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The Shelter and the Stones

Blue, pink, yellow, green, and white. The stones are in a rough circle on the bench between us. It’s a blisteringly cold Halloween. While walking here I saw pumpkins watch the world go by from front gardens, faces in an audience, most smiling, one rather furious in what must have been an esoteric flourish of the artist. More than one house had a bloody handprint on the door’s glass. The door of what I knew was a childless couple’s house had a handwritten sign saying “no trick or treaters PLEASE!” We sit in a shelter with a clock in its spire, like the top of a church that stretches far beneath the earth. Ahead of us the sea rolls in and out. My companion’s gaze is fixed on the coloured stones as if he’s trying to make them dance, or tell secrets. His name is Adam Turner and he obsesses me. Or did, a very long time ago. This memory is very old. I remember that he kept the stones in his bag, amongst other such totems of pagan magic. Adam Turner was a witch, though I’d tried many times to
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The Seahorse and the Boy

There were things in that house that she struggled to forget, even though they were, in and of themselves, perfectly ordinary, and certainly much less horrible than what she’d experienced. A framed picture of a smiling woman with a little boy who shared her face in the background, playing with plastic toys. A plaster seahorse, a tiny and not very attractive thing, like a charm pulled from a cheap bracelet - and placed carefully in a bell jar as if it was a sacred object. She didn’t know how these things and others related to the animal scream of the killer as he chased her down the hall, down the stairs, her brain frantically trying to process the environment while also operating her limbs at a speed they weren’t used to. Perhaps they didn’t mean anything at all. But she doubted it... A grandfather clock with a spiderweb crack in the glass of its door, the brass chime smeared with generations of fingerprints. A woman’s casual wear from the 1970s, housecoat and gloves placed reverently
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The Poison Bride

When the famous poetess passed out in her mashed potatoes on Christmas Eve, 1978, her husband rolled his eyes and her two children carried on glumly chewing. It was a semi-regular performance, the passing out act. George wondered how he'd ended up marrying the silly bitch. Once on a literary tour, they'd been besieged by girls who seemed to regard him with envy for having such unfettered access to their mentally unstable idol. He'd happily switch places with any of them, or the middle-aged sad-sack men who worried at her ankles at luncheons. Two years ago she'd had a brief affair with an English teacher. To George's dismay, she came back to him. A minute passed and the kids, whose expressions these days were normally blank, started to look nervous. Amelia Porter might have been a dab hand at a sonnet, but she still needed oxygen. George had another glass of mulled wine. He wouldn't be surprised if she'd learned to breathe through her ears. Another minute pas
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The Case of the Lascivious Lord

Homer Featherstonhaugh (pronounced Fan-shaw) stood in the cathedral praying to God that his lunch wouldn’t repeat on him. A minor royal had been beaten to death with a bust of St Thomas Becket. There was blood everywhere, and any chance of the fellow lying in state so mourners could see him at rest had been dashed across the cobblestones, alongside his coltish good looks. ‘He’d just come down from Ascot’ said Chief Inspector Worthing of Scotland Yard. ‘Not a particularly religious chap, either, so what he was doing here is a mystery in itself.’ ‘I only left him a few minutes!’ declared Sally O’Connor, the dead man’s PA, a good Irish girl who’d just about stubbed out her accent, though it still snuck through when she was excited. ‘I can’t think why he wanted to come to this place. Normally, Lord Wallace has to be bullied by his mother to attend church on Christmas Day. But we were heading home in a Hackney carriage when he saw the spire over the rooftops and said that he needed to go th
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Jack the Ripper in the Wild West

1 The saloon doors swung shut and a new person entered the establishment to no particular fanfare or even notice. Whorehouse music filled the room, and in a corner Rancher Pete had one of the regular girls all but pinned up against a wall. It had been years since Pete was a rancher, before what he called "the government men" had come and taken his ranch away from him, forcing him to make money the dishonest way. Challenging gunslingers to duels and then collecting what was bet against him at best, outright pillage at worst. He had an ugly wound covering half of his face which some said was a birthmark, though not in his hearing. He said that it was a burn from when the government men torched his ranch. The way he told the story, he’d risen from the flames like the broad-winged bird of myth, a pistol in each hand to execute the lousy bastards as they tried to turn on their horses and gallop away, bullets tearing through the thick Louisiana cotton of their overcoats. Neither he
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Daddykins

1 It was a few days into the year 3000 and I sat in my office on 59th St, waiting for either money or a girl to fall into my lap. As it happened, I got both.   Unlike the fancy qualifications hanging on my wall, the girl wasn't a hologram. She looked like she belonged more to the age of telegrams. She wore a thick ermine coat and a scarf with a couple of fox heads at the end.   'I'm here about  Daddykins ' she said.   ' Daddykins ?'   'My father.'   'I see' I said, 'and how can I help  Daddykins ?'   'He's looking for a nemesis.'   I sighed and picked up a remote. Pointing it at the wall, I projected an image of a notice, headed NEMESIS WANTED. The notice read: "Gentleman villain seeks nemesis for the usual mayhem." It was signed "Mortimer Wilkins".   'I don't suppose he'd be responsible for this, would he?'   'That's daddy' she said, without much enthusiasm.   'I got it in m
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