48 Hour Film Challenge - Tapped Out

As last year, some mates of mine had a crack at the Sci Fi London 48 Hour Film Challenge. They were given a title, a prop and a line of dialogue... and just 48 hours to write and shoot a short sci fi film that included all three. Here's what they came up with...



Well done, guys - best of luck with the competition!

Friday Flash - Icebreaker

Another unsuccessful competition entry this week, the challenge being to write a murder / mystery story set in my local area, in under 2500 words. Just squeaked it.

Icebreaker

It’s the middle of November and winter’s drawing in. I’m walking up the lane through the woods at the back of Cragside Farm and there’s ice in the tractor track puddles for the first time this season. I take this route because no one else ever does. The old man rarely leaves the house these days, and any visitors come up the tarmacked drive, through the gates with the CCTV. His son had those cameras fitted; I was here the morning he arrived to supervise. Bossy type, rude even, the way he spoke to that bloke from the security company. I knew not to use the drive again after that. Before then, I might have snuck up that way if it was late and dark and I’d had an especially long day on my feet. It adds another half mile to the journey, taking the back way, but what’s half a mile when you walk as far as I do?

Cragside Farm has been my home for 3 years now. No one knows I live here, but no one particularly cares. If you look at me at all, you probably think I don’t live anywhere. By the true definition of the word, I am homeless. I neither own nor pay rent on my own accommodation. No census or electoral register records my residence. I pay no taxes, utilities, nor anything towards the upkeep of this property. I haven’t even set foot inside the farmhouse itself. I sleep in the barn, the hayloft that’s still stacked with bales even though the old man sold off the last of his cattle in the summer. I worried he might sell the hay too, but nobody wants these old, square bales anymore. Nowadays they want huge, round, wrapped in plastic bales that’ll feed a herd for a couple of days and don’t have to be lifted by hand, the twine cutting into your palms, the dust coating your throat as you break them and shake them in the hay racks. I know all about that. I grew up on a farm just over the Pennines. How I got from there to here, that’s a story I prefer not to think about anymore. Thinking won’t fix it.

Even with the shelter of the trees, the wind cuts through me. There’s nothing beyond Cragside Farm but the moors of Marsden and Saddleworth. The rocky summit of West Nab standing vigil over Meltham and Huddersfield, staring out across to Bradford in the north and Leeds in the east. I couldn’t live in a city. I only ever walk as far as Huddersfield, find a busy corner to lay my cap down, hope I make enough to feed myself on the walk home.

It’s dark by the time I reach the barn. Across in the house, the old man’s already hunkered down in front of his TV. I’ll join him soon. First I climb into the loft and set out my evening meal. A stale sausage roll and half a Cornish pasty I salvaged from the bins round the back of Greggs; part of a ham sandwich someone left on the wall by the canal (for the ducks?); a bruised apple and a brown banana from the fruit stall on the indoor market. I usually eat better than this but I’m saving my money for when it’s too cold to sit around on street corners. I made almost five pounds today, spent just twenty pence. The rest goes in my stash for a rainy day, or a snowy day, or a day even icier than this one. They’re coming.

After tea, I retrieve my blanket from its hiding place under the loose hay and head back outside. My watch stopped working last year but I have a pretty good sense of time. NCIS will be starting any minute. It’s LA tonight. We like the acronym shows, me and the old man. CSI, SVU, even the old NYPD Blue repeats, we watch them all. Him from his armchair by the fire, me from the holly bush in his overgrown back garden. It’s one of those bushes you can climb right inside (if you don’t mind a few scratches) and there’s a big hollow space waiting to welcome you. When I was a kid, I’d have made a den here. Did I ever grow up? There’s a good view of the TV, anyway, and I can just make out the subtitles. The old man’s half deaf; he always turns on the subtitles.

So we watch our shows, NCIS followed by a CSI double bill. He doesn’t move from his chair, I don’t move from the bush. The wind carries the drone of cars climbing the hill towards West Nab. They sound so much closer than usual. Occasionally I even think I hear one approaching, but I see no lights through the trees and I know it’s just my imagination. I return to Miami. Horatio cracks the case, makes a subtitled quip, puts his sunglasses on and heads off down the boardwalk. There’s lots to be said for watching shows set in the sunshine state when it’s too cold to feel your fingertips. Even the fire in the living room has died down to embers, and finally the old man gets up from his chair, switches off the TV, and heads upstairs. I wish him goodnight and retire to the barn. Still wrapped in my blanket, I crawl deep into the stack of loose hay till all but my face is covered and fall asleep in seconds. It’s been a long day.


* * *

I wake to the crackle of a police radio. I’ve been moved on enough to recognise that noise as a threat. I go quickly to the boarded up window. There’s a gap in the boards when I can see out into the yard. Two police cars, an ambulance, and a muddy Range Rover I recognise as belonging to the old man’s son. Another car, an Audi, is just pulling up. Probably CID. I should be relieved: they wouldn’t come in such force just to move me on. I should make myself scarce, but morbid curiosity gets the best of me.

I climb down the ladder and cross to the front of the barn. There’s another window here, also boarded, except for the very bottom pane which still has its glass. Frosted outside, cobwebbed inside, but I can just make out two figures in the yard beyond. The younger is male, uniformed, probably the source of the radio crackle that awoke me. The other is a woman, late thirties, red hair and rectangular spectacles. I’d call her attractive if I allowed myself to think that way anymore.

“Bit of a wasted journey for you, Inspector. Pretty certain it was an accident.”

“What was he doing up there?” The woman’s looking up at the roof of the farmhouse, then her face drops slowly to the yard.

“Problems with his TV aerial. We spoke with his son – it was him what found him, first thing. Terrible that, finding your dad sprawled out in the yard, stiff as a board – I mean, frozen, like, not just the rigor…”

“Why was he here? The son? Does he often visit so early in the morning?”

“On his way to work, like. Apparently the old fella rang him last night complaining about the reception – couldn’t get any of his programmes. On about going up on the roof and fixing the aerial himself, but Mr. Armitage - the son, I mean - he thought he’d persuaded his dad to wait till morning. Guess he just didn’t want to miss the snooker.”

I go cold inside, colder than I felt in the holly bush last night while I watched three crime scene dramas back-to-back with a man whose TV was apparently on the blink. A man who never once got up to make a phone call (it’s out in the hall, I’ve never seen him use a mobile or cordless). I’ve watched enough detective shows to know something’s not right… but what can I do about it?

“Higgins versus Murphy, ma’am. Blinder, down to the very last frame. Don’t suppose you…?”

A third voice interrupts the post-snooker commentary, shouting “officer!” from across the yard. The inspector turns and I follow her gaze. I recognise my suspect immediately.

“This is Mr. Armitage now, ma’am. Mr. Armitage, this is Detective Inspector Silver—“

The inspector tells the son she’s sorry for his loss and Armitage’s face flashes a brief, humourless smile. Whatever he says now will be a lie. I know it, but how could I ever prove it?

“I’ve been going over the CCTV. I know what it looks like, but I just wanted to be sure…” He pauses and stares straight through the dirty, frosted window. I step back, suddenly afraid. Can he see me? Does he know I’m here? That I stay here every night? What if those cameras on the gate weren’t the only ones he had installed? What if he has me on film, coming and going from the barn, climbing into the holly bush, watching…

Watching…

Just like three years ago last summer. I spent my evenings on the rec’, watching the birds. There were always kids around, mucking about. Playing football, riding their bikes, smoking and swearing. I didn’t think anything of it. This was Delph, a little village just over the hills. I’d lived there most of my life. As a kid, on my dad’s farm, and then, when I was older and my brothers proved more agriculturally-minded than me, in a poky terrace in the village. I designed websites, kept myself to myself, never had a girlfriend or went out drinking, but I liked to walk down on the rec’, on a summer night, to sit and watch the swallows darting low to catch flies, or the blackbirds bobbing around on the ground, digging for worms. Sparrows, blue tits, magpies, the occasional chaffinch or peewit… until one night I found the little girl.

“Wanted to be certain,” the son continues, his eyes returning to the inspector, “that no one else… I mean, you tell yourself it was just an accident, that the silly old fool just couldn’t wait till morning… but I always worried about him, out here on his own. That’s why I had them cameras fitted in the first place. You hear such horrible things…”

“We’ll need to examine that footage ourselves,” says the inspector, and Armitage nods, his mouth a thin, tight line.

“Of course, of course… but there’s nothing… He was alone all night. No one else comes up the drive till my own Range Rover, first thing. I had to be sure, you understand. That there wasn’t any kind of… foul play. Bad enough knowing he might still be alive if I’d come round last night… but I was so tired, I’d had such a long day…”

The inspector tells him not to blame himself, but I’m thinking about the phone call. The one the old man supposedly made to report his faulty TV. The phone records, I think, the police can trace any calls made to and from this house last night, I’ve seen it done a thousand times on TV. They can prove no such call was ever made… but then I think of the CCTV, and I realise how long the son’s been planning this…

He must have been here, I realise, long before his father retired for the night. Early enough to place that call himself, from out in the hall where he knew his father wouldn’t ever hear. Some accomplice – his wife, perhaps, or a friend he’s cut in for a profit once he sells the farm –lice – his wife, perhaps, or a friend he’s cut in for a profit once he sells the farm – was waiting at home to answer. Or maybe he just had an answerphone set up. It wouldn’t matter, as long as the records showed a call from here to there last night, long enough to complain about bad TV reception. But I know he’s lying. I know the old man didn’t leave his armchair from the start of NCIS to the end of CSI. I’m a witness – if not to the actual crime, then at least to the fabrication of Armitage’s alibi. But he’s a grieving son who’s just lost his father… and I’m a homeless beggar hiding out in the barn. A homeless beggar who the police already have on record…

I found her body in a scrappy patch of dock leaves at the corner of the playing fields. I thought she might be still alive, despite all the blood. I picked her up and carried her to the nearest house. I should have just left her. The police came, and her blood was on me. Nobody knew what had happened. She’d been missing all afternoon. Her parents were frantic. They took me in for questioning. I tried to tell them, I’d just been watching the birds. They broke into my house, found the porn on my computer. I was a twenty-eight year old man without a girlfriend. It was nothing sick or perverted, not kids or S&M or... I shouldn’t have had to defend myself. I shouldn’t have felt so ashamed. They made me feel that way. They wanted me to confess.

The case fell apart. Someone had seen me at home when the girl went missing. The DNA evidence didn’t tally. The police lost interest and let me go. It didn’t matter. The damage was done. The stares, the whispers, the mothers pulling their children hastily away as I walked down the street. Even my own family… I left Delph three weeks later. Walked away from it all: my home, my job, my life. Been walking ever since.

I’m walking again now. I sneaked out the barn and up through the winter-dead brambles to the track I came in on. There was no point staying. I’ve watched enough of those shows to know that without actual, physical evidence, it’s going to be my word against Armitage’s. There’s nothing I can do for the old man now, and there’s no home here for me anymore. I’m carrying the few belongings I kept stashed in his barn. My blanket, my flashlight, my meagre savings in an old tobacco tin…

When I stumble, the tin goes flying. I stoop to pick it up from amid the smashed ice. The ice that’s been smashed by tyre tracks. Big, heavy tyre tracks that weren’t here last night… when the ice was fresh. Not tractor tracks though…

Suddenly I remember the sound of the approaching engine while Horatio did his thing and the muddy wheel arches on the son’s Range Rover, which he went out of his way to prove never came here last night… and then I know. I have to go back.

48 Hour Film Challenge

Some friends of mine entered the Sci-Fi London 48 Hour Film Challenge. They had just two days to write, film, edit and complete a short sci-fi film... and this is what they came up with...


Rat Race (SCI-FI London 48 Hour Film Challenge... by StudioLAX

Congratulations, guys - I love it!

Friday Flash - Pile Up

I wrote this week's Friday Flash story for a competition entry last summer. Looking back now, I know why it didn't win. I was trying too hard to write the kind of story that I thought won competitions.

Perhaps you'll enjoy it despite that...

Pile Up

At what point do you realise you’re married to the wrong person, Alicia wonders. Is it the point where you hear about the sixteen car pile-up on the M62 and you think, ‘Brian’s on the motorway now’, but you don’t think, ‘I hope he’s OK’. Instead you start imagining a knock on your door and a sombre-faced policewoman:

“Is there anyone we can call?”

They met seven years ago, at a B&B in York. It was high summer, but they were the only ones there. Brian was up from Wolverhampton, attending a conference on The Future of Social Networking at the Barbican. Alicia was sightseeing. Since breaking up with Don, she didn’t mind holidaying on her own. Going where you wanted when you wanted without having to worry whether your partner really wanted to be there, or whether they’d rather be somewhere else, doing someone else. Don had been shagging that waitress from the Bull's Head for three months by the time they went to Crete. Why keep up the pretence for two whole weeks then drop the bomb the moment they got home?

“I didn’t want to spoil the holiday.”

Yes, because now Alicia had such great memories of it.

She turns off the radio when the adverts come on and goes to the fridge for Ocean Spray. It’s good for your bladder. She had an infection last year and Brian made her drink it. She was never a fruit juice person, but she’d grown to love it. Now she even drank it with vodka. It was weird the way living with someone changed basic things like your diet, what time you went to bed and when you did the washing. She’d never watched The Simpsons before meeting Brian. Now she watched it every night. Even the ones she’d seen three, four times. Would she still watch it if they split up, or would it be forever tainted by them?

Ah, but who was she kidding? They wouldn’t split up. Not on her instigation, anyway. Sometimes she pictured Brian’s face with that curled lip, does-not-compute expression he got whenever she had the temerity to disagree with him. Besides, it was complicated. She might not love him anymore, but she did still love him. One word, so many different definitions.

Sometimes she wishes Brian would have an affair too. But that was insane. Catching Don with that tart was the worst thing that ever happened to her. Worse than the time she broke her nose ice-skating, worse than the time she thought her dad had cancer (it turned out to be polyps), worse even than the abortion. At least that had been her choice. And yet if she’d arrived home tonight to find Brian shagging a floozy from someone else’s local, would part of her not have been relieved? What - she didn’t love Brian the way she’d loved Don? No, you couldn’t compare. All those definitions rendered comparisons worthless. Besides, Brian wouldn’t ever do that. He didn’t have room in his heart for another woman. He barely had room for her.

As she peels the potatoes, she thinks again of York. Arriving for breakfast to find her future husband sitting alone with his muesli. He’d caught her eye the moment she walked in.

“Good morning! Isn’t it a lovely day? I think we’re the only ones here.”
That appeared to be the case. Alicia had been intending to sit over on the other side of the room, but might that seem rude now?

“Why don’t you join me? I’m having the full English, what about you?”

When the waitress arrived to take her order, Alicia realised she didn’t have a choice. She asked for a grapefruit and some toast, thinking suddenly of her figure. Why? That was when Brian started telling her about his conference.

“To be honest, I could have done without it. We're so busy back at the office. But people are coming from all over the country – even abroad. Amsterdam, Iceland, one bloke from Czechoslovakia, or whatever they call it these days. I’m the keynote speaker. Can’t do it without me.”

Alicia had never spoken in front of an audience. Wasn’t he nervous?

“I’d only be nervous if I didn’t know what I was talking about.” His laugh defused the arrogance. No, it wasn’t arrogance, she remembers thinking: it was confidence. Such a scarcity in her own life, she hardly recognised it. Yet when she was with him, his confidence became hers. “I can do anything” became “we can do anything”. “They can’t do that to me” became “they can’t do that to us”. And so on. For a time, it was irresistible.

He should be home by now, she thinks, peeking through the blinds. It’s still raining. A car goes past the end of the drive spraying water from the puddles. It’s not Brian. She turns down the gas on the potatoes and checks her mobile. Sometimes he texts if he’s stuck in traffic.

Nothing.

She imagines herself in a solicitor’s office, Grantham, Surley and Braithwaites, talking over the particulars of her late husband’s will. His life insurance would pay off the mortgage. Then there’d be his pension and death-in-service benefits… but it wasn’t about the money. It was the long term benefits that really excited her.

These are only thoughts, she tells herself. Everybody has thoughts. Bad thoughts. Mean thoughts. Bleak, fatalistic, inappropriate, just plain evil thoughts that blow through your head like thunderclouds but don’t actually bring rain.

She remembers being a little girl, lying in bed, unable to sleep until she heard her dad come home. The later it got, the more she worried. It didn’t matter what Mum said to reassure her. Uncle Alan hadn’t come home one night; he’d been run over on the way back from his club by a drunk driver. Mum said that had been a tragic accident, but with something like that already happening to somebody in their family, it was far less likely to ever happen again. That was something called probability, though it turned out Mum didn’t really understand probability at all. Alicia’s maths teacher told her that if you tossed a coin nineteen times and it came up heads every single toss, it still didn’t change the odds of it coming up heads again on the twentieth. So Alicia had to learn to beat the odds and find another way to protect her dad. People said bad things happened when you least expected them, so every night she expected the worst. A crash, a fire, a shooting, a kidnapping… another drunk driver. By picturing it, she denied it. And every night her Dad walked in the door, that was one more victory over fate.

By those rules, wasn’t she now protecting her husband in exactly the same way? Ruling out the possibility of an accident by imagining it first? She ought to feel good about that. Why didn’t she?

When Brian asked her to marry him, it’d been a foregone conclusion. She’d thought about saying no, but she’d only have been doing it to see the look on his face. He’d probably think she was joking anyway. He’d already booked the church, and two weeks off work. “The difficult thing’s going to be the guest list. Narrowing it down. If I invited everybody who thinks they’re going to be invited, we’d have to hire the Albert Hall.” Brian had 2476 friends on Facebook, and few were mere acquaintances. Alicia could think of maybe six people she wanted on her side of the church, and that included her mum, dad and brother Ray. She ended up inviting people she hadn’t spoken to in years, in a vain attempt to balance the numbers.

Vain – there was another word that lost you in its definitions. A word that could have applied to both bride and groom that day, in entirely different ways.

For their first dance, Brian serenaded her from the stage. You’re Every Woman In The World To Me. They didn’t actually dance, she just stood there like a lemon and let herself be sung to. At what point do you realise you’re married to the wrong person? God help you if you’re still wearing your wedding dress.

She didn’t wish Brian ill. She certainly didn’t want him dead. She didn’t even hate him. She just didn’t ‘love him’ love him. The ironic thing was, if he didn’t walk in that door soon… if fate actually won this round…

When she hears his car in the drive, her emotions are all a tangle. Relief tied up with regret, twisted into guilt. Always guilt. What does she have to be guilty about? She was only thinking. This is all his fault. If he’d been home on time, none of this would have ever entered her mind. She takes a deep breath and forces the frown from her face, ready to greet him. As she does every night, she laments the passing of her time alone and readies herself for another evening of cohabitation.

The look he gives her as he opens the door wipes those thoughts away. She doesn’t even have time to say, “you’re late,” or “what time do you call this?” or ask if he got stuck on the motorway because of the accident. She knows something’s wrong.

“Sit down,” he says, and yanks off his tie like it’s the real reason his face is so white, his eyes so red and rubbed bloodshot. “Just sit down,” he repeats when she tries to ask why, and even now hope flickers in the dread. Has he met someone else? Was he with her tonight? Is he going to leave? She pulls out a chair with a scrape.

“Ray called me on my way home. From the hospital. He didn’t want to tell you over the phone, better someone told you in person. Obviously he though I was best…”

He crouches in front of her and takes her hand. Behind him, the cat flap goes and Mandrake squeezes through, bedraggled from the rain. He lets out a crabby meow and rubs himself against the tea towel that’s hanging from the radiator. Then he glares at Alicia like it’s all her fault. Where’s the summer gone?

“It’s your dad,” Brian says. “He was in an accident. There was a crash on the motorway…”

The cat’s right, Alicia thinks. It is all her fault. Her daddy’s dead, her mum’s too upset to talk, even her brother doesn’t want to be the one to break it to her. It’s all her fault. She hasn’t been protecting him like she used to. When she heard about that accident, all her thoughts were for Brian. No, not for Brian. They hadn’t been for Brian at all. Selfish cow, she thinks, look what you’ve done now!

Her husband’s still talking. Of course he is. He’ll take care of all the arrangements. She doesn’t need to worry. It’ll be the best funeral anybody’s ever had. A testament to the man, a great man, a man Brian had a lot of love and respect for. Everything he deserves, we’ll do him proud.

“I have to go pack,” Alicia tells him, “I need to be with my mum.”
Brian says he understands. He thinks it’s a good idea. A few days at her mum’s, that’ll do them both some good. They can grieve together. He’ll drive her over there now, fetch her back at the weekend.

“No,” says Alicia. “I might have to stay longer than that. Quite a bit longer…”

Brian doesn’t understand, she thinks. But he will. She’ll make him. This is her chance. He asks how much longer and she answers without hesitation.

Friday Flash - Forest For The Trees

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...

Forest For The Trees

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.