Incandescent

The demon Asmodeus returns to the world to help a young boy with his homework

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Ayer avage aloren Asmoday aken.

A circle had been drawn in pale rock salt, with a triangle outside of it.

Ayer avage aloren Asmoday aken.

Three red candles had been placed at each point of the triangle, and lit accordingly.

Ayer avage aloren Asmoday aken.

The Sigil of Asmodeus had been drawn in red on a piece of white paper, and placed within the triangle.

Ayer avage aloren Asmoday aken.

Now, Simon sat back in the salt circle and waited. He repeated the summons over and over, focusing all his thought, all his energy on the triangle and the sigil inside it.

Ayer avage aloren Asmoday aken.

Nothing happened. He was about to give up when he thought he detected the smell of sulphur. The temperature in the room rose rapidly, and he began to perspire. Simon continued to focus on the triangle of salt as his head began to feel heavy, and his eyelids drooped. The ritual was sapping his energy, and he had to fight the urge to keel over and fall asleep.

Ayer avage aloren Asmoday aken.

And then it happened.

With a surge of power that blew the lightbulbs in the room, and a sweeping warm wind that blew out the three candles, the demon Asmodeus appeared in the centre of the triangle.

Simon immediately rallied, and clapped his hands and laughed. Sitting up to his full height, he addressed the demon.

‘Foul creature from the Underworld,’ he began, ‘I, Simon the Mage, have summoned you to do my bidding!’

Asmodeus tilted his head to one side and appeared to squint.

‘You don’t look like a mage,’ the demon said, ‘you look like a child.’

‘I’m not a child! I’m fifteen…’

The demon rolled his eyes in his head, ‘You are a child!’

‘Silence, evil one! I am in charge here!’

‘If you say so, Simon the Mage.’ The demon replied, playing with a few grains of salt with a red claw, ‘I like the candles…’

‘Don’t touch them please.’ Simon asked.

‘Red is definitely my colour.’

‘I said silence! You have been called forth for a reason.’

‘Ah, I see — you want something from me.’ Asmodeus stretched and yawned, ‘Well go on then — I haven’t got all day.’

‘How long have you got?’ Simon asked, craning his head to see whether the salt triangle was still intact.

The demon shrugged. Simon looked down at the spell book he held in his lap.

‘It says here that so long as I keep you within the triangle, you must do my bidding.’

‘It does, does it?’ Asmodeus, ‘And what book might that be?’

Simon held it up for the demon to see, and tapped the title with his finger. ‘It’s Daemonology by King James the First…a new version with modern commentary.’

The demon rolled its eyes into the back of its head. ‘That man…if I had a soul for every time one of you demonologists mentioned James….’ the threat lingered in the air with the smell of brimstone.

‘Did you know him?’ Simon asked.

‘King James?’

‘Yes.’

The demon looked at him suspiciously. ‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I have an essay I have to write about him for history class. About his interest in demonology and the occult. I thought you might be able to provide a unique perspective of the man.

‘Is that so?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s in it for me?’

‘I’m sorry?

‘What do I get out of the deal?’

Simon looked at the demon in disbelief, ‘You don’t get anything. I summoned you, you do my bidding, and then I banish you to whence you came!’

‘Let me be clear on this,’ Asmodeus hissed, displaying a forked tongue, ‘you’ll banish me back to the Underworld with nothing to show for it?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘No deal.’

‘Tough! That’s how it works, according to my translations…’

The demon nodded sagely. ‘Tell you what, Simon the Mage, I will tell you everything I remember about King James, if you break one of the lines of this triangle before you banish me — just so I can stretch my legs a little before I have to go back.’

‘Stretch your legs?’

‘Just to have a little run around. Not for long. I would be most grateful.’

Simon looked down at his book, flicked a few pages forward and back, and frowned. ‘It doesn’t say anything about breaking the triangle.’

‘That’s because dear old James the First never got that far. He didn’t do much in the way of dabbling. He wasn’t a mage like yourself. Come on, what’s the worst that could happen?’

Simon slammed his book shut dramatically. ‘If you trick me…’

‘No tricks,’ was the answer, ‘just stretching my legs.’

Simon placed the book down inside the circle, stood up and walked up to Asmodeus in the triangle. Breaking eye contact with the demon, he reached out and scooped up some of the salt.

‘Oh Simon,’ said a voice from over his shoulder, ‘you fool.’

Simon looked up — the triangle was empty. He looked over his shoulder and gasped. Asmodeus held up the demonology book, which smouldered in his grasp.

‘Oh God,’ Simon gulped.

‘Bit late to ask for His help,’ Asmodeus laughed, ‘now where were we?’

The smell of sulphur now filled the room, as Asmodeus gripped the book tightly. The cover started to char, the paper curled and darkened, and finally it burst into flames. Simon could only watch as Asmodeus held it up, allowing ashes and embers to fall to the floor and ignite the carpet.

Simon ran from the room and Asmodeus disappeared in a cloud of acrid black smoke. The young demonologist ran downstairs to raise the alarm, but the demon was waiting for him at the foot of the staircase. Asmodeus gripped Simon by the neck with red-hot claws that burned through his skin. Tears rolled down Simon’s cheeks, drying before they reached his jaw line. He was powerless to do anything, and the demon was so strong.

‘I am a fallen seraph,’ Asmodeus said, ‘a prince of demons. I still burn with the holy fire that created me. Inside I carry an incandescent light, the like of which you have never seen. And you call me foul. You call me evil one? Let me show you how evil I can be!’

Simon looked into the demon’s eyes, which seemed to be two coals, burning white-hot. His eyes streamed as if he were staring at the sun. What little air that reached his lungs was hot and dry. He felt like he was burning up from the inside.

‘You are nothing but a child!’ Asmodeus hissed, and squeezed Simon’s throat further, burning away layers of flesh, ‘A weak, feeble, human child!’

Simon passed out, and the demon dropped him. He fell to the floor in a heap, and Asmodeus placed a burning claw on his head.

‘Poor child, meddling with things you don’t understand. Be rest assured, I shall bring Hell upon this house and all living in it. Thank you for freeing me — now burn.’

Simon’s hair ignited under the demon’s grip, the flames engulfing his body, consuming him and igniting the stairs beneath. Asmodeus looked up to see the fire from Simon’s room taking over the landing. A door creaked behind the demon, and a young girl appeared in the hall.

‘Simon?’ She asked, rubbing her tired eyes.

The demon smiled.

Within half an hour, the fire brigade arrived at the scene, responding to neighbours’ calls, but it was too little, too late. Try as they might, they couldn’t put the fire out, and it showed no sign of abating. Some said that it was the worst fire they had ever seen. The light from it was visible all across town, and the smoke hung low in the air so that people had to stay indoors and keep their windows closed for days. No matter how much water was poured on it, the fire wouldn’t go out — it was as if it had tapped into some kind of fuel supply that kept it burning and raging.

Before the sun came up the next morning, there was a huge explosion, and an enormous fireball burst forth from the house, enclosed within a mushroom-shaped cloud. Whatever had fuelled the fire was running out, as it died down quite quickly, leaving the house to collapse in on itself. There was no way of determining what had started the blaze, which was labelled in the press as an awful tragedy. The whole family had been consumed by the flames — there were no survivors.

In the weeks that followed, parents hugged their children close, and lovers clung to each other. The town had suffered a sad loss, and it had left a scar not only on the street where Simon’s house had once stood, but also in the minds and hearts of those who lived there. Some turned to religion, and it was true to say that, following the memorial service for the family, more people began attending church regularly than had been seen for a long time.

Far from the scene of the disaster, across national borders and continental divides, back in the desert that it had once called home, Asmodeus raged and burned. The demon stayed away from mankind as much as possible, grateful to have been set free, but angry at being stuck in the human world. Tribesmen recorded more wildfires than had been seen for generations, burning what scant vegetation grew in the desert. They stayed close to the villages and oases, and left the wild desert to the elements, for it was well-known that the desert was where the Devil lived. Children listened to their parents, and didn’t stray. Even the livestock stayed close.

Everyone was in agreement — there was something out there that hadn’t been there before, and it commanded fear and respect. What it was, and from whence it came, was unknown, but there were those who swore that when the hot wind blew across the dunes and shifted the sands, a voice could be heard speaking words whose meaning were all but forgotten.

Ayer avage aloren Asmoday aken…

The Ward

Be careful who you take into your care…

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It was a sad day for all involved. The Willard family crypt welcomed another two family members into its cold marble embrace — victims of an apparent murder-suicide that had left little Jenna Willard orphaned, and unable to speak about what she had witnessed. People paid their respects, told her they were sorry, and left. Someone had suggested that, given the circumstances, a wake would be inappropriate.

The circumstances: Jenna had found her parents dead in the living room one morning and had raised the alarm by walking to next door where she collapsed into a neighbour’s arms. It was assumed that she had tried reviving them, because their blood was spattered over her arms and across her chest.

Jenna Willard. People said her name like a curse. She had always been a bit odd, had no friends in school to speak of, and had spent most of her time at home in what seemed like a loving family unit. Yet her parents had clearly chosen to leave her behind, to the mercy of social services and the courts, with no one for company.

People whispered around her as they discussed her fate, and looked uncomfortable when she tried to lip-read. Her horrifying experience may have rendered her mute, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t understand what was going on. She knew they were trying to place her somewhere, without asking her opinion or including her in the decision-making process.

A distant uncle was eventually tracked down across country, living in some kind of decaying ancestral pile. He sent a car for her, and to everyone’s relief she packed a small suitcase and left to live with her only remaining relative. The house was sold, with the money put into a trust fund for Jenna’s twenty-first birthday, and people moved on. A girl who was never really there was now really gone.

The vines grew over the Willard family crypt, the metal on the doors rusted and buckled. People chose to forget what had happened. Neither Jenna nor her distant uncle were heard of again, and no-one visited the crypt on their behalf. It fell into ruin and the Willard family name passed into urban myth.

As for Jenna — she entered into a world so strange and antiquated it seemed as if she had gone back in time. From the day that the car brought her to the high gates of her uncle’s home and left her to walk up the driveway to the big, crumbling house, Jenna felt she was in a place left untouched by the modern world. She was living somewhere time stood still, and had done for a while.

She took comfort in the fact that her uncle’s house was trapped in a period before her parents’ deaths, as if staying here would stop time progressing to that awful day. Jenna relished it privately, and although she had never said so, she felt happier living with her uncle than she had done with her parents. She had a whole wing of her own to amuse herself in, a far cry from the tiny bedroom she had been used to.

Her uncle Ralph was an ageing gentleman who had never married or had children of his own. He was kind to Jenna but not loving, and whilst the few staff he employed to run the house would tiptoe around her, he refused to give her any special attention.

‘Just because you have suffered a tragic loss, doesn’t mean you shall be treated any differently,’ he said on the day that Jenna moved in, ‘the Court has appointed you as my ward, and you shall be educated and disciplined as I see fit. I understand that a significant sum of money is being held in trust for your twenty-first birthday, but in order for you to touch it, you have to get there first.’

Jenna had just stared at her feet as she was being addressed, although Ralph noticed that she was balling and un-balling her fists as she breathed. He assumed it was some kind of coping mechanism she had developed. He would see to it that she stopped that and any other habits she had picked up. Life would be hard for her, he would make sure of that, but she would be all the stronger for it.

Jenna let Ralph think what he wanted to think about her. She was meek and quiet. As time went on, the house staff would whisper about her or giggle behind their hands. Little did any of them realise that a fire was burning inside of her that she was fighting to control. She would ball and un-ball her fists to refocus her mind and vent her energy in small amounts.

One day, she caught two maids talking about her, and decided to make an example of them. They laughed at her when she stood before them balling her fists and not saying anything as usual. This time was different, however — she un-balled her right fist and pointed at one of them, who promptly started clutching at her chest and collapsed. As the maid writhed around on the floor, Jenna pointed at the second one, and she, too fell down in pain. Jenna kept focusing on them, sharing her pain with them, so much so that they couldn’t cry out. Within minutes they were dead, and Jenna simply stepped over their bodies and skipped away with a new energy.

The coroner recorded that both maids had died of a heart attack, most likely within minutes of one another. They had been found later by chance, huddled in a heap. Since no-one had witnessed the strange event, their deaths were recorded as the result of natural causes. Some had questioned whether drugs were involved, but this was quickly ruled out due to lack of evidence. The only comfort for their families was that at least they’d died together.

Things changed within the great house from that day. The staff informed Ralph that Jenna had been heard singing and laughing to herself when she thought no-one else was around. She was still mute when other people were around, but it was clear among the staff that she was hiding the fact that she could make some kind of noise.

Ralph’s valet was the next to go — suffering a stroke one day whilst he was in the pantry. Unknown to everyone else, he had tried forcing himself on young Jenna, and she had simply un-balled her fist and pressed her palm to the man’s forehead. He had collapsed, dead within seconds.

The cook saw Jenna leaving the pantry, so she had to go too, if only because she must have heard Jenna’s struggles with the valet and chose to do nothing. Once again, Jenna simply touched her, and she suffered a seizure so bad she became comatose and died later in hospital.

One by one, the staff died, and people in the village told of a sickness that had set in at the big house. The police called to speak to Ralph, who couldn’t make sense of what was happening. When they tried to interview Jenna she was sullen and quiet, and Ralph had explained that she was mute. They left with more questions than answers, which set the village tongues wagging even more.

Although no-one was brave enough to broach the subject, people whispered that it must be Jenna’s fault. People who had been through the childhood tragedy that she had were bound to be touched by it in some way. She had brought a negative energy to the big house, and the staff had suffered because of her being there. These rumours reached Ralph’s ears, and so he called his ward to the study to ask her how she felt.

‘The local gossips have been at it again,’ he told her as she stood before his desk staring at her feet, ‘they say that you are cursed because of what happened to you as a child. No child should grow up without parents, and although I took you in, I have to admit, I haven’t been the father figure that I perhaps should have. What should I say to these rumour-mongers?’

‘Say nothing.’ Jenna answered.

Ralph was taken aback, not just because Jenna had actually spoken, but because of the force with which she spoke. It was an order.

Jenna looked up at him, meeting his eyes with an angry stare that he couldn’t break away from.

‘I did it,’ she said, ‘I did it all. My parents, the maids, your valet, the cook…and now you. You will say nothing.’

Ralph opened his mouth to speak, but couldn’t find the words. He tried to talk, but could only make strange yawning sounds that became increasingly desperate and wild as he feebly tried to fight against a hardening block in his throat.

‘You will never speak again, uncle. But don’t worry, I’ll look after you, just like you looked after me.’

Ralph gasped for air and clawed at his neck in panic.

‘Calm yourself,’ Jenna said with a smile, ‘you’ll only make this more difficult. You’re going to live for a long time, but it’ll be just us here, and you will never be able to speak again.’

Jenna turned and skipped away, and for the first time, Ralph realised that she was no longer the small, frightened child who had been thrust on him by the Court. She was a strong, powerful young woman who had grown up without him even noticing. As she laughed to herself and closed the door behind her, for the first time in a long time, he felt afraid.

The Poet’s Chair

Be careful where you sit…

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Henry inherited the house on Derwen Avenue from his mother, or rather, his mother had been unable to sell it to pay for her care so it had lay undisturbed for years, whilst she had whiled away her twilight years in the best care home that Henry could afford. It wasn’t a bad house, no bad things had happened there, but there was something about the place, some feeling, that had prevented it from being sold.

From the outside, it was an ordinary-looking house in an ordinary street, although unlike most of the surrounding houses it had three floors rather than the standard two. His parents had extended the top floor in the Seventies, creating a huge room that spanned the footprint of the whole house, with a large window at the back that afforded views across town.

Henry had done his best, or rather paid his best, to keep the outside of the house in good shape. He was determined to maintain the building so that he could one day sell it, although out of respect for his dear mother, he hadn’t moved in, or even entered the property until she passed away. After the funeral, and the respects paid by people he didn’t know, he returned to the house on Derwen Avenue.

First, he planned to make an inventory of everything in the house and divide it between what was saleable, and what needed to be thrown out. Henry planned to start in the attic level and move his way down. He hadn’t been up there in years, not since his father had passed. His mother had everything covered in dust sheets and closed the door to the top floor. She never spoke of it, but in those years living alone in the house, Henry often caught her staring up at the ceiling.

The cleaning day began like any regular day. Henry began pulling the dust sheets off the furniture and shifting cardboard boxes to the doorway so he could sort their contents easily. By lunchtime there was one large dust sheet left, over a tall piece of furniture at the back of the room. Henry walked up to it, and like a magician pulling a tablecloth without disturbing the plates, whipped off the last dust sheet and folded it with dramatic flair.

Underneath was an intricately-carved chair fashioned from dark wood. It looked to Henry’s untrained eye to have been made from a single piece. He ran his fingers over the Celtic knotwork design, surprised to find a face surrounded by leaves where a person’s head would have rested. He wondered how old it was. There was no dust on it but it would need polishing before it could be sold.

It was a solid, heavy-looking thing, and he wondered how it had come to be on the top floor. The chair was so cumbersome it must have taken a lot of effort to move it up there. Henry didn’t remember any fuss about moving furniture to the top floor. And he didn’t remember either of his parents ever mentioning the exquisitely-carved item that they surely would have wanted to display.

That night he stayed in the house, not wanting to leave until the task was done. He slept in his old room, which was so much smaller than he remembered it. As he closed his eyes a strange voice seemed to whisper in his ear:

‘A oes heddwch?’

His eyes snapped open. The room was empty. He sat upright in bed and switched on the bedside lamp. Nothing was out of the ordinary. His window was shut, but he knew that these old properties often breathed of their own accord. He convinced himself it was just the wind, and lay back down to sleep.

Dreams came to him quickly — flashes of images without any kind of order. His parents, the house, strange men clad in white sheets, a shining sword being drawn from its scabbard, and the big, dark chair with its dust sheet billowing in the wind. Through it all he heard that voice:

‘A oes heddwch?’

When Henry awoke in the morning he remembered it all, and remembered what drew all the fragments together. He lay in bed, listening to the house creaking around him, and a single word escaped his lips. A word he hadn’t heard since school, since childhood:

‘Eisteddfodau.’

He thought back to his school days — the Eisteddfod was a cultural event held in schools on or around March the First. Prizes were given for competitions in singing, poetry, writing and other artistic pursuits. There were larger national, and international Eisteddfod events — artistic olympiads — but he had never attended any himself. Henry couldn’t remember his parents attending one either.

The highest accolade in an Eisteddfod was the bardic chair — a new chair was carved each year from wood for the winner of the poetry event. During the closing ceremony of the event, the archdruid would pull a sword from its scabbard and ask if there was peace. The crowd, if in agreement with the winner’s announcement, would affirm that there was, indeed, peace.

Henry was mystified by the chair — he was confident in his assumption that it was a bardic chair, that it potentially held great cultural value — but he had no idea why either one of his parents would have had it in the house. The question was what to do with it? He might be able to offload it to a specialist antique dealer, but he was curious about the chair’s past, and how it came to be in his parents’ house.

As the emptying of the house began, and furniture was sold off item by item, Henry tried his best to research the chair. The vivid images of his dreams haunted him day and night, and his only respite was the hours he spent obsessing over the chair’s past. There were bardic chairs up and down the country stretching back almost a thousand years. Which one this was, he couldn’t tell, and how he was meant to find out, he wasn’t sure. His research came up empty handed, until the day the museum called.

Arwyn Saunders, head of collections at one of the museums he had approached, called one day and asked to come and see the chair. Henry was happy to oblige, as the house was mostly empty and he wanted rid of the item so that he could sell the property.

Upon his arrival Henry guided Arwyn quickly to the top floor. He had managed to push the chair half-way to the door, and had given up. It now sat in the centre of the room with its dust sheet folded up neatly on one arm.

‘Beautiful carvings,’ Arwyn mused, tracing his finger along the knotwork just as Henry had done the day that he found it.

Henry suddenly felt defensive. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. His thoughts bounced from wanting the man to leave, to keeping him there until he told him all he knew. It was strange to think, but he almost felt jealous of Arwyn and whatever knowledge he had of the chair.

‘And you say you don’t know where it came from?’ Arwyn asked.

Henry shook his head. ‘I assumed it was a bardic chair.’

‘Yet you say neither of your parents were Eisteddfod bards?’

‘If they were, they never talked about it.’

‘I don’t suppose your father was a carpenter? He could have made it?’

‘No, he was an accountant.’

‘Perhaps the chair was here when they moved in?’

‘The house has been in the family for generations, so it’s entirely possible.’

‘Interesting,’ Arwyn straightened up and removed the dust sheet from the arm of the chair, and ran his palm over the carved wood beneath, ‘it’s an old one, that’s for sure. The dark colour of the wood, the design of the carvings…it’s not a recent piece.’

‘How much?’ The words escaped Henry’s mouth before he could he could stop himself.

Arwyn shrugged, ‘The Museum tends to have pieces donated to it, rather than purchasing them. At any rate, I don’t think we’d be able to afford it — it’s so old, it’s entirely irreplaceable. I can call a valuer friend of mine if you like, he could let you know how much it might be worth for insurance purposes.’

‘Insurance purposes?’

‘I mean you wouldn’t be able to get one like this if anything happened to it.’

Henry frowned. ‘What could happen to it?’

Arwyn shrugged again, ‘It’s unlikely to be stolen, given its size. But fire, woodworm, or rot? There are plenty of things that could go wrong. Best to have it valued and insured if I were you.’

‘What about removing it from the premises? I’m trying to sell the house.’

‘I would insure it before you move it. Just for your peace of mind.’

Henry agreed to have a valuer visit to price up the chair. Arwyn took a few photos of the carvings to help with identifying the chair, and said he would be in touch. Henry waved him off and closed the door, leaving himself alone in the house with the chair. The voice returned to him:

‘A oes heddwch?’

‘Who is that?!’ He shouted. There was no reply. He switched the lights on in every room, moving methodically through the house from the ground floor up to the attic level. Most of the rooms were completely bare now, so he was able to quickly check over the house. Still the voice whispered, sometimes ahead of him, at other times behind. Try as he might, Henry couldn’t find the source, and so he made him way up to the top floor, and exhausted, sat in the bardic chair.

A few days later, Arwyn returned to the house on Derwen Avenue. The door creaked open as he knocked on it, and he stepped inside the empty hallway.

‘Henry?’ He called, looking around. The lights were all on, despite it being a sunny day, ‘anyone home?’

Arwyn jumped at a sound from above his head — a thumping sound followed by heavy scraping. He followed the sound up to the first floor, looking up at the ceiling all the time. When he reached the foot of the stairs to the top floor, he could see a shape in the gloom — the lights had been switched off upstairs.

‘Henry, is that you?’ Arwyn said, climbing the stairs. He reached a light switch and flicked it on with a gasp.

Henry was sat in the bardic chair, bolt upright, staring straight ahead. He was unshaven and looked worn out and bedraggled.

‘What’s happened to you?’ Arwyn asked.

This broke Henry’s reverie, and he looked at his visitor.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘My valuer friend said he hadn’t heard from you so I thought I’d check in. Are you alright?’

‘Never better.’

‘You’ll be happy to know I managed to identify the chair from its carvings.’

‘Have you?’

‘Bit of a story behind it — there was an argument between two potential winners at an Eisteddfod, and one of the men stole the chair before it could be awarded. It was never seen again, and he was never at peace.’

‘You don’t say?’

Arwyn stepped into the room and Henry tilted his head to one side, as if he were listening to someone close by. Henry smiled.

‘I think you should go.’ He said.

Arwyn stopped. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘I said go! I’ve decided I’m keeping the chair, and the house.’

‘But you’ve sold everything. There’s nothing here for you!’

‘I have everything I need right here,’ Henry said, tapping the arms of the chair and standing up, ‘and you need to go.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Henry rushed at Arwyn, who stumbled back out of the room. The voice was shouting in Henry’s ear now, no longer a whisper. Arwyn held his hands up to protect himself, but Henry barged him, pushing him backwards and sending him tumbling down the staircase to the floor below.

Henry stood at the top of the stairs looking down at Arwyn’s broken body. The voice came to him again:

‘A oes heddwch?’

‘Heddwch,’ he answered grimly, and returned to sit in the poet’s chair.

The Golder’s Green Golem

Who is more powerful: the creator, or the created?

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Mordecai couldn’t believe his eyes. His daughter had brought his grandson Hugo home crying and bloodied after being beaten by bullies in school. Hugo was besides himself and was adamant that he would never be going to school again.

‘This is not the same country I escaped to all those years ago,’ Mordecai said sadly, ‘we were supposed to be safe here, not persecuted.’

‘It’s not persecution Dad,’ his daughter Gilda said, somewhat defensively, ‘he’s just been roughed up a bit. I’ll go down to the school in the morning and sort it out.’

Mordecai shook his head. ‘That’s how it started in Czechoslovakia. With the children. You poison a child’s mind, and eventually you have a sick adult. My parents sent me to England before the Nazis invaded the Sudetenland — they thought I would be safe here.’

‘We know the story, Dad,’ Gilda said, whilst cleaning a cut on Hugo’s forehead, ‘but it’s not going to help here, is it?’

Hugo had stopped crying, sniffing back tears, fearing a family argument. He’d had his fill of angry outbursts for the day.

‘Your mother needs help in the kitchen,’ Mordecai said, ‘I’ll finish cleaning up the boy.’

Gilda handed over the damp cloth to her father and left the room with any complaint. Mordecai beckoned his grandson to him.

‘Come and sit with me, Hugo. You remind me of myself when I was your age — perhaps younger still. I had my fair share of troubles as a boy, just for being who I was. It was a dark time for us Jews, and although it doesn’t seem as dark at the moment, I’m afraid I can see the same clouds circling. How old are you now?’

‘Ten.’ Hugo sniffed.

‘And these boys who attacked you — were they your age or older?’

‘My age.’

‘So sad that your peers would be behave that way. So many gave their lives — or had them taken — so that we might live in a better, safer world. How sad that it has come to this. Do me a favour will you? Walk over to my bureau and bring me back the book that sits in the bottom drawer.’

Hugo did as he was told — the bureau was bigger than he was, and had always been out of bounds as he had grown up. Hugo had often wondered what his grandparents kept inside it, and had long hoped to steal a look one day.

He pulled open a bottom drawer and found a brown volume sitting on a silken cloth.

‘Quickly, boy.’ Mordecai whispered, with an urgent glance towards the doorway into the kitchen.

Hugo picked up the book — a very old volume by the looks of it. The cover was brown leather and held a clasp that no longer fastened it together properly. There were markings burned into the leather — Hugo recognised the Star of David and some Hebrew lettering, but the rest of the symbols were alien to him.

‘What is it?’ He asked, as he gave the book to his grandfather, and squeezed in beside him on the chair.

‘This, my boy, was a book given to me by our Rabbi back in Czechoslovakia before my parents sent me here. Out of all the people leaving, he thought that I was the most honest and trustworthy. He told me to keep it safe from the enemy, who was looking for it.’

Mordecai opened the book, causing the spine to crack. The pages of the book were made of a parchment that spoke of centuries past. They were brittle and dry, but had been well looked after.

‘Our Rabbi told me that this book once belonged to Rabbi Loew, the Maharal of Prague. With it, he created the Golem — a man made of mud — to do his bidding and protect the Jews of Prague during the sixteenth century. Just as the Lord created Adam from clay, so the Rabbi created the Golem from the mud of the Vltava, and carving a Hebrew spell into its skin, brought it to life.’

‘Dad can you come here and carve the meat?’ Gilda called from the kitchen.

‘Wow,’ Hugo gasped as his grandfather turned the pages, revealing the ancient spells and diagrams associated with the rite of bringing the clay creature to life. ‘Why did the Nazis want the book?’

‘If they had been able to get a hold of these incantations, our Rabbi felt that they would use them to create a golem army at Hitler’s command — strong creatures that couldn’t be shot or killed like men can. It would have spelled disaster.’

‘Dad!’ Gilda shouted.

‘Yes! Yes, I’m coming.’ he ruffled Hugo’s hair and got out of the chair with difficulty, stretching his stiff legs and shuffling out of the room.

Hugo flicked through the pages, looking at the symbols that he had no chance of understanding. An idea dawned on him, and he pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket and began taking the pictures of each page, including the covers. As his mother came into the room to call him for dinner, he closed the book shut guiltily, and left it on the chair.

Later that night, he sat up in bed awake, looking over the images on his phone. He couldn’t read any of the words or understand any of the diagrams, so he managed to find a free translation app and downloaded it. What came out of the translation was a garbled string of words, some in English, some in the original language he assumed was Hebrew.

Hugo eventually fell asleep and dreamed of mud-men: some big, some small, all following his orders. He would show the bullies who was boss. There was a strange shadow over his shoulder in his dream, a shape that could have been a man or something else. When he tried to look at it he found he couldn’t focus on it — the shadow was somehow always behind his shoulder.

Over the course of the weekend Hugo spent his time translating the Hebrew and trying to make out what the symbols and diagrams meant. He did a little research into the creation of golems, and found that, with the correct incantations, it was an absurdly-simple process. In the waking hours of Sunday, when the town was quiet, he made his way down to the riverbank with a small trowel and began to dig in the mud.

Hugo’s plan was to create a full-size golem, but the sheer amount of time spent labouring in the mud and the cold river water made him abandon that idea for something smaller and easier. He ended up creating a man-shape just a little taller than himself, and stood back to admire his creation. The creation didn’t look much like the diagrams in the pages of his grandfather’s book, but it would have to do.

Hugo carved some Hebrew letters into the creation’s forehead, and then began the incantations he had translated into English. He had no way of knowing if the magic would translate too, and when he was done, he sat on the riverbank feeling defeated. Nothing happened. The hours rolled by, his family would be wondering where he was. With great reluctance, Hugo left the creation on the riverbank. He walked home with the foreboding feeling that he would have to face the bullies some time the next day.

Sunday ran into Monday all too quickly, and Hugo kept himself to himself. At half past three in the afternoon, he bolted to the school gates, where the bullies were already waiting for him. He decided to push on and managed to rush past them, but they caught up with him in an alleyway between the houses. Jonathan, the outright leader of the gang, held Hugo in one hand whilst making a fist with the other.

Hugo closed his eyes tight and prepared for himself for the inevitable pain that would accompany the punch. Nothing happened, not to Hugo anyway. He heard Jonathan scream, and opened his eyes to see a small boy pulling the bully’s head back by his hair. The other boys backed away.

‘What is it?’ one of them shouted.

Through his delirious tears, Hugo saw the golem he had created. It was small, indeed, but had a seemingly huge strength. Jonathan screamed and cried whilst wriggling himself free of the golem’s grasp. The creature just stood there, waiting, and Hugo suddenly realised the power that he had over it. He pointed at the bullies and shouted ‘Get them! Get them all!’

The golem went to work, chasing the bullies away. Hugo followed at a distance, pleased and proud of his work. The bullies scattered, but not before the golem had a chance to bloody two of their noses and rain blows down upon their heads. Now that he had had his revenge, Hugo shouted for the golem to stop.

The golem didn’t stop.

It just simply carried on looking for its next victim, and found a homeless man outside the local supermarket. The man was dazed and detached, only noticing the golem when it started to attack him. Hugo shouted at the creature to stop, but it continued to ignore him. Other people ran to the homeless man’s aid, but they, too were attacked by the insatiably angry creature. Horrified by what he had done, Hugo backed away, and once at a safe distance he broke into a run.

He meant to run home, but his feet and guilt led him to his grandparents’ house. He knocked on the door and was in tears by the time his grandfather opened it.

Mordecai couldn’t understand the babble of words that came out of his grandson’s mouth. Something about the bullies and people being attacked in the high street.

‘Perhaps we should call the police,’ he mused to his wife, ‘sounds like something serious is happening.’

‘Are you hurt at all, Hugo?’ She asked, examining him closely.

He shook his head.

‘Did you fight those boys?’ Mordecai demanded.

Hugo shook his head again and thought it best to come clean. Whilst staring at his feet he mumbled that he had made a golem and set it on the bullies.

‘A golem?’ His grandmother shrieked, ‘Where did you get such an idea?’

Hugo looked up into her eyes, trying not to cry. His grandfather had paced over to the bureau and opened the bottom drawer.

‘The book is still here,’ Mordecai said to his wife, holding the book up for her to see.

‘That book!’

‘I took pictures on my phone. I tried translating the pages, but I didn’t think it worked, until the golem came to my rescue earlier.’

‘I blame myself for showing you the book. Why didn’t you command the golem to stop?’

‘I didn’t know how to,’ Hugo cried, ‘I don’t think that I got all the pages in the book.’

‘So you didn’t complete the spell?’ Mordecai asked as he stowed the book back in the bureau.

Hugo shrugged.

‘The golem will only listen to you. We have to track it down and stop it.’

‘And then what?’ His wife asked, ‘What will you do about it?’

‘I shall call on the Rabbi,’ Mordecai responded, ‘and you’re coming with me, boy.’

‘How will we find the creature? It could be anywhere by now.’

‘I guess we’ll just follow the screams. But first — to the synagogue.’

A quick look at the television saw a news report of a “localised incident” that the police were looking into, and asked the public to stay at home or else stay vigilant whilst they were out and about. Mordecai marched Hugo to the synagogue a few streets away, and made him tell the Rabbi everything that had happened.

The Rabbi was understandably shocked, and skeptical of Hugo’s story until Mordecai told his part in the story, explaining how his Rabbi in Czechoslovakia had entrusted the book to him as a young child.

‘Three things you must do,’ the Rabbi told them, ‘find the golem, bring it here, and then shut it down.’

‘How do we do that?’ Hugo asked, ‘what if it won’t listen to me?’

‘Have faith, child,’ the Rabbi said with a pat on his head, ‘just bring the creature here.’

Mordecai and Hugo left, making their way to Golders Green Road, where they found people running in their direction.

‘I think we’re in the right place,’ Mordecai said grimly.

There were bloodstains splattered on the pavement, and as they approached the supermarket there were bodies in the road. Mordecai shook his head and uttered quick prayers for those they stepped over on the way.

‘This is all my fault,’ Hugo said, and began to cry again.

‘It’s our fault, boy,’ Mordecai said, looking down on his grandson, ‘their blood is on both our hands. Dry those tears. You must command the creature. You must be forceful. Otherwise it might not listen to you.’

Hugo nodded, and sniffed back his tears. He pointed ahead of them.

‘There it is.’

The creature was stamping on the head of someone lying prone in the street. Hugo shivered as they approached it.

‘What did you tell it to do, Hugo?’

‘I just told it to get them all. But I didn’t mean everyone!’

‘As the old saying goes, “be careful what you wish for.”’

They approached the creature cautiously. As they got within a few feet, the creature stopped what it was doing, straightened up, and looked at them with glowing eyes.

‘Look at its eyes!’ Hugo shouted, ‘I didn’t make them like that!’

‘No, boy — those are the eyes of the golem. They burn with a holy fire, and only One can create that. Now, we must be quick in our task before the police arrive.’

They approached the golem slowly, deliberately, with Hugo in front of his grandfather. The creature seemed to have grown taller, and as Hugo stepped up to it, it loomed over him.

‘Now,’ Mordecai whispered by his side, ‘be forceful. Tell it to stop, and order it to follow us to the synagogue. Quick as you can.’

‘Golem!’ Hugo shouted, ‘I command you to stop! You are to follow us to the synagogue!’

The golem’s eyes burned brighter, and it opened a crack where a mouth would have been — a mouth that Hugo hadn’t given him. It hissed like a kettle boiling, and closed its mouth again. It walked forward and stopped in front of Hugo. The little boy trembled before it, but he didn’t falter.

‘Come with us,’ he said and began to walk away.

Mordecai watched as the golem followed his grandson down the street. He had heard of the fire in a golem’s eyes all of his life, had read about them in the book that had been entrusted to him. He had always wanted to see what they looked like, and now that he had faced them he felt rooted to the spot.

His legs felt heavy, and a cold chill rippled through him as the golem looked at him. He couldn’t move, his lungs seemed frozen, and his breath gave out. Even after the creature had passed him by, he could still see those eyes.

‘Grandpa?’ Hugo turned just in time to see Mordecai fall. The golem stopped and waited, but nothing could be done. People didn’t come to help, as they were afraid of the golem. Hugo cradled his grandfather’s head in his lap and cried. The golem stood over him and dropped an arm over the boy’s shoulder. Hugo looked up into the burning eyes of his creation.

‘Will you help me?’ He asked.

The golem nodded, and stooped down to pick up Mordecai’s body. Hugo walked meekly by its side, holding on to his grandfather’s cold hand. They retraced their steps down Golders Green Road, and Hugo led the way to the synagogue.

Time passed too quickly. Mordecai was buried quietly and privately. The golem was made to stop by erasing the Hebrew spell that had been etched into its forehead. The Rabbi promised that the creature would be held and looked after in the synagogue. Hugo begged and pleaded with his mother to let him switch schools, or even try homeschooling, but the day came for him to return to school.

On that day he stood on the street opposite the synagogue. The golem was in there somewhere — he had seen it, and could feel it even now. It was sleeping, not dead. What was done could not be undone.

‘Why did my grandfather have to die?’ Hugo had asked the Rabbi.

‘Because you had created life,’ was the answer, ‘in a way that only the Lord is allowed. So a life was taken to right the balance.’

Hugo’s grandmother had handed over the golem spell book to the Rabbi. Neither she nor Hugo’s mother wanted to be reminded of the circumstances in which his grandfather had died. His family didn’t talk about it, and no-one wanted to discuss it in school. The Rabbi assured them that the police had been satisfied in their enquiries, but didn’t go into further detail.

One day after school, he returned to the river where he had dug enough mud to make the golem. He stared down into the murky water and was shocked to see two glowing eyes staring back at him — staring through him. Hugo dropped a stone in the water, but when the ripples subsided, the eyes were still there, in place of his own. He was tarnished somehow, inextricably linked with his creation, and the awful things that it had done.

Gimmick

Not all magic is black and white

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.com

Robbie was down on his luck. As he sat on the front porch surrounded by streamers and balloons, he reflected on his choices that had brought him to this very spot. He had always loved magic and performing as a child, and had been a member of his local magic circle as a teenager. He had dreamed of one day being a great magician with a stage show of his own in Vegas, but he had sadly never progressed past the children’s party stage. He was getting on a bit now, and his act was getting old. He had performed at the birthday parties of most of the neighbourhood kids for almost a decade, and they were tired of the same, stale material. What he needed was a shot in the arm, a new routine — something special, something magic. What Robbie needed was a gimmick.

Today, he was considering packing it all in. The kids at the party hadn’t enjoyed his performance, and neither had he. The birthday boy had actually burst into tears at one stage, and the parents had suggested he call it a day. Now, as he waited for his ride, a little earlier than planned, he questioned where his life was going, and whether there was any magic left in it at all. It didn’t seem so right now — the time and effort he put into his magic acts outweighed the money — or lack of — that he made from his performances.

He was silent all the ride home, and by the time he got in he had decided — he was finally done with magic. He felt relieved, having made the decision at last. It had been coming on for a while, and the ruined birthday party had sealed the deal. There was no pleasure in making other people miserable. In his head he heard his parents’ voices telling him it was time grow up and move on from magic. He’d given it a good go, no-one could deny that, but in this age of cell phones and social media, his kind of magic was a redundant, childish pursuit. Robbie went to bed early, lulled into an uneasy sleep by a few beers, flitting from bad dream to bad dream until his alarm clock went off at an ungodly hour.

He was putting bread in the toaster when there was a thump at the door. The newspaper boy was obviously early on his round this morning. Robbie figured the least he could do was to look to see what job ads were in the paper — make an early start to his new life. When he opened the front door and looked down, there wasn’t a newspaper in sight. Instead, a felt top hat and a white-tipped magician’s wand were in the centre of the doorstep.

Robbie looked at them, bemused. Someone was having a laugh, and a cruel one at that. He looked up and down the street, but no-one seemed to be about. He was tempted to slam the door and leave them there to show that he didn’t appreciate the joke. There was something about the hat, however, that made him want to pick it up and put it on. He gathered up both the hat and wand and retreated back into the house.

Back in the kitchen, he placed the hat upside-down on the table and returned his attention to the toaster. The wand seemed to roll off the table of its own accord, and hit the floor just as Robbie was turning around. He bent down, frowning, picked it up and returned it to where he had left it, on top of the hat. There was a soft thudding noise from under the hat.

Robbie picked the hat up and found a small white rabbit sitting underneath it. He gasped and dropped the hat back down over the rabbit. He stared at the hat and the wand, and then tapped the hat with the wand. There was a scrabbling sound and then another thud. Robbie picked up the hat again, and found that the rabbit had been replaced with a white dove.

The dove flapped its wings and flew up to perch on top of the kitchen cabinet. Robbie looked from the hat to the dove and back again. He upturned the hat on the table and tapped the brim with the wand. Unbelievably, the dove flew down and landed in the hat, where it promptly disappeared. Robbie looked inside the hat, but there was no dove, and no rabbit.

What he did see was a gold label sewn in to the felt of the hat. It had swirling letters written in black, which he read aloud.

‘The Great Robbino.’ Robbie laughed. That was what he had called himself as a boy when he put on magic shows for his family. He had learned card tricks and simple sleight of hand, but they were just that — tricks. This was magic — real magic.

For the next few weeks, Robbie played around with the hat, practising old tricks, and inventing new ones. The hat worked like a charm, doing whatever he wanted it to, and then some. He tested his new routine on a few children’s parties, and found that he was all of a sudden getting more bookings. People wanted to see the rabbit turn into a dove, to see cards burst into flames of their own accord, only to drop into the hat and come out whole again.

The trade-off was that he didn’t see his friends and family much. When he wasn’t performing, The Great Robbino was at home, squirreled away with the hat and wand, testing its limits, seeing how it could stretch him as a magician. He didn’t care much for the world outside. He let the mail build up, and let the newspapers pile up by the front door.

Once he was confident that he knew how to work the hat and wand, he decided to film short clips of his new magic routines with his smartphone and upload them to the internet. He immediately expanded his audience, and his magic act bookings went through the roof. People enjoyed his seemingly impossible magic, and he enjoyed the adoration. His career was going from strength to strength, until the day he received the message.

He was going through his new morning routine — answering fan mail and email queries, checking his online videos for any comments — when he noticed a new unread message in his inbox. He opened it up, and read a single line of text gave him chills:

I SEE YOU FOUND MY HAT.

It was only six words, but they turned his world upside down. Someone out there knew about the hat, and by extension, what it could do. If they new that the hat was his source of magic, they also knew that he was a fraud. It was someone else’s magic, not his. He thought back to the day before he had found the hat on his doorstep — back to that awful birthday party that had made him want to call it quits.

The Great Robbino was only “Great” because of the hat. Without it, he was Robbie the failure. Someone, somewhere knew this. He checked the sender’s name, but it was a series of numbers without an image associated with it. He decided to pause his video uploads for now, and to keep his magic to local functions and parties. Even so, a week later he woke up to see another six-word message:

I WOULD LIKE MY HAT BACK.

This time, he replied. He sent a message asking who the person was, and what he meant. He tried to play dumb, pretending that he didn’t know anything about any hat. The response chilled him even more than the original message had:

YOU, SIR, ARE IN POSSESSION OF A MAGICIAN’S HAT AND WAND THAT DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU. YOU MAKE THINK IT DOES, BECAUSE YOU FOUND YOUR NAME INSIDE, BUT THAT LABEL HAS READ MY NAME AND MANY OTHERS DURING ITS TIME, AND WILL IN FACT READ THE NAMES OF OTHERS WHEN THE HAT DECIDES TO LEAVE YOU. AND IT WILL LEAVE YOU, WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECT IT. I KNOW THIS BECAUSE IT HAPPENED TO ME. I HAD SPENT YEARS LOOKING FOR MY HAT, WITHOUT A CLUE WHERE IT HAD GONE, UNTIL I CAME ACROSS YOUR VIDEOS. NOW I KNOW YOU HAVE IT, I WOULD LIKE MY HAT BACK.

The Great Robbino turned the hat around in his hands, trying to see if there were any marks on the gold label that might show where other names had been written. There was, of course, nothing — it was for all intents and purposes, his hat, because it had his name on it. He put the hat down on the table and tapped it with the wand.

‘What on earth can I do?’

There was a muted clang from inside the hat, and when he gingerly picked the hat up there was a small dagger on the table. He stared at it in disbelief, then put it back in the upturned hat for it to disappear. When he turned the hat and tapped it again with the wand, he heard the same soft clang of metal. Sure enough, the dagger was back.

‘That settles it,’ he said to himself, picking up the dagger and admiring it.

He replied to his mysterious messenger, arranging to meet in the parking lot of a forestry at the edge of town. His plan was to meet and despatch the messenger, burying the body in a shallow grave in the forestry. He would dispose of the dagger inside the hat, and then carry on with his life. He had great plans for the hat and wand, and another look at his name on the label made him think that they had great plans for him.

After a day spent pacing through the house, waiting for the sun to go down, The Great Robbino packed a tarpaulin, rope and shovel into the trunk of his car, and, taking the hat, wand and dagger with him, departed for the forestry. When he arrived at the parking lot, there was already a car there with its engine running. It flashed its lights at him, so he pulled up next to it.

An old, white haired man got out of the car and stood, with his arms folded waiting for him to get out. He looked into the hat one more time, and put his hand in ready to pull the dagger out. The overhead light caught the gold label inside the hat, and to Robbie’s horror, his name was no longer there. He swallowed, and dipped his hand into the hat, tapping the brim with the wand — the dagger was still there.

He got out of the car, and the old man looked him up and down.

‘You’re a scrawny one, aren’t you?’ The old man said, ‘You look bigger on the internet.’

‘Talk,’ Robbie said, cradling the hat protectively in front of him.

‘Fine,’ the old man sighed, ‘my name is Curtis, and the hat and wand came to me when I was a young man, at a juncture in my life when I had stopped believing in myself, and more importantly, stopped believing in magic. I didn’t have the hat for long, but if you search online hard enough, you might find record of Curtis the Magnificent and his marvellous magic hat.’

‘This old thing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where did you get it?’

‘I didn’t. It got me. It just turned up one day in my life when I least expected it, but when I needed it the most. And, when I became complacent with its power, it simply vanished. And I have searched in vain for years. Until now.’

‘I’m not complacent,’ Robbie said, ‘and if you lost the hat I’m afraid it’s finder’s keeper’s.

Curtis shook his head. ‘You should know that magic doesn’t deal in absolutes. It isn’t just “black magic” or “white magic” — there are spaces in between the evil and the good. It’s how you use your magic that counts. What the magic brings out in yourself.’

Robbie gripped dagger inside the hat and stepped forward.

‘How badly do you want it back?’

‘Badly,’ Curtis replied, and pulled a gun from his coat.

Robbie grabbed the hilt of the dagger, and dropping the hat, thrust it forward at Curtis. Curtis looked down and laughed. Robbie followed his gaze and with shock, saw that he was holding a small bunch of flowers.

‘Like I said — complacent.’

Curtis raised the gun and fired at Robbie’s forehead. Both men watched in disbelief as the gun spat out a stream of coloured handkerchiefs.

‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’ Robbie demanded.

Curtis, wide-eyed with rage, threw the gun at Robbie in frustration, and in the headlights from both cars, started looking for the hat. Robbie slowly came around from the shock of cheating death and realised that the hat, wand, flowers and handkerchiefs had disappeared.

‘Gone!’ Curtis cried, and began wailing uncontrollably, ‘I can’t believe I’ve lost it again!’

‘Listen, Curtis,’ Robbie said in what he hoped was a soothing tone, ‘magic has obviously made clowns of us both. We were both prepared to commit a serious crime in the name of magic. I think we’ve come away from this lightly.’

Curtis ignored him and continued to rage around the parking lot, checking under and around both cars. Robbie decided there was no getting through to him, and returned to his car and drove away, leaving Curtis to his despair in the forestry. When he arrived home, he gave the place a thorough search, but the hat and wand were nowhere to be found.

Robbie sat in silence, and realised for the first time ages that he hadn’t spoken to any friends or family. The light on his answer machine was flashing red, showing that it was full of messages. The first few were from people wanting to book The Great Robbino. He deleted them all — reflecting that, without the magic hat, The Great Robbino wasn’t much magic at all.

He picked up a deck of cards and began shuffling, thinking back to his earliest performances. Start with cards, practice sleight of hand, repeat as desired. All a magician needs is one, good signature trick to entertain. No gimmicks, just simple illusion. Robbie fell asleep on the couch and woke up late the next morning.

As he began putting breakfast together, the news bulletin on the radio covered the apparent suicide of a man from out of the county, who had been found dead in his car in the local forestry car park. Robbie felt a cold tingling in his hands. The were few details at the moment, but he didn’t need any. He knew he had had a lucky escape the previous night.

Gracefall

At what price do we fight evil?

Photo by Mikhail Nilov on Pexels.com

As usual, Sister Maria Grazia sensed the evil long before she could see it. As the black sedan car rolled through the Tuscan hills, she could feel the pressure weighing down on her head. She closed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose, and counted three slow breaths. Ordinarily she would have prayed, but she needed to save her prayers for when she got there.

She looked out of the car window and saw the once-green trees turning brown, barren vines stretching into the distance, and there like a dirty smudge on the horizon, the hilltop Convent of the Povere Sorelle in Toscana. A medieval fortified abbey that had somehow escaped the ravages of time, its dark brown towers reached up like fingers, as if the ground was attempting to grasp the sky.

Maria Grazia made the sign of the cross and kissed the small rosary that hung about her neck. The sight of the Convent intensified the pressure on her head, so she looked away and resumed counting her breaths. If the driver noticed any of this he didn’t seem to catch on, or else felt the nun was best left to her own devices.

The car followed a road that snaked through the countryside towards the Convent, and became a brown dirt track as it fell under the shadow of the hill where the Convent had been built. The road wound around the gradual slopes of the hill, and then turned on itself in steep corners as the ground rose up abruptly. The driver changed down a gear, and then another, as he tried to push the car forward to its destination. Eventually, just as he thought the engine was about to give up, the car reached the crest of the hill and the Convent that crowned it.

The driver jumped out of the car and opened the door for the nun. She stepped out and turned to take in the breathtaking view of the countryside. The landscape went as far as the eye could see, and then some, as straining to look for the horizon caused her eyes to blur.

Sister Maria Grazia took her case from the back of the car, paid the driver, and watched him turn the car around in front of the Convent doors before prowling away down the hillside. Once he was out of sight, and certain to be safe, she turned to a bell-pull to the left of the cracked wooden doors and pulled on the chain. A feeble bell rang somewhere on the other side of the door, so tiny and insignificant a sound that she was compelled to pull it again.

She could hear the pit-pat of urgent footsteps approaching beyond the door, and it was then that she noticed the absence of all other sounds. She turned away from the door and listened — not a bird, nor an insect, made a sound. The countryside was quiet. Waiting, and watching, to see what she would do next. Behind it all, she could sense the evil presence that had given her the headaches in the car.

The footsteps stopped, keys jangled, and a heavy-sounding bolt was moved on the far side of the door. A small mouse-like nun dragged open the impossibly heavy door, and stood behind it, half-covered as if she feared the outside world. Her tiny eyes blinked once, twice, in the daylight.

Maria Grazia offered her hand to shake, but the other woman didn’t accept. She simply hid behind the door, and looked back into the gloomy recesses of the convent.

‘I am Sister Maria Grazia,’ she said, ‘I understand you are in need of assistance?’

‘Sister Caterina,’ the small woman said, ‘are you an exorcist?’

‘After a fashion.’

‘Do come in. We tried to deal with the problem ourselves, but it has…worsened, and Mother Superior said we’d need a professional.’

Maria Grazia walked through the doorway, and Sister Caterina closed the door, sealing them in the perpetual twilight of the Convent.

‘How is the child?’ Maria Grazia asked.

‘This isn’t about the child,’ the other nun said, bolting the door with considerable difficulty, ‘she is beyond our help.’

‘How so?’

‘The girl died, after Mother Superior conducted the exorcism. All we can do now is pray for her little soul.’

‘So the exorcism failed?’

‘No, it was a success.’

‘Then where is the demon now?’

‘Right this way, sister.’

Sister Caterina led Maria Grazia down a long corridor that seemed to darken with each footstep.

‘Where are the other sisters?’

‘Everyone is confined to their cells for their safety. Mother Superior said she didn’t want the creature to find another host.’

‘And where is your Mother Superior now?’

Caterina stopped and held on to Maria Grazia’s arm, and spoke through scared tears.

‘She took to her bed after fighting with the creature. The exorcism took a lot of her strength, and in the subsequent fight she was badly injured. We pray for her every day, but she doesn’t seem to be getting better. She said that she would not recover until the demon was gone.’

‘Take me to it,’ Maria Grazia commanded, ‘and let me rid this place of the evil filth.’

‘Thank you Sister,’ Caterina bowed her head and led her quickly through a cloister and then into a room with frescoed walls and a beautiful vaulted ceiling. They took another corridor and a side door into the heart of the Convent — a large, bare room with a light well that allowed a shaft of light to penetrate to gloom.

‘This is it, Sister,’ Caterina said, and ducked out of the room.

Maria Grazia looked at the centre of the room, where floor-to-ceiling bars held a creature that was both familiar and unfamiliar to her. The horns on its head, the bat-like wings pressed flat against its back, the claws and fangs — all straight out of a medieval bestiary, the likes of which graced many of the libraries of these ancient communes.

She backed out of the room and closed the door behind her. Sister Caterina stood in the corridor, wringing her hands.

‘Sister,’ Maria Grazia began, ‘that’s a gargoyle.’

Sister Caterina nodded.

‘It’s a block of stone.’

Again, Caterina nodded. Maria Grazia frowned and folded her arms.

‘Would you like to give me some kind of explanation?’

Caterina sighed and began pacing in front of Maria Grazia — as she did so, the story unravelled.

‘The girl was brought to us six months ago. By her parents’ accounts she had been a sickly child from birth, but as she grew, the girl began to act strangely.’

‘How strangely?’

‘She began playing with an invisible friend, a voice that she said was in her head. The voice began to speak through her, in languages she could never have learned at such a young age. When it became apparent that she wasn’t making it up, her parents brought her here. Mother Superior suspected demonic possession, and promised to exorcise the creature from her.’

‘Your Mother Superior performed the exorcism herself?’

Caterina nodded.

‘Is she a trained exorcist?’

‘No, but the parents were so desperate, and the demon had such a hold over the girl, that she felt compelled to perform the rite the very same day.’

Maria Grazia closed her eyes, and pinched the bridge of her nose.

‘We all prayed for the girl,’ Caterina continued, ‘but she couldn’t be saved. Mother Superior managed to cast the demon out into a stone gargoyle, with the intention of breaking it into pieces with a hammer. To break its corporeal body so that it would be forced to leave and return to the Underworld.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘The creature was too strong. It attacked Mother Superior, and we almost lost her as well as the girl.’

Maria Grazia shook her head, ‘The rite should never have been attempted. I know she thought she was doing right for the girl, but your Mother Superior should have left it to a professional.’

‘Can you help us? Even now, Mother Superior lays sick in bed, and the creature thrives.’

‘Do you know its name? Has it identified itself at all?’

‘The creature calls itself Lucien.’

Maria Grazia nodded, and unfolded her arms. ‘Is there anything else I should know?’

‘You won’t be able to break it with a hammer. Its stone is too strong.’

‘We shall see.’ Maria Grazia turned back to the door and opened it. The room was dark, save for a shaft of light coming in through the light well that illuminated the gargoyle’s body. Maria Grazia walked up to the cage and held onto the bars.

‘Lucien?’ She asked.

There was no response. She walked around the circular cage to stand in front of the gargoyle’s face. Green with moss and spattered with lichen, the creature looked pox-ridden.

‘Lucien I know you’re in there. I command you to speak.’

Still nothing. Maria Grazia set down her case, opened it, and picked out a glass phial. Pulling out the cork, she threw water onto the gargoyle.

‘In the name of Christ our Saviour, I command that you speak to me.’

A hissing sound came from the gargoyle’s mouth, like sand falling through an hourglass. The creature moved with the sound of stone grating on stone, raising its head to see Maria Grazia in the gloom beyond the shaft of light.

‘Who are you to command me?’ the creature asked.

‘You don’t need to know my name.’

‘You seem to know mine, Sister.’

‘I do, although I cannot say I’ve heard of you. I can’t recall your name from any of the texts I’ve studied.’

‘Perhaps you have been reading all the wrong texts,’ the gargoyle said, stretching like a cat and yawning silently, ‘but then your kind often do.’

‘My kind?’

‘The Fisherman’s followers. Tell me this, Sister, what do your texts say about killing hosts during an exorcism?’

‘It was regrettable, what happened to the girl.’

‘The words you should be looking for are “Thou Shalt Not Kill”, I believe.’

‘You believe? Your kind don’t have any beliefs.’

The gargoyle growled — a gritty sound that grated against her nerves.

‘We believe, Sister, much the same as you do. We believe in free will above all things. Freedom in all things. To be our own masters.’

Maria Grazia laughed, ‘Your own masters? You serve a master — the one who fell from Grace.’

‘I no longer serve him.’

‘Really?’

‘It is true. That is why I am here — banished from the Underworld, inhabiting the body of a feeble child, trying each and every way to leave her and make a glorious return to Pandemonium. Now trapped in this stone, behind these bars. I have no master but myself. Can you say the same?’

‘I follow the rules of my Order, and those rules set out by the Lord our God.’

‘You mean the rules as interpreted by the Church. For that is what they are — interpretations.’

‘I am not here to debate theology with you, Lucien. I am here to destroy this body you inhabit and expel your presence to the abyss where it belongs. That is my mission, and that is what I shall do.’

The gargoyle prowled around the inside of the cage, and settled on its haunches in the middle, directly under the shaft of light.

‘Very well,’ it said, ‘go ahead.’

Maria Grazia reached into her case once more and selected a slim book, from which she read aloud.

‘May the Holy Cross be my light. May the dragon never be my guide. Begone Satan. Never tempt me with your vanities.’

The gargoyle laughed, a guttural, gravelly sound. ‘Satan isn’t here, Sister. And I have yet to tempt you. But I shall.’

Out in the corridor, Sister Caterina heard the demonic laughter and put her hands over her ears. She paced before the door, fighting back tears. The gloom of the building deepened as the afternoon became the evening. She heard a roaring sound, and clang of stone upon metal, but was too afraid to open the door. The last time she had done so — during the young girl’s exorcism — she had caused the death of the original host, and the injury to the Mother Superior.

She waited, and eventually the door opened. Sister Maria Grazia appeared in the doorway, a light sweat on her brow. Sister Caterina looked at her with tired, yet hopeful eyes.

‘It is finished.’ Maria Grazia stated, and closed the door behind her.

‘Will you see Mother Superior now?’

‘No, Sister, let her rest. Lucien will not be bothering you any further.’

‘Thank you Sister, you’ve saved us all. Can you tell me how you did it?’

‘It’s probably best you don’t know.’

If she was affronted by the rebuttal, Sister Caterina didn’t show it. She simply walked Maria Grazia back to the front entrance.

‘Can I call a car for you, Sister?’

‘No thank you, I’d like to walk a while.’

Sister Caterina nodded, and began to close the door, ‘One last thing…’

Sister Maria Grazia was nowhere to be seen. She had simply disappeared. Sister Caterina gasped, made the sign of the Cross, and closed the door. Once the bolt was back in place she scurried off to the room that had held the creature.

Sister Caterina pushed the door open and peeked inside. The cage was still intact, but it was full of rubble, as if the gargoyle had exploded into pieces. She walked around the cage, watching the stone dust rising and falling within the shaft of light. Something crunched underfoot and she looked down: there was Sister Maria Grazia’s rosary.

She picked it up, seeing that it was broken as if it had been ripped from her neck suddenly. Sister Caterina paced the room again, keeping her distance from the cage, occasionally throwing a suspicious glance to the fading shaft of light. Something didn’t feel right, so she made her way back to the front door.

In the dying light of day, Sister Caterina left the Convent and looked down the sloping road, finding nothing. She then walked up to the steep ledge opposite the entrance and peered over the sharp drop that lay beyond.

Sister Maria Grazia’s body lay on the ground below, twisted and broken where she had landed. Sister Caterina cried out in grief. She held up the rosary and dropped it over the edge. Then she returned to the Convent, bolted the heavy door behind her, and went to the Mother Superior’s room to tell her what had happened.

Sensing that something had changed in the convent, the sisters began to leave their cells. They were free from the grip of the demon, but as Sister Caterina informed them, that freedom had come at the cost of another nun’s life.

The Gloaming

A highwayman stops a coach, and gets more than he bargained for

Photo by Lucas Pezeta on Pexels.com

The coach entered the forest road just as the sun began to slink under the horizon and day gave way to night, pulled by four black horses with wild wide eyes, and white foam at their mouths. Their top halves sweaty and their bottom halves flecked with mud, they looked like they had seen better days, yet they pressed on as if the Devil himself were chasing them. Those with full possession of the facts might have said that this was indeed the case. Urged on by the cries of the driver, and the crack of his whip, the horses pulled the coach into the gloaming made all the more dark by the trees reaching up on either side of the road.

Solomon listened to the sounds of the coach approaching — the panting of the horses, the squeaking of the wheels, the thud and crash as it hit the varied potholes in the old road. He knew each and every hole, many of them having been of his own making. They enabled him to judge where along the road the carriage was, how big the vehicle itself was, and more importantly, they allowed him to guess its weight. From these sounds, Solomon estimated it would be a heavy haul tonight. It might even take him multiple trips to plunder the carriage and safely transfer the booty to his hideaway.

He shivered in anticipation — a tremor that rippled down through his body and transferred to his horse, Bridget, who stamped her feet and snorted.

‘Easy girl,’ he soothed her and stroked her mane. If he had been paying attention, he might have noticed that his horse was more skittish tonight than usual. He might have considered that she, too, had picked up the sounds of the carriage, but had interpreted them differently. Where Solomon heard a heavy-laden carriage of wealth for the taking, Bridget sensed a danger that was hurtling toward them at speed.

Solomon gave a gentle swish of the reins and Bridget trotted out of the treeline and stopped in the middle of the road, as she had done countless times before. With one hand holding the reins steady, he reached inside his coat with the other and pulled out his pistol. As the coach approached, Solomon cocked the pistol. Bridget snorted, and in the last light of the day he could see her breath rising in the cold night air.

The coach followed the curve of the road and as he saw the lanterns swinging from the front of the vehicle, Solomon raised his pistol above his head and fired a warning shot. The coach appeared to slow a little but didn’t stop, and was still travelling too fast for Solomon’s liking. He fired a second warning shot that, again, seemed to be ignored by the driver. He could see the driver’s face illuminated by the lanterns now, as the coach bore down on his position. He took aim at the driver’s head, and shouted a last warning.

‘Your money, or your life!’

The coach kept on coming, and if anything, seemed to speed up. Solomon fired, and hit the driver square in the face. The poor man spun in his seat and fell off the coach, taking the reins with him. The horses reared as the reins became stuck in a front wheel, causing the coach to veer to one side. Solomon thought it would fall over and spill whatever treasures it was carrying, but something odd happened — the coach righted itself and the horses became calm.

Solomon dug his heels into Bridget’s rib-cage and she trotted towards the other horses. The horses greeted her by bobbing their heads, and as Bridget passed them, a man stuck his head out of the carriage window. Solomon took aim, and as the man lifted his own pistol out of the window, the highwayman shot him. The man slumped against the window frame, his pistol arm hanging out, and dropped his weapon to the ground. Solomon drew level with the window. All seemed quiet, so he dismounted and tied Bridget to the coach, picked the dead man’s pistol up and opened the door.

He dragged the body out of the way, looked into the gloomy interior of the coach and saw the dead man’s companion. Sitting there quietly, with some kind of sack or hood over the head was, he guessed by the clothing, a woman. The hood and dress were black like widow’s weeds, and two hands showed beneath slender black lace gloves, clutching a small bag in her lap. The woman moved her head to face the window, as if she could see Solomon through the hood. He backed away, and reaching up, took one of the lanterns from the driver’s seat and waved it in the window.

As he suspected, the woman was chained, both by her hands and feet, to a metal ring that had been screwed into the floor of the coach.

‘Who are you?’ He asked.

The woman shifted her head in a way that reminded him of a bird tilting its head to one side to get a better look at a worm. Her hands tightened their grip around the bag, and Solomon thought that the night might not be a total waste of effort after all. He opened the coach door and climbed up inside. The woman remained still, but he had the eerie feeling she was following him with her eyes under the hood. He sat opposite her and lifted up the lantern, taking in the chains, one of which reached up under the hood.

‘Are you alright?’

The woman moaned slightly, an internal sound that seemed to have difficulty leaving her throat. Solomon frowned, and placing the lantern on the seat next to him, reached forward to grab at the hood. The woman didn’t flinch as he pulled it from her head…

Solomon had never seen a scold’s bridle in use. It was a torture device that he had heard of but hadn’t come across. It was a thick metal frame that encased the woman’s head with a metal plate that went into her mouth and pressed down on her tongue to stop her from talking. The woman moaned at him again, and he caught her eye. She stared at him with what he assumed was fear, and then looked down to her right shoulder. Solomon followed her gaze — there, hanging in the air just off her jawline was the lock that held the scold’s bridle in place.

‘Shall I take it off?’

She nodded, and her chains clanked with the movement.

‘Where is the key?’

She looked out of the door, at the darkening night beyond the lantern. Solomon took her hint, and ducked out of the coach, holding the lantern aloft. He rifled through the dead man’s pockets until he found a thick metal ring with three keys. He looked at them one at a time and then glanced back at the coach. The woman hadn’t moved.

Solomon climbed back into the coach, set the lantern down next to the woman, and tried a key in the lock. It didn’t fit. The woman groaned, and her eyes rolled back into her head.

‘It’s bound to be one of these,’ he said, causing her to nod in agreement.

He tried the second key, which fit through the keyhole, but wouldn’t turn. With a look of triumph, he used the last of the keys, and opened the padlock. The woman stayed still as he pulled the steel cage from around her face and threw it out of the doorway. She closed her eyes as she moved her neck first to one side, then the other, and Solomon could hear the bones cracking in her neck. He shuddered, which she noticed, and put a gloved hand over his.

‘Be not afraid, good sir,’ she said with a honeyed voice that seemed to arrive directly in his head rather than come through his ears, ‘you have done a good deed this night.’

‘I’ve killed two men.’

‘My guess is, they weren’t your first.’

Solomon shook his head, and the woman stared at him intently. He looked down at her hands, which now gripped her bag tighter than before.

‘Hand over the bag.’

‘Take it from me, if you dare.’

At the sound of defiance in her voice, Solomon raised his pistol.

‘Give it to me.’

She loosened the bag’s draw-string, all the time maintaining eye contact with him. She slowly pulled something out of the bag, and then threw the bag at him.

‘Take the bag.’

He looked down at the bag, crumpled in his lap, and then looked across at her hands. She was taking her gloves off, finger by finger, her fingernails gleaming in the lantern-light. Her hands were smooth, and as white as the full moon. They were the hands of the gentry, that had never known a day’s hard labour.

‘What’s that?’ Solomon pointed at a sleek black cloth that the woman was rolling over in her hands. She slowly unpeeled it, like a bad fruit, to reveal a little figure made of twigs. A brown ball sat atop the frame to serve as a head, and it was clothed in a dark blue cloth. Solomon looked at the blue cloth, and a cold feeling crept over him. He pulled on the sleeve of his tunic beneath his overcoat, a little splash of blue cuff. The woman smiled as she held the figure in front of her.

‘It’s a poppet.’ She said, and dug her fingernails into the figure. Solomon felt the air rush out of his chest as it constricted. He felt light-headed and gripped by terrible pain. The woman reached into her pocket and pulled out a piece of string, which she looped around the poppet’s neck. Solomon felt his windpipe closing as she draw the noose tighter around the poppet.

‘Now, what was the exchange you offered the driver?’ She said, in her sweet voice, ‘Money or life? Which one will you keep?’

She swung the poppet lazily in front of him. Solomon clawed at his neck, as if by some brute force he might create a hole to breathe through.

‘Life!’ He managed to wheeze.

‘Good choice, highwayman,’ she said, and dropped the poppet into her lap. Solomon fell to the floor of the coach, gasping. The woman took the ring of keys from him, and freed herself from the chains binding her hands and feet. She laughed — a sound like water burbling in a mountain stream — cool and inviting, with hints of dangers untold.

‘You are mine now,’ she whispered in his ear, ‘and you will drive this carriage for me. Get up, there is a long road ahead of us. We shall travel at night, and rest at day.’

‘Where are we going?’

The woman smirked. ‘Far away from where I have been. Take the driver’s clothes outside, and be quick about it, lest the poppet swing from the door-frame!’

Solomon did as he was bid, clothing himself in the driver’s garments. The woman made him drag the two bodies out of the road and roll them into the ditch. With a sad, last look, he said goodbye to Bridget. His neck and chest still felt tight, and his breathing was laboured as he climbed into the driver’s seat, took the reins and whipped the horses into action. The coach lurched forward, and rumbled off down the old forest road, leaving Bridget behind to whinny in the dark.

The next morning a travelling peddler discovered the bodies in the ditch, along with the scold’s bridle and the chains that had bound the woman. Noting the guardsman’s uniform on one of the bodies, the peddler moved on to the nearest town and brought back an officer, who declared that the old forest road was not safe at night. Word was sent to every town, village and homestead that bordered the forest — a witch in chains had been released, and as the gloaming descended upon the forest each night, there were worse things than highwaymen to fear.

The House On Juniper Lane

When a childhood dare goes wrong

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The House on Juniper Lane stood apart from the others, alone on the edge of town. Trapped somewhere between civilisation and the wilderness, the old and unloved house had been home to a Miss Montfort at one point, but no-one had seen or heard from the old lady in years. It loomed over the single-track lane that ran between high hedges and over-grown trees on its way up to the moors. People went to the moors to disappear, and it was said that some of them really did — following the false-lights and corpse-candles until they were welcomed into the cold, earthen embrace of the peat bogs.

Knocking on the door or one of the windows was a right of passage for every child growing up in town, and Brodie was no different. Whole generations had taken their turn, encouraged by their friends and bullies alike, marching up to the front of the house and knocking a trembling hand against the flaked green paintwork of the front door, before running back to the relative safety of the lane. Everyone would hide behind the hedge, waiting for signs of life from within the house. Signs that never came, at least not until it was Brodie’s turn…

Brodie had moved into town with his parents six weeks earlier. He made friends easily and, apart from a few scuffles in the schoolyard at the very beginning, he had settled in quickly. As September turned into October and the school term stretched on, whispers in the corridors said that if Brodie really wanted to fit in, it was time for him to knock on the door of the House on Juniper Lane. He didn’t see what the fuss what about — it was, after all, just a house. It was just a building, and it hadn’t been a home for a long time.

Without even having the conversation himself, Brodie somehow agreed to the dare to take place on the first Saturday of the school holidays. The day in question started without incident — Brodie had breakfast and went through his morning routine while his parents were still in bed. He was out the door before they came downstairs, and minutes later was on his way to Juniper Lane. There was quite a crowd gathered out the front of the House when he arrived. Among the friendly and not-so-friendly faces he saw Lacey — the girl he secretly liked, and was hoping to impress with his bravery.

‘Here he is!’ Shouted Mike, the bully who lived on Elm Road, ‘Get a move on, we haven’t got all day.’

‘You don’t have to do this, you know,’ said a nervous Lacey.

Brodie gave her a wink, said ‘It’s okay,’ and puffed up his chest as he stepped up to the front gate.

He held on to the iron for a moment, tightening his grip on the top of the gate, feeling the rusted metal dig into the soft skin of his hands. He tried telling himself not to be scared, but he had heard the strange stories about the House in the past week. How someone’s cousin had broken in to the House one Halloween, and was so petrified by what he saw inside that his hair turned white and he stopped speaking altogether… How a lovers’ tryst had been stopped short by the sound of screams coming from inside the House… How even the police were afraid to check it out…

Brodie looked up at the house, taking in the crumbling gables, the loose shingles on the roof, a boarded-up window on the upper floor, grey net curtains hanging limp in the ground floor windows.

‘Go on,’ Mike whispered from behind his left shoulder, ‘just give it a knock.’

Brodie nodded, and pushed open the gate. The metal protested against his efforts, but he prevailed, and managed to push it open enough to slip through. He walked up the broken concrete path, making a note of the slabs sticking up at odd angles that might trip him up if he needed to run. He eyed each and every window suspiciously, searching for signs of life. Behind him the gathered children fell silent. The leaves of the trees overhanging the garden rustled in a cold wind that crept down the collar of Brodie’s shirt and chilled him to his core.

He stood on the doorstep, his heart racing, and raised his hand. There was no going back now, no matter how much he wanted to run away. If he did that, he would never be able to show his face in school again, and he was certain Lacey would never do so much as breathe in his direction. He balled his fingers into a fist — now or never — and rapped it against the wooden door. Small flecks of green paint came away and fell to the floor in front of his feet. Nothing else happened, so he turned to his audience with a grin on his face and shrugged.

This didn’t have the desired effect. In fact, the faces that he saw were full of dread and fear. Mike, as pale as virgin snow, raised his arm, and let his mouth hang open.

‘Look!’ Lacey shouted, with an urgency in her voice that scared Brodie.

He followed the line of sight from Mike’s outstretched arm to the bay window to the left of the front door. There, in a gap in the net curtains was a candle, burning brighter than the daylight, it seemed. Brodie was transfixed — he hadn’t noticed it on his approach to the House. Someone, or something, was clearly present on the other side of the glass. He watched the flame dance in the air on the inside, and wondered how quickly the curtains would take to go up in flames, should the candle catch one of them in the breeze.

Brodie was so engrossed in the strange candle that he didn’t hear the creak of the door opening on its hinges. He did, however, hear Lacey screaming, and that snapped him out of his reverie. Before he could turn to look away from the house, he felt a stabbing pain in his shoulder. He looked down and saw a gnarled, grey hand clasping his coat, skin stretched over the knuckles so tightly that the bones were in danger of bursting out of it. The overgrown fingernails felt like they were piercing the material of his coat and shirt and digging into his very flesh. Frozen to the spot with panic, Brodie forced himself to look up from his shoulder and into the dark doorway of the House.

What happened next could never be agreed upon. Some of the children said that Brodie fainted on the doorstep, others said that a hand had grabbed him and dragged him through the doorway. One thing they did agree on was that they wanted to put as much distance between them and the House as possible. In the days that followed, and in all the years to come, each one of them regretted running from Juniper Lane, and felt ashamed at leaving Brodie there alone to confront whatever evil lurked inside the House.

An assortment of emergency services personnel and parents gathered outside the House, but none of the children would return there. The adults, at one time or another, had all knocked on the door themselves, and understood the fear that the children felt, but a child was missing, and something needed to be done. The police had to break the door down, as it had rusted and rotted in place, and couldn’t possibly have opened of its own accord that morning. A full search of the property was conducted and a full set of bones, assumed to be those of Miss Montfort, was discovered upstairs in the master bedroom, hidden from the outside world by the boarded up window.

Brodie was never found. It seemed that the House had claimed another victim in addition to the old lady. Brodie’s parents stood outside the gate and wept on the day that the bulldozers tore the House down. They had hoped to find something — anything — to shed light on their son’s disappearance, but the House kept its secrets even at the hour of its destruction. They moved away within a year, unable to get over the tragedy, and always reminded of it whenever they saw any children about town. For the children’s part, it was a long time before they felt safe enough to play in the streets. As the years rolled into decades, Brodie’s name all but disappeared from the town’s lips, and as the grasses grew over the plot where the House had once stood, a younger generation found it hard to believe that any of the stories about the place were true.

One further note to bring this curious case to a close — when the police searched the House looking for Brodie on that awful day, an officer found the candle in the bay window burned right down to the end of its wick. The wax was still warm, proving the children’s claims that it been burning in the window, and it had dripped down the inside of the windowsill to the floor below. How it was lit, and by whom, were just two of the questions that remained unanswered about the House on Juniper Lane.

FLASH FICTION: Votive

Two men meet after years apart, only for their connection to come to an abrupt end

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Father Molloy struck a match against the side of the box and swore as it broke. He looked skyward and apologised for his language, before selecting another match from the box and striking it against the sandpaper strip. The head of the match lit this time, but the stick snapped in his fingers, causing him to drop it. He stamped it out and tried again, striking lucky the third time.

‘Cheap matches, Father?’

Father Molloy hesitated, his hand above the votive candle, gripping the match to stop himself from trembling.

‘That they are, Seamus,’ he replied, keeping his voice level as he leaned over the candle to light it, ‘Is it really yourself?’

‘You knew I’d come back one day.’

Father Molloy nodded and blew out the match. ‘As you all do, eventually.’

The other man was silent, but Father Molloy could sense him seething from a few paces over his shoulder. Father Molloy lit another match, and leaned stiffly over the bank of candles to light a second flame.

‘Enough candles there, Father?’ Seamus asked.

‘One for everyone, but never enough.’

‘One for everyone?’ Seamus took a step backward, ‘my you have been busy.’

‘The Lord’s work is never done,’ was the reply.

Seamus snorted. Father Molloy watched the match burn down to his fingertips and blew it out.

‘Have you come to talk?’ He asked.

‘I’ve come for confession,’ Seamus said, ‘I think you’ll find it’s long overdue.’

‘What is it you’d like to confess, my son?’

‘Not me, Father, you.’

Father Molloy sighed. ‘So that is why you have come, Seamus? I have too much to confess, as I’m sure you can imagine.’

‘I can,’ Seamus growled, ‘but I’ll hear it anyway.’

Father Molloy began to turn around, but a hiss from Seamus stopped him dead.

‘Stay where you are father, don’t turn around.’

‘Whyever not?’

‘I don’t want you to see what I became. What you made me.’

‘Oh Seamus.’

‘Don’t you dare turn around, old man.’

Father Molloy smiled to himself, and put down the box of matches. He cracked the knuckles of one hand, and began to turn.

‘Father forgive me…’ Seamus started, and the priest heard a soft clicking sound, and felt cold metal pressed against the back of his head, ‘…for you have sinned.’

Seamus turned on his heel and walked away, tears blurring his vision, as Father Molloy’s body collapsed over the bank of candles, extinguishing the flames that he had lit. The matchbox fell to the floor and spilled its cheap contents across the stones, where they were anointed by Father Molloy’s blood as it began to drip from above.