Stinkpit

by Liam Hogan

John Arnold’s traps were full; too many rabbits for one man’s needs. He could try selling a few down The Lamb for a fiver or maybe just a pint, though if he did he’d have to suffer the taunts of “gamekeeper turned poacher”.

It wasn’t accurate. It had been his dad, Bob Arnold, who had been the gamekeeper, for the estate that was now lorded over by a know-nothing Yank. Technically, Jack wasn’t poaching either, because Jack was a landowner himself. Only the gamekeeper’s cottage and its postage-stamp kitchen garden, passed down from father to son, having been unexpectedly bequeathed in the previous estate owner’s will. Unexpected, because who knew Old Man Farrington had a heart, let alone a soft spot for a long serving employee?

The local wags said Bob must have known where the bodies were buried, the Old Man’s second wife in particular. But she’d been thirty years her husband’s junior, so maybe she’d grown tired of waiting for him to die, something he always seemed on the cusp of doing, some ghastly wasting disease with an impossible to remember name. Little wonder the Old Man had become obsessed with the occult, or so the rumours said, when more practical remedies eluded him. (Continue Reading…)

The Green Scarf

By A.M. Burrage

When the Wellingford family became extinct the days of Wellingford Hall as one of the great country homes of England were already numbered. The estate passed into the hands of commercial-minded people who had no reverence for the history of a great house. The acres around the old Hall became too valuable as building sites to be allowed to remain as a park surrounding a country mansion. So the fat Wellingford sheep were driven elsewhere to pasture, and surveyors and architects heralded the coming of navvies and builders.

All this happened many years ago. The old park became crossed and criss-crossed by new roads, and perky little villas with names like ‘Ivyleigh’ and ‘Dulce Domum’ sprang up like monstrous red fungi. Even these have since mellowed, and grown their own ivy and Virginia creeper, and put on airs of respectable maturity. The Hall itself, forlorn and abandoned, like some poor human wretch deserted in his old age, began slowly to crumble and decay. (Continue Reading…)

A Belly Full of Spiders

by Mário Coelho

Alone in a dark basement, Davey’s learned to do much without his eyes. He can hear the groaning of a house that never settles. He can taste different flavours of humidity: rust, cloth, mould, sweat. When he sniffs, he knows what Mom and Dad are cooking upstairs. Baked potatoes, drizzled in olive oil and peppered with garlic. Sirloin steak, charred on the outside, bloody within.

Sirloin. Sir Loin, Lord Gone whispers in his mind, his voice like scratches. Sir Loin, knight of the rotund table. You don’t need a knight, Davey. You just follow what I say.

Davey looks up at the ceiling he can’t see. He misses the old dark, the one that preluded lucid dreaming. He doesn’t dream anymore. Lord Gone doesn’t let him. Davey just moves between a darkness that is still, and a darkness that is stirring. (Continue Reading…)

No One Really Lives Alone

by Lesley Hart Gunn

When the priest comes to your house to vanquish your demons, draped in ancient symbols with pockets of holy water oozing from her like sap, don’t ask who sent her. She’ll mark your doorstep with a small crucifix that she draws in the air with a careful and deliberate flourish, and you won’t be able to stop yourself from staring at the indiscernible thing hanging above your door long after she steps over the place where you used to keep a welcome mat. 

She won’t worry herself with introductions or niceties but will take a deep breath as she takes in the state of your living conditions and begins knocking on the floors, walls, and ceilings, calling out to the lesser imps that stay between the rot in your baseboards and sagging drywall. You can tell her not to bother, not to worry about the little things. It’s just the gnawing of rodents or insect damage. Nothing an exterminator can’t handle. She’ll knock and whisper her way down the hall, stopping to lick the walls, to taste the residue of the burnt offering you served up on the floor. She’ll find the leftover ashes since you didn’t bother sweeping them. She’ll ask you if you live alone, which is a trick question, because no one really lives alone, and she knows that. She knows what hides in cupboards and closets, watching and waiting. That’s why she comes.  (Continue Reading…)

Her Face, All Teeth

by Greg Stolze

Denny did not want to spy on the confessional, but at the same time, he did. He wanted what he did not want, or he did not want to want what he wanted. As a Catholic, he should have been well-equipped to deal with this.

Unfortunately, he was also well-equipped to spy on the confessional.

Denny had a quiet body. He could sit very still for a long time. He’d gone hunting as a child, and impressed his dad by watching, over the rifle barrel, until a deer revealed itself. Denny’s little brother Bart always got excited when a deer appeared. Bart shot too soon, scaring the prey away. 

In the war, Denny’s still body had let him set up somewhere and wait, and watch. He was mistaken for part of the landscape until someone or something came into view, and became a good shot, and caught a bullet. When he took those shots, his face didn’t change but he felt it. He really didn’t like seeing people die, even enemies. But, as his father had said when Bart got upset about his bad shots, there was no point being a big baby about it. (Continue Reading…)

A Pearl as Red as Sin

by R. A. Busby

 The baby bit hard into my flesh and held there.

It dug into the left side of my womb with a pinprick pinch, sharp and determined. Lying in bed, cheek hot against the old pillowcase redolent of hair and bleach, I imagined the embryo floating through a warm-wet universe, a creature small as a salmon’s egg with tiny biting jaws that tore into the dark walls of my flesh and ate itself a cave to grow inside.

It nestled there, a pearl as red as sin.

But whose? (Continue Reading…)