ACT ONE The half-crumbled watchtower still stands as it has stood for many a year in this unholy space that abuts the present and the past. Moss, lichen and vines my unscientific mind cannot name flourishes on its damp, aged stone. It is an old building constructed from crude blocks of stone, joined to a […]
They left me here during the evacuation. Old shrunken and childless widow with broken hips and no one to check on her, knees that lock beneath soiled nightgown and sheets, I listened as it all played out on my now-dead transistor radio. “Only three days,” my wageless nursemaid Natalia said, “I’ll be back in three […]
Delayna snapped the first crow’s neck without thinking about it. She had learned this from her parents. Before they robbed and prostituted their way out of her life and into prison, they had taught her to ignore the weight of sin and instead focus on doing what needed to be done to get by. Their […]
They’s building the bonfire in a field on the forest’s southern fringe, a two minute trudge from camp. They’s piling fuel high—if there’s one thing they got in abundance ’round these parts, it’s wood—close enough to the tree-line to make a point, far enough not to set the whole woodland ablaze. Huffing and cursing, cousins […]
The ghost boy was the colour of bone, of gossamer spider web, of salt trails of dried tears. He still had his shape, his outline. No one had said his name in thirty years, even though he’d scarred the house with it, carved onto a tree in the garden, scratched into the paint under the […]
First Forgetting It was snowing when Ria arrived in Carrmore, and didn’t look as if it would ever stop. Taking time out from unpacking the boxes and bags that she had crammed into her little green Skoda for the drive north, she went to the bedroom window and watched the flakes descend with universal patience […]
Alix was never sure what kept the groaning rickety-spider of a dock up, unless it was the mussels that swarmed over the piles, turning them to hazards that could slice a swimmer open. The divers were all over scars from waves and mussels, always being pushed into shell sharp as knives and leaving their blood […]
“Mr. Doornail has eaten my heart!” the old man cried in the village one morning, noticing belatedly the horror that had been done him. Shortly thereafter, he took off his spotless white fedora, threw it into the air, and sidestepped casually into the path of an automobile. Mind, no one had wanted the old man […]
I liked the weirdo. He made me laugh. Sure, sometimes he freaked me out with the stories he told, but most of the time he was fine. He made us, Rudy and I, crack up. My friend teased him. “And where would these monsters be, old man?” It was the beginning of summer. Cicadas filled […]
This is my grandmother’s house; mine since last Tuesday when the will was read, an impoverished student sitting on a million dollar piece of property. The air still carries the scent of her, the faintest hint of lavender and Pears shampoo—but there have always been odours in this house that seem to have no source: […]
