks. Metal rasps. Her hair swings forward, face set in effort. “Help me, for God’s sake.”

The bell gives a single note, small and exact. Richard feels it in his chest, his teeth, the hinge of his jaw. Not sound, but command.

He moves without thought. The spade leans against the fence. His hand closes on it.

“Richard?” she says, half-turning.

He swings.

The sound is dull, ordinary. She folds at once, knees giving, head striking the slab before sliding into the mud. He stands over her, breathing hard.

The bell tilts in its bracket, mouth dark, and gives a soft tick, a pulse under his skin.

He kneels. “Jules,” he says.

He slides his hands under her shoulders to lift, but the ground is already loosening, accepting her weight. Her legs sink first, fabric darkening.

“No,” he says, but his hands don’t pull. They guide.

Her eyes flicker open once. She looks at him, not pleading, not afraid. Accusing. Her lips move but make no sound.

The suction takes her hips, her chest. One arm lingers a moment, palm up like an offering. Then it slides under, fingers last. The bog closes neat as a purse string.

Silence.

Richard sits back on his heels. His palms are black to the wrist. He lifts them, stares as though they aren’t his. The bell’s mouth faces him. Inside, he hears breathing.

“All right,” he whispers. “All right.”

The bell doesn’t answer.

It doesn’t need to.

Editor’s Note

A splendid tale from an up and coming writer. We spoke to Daniel about where this idea came from, and the importance of locality in our interview with him.