I will have a brand new Friday Flash for you next week, I promise. This week though, I'm proud to represent my prize-winning short story Forest For The Trees. Originally written for Elephant Words back in 2007, this story marks the first time I've ever won a writing competition - the grand runner-up prize of five whole pounds! Chev suggested I get the cheque framed, but sadly the prize money came via Paypal, so the internet has defeated me again. Many thanks to the folks at Acacia Books who were discerning enough to select my story for inclusion in the first issue of their new quarterly horror and speculative fiction e-zine Aversion. Find out more about the competition or order a copy of the zine and read a bunch of other scary stories by clicking here.
But before we get to that, a quick mention for this week's Thoughtballoons character - Buffy The Vampire Slayer. As with last week's Lara Croft, this is a character who came to comics late, via movies and a long-running TV show. Comics were obviously a huge influence on the show's creators though and they recently chose to continue Buffy's adventures in a monthly mag from Dark Horse. You can read my Buffy story here.
And now, the main event. Drumroll please, here comes my first ever prize-winning, magazine published short story...
A ‘Wake Up, Little Susie’ Adventure
It’s 2.32am on the disposable digital watch I wear because anything more valuable might get trashed in a fight. The middle of the night (midnight’s such a misnomer): dark, silent and cold. As usual, I have no idea where I am, or why I’m here. Just that feeling in my belly, like I’ve eaten too much fruit and it’s starting to ferment; and the noise in my head, like a mobile phone signal heckling my stereo.
I stand still, resting a hand on slimy bark. The pines around me grow so close together their lower branches are mostly bare, spindly quills: their needles and cones much higher than I could ever reach – but at less than five feet tall, that could place them on the top shelf in the supermarket. My name is Susie Chernobyl and this is the night I wake up in the woods.
Once, when I put my faith in doctors, they gave my condition names. A rare combination of narcolepsy, dissociative fugue, and somnambulism; so rare even the experts had only read about it in dusty old cracked-spine textbooks. It’s a terrible moment when you finally acknowledge it, but doctors know nothing.
I give it a few moments for my eyes to adjust, listening through the night noise of the woods for a clue to why I’m here. There’s always a reason. Above me, an exasperated wind nags at the higher branches. There could be moonlight up there, but it won’t ever trouble the soggy mattress at my feet. Beneath the wind, I can make out the syncopation of old raindrops, fingertipping their way down through the branches, drip drip-drip DRIP drip drip-DRIP drip…
As the darkness opens, I can see two, three trees ahead of me now – though still I don’t move. I might be warmer if I did, but not yet. I huddle into myself and shiver without noise. Sometimes when it’s really cold, I’ll express it vocally, but I’ve never been a ‘brrr!’ person – more a ‘hoo-ah!’ – like Al Pacino in the blind dancing film. (He’d have to be blind to dance with me. Even then, I wouldn’t wager my chances.) But there’s no risk of a ‘hoo-ah’ tonight, not until I know what I’m up against.
Top half: I’m wearing an itchy woollen polo neck, at least two T-shirts, and one of my unduly padded bras. Bottom half: jeans (always jeans), long johns, knickers, it feels like two pairs of socks, and toe-capped boots. No coat, but I’d only have had to ditch that anyway – coats slow you down. I’m certainly waking up a lot more prepared than I used to. Time was, I’d come to face down on a frosty lawn, wearing only a ratty old nightie and bed socks. Try fighting ninjas when you’re dressed like that. No, really. And just in case you still haven’t caught on, get that image of Jennifer Garner right out of your head – me in skimpies isn’t going to vamp or beguile anyone, not even a carnally-unsatisfied ninja. Nauseate – very possibly; but ninjas are plenty formidable already, without the added peril of flying ninja spew. Not that I want to give you the impression it’s always ninjas: I’m just using them as an example. I don’t think it’s ninjas tonight. I don’t know what it is, not yet, but it doesn’t feel like ninjas. Somewhere in my brain, that blasted pre-signal staccato kicks in again – and I await my instructions. But it’s too early. Damned esoteric static. Sometimes I wish they could just write me a letter.
Still none the wiser, I move forward through the pines, pausing every few steps to give it the full 360, and to listen. Nothing, still nothing. Just the wind, the drip DRIP-drip drip, and the slight suck of my boots in the quaggy mulch. Gradually the woods unfold, and the pines give way to other, older trees: twisted sycamore and imposing oak, their leaves fallen with the season, crisping and curling at my feet; the peeled-paint bark of a skeletal birch; a huge, just-berried holly. Unruly brambles tangle the undergrowth spotted with shrivelled blackberries even the birds won’t fly down to eat, and I find myself wishing – as I so often do – that I was home in my bed, unaware. Safe in that other life, oblivious to the substance of the world and my true role in it. Asleep. What sort of existence is it when in your moments of greatest clarity, you wish only for blissful ignorance?
The sound of the baby flips the switch from introspection, and I’m back in the moment: the dark, soul-cold night, the drip-drip drip DRIP drip-waaaaaaaah! I follow the wail up a slope and hurdle a huge, rotting trunk, dragged down by its own ancient weight. There’s a stream cackling somewhere below, and up ahead I catch the first glints of life: the flames of torches, and the low, earnest chant.
“Ad gloriam, ad majorem Azrael gloriam. Ad gloriam, ad majorem Azrael gloriam. Ad gloriam…”
Cultists. It had to be bloody cultists, didn’t it? And Azrael? What the hell are they doing invoking Azrael? Like he’s going to give any kind of shit about them. White robed, Halloween-masked amateurs. White robes! Out here in the middle of a sinking forest. I bet their wives love them. I can see the commercials now. “My robes were always filthy after a night of ritual sacrifice – until I discovered ‘Cult! Automatic’. Guaranteed to fetch out all ground-in forest-sacrifice stains like mud, berries, and virgin’s blood. Abaddon recommends NEW ‘Cult! Automatic’.”
Seriously – anything but cultists. Ninjas, zombies, CEO’s, admen – anything. I feel my last meal come rolling back up my throat and wonder what it might have been. Something spicy, obviously. Something I wouldn’t even touch in my right mind. If you can call this my right mind.
For a moment I freeze. It’s overwhelming:
“Ad gloriam, ad majorem Azrael gloriam. Ad gloriam…”
Drip drip DRIP-drip drip DRIP drip-drip…”
Waaaaaaah!
Then above all that I hear that old dissonant pulse come breaking through on my wavelength… and after all this time, I know how it goes – I’ve guessed my orders long before they’ve even been sent.
“Protect the child.”
Everything else falls away, and at last I have clarity. Out in the clearing, the leader of the cult steps up to the altar, cradling the baby like a plastic-smile Nativity Joseph. At last I can see the sky – no moonlight after all, just an oppressive, damping drizzle. The chanting builds, and moisture sizzles on the cultists’ torches. Then someone steps forward with a silver dagger – that’s what I hate most about cultists: they’re all so blasted cliché. Just once I’d like to see one of them bring forth a machete, nunchucks, or a Heckler & Koch. Something to surprise me. Something that shows at least a little damned imagination!
“Hear us, Azrael!” shouts the main man, and all the rest go silent. He lays the mewling infant on the wet stone of the altar, then folds back the hood of his robe. And I let my mind do its thing. It’s a dozy Saturday afternoon and he’s on his way to pick up the kids from the ice rink, but he stops off at Woolworths on the way. Flips through the Halloween masks ‘til he settles on the one he’s wearing now. The one that suits him best. His wife’s told him not to be late – they’re meeting the Armitages for dinner – and he’s told her she’ll have to book an early table: there’s a lodge meeting tonight. Must remember to set the video for Strictly Come Dancing…
It helps me to remember that most of the time my enemies are just as dull as the rest of us. Even ninjas scratch their arses when they think no-one’s looking. Dismiss their intrinsic humanity and you bestow on them a significance they haven’t earned, and an intimidation that would be paralysing under circumstances like this. Imagine them scrubbing the stains out of their silly white cowls, or losing out on a parking space to some wattle-necked fogey in a 4X4, and any sense of menace just pales away. Then you can act.
As I move round the edge of the clearing, getting as close to the baby as I can without drawing attention to myself, I watch the leader take the dagger in his palms and hold it up to the cold cinder sky. Another worthless invocation, like a teenager reciting ‘Candyman’ in front of a candlelit mirror. Then he grips the hilt with both hands and angles the blade down, his eyes rolling back – and with a low, guttural howl, he…
…goes down like a million different boxers, shipwrecks, and hookers, in a library full of metaphors.
Something I might not have mentioned about my strange, quack-confounding condition is the ability I possess, when awake and myself (as opposed to that other person who shares my waking hours) to induce certain, sudden, sleep-related afflictions in others. The scope is limited – I couldn’t just make this whole lunatic congregation catch z’s as one whilst making off with their nappy-rash sacrifice – more’s the pity – but I can certainly snooze out their budget airline Charlie Mansun mid-infanticide and cause enough of a kerfuffle amongst his flock to distract from my big entrance.
And so I break from the trees, cut through a gap that’s formed in the stupefied crowd, vault the altar, make like the baddie from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and keep on going out the other side where a boot-worn path leads away from the clearing and back to whatever kind of civilization these cultist clowns call home. Tending to their cataleptic principal, the brothers are slow to react. It helps too that unlike most of them, I need no Halloween mask to engender shock and disgust: the face I was born with is more than enough. The child shrieks back over my shoulder, its waaaaah like a flare through the trees behind me. A trail even sheep like these can follow – and follow they do, faster and more determined than I’d anticipated. This limits my options. Stick to the path and they’ll be on me in minutes. I don’t have enough sleep left to put them all down: I could probably manage another two or three right now, but there had to be at least twenty in that clearing. Stand and fight? That’d be the plan if I didn’t also have the baby to defend. Too risky, as is. Get the child to shut its yap? In thirty years of life, I’ve developed more social graces and dinner party etiquette than I have maternal instincts (yet I only ever dine out at KFC, and even then, by myself) so I wouldn’t have the first idea whether it’s crying because it needs to be burped, wants its bottle, or is flat out terrified of the scary-looking midget lady who just abducted it from the nice, boogly-eyed, child-executioners. Perhaps if I’d ever considered the possibility of an eligible male approaching me to do anything more than stub out his cigarette… But physicality aside, the fact that my waking hours brim almost entirely with running, punching, screaming, and fighting, there’s no time left for romantic assignations anyway, not even with the odious and desperate. (It should also be noted that the majority of men I come into contact with end up trying to kill me one way or another – and the same goes for women, should I ever choose to consider the Sapphic alternative.)
Whilst this all ploughs through my mind, the pursuant cultists are gaining ground, and I realise now that there’s only one option left: get off the path. I’m fully aware of the risk – trips and tangles and branches that’ll hook out an eye and leave it dangling like a bird feeder, but I’m taking the chance these hazards will be far more likely to impede my robe-dragging shadows.
At first this goes entirely according to plan, as the closest of them fall back, stumbling and snagging and forced to cast away their vestments for their chase to continue. I’ve brought the baby to my chest now, shielding its eyes from the scratches, grasps and snarls, whilst keeping my own to the ground, dodging octopus roots and leaping moss-gutted logs, before sprinting up a mud-slippery slope that leads along the edge of an abrupt shale banking. One foot wrong and I’m thirty feet below in a petulant stream – or maybe it’s a river – it’s loud enough anyway to be audible over the thumping-panting-pounding of my heart and my feet and my head, and the siren in my arms. Behind me – disrobed now and unmasked (beneath their smocks, they’re dressed as sensibly as me) – the cultists are drawing closer still, and organising too. Shouts go out and I know they’re dispersing – taking two, three, four different routes to the same destination, circling to ensnare.
At the top of the rise I scatter a wet drift of leaves, and from nowhere an awful image shoves into my mind: a bescarfed November afternoon, lovers in the park, hand in hand and kicking through the late Autumn tumblings. And it fills me with such an ache, such an intense clench of sadness – self-pity, maybe, but when you’ve only got yourself, what other kind is there? – that I almost let them catch me. Kill me. What does it matter? What does any of it–?
That’s when they come at me, two from the left and one from behind, crashing out of the dead ferns and swiping through the low slung branches of a lime. I dodge and kick like somewhere, someone’s hammering on a joystick, and send one of them immediately rolling backwards down the banking. I hear him scream, and a snap I hope is more than just another twig. The other two hesitate – gender and size always leads my opponents towards underestimation, and I always use that in my favour. Swapping the child from arm to arm, I grab for the nearest weapon: a fallen branch shaped like a hod-carrier’s arm. Then I hear the sound of running, and furious voices calling more of them this way, and the baby screams louder than ever, and I know this is getting desperate. So I close my eyes, and I concentrate. Tap into the sleep – all that I have left – and use it the best way I can. In the crook between arm and breast, the baby goes quiet.
Now I can think. My opponents trade glances. They know there’s something not right this. About the freak that stands before them. More than just her car crash face and her stunted, nigh on hunchbacked gait. More than the fact that she’s out here in the middle of god knows where, 3am, crashing their flock and making off with their lamb. I imagine them talking it over, later in the pub. A pint of bitter and a pint of cider. A packet of cheese and onion split on the table before them. Trying to put it into words: this feeling they’re having right now, like they’re in the presence of someone… something other. Something far beyond their own feeble dogma – something that makes them question everything they’re doing, everything they are.
And then I hear the shouts again, closer than ever, and I can see the light of their torches come flickering up the rise. And so I turn, and I sprint back to the edge of the steep shale banking, and I jump. Putting my faith in a power they’ll never understand: praying for a deep and swift-flowing river… not just a stream.
Hours later, sodden but safe, I book myself and my charge into
a Travelodge on the edge of a still-drowsy retail park. The girl behind the desk gives us a look like maybe she ought to ask questions – but she’s seventeen, her boyfriend’s a dick, and they’re not paying her enough to give a toss. Once in the room, I bathe, dry, and swaddle the child (it sleeps throughout), then shower the chill out of my own body. I can’t risking sleeping, not ‘til this is over, so I drink all the coffee sachets the hotel has provided, then call down for more. I know it won’t be much longer, and it isn’t. Soon enough there’s a knock at the door and I know my part is done. Someone else will take it from here: that’s how it always happens.
My name is Susie Chernobyl, and this was the day I saved the life of The Snake Baby. The Iniquitous Wretch. The Perpetual Mockery. The Scarlet Nesbiros. And now I can sleep.
