The House

As a child I grew to regard the house as a malevolent entity, and tried my hardest to avoid spending any time inside. On my way home from school I would drag out the long walk through the marsh as long as I could, would arrange as often as possible to stay the night at a friend’s, and would eagerly spend every school holiday far away at my father’s house in the city.

It is, of course, just a normal house, if somewhat isolated, and my personification of it as a malicious creature purely a projection of my unhappy childhood. But even now, on my return, I have found it difficult to shake off my unease while inside. I choose to sit outside, despite the cold and the dark and the flooded lawns, rather than lock myself inside, alone in there with nothing but my grief. I look up at the window of my mother’s room, the flickering glow of the candle I had placed at the foot of her bed the only light inside, every other window a void as black as a freshly dug grave.

My mother has been ill for as long as I can remember, confined to her bed and surrounded always by a collection of nurses and carers, well-wishers and occasionally friends. It felt to me as if time here had no meaning, held in a state of endless suffocating stasis. I yearned for escape, and took my chance as soon I was old enough and able.

I returned a week ago. My mother’s health degenerated shockingly quickly, and out of the blue I was called and told to return as soon as I could, that if I did not come now I might miss the chance to see her once more before she was gone. I made the necessary arrangements with work, and arrived here by train the next morning.

I decided to walk to the house from the station, along the old gravel path that ran out through the marshes to the house. Its surface was pitted with vast holes filled with black muddied water, as if it were itself a scale map of the surrounding terrain. As with all things, the distance seemed to have diminished with time, another instance of that inevitable contraction of space that occurs somewhere between childhood and adulthood in direct contradiction to the irreversible expansion of the universe. But at the the path’s end the house still stood there like a redblack skull against the sea and the sky.

There was barely anything left of my mother. Her presence used to be tangible, formidable even in the confines of her bed, but now her body was barely visible even as an outline under the thin white sheets. Her face, gaunt and disembodied, lay on a thick pillow, an ancient bust on a plinth. The skin was stretched so tightly across her bones the set of her face was pulled into a constant silent scream.

Every day I sat on a chair at the end of her bed, watching the almost imperceptible rise and fall of the sheets over her chest for continuing signs of life. Around me in an unseen blur moved the nurses, turning her, feeding her, talking incessantly to her as if she could hear, as if she might respond.

In the evening the nurses left, and we were left alone. Me, my mother, and the house around us. The creak of the floorboards, the whisper of her breath, each inaudible in the noise of the day but by night loud enough to keep me from sleep.

A storm blew in on Saturday night, winds howling outside like screams of anguish. The power went out about midnight and I sat in the dark, listening to the rage outside. Eventually I must have fallen asleep, for I dreamt I was adrift in a great sea, my face turned down into the depths. The soundless immensity below me was filled with the shadows of unrecognised beasts, each one appearing huge at first until I realised that it was dwarfed by the what lay below it, on and on ever increasingly until the final creature I could perceive stretched on from horizon to horizon. Yet beneath that I knew lay something larger still.

I awoke in the chair. Sun shone in through the thinness of the curtains. My mother was dead, her eyes wide open in a final defiance.

The power was still out and the phones were down, both the landline and my mobile phone. Outside I discovered the seawall had been breached, the house now surrounded by an unbroken sea that lapped gently at the edges of the lawn. There was no sign of the rowing boat that was usually tied to the jetty beyond the seawall, and there was no sign of the jetty, either. I brought a chair out from the kitchen and sat out on the sodden lawn in the unnatural stillness that the storm had left behind, my eyes closed beneath the pale sun that hovered both above and below the horizon of the new sea.

I waited all day for help, but none came. I saw no passing boats, no activity of any kind. When the sun went down I looked back to the town but saw no orange glow of street lamps, no sign of the bright glare of emergency spotlights. There was only darkness and stillness and silence.

I could find no torches in the house, searching around in cupboards illuminated by the light of my phone’s screen. I found some candles on the living room table, and I lit one of these and placed it on my chair at the foot of my mother’s bed. I did not like the idea of her there alone in the blackness of her room, overcome by a sentimentality I did not previously know I had.

I could not bear to spend the night in the house with her. I could feel the walls closing in on me, the corridors shrinking, the floors and ceilings pushing towards each other, an overwhelming sense of being buried alive.

I fled out into the garden and sat in the chair I had placed there. I sit there now, weeping under the starless sky, the garden illuminated slightly by the candle’s glow at my mother’s window. My eye keeps being drawn back to the light, an involuntary response to light in darkness.

The candlelight flickers, dims, then brightens again. A pause, before it dims again, as if being drawn away from the window, and then it is gone. The lightlessness is complete, infinite, almost physical in its totality, leaving a blackness so uniform it feels artificial in some way, as if a cover has been placed over my eyes.

Then there is a glimpse of the light again, illuminating for a scant second the window of the upstairs bathroom that lies adjacent to my mother’s room. Darkness again, followed by a glow from the next window, the one at the top of the stairs. More darkness, and then a distant glow visible through the marbled glass of the front door, way back at the far end of the house, back further than surely the house extends.

It approaches slowly, down the long hall, growing bigger and brighter until it must be right there at the porch window. The door handle turns, the door creaks open, and the light rushes out towards me. She says my name for the first time in years.

_________

Notes.

1. Another story written in 2013
2. And unpublished anywhere until now
3. As far as I can remember at least

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Tales From The Town #221: Spooky Stories For Halloween

It was the night before whatever day it is that comes after Halloween. It was dark outside, quite cold, raining (probably), and windy (definitely). The power was off, and nobody could even use their phones any more because the batteries had run out hours ago, so there was nothing at all for any of them to do except sit in the living room with some sweets and tell each other scary stories by torchlight.

And for those of us who weren’t invited, maybe we can put our ear to the door, stand as quietly as we can, and listen in. We might have missed the start, but we’re sure to hear the rest….

Tina’s Spooky Story For Halloween (fragment)

…for they knew that when the sun came up, they would never be able to see each other ever ever again.

Intermission/Interpretation

“And that’s the end of The Halloween Parting,” said Tina, as she closed her book and looked up slightly shyly at her audience.

“Wow,” said Daniel. “Spooky!”

“And amazing!” said Ethel, breaking into applause and throwing various packs of sweets at Tina to celebrate her storytelling triumph. “Best story ever!”

“What? No it wasn’t!” said Claire. “It was awful.”

“You’re awful,” said Ethel.

“Shut up,” said Claire. “This was the worst spooky story ever and you all know it.”

“I don’t know it,” said Daniel.

“You don’t know anything,” said Claire.

“Claire doesn’t have to like my story if she doesn’t want to,” Tina said quietly, sadly.

“Which is just as well, because I hated it,” said Claire. “First of all it wasn’t spooky at all.”

“But it had a vampire in it!” said Daniel. “And a frankenstein!”

“And they were in love!” said Ethel.

“Which means it was a romance,” said Claire. “So not even spooky in the slightest. And secondly it was a stupid romance, because if they were so in love why didn’t they just tell each other instead of not telling each other?”

“Because a vampire and a frankenstein can never be together,” said Daniel.

“Why not?”

“Vampire’s drink blood, and frankensteins don’t have any blood,” said Ethel.

“Only embalming fluid,” said Daniel.

“It’s what makes it so tragic,” Ethel added, tears welling up again as she contemplated just how sad the story was.

“Tragically awful,” said Claire. “None of that was even in the story anyway.”

“It was implied,” said Ethel.

“No it wasn’t,” Claire said. “And thirdly they weren’t even real vampires or frankensteins. They were just wearing costumes. Which is stupid. They could have been anyone, dressed up as anything.”

“It’s a metaphor,” said Tina, almost inaudibly.

“There’s no point explaining it, Tina,” said Ethel. “Claire doesn’t know what a metaphor even is.”

“Of course I know what a metaphor is,” said Claire. “It means that the story means even less than you thought it meant in the first place. And I already thought that it meant absolutely nothing at all!” Claire glared at everyone to prove she was right and they were wrong. “So Tina should put those sweets back in the blow so someone who tells an actual spooky story about something instead of a stupid love story about nothing can win them.”

Tina silently passed her torch over to Ethel and receded slowly, ignominiously, into the shadows. Beside her, in the eerie pale LED glow, Ethel stood up, waited until the rhythmic thud of sweets being returned to the fruit bowl had faded, and began to tell her terrible tale of terror…

Ethel’s Spooky Story For Halloween

This story is called The Spooky Old Tree Full Of Spiders and it was written by me, Ethel, and no one else, especially not Claire, so if hers is similar to this it’s because she copied me and I didn’t copy her at all.

Now, if you go down to the woods today, you’ll see a spooky old tree that used to be full of spiders. Big ones, little ones, poisonous ones, venomous ones, those hairy ones that look like they live on dad’s back. Just millions of spiders. Billions of them. Maybe even trillions of them. Nobody knows because no one, not even a computer, not even Claire, could count that high.

But did you see how I said it used to be full of spiders? That’s because now there’s no spiders in that tree at all. There’s not even any cobwebs.

So where have they gone? Nobody knows. But they must have gone somewhere. Perhaps they’re right here in our house, in this room, about to crawl out from beneath the rug or drop down from the ceiling or come rushing at us in a great big wave out of the chimney to EAT US ALIVE TO DEATH RIGHT NOW!

Intermission/Interruption

“Aaaaaaaaaargh!” Claire screamed.

“Haha! I scared Claire!” said Ethel, pretty proudly. “With imaginary spiders!”

“No you didn’t!” Claire said. “It was Mum.”

“Mum? What did Mum do? She’s not even here.”

“She opened the door,” said Claire.

“No she didn’t,” said Ethel.

“No one opened the door at all,” said Tina.

“Someone opened the door,” said Claire. “Otherwise it’d be closed.”

“It is closed,” said Daniel. He reached out and pushed it firmly shut with his foot to prove it.

“Only because Mum obviously closed it again when I screamed,” said Claire. “That’s why you should always scream at spiders. Because it scares them off.”

“Mum’s not a spider,” said Ethel.

“She’s worse than a spider,” said Claire. “And she’s much worse than Ethel’s stupid story about spiders.”

“Worse as in scarier or worse as in more awful?” Tina asked.

“Worse as in way scarier because Ethel’s story wasn’t scary at all,” said Claire. “And worse because spiders can’t open doors and spy on us but Mum can. And did. I wouldn’t have screamed otherwise.”

“Why would Mum spy on us?” Tina asked.

“Why wouldn’t Mum spy on us?” Claire asked back.

“Maybe she wants to hear our stories,” said Daniel.

“Why would she want to hear these stories?” said Claire. “They’re not even scary AND they’re boring.”

“Mine wasn’t boring,” Ethel said.

“Well it certainly wasn’t scary,” said Claire. “It was barely even spooky.”

“I thought it was scary,” said Daniel, quietly, from underneath the settee.

“Only because you’re scared of everything,” Claire said.

“I’m not scared of every thing, although I can be scared by any thing” said Daniel, thinking of all the things he had ever been scared of as he said it and slightly scaring himself all over again as he thought it. “And I’ll tell you what I definitely am scared of. My very own SPOOKY STORY (that is also scary and definitely not even slightly boring at all)!”

He took the torch from Ethel, flicked it into the battery saving quick flash mode (the spookiest of all the torch’s modes), and began to tell his tale to the assembled crowd (and Mum if she was still listening just outside the door)…

Daniel’s Spooky Story For Halloween

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, in a land not very far from here because it was ACTUALLY HERE, in the middle of winter, after school, in the RAIN, and also the SNOW (and it was pretty windy too, and getting dark), instead of coming home with you three, like a good boy, I walked all the way to Nanny’s house instead, like a really good boy, because it was her birthday, and I wanted to give her a present and also show off my new coat, which was bright red, and had a hood, which was also bright red, and it was HUGE! It came right down to my nose!

So I walked through the woods, past the witch’s house, round the pylon, past the witch’s house again, and then back through the woods, all the way to Nanny’s house.

“Hey Nanny!” I said. “It’s me, Daniel! And I’m wearing a super cool super warm super amazing red coat. And also I’ve brought you some tasty presents for your birthday! Which it is! Today!”

But Nanny wasn’t there. I looked all round and she wasn’t anywhere. She wasn’t in the kitchen, she wasn’t watching TV, she wasn’t in her bedroom, she wasn’t in the spare bedroom, she wasn’t on the roof, she wasn’t anywhere. But then I saw her come rolling out of the cupboard under the stairs and trundling off into the living room, and then she called out, in a voice that sounded EXACTLY like Nanny’s, but also different somehow. “Oh, Daniel, is that you my dear? Why don’t you come down here so Nanny can say hello to her very favourite grandson with her very own voice and look upon you with her very own eyes!”

So I went downstairs, and there was Nanny, sitting in the living room, watching SNOOKER! Or was it darts? It was either snooker or darts. Or bowls. Something utterly unwatchable by normal human eyes, anyway.

“Here I am Nanny!” I said, and Nanny looked at me with her very own eyes, which looked exactly like Nanny’s eyes had always looked, but also slightly different somehow.

“Wow, Nanny, your very own eyes are huge!” I said. “And they never ever blink!”

“All the better to see you with,” Nanny said. “Now why don’t you come a little closer, so I can touch your nice bright red coat with my very own hands and feel how cool yet warm this amazing piece of clothing is!”

So I stood a little bit closer, and Nanny ran her hands up and down my sleeve, which felt exactly like it always feels when Nanny runs her hand up and down our sleeves, but also slightly different somehow.

“Wow, Nanny, your hands are like big metal irons,” I said. “And they hum so loudly!”

“All the better to straighten out all the little creases,” Nanny said. “Now why don’t you shove those tasty presents in that basket you brought me right into my mouth like a good boy.”

“Wow, Nanny, what big sharp weird teeth made out of cogs and knives and whizzing whirring blades you have,” I said, as I began pushing all the bananas I’d brought from home into her mouth.

“All the better to maximise nutrient extraction,” she said, as she minced up those bananas into a weird paste with her food processor mouth, exactly like she always did, except slightly different somehow.

And it was only then, as she enjoyed her disgusting, revolting, inedible, uneatable, utterly inhumanely dreadful bananas, exactly like she always did, that I realised that Nanny wasn’t a human at all.

She was a robot!

Intermission/Interrogation

“And that’s the end of my spooky story for spookyween,” said Daniel, taking a packet of wiggly strawberry worms out of the fruitbowl to celebrate a tale well told.

“That is not a spooky tale, Daniel,” said Claire, taking his packet of wiggly strawberry worms away from him and putting them back in the bowl. “It’s just Little Red Riding Hood with a robot at the end. So no wiggly worms.”

“Oh come on Claire,” Tina said. “Let Daniel have his wiggly worms.”

“None of us even like wiggly worms,” Ethel said. “So he might as well have them.”

“Urgh okay, have your stupid wiggly worms,” Claire said, throwing the packet of wiggly worms at Daniel. “It still wasn’t scary in the slightest. Robots are science fiction not spooky fiction.”

“It wasn’t any sort of fiction,” said Daniel. “It’s a true story.”

“No it wasn’t,” said Claire.

“Yes it was,” said Daniel.

“If it was a true story,” said Claire, her eyes narrowing in the torch light. “How did you walk to Nanny’s house, when Nanny lives on the moon?”

“It was before Nanny moved to the moon,” Daniel said. “Obviously.”

“That sounds unlikely,” Claire said. “But okay, if it happened in the past, how come Nanny isn’t a robot now? We’ve seen her loads since then.”

“She is,” said Daniel. “Haven’t you seen how many bananas she eats? And liquorice! If she was a human there’s no way she’d eat liquorice. It’s made out of oil. And bananas are made of sick. And I think also bogies.”

“You never even mentioned liquorice in your stupid made up story. And if she was a robot she wouldn’t eat bananas or liquorice,” said Claire. “She’d eat electricity.”

“Maybe she only eats moon electricity,” said Daniel, with a shrug of his shoulders.

“And why did you take her bananas and liquorice in the first place if only robots eat bananas and liquorice and you didn’t even know she was a robot yet?”

“Because Nanny likes bananas and liquorice,” said Daniel. “And also it was her birthday.”

“Nanny’s birthday isn’t even in the winter,” said Claire. “It’s either in the summer or the spring.”

“Robo-Nanny’s is!” Daniel said. “And also I was getting rid of all our bananas so that Mum couldn’t make any of us eat them. You should be thanking me not interrogating me.”

“You’re the only one here who doesn’t like bananas, Daniel,” Claire said “So what happened to actual Nanny, anyway? Did the robot eat her too?”

“Nothing happened to Nanny,” Daniel said.

“What do you mean, nothing happened to Nanny? Something must have happened to Nanny, otherwise she wouldn’t have replaced by a robot.”

“Nothing happened to Nanny,” Daniel said. “She’s always been a robot.”

“What?!” Claire said. “No she hasn’t.”

“She has,” said Daniel.

“Yeah, that’s the entire point of the story, Claire,” Tina said.

“Otherwise it wouldn’t even make any sense,” said Ethel.

“But it didn’t make sense,” said Claire.

“Stories don’t have to make sense, Claire,” Tina said.

“That doesn’t make sense, either,” Claire said. “At least my story makes sense.”

“I bet it doesn’t,” said Ethel.

“I bet it does,” said Claire. She snatched the torch out of Daniel’s hand with a frightening show of speed. “Now shut up and listen…”

Claire’s Actually Spooky Story For Halloween

“There’s no such thing as ghosts!”

And to prove it, Claire disappeared from existence entirely.

After Show/Aftermath

The torch hit the floor with a thud, bounced up into Daniel’s forehead, hit the floor again, flickered once, and went out. In the ensuing silence and darkness, no one was quite sure if the story had started, paused dramatically mid way through, or finished entirely.

By the time Daniel got the torch back on, Claire really had disappeared from existence entirely.

“So Claire was a ghost all along?” Daniel asked, genuinely quite impressed. “Spooky.”

“Of course Claire’s not a ghost,” Ethel said. “She’s just copying the end of your Nanny story and crossing it with the end of my spider story and then adding in the end of Tina’s vampire story for some sort of annoying effect.”

“Double spooky,” Daniel said, as retrieved the torch and panned it round the room searching for her. “So where is she then?”

“Maybe she sneaked out the door while we were all waiting for her story to start, get going, or end?” Ethel suggested.

“There’s no way Claire sneaked out of anywhere,” said Tina. “Maybe she’s hiding under the sofa?”

“But I’m under the sofa,” said Daniel. “Maybe she climbed up the chimney?”

He pointed the torch up the chimney but she wasn’t there either.

“Maybe she’s behind the curtains?” Ethel suggested, suddenly yanking them open in the hope of revealing Claire but only actually revealing the cat sleeping beside the radiator.

“Perhaps she’s scuttling about on the ceiling?” Tina suggested, and they all very slowly looked up…

…but she wasn’t up there either (unless she’d turned into a spindly little spider, which obviously she hadn’t).

“I suppose this must mean Claire really did never actually exist at all, then?” Daniel said. “Triple spooky.”

“If Claire never existed, who dropped the torch into your face?” Ethel asked.

“Oh yeah,” said Daniel.

“And if Claire never existed, who even suggested this story competition in the first place?” Tina asked.

“Oh yeah,” said Daniel.

“And if Claire never ever existed,” said Ethel, pointing to the empty spot where the fruitbowl where the sweets had been had been. “Who stole all our sweets?”

“Oh no!” said Daniel. Even his packet of wiggly worms was gone.

“And I don’t even like wiggly worms,” said a ghostly ghastly disembodied voice that came from everywhere at once, followed by an equally ghastly ghostly cackling laugh that lasted until midnight and beyond (when Claire fell out of the cupboard with a thump).

__________

Notes:

1. Written in October, 2025

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(untitled)

They live lives that might as well have been granted
by some fairy tale ring

Unlimited riches
impunity from the law
immortality

Yet instead of gratitude
generosity
any hint of joy

All they seem to feel is misery
and resentment
in the bitter petty emptiness
of their infinitely withered hearts

__________

Notes:

1. Written on January 30th, 2025

__________

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The Judgement Of History

It was perhaps an hour after midnight on the night before Christmas when the discussion amongst those of us still present turned to the true nature of hell, and more interestingly, whether one would recognise it if indeed we were to find ourselves there (an outcome that most of us acknowledged, due to the realities of the worlds of business and politics we inhabited, was for each of us a distinct possibility, though not yet, we hoped, an inevitability).

There were only seven of us left by then. Earlier in the evening it had been announced that a storm was approaching, a surprise given the meteorological forecast, and most of the members of our small but exclusive society left upon this pronouncement so as to miss the worst of it. For those like me, however, where the journey home was not a practical one to make at so late an hour, the decision to see out the storm in the comfort of our favourite armchairs was quickly made, and we settled in for the night.

The fire had originally been lit more for its atmospherics than its heat, and now the flames and the smoke provided us with a suitable ambience for our heretical discussions, amplified these last few hours by the periodic flashes of lightning that pierced through the curtains as surely as they would have through our eyelids, should any of our number have wished to rest their eyes and doze through the evening’s confinement.

And if the lightning was not enough to keep us from our slumbers, then the roar of thunder that accompanied each flash, and the ceaseless beating of the rains, which hammered like the fists and the feet of the mob against the window panes and the roofing tiles of the annex in which we were seated, undoubtedly were.

The seven of us there that night were: The venerable Mr Eden, longstanding patron of our club and the man, it must be acknowledged, in whose shadow all of us still stand; Mr Canning and Mr Lawrence, retired now but both still much admired for how they dealt with the mutineers in their day; Mr Bourke, a visiting professor emeritus from Dublin whom I had never previously met; Mr Baring, my great friend and long-time companion, and on whose account I had journeyed to the city earlier that day; myself, being as I am a gentleman, as you know, of no particular renown; and Mr Curzon, a taciturn fellow only recently inducted into our circle, who had, I believe, made his fortune in shipping, and at the very least had a reputation for being well-travelled and knowledgeable even by the standards of the rest of us fellows.

The evening’s conversation initially concerned little more than the traditional greetings and homilies of the season, such as each of us have said and heard on untold occasions before. There is a circularity to Christmas which makes the present feel somewhat indistinguishable from the past, and it’s insistence on both public and private cheer brings its own difficulties, shall we say, even at the best of times. And so there was an undercurrent of irritation in much of what was said, as there always is in the slightly hollow exhortations to peace and goodwill that are customary at this time of year, though of course gentlemen such as ourselves try our damnedest to hide it.

Soon the subject of our politely expressed displeasure turned to the vagaries of the weather, and the various complications and alterations to our plans this unexpected storm would likely cause us, and then, too, of course, the insipid company and ungrateful nature of many of our distant family members upon which we were expected to play host in the days to come.

But luckily the season lends itself well to tales of a more unpleasant nature as well, and quickly we gave up any pretence of civility and good manners, Mr Baring relating to us with evident relish the latest news concerning a series of unsolved murders in one of the neighbouring counties, the particulars of which had been kept quiet by the local press at the behest of the region’s police force.

Yet Mr Baring, through his contacts within the constabulary (which proved so beneficial to his commercial interests), had been informed of some of the more garish details of the crimes, and was taking great pleasure in describing to us the monstrous and macabre violations to which the victims had been subjected.

“The perpetrators of such crimes may evade the law of our lands,” said Mr Eden into the silence that followed Mr Baring’s evocations. “But upon their own death, justice shall prevail. There are some judgements from which none are spared.”

It was this comment that turned the conversation towards the theological. Mr Eden, a man of the law in his youth, inevitably saw hell in the simplistic terms of his profession, envisioning it as some great and flawless penal colony, where every judgement would be ineluctably correct, each sentence eternal, and the punishments robust and inescapable.

Mr Canning and Mr Lawrence here agreed with Eden, the pair still playing, after so many years, the dutiful proteges. But disagreement soon came in the form of Mr Bourke’s contention that if hell was little more than a divinely administered prison, its very scope for inflicting pain and torment upon the soul would be limited. Indeed, it was his opinion that any system of hell that revealed itself openly to those it had captured would be resisted, and therefore rendered, eventually, ineffective.

“One would settle in for eternity,” he said, his voice carrying with it the authority of a lifetime of lectures upon, I suspected, this very subject. “For as we know, in war the daily horrors inflicted upon the flesh are steadily countered by a growing numbness to pain, and in famine increasing psychic detachment from reality inhibits the terrors of the mind from flowering into full bloom.”

Further, he explained, hell would need to operate without the fear of death (for how can there be death in an infinite system), while also foregoing the fear borne of concern for those we loved, for in the eyes of God each of us are judged for our own crimes only, and not for those of others, and so, no matter what our infernal captors could threaten us with, we would know the still-living were beyond the scope of their powers. Within these limitations the ability to truly strike effectively at the heart of man would be nullified and rendered void, he contended.

“But what of corporal punishments?” asked Canning. “As all of us here know, pain is a useful tool when wielded by the hands of the righteous and the just.”

“Pain itself is not enough,” he said. “We can endure mere pain for longer than we should.”

And at this he held up his own hand, and with a quick twist with his other, removed it, holding up for all to see his mutilated wrist, and the scars that ran like lava flows down towards his elbow.

“No, there are two possible forms that hell could conceivably take,” Mr Bourke claimed, after a suitable pause for us to appreciate his theatrics. “One would be a series of nested dreams, in which, on waking from a nightmare, we would find ourselves trapped within a nightmare greater still. And from that eventually we would wake, and so on, for eternity, with each layer beneath more frightening than the last.”

“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,” I murmured, recalling some quotation or other that had been taught to me in my youth.

“Very good,” the good professor said to me, with a nod of approval, before returning to his conjectures. “And the other possibility, the one that seems more likely – and, indeed, the more often I dwell upon the problem, the one that seems to me the only true possibility – is… this!””

He held his arms out wide, his truncated left arm granting an asymmetry to the gesture which rendered it somewhat disconcerting.

“The club?” asked Mr Baring, already perplexed by Bourke’s arguments and now almost completely lost as to his point.

“I speak of the world itself,” Professor Bourke said. “For a true hell would maintain the appearance of reality. It is only in the here and now, in the everyday mundanity of existence, that the corruption of the soul can retain any meaning.

“To be corrupted in hell carries with it no lasting shame. Of course we would be corrupted in hell. Of course we would be humiliated and perverted and defiled until we were a broken shell. How could we expect anything else?

“To be corrupted in life, however, to have to live with that corruption, to see the effects of our actions, and to be forced to live with what we have done, to have that gnawing fear, that dread, within your heart, knowing that at any time you may be confronted by your past misdeeds, or be forced into committing misdeeds anew. Is that not a punishment worthy of hell itself?

“To be forced, not by circumstance but by the very failings of your own soul, to behave in terrible, horrifying ways, out of nothing more than cowardice, or desire, greed, laziness…

“To live to see all the things you believed in and fought for, the better world you hoped to bring about, all those slow steps of progress undermined, hollowed out and eventually swept away by a tide that brings back to us nothing but ever increasing hate and horror. And all of it of our own doing, all our justifications for those same deeds revealed to be no more than the self-serving lies of the common criminal we here so like to judge and have without mercy condemned more times than we can ever hope to remember.

“Now that,” he said, as he began to screw his hand back into place. “That is a hell to be feared. A hell that would be worthy of its reputation.”

I again responded to this with a quote – “I began to learn to hope and what brings a more bitter despair to the heart than hope destroyed” – before Eden, in his diplomatic way (perhaps to calm the coming bluster of Canning and Lawrence), said, “Perhaps it is both. Or neither. Perhaps the passage of time itself is punishment enough. The realities of our lives and misdeeds reduced to mere footnotes in one of Professor Bourke’s many unread histories.”

“The horror,” Canning and Lawrence said, with forced jollity, and Bourke too repeated the phrase quietly as he slumped back into his chair, and then the room fell into a deep and not especially comforting silence, in which we listened to the beating of the rain and indeed to the beating of our own hearts for what seemed like an age.

Just when it seemed like the silence would continue for the rest of the night, as we all began to drift off into ruminatory slumbers, it was broken, unexpectedly, by the largely forgotten figure of Mr Curzon, who let out a dry and desperate laugh that caused us all to turn in near unison towards his chair.

He leaned forward, his face rising from the shadows and into the illumination provided by the fire, and as he turned to face us, the shadows thrown upon his skull by the flames seemed to shift and shiver around the fearful rictus of his smile, and in his careful, calm way, he began to recount to us the following tale.

“It was perhaps an hour after midnight on the night before Christmas,” he said. “When the discussion amongst those of us still present turned to the true nature of hell, and more interestingly, whether one would recognise it if indeed we were to find ourselves there…”

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Notes:

1. This is a reworked version of On The Nature Of Hell
2. I was asked to turn it into a Christmas ghost story
3. So I did
4. In November 2024
5. But then it wasn’t needed anyway

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Support An Accumulation Of Things

Tales From The Town #181: A Psychic Assault On The Children Of The Town

First day of the summer holidays, and the “Back To School” signs were up in Smiths. Even Tina shuddered in horror and walked past as quickly as she could.

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Notes:

1. Written on 18th July, 2024.

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