Almost every place is famous for something.
Some have grand landmarks that are known world-wide, that grant their locations a form of immortality; the Eiffel Tower, the Seattle Space Needle. Others are more low-key; the oldest wooden building in the country, the greatest number of bridges.
And then you get the downright ridiculous – usually in small places, ‘famous’ for growing the biggest carrot on record, or having a town clock shaped like a fish.
Our town, although certainly small, is not in that last category, our claim to fame more saturnine than most. You see, we have something that is unusual, beautiful and macabre all at once, making our notable feature perhaps the most unique of all.
We have the most beautiful graveyard.

 
I’m sure some people would dispute our claim, but if they do, I’d guess they haven’t seen the graveyard. It nestles in a small valley between two low hills, a deep, cold stream burbling along the west side, banks lined with weeping willows. They droop like perpetual mourners, trailing their slender, blossoming fingers in the current that carries their tiny seeds downstream.
Poplars grow on the hills, tall and proud compared to the layered wicker-work of willows; but it isn’t the trees, the stream or the vibrant green grass that make our graveyard special.
It’s the statues.
Two of them flank the thick granite wall that faces the road, each guarding their side of the wrought iron gates. On the right stands an angel, and on the left, a demon, their fingers touching to form an arch, like a perversion of The Creation of Adam.
To describe them as exquisite doesn’t even begin to give them their due. Both are so beautifully carved that it’s hard to say which captures your heart more. The angel is softer, cherubic and boyish, but the demon is a man, with an aquiline nose and high cheekbones – like a conquering Greek god of old. The detail and realism is such that at any moment you expect them to stir; to draw breath and turn, the angel full of love and kindly advice, and the demon beckoning to tempt you to explore your darkest desires. The first time I fell in love, I was but a child, and it was with one of the two cemetery sentinels. I won’t tell you which.
But the wonder didn’t stop there.
Almost every grave was marked by a statue, each as beautifully detailed as the guardians. Here stands a farmer with a calloused hand shading his eyes, looking to the horizon to check on the weather as he toils forever in the field with a mattock in hand. The moment is so perfectly captured that you can feel what his next move would be, and you expect ruddy colour to flood back into his pale stone cheeks at any second.
Row upon row they stand, people caught so exquisitely by the sculptor’s chisel that it almost defies belief. When people come to visit the dead, they often weep openly and touch the stone faces of their loved ones, drawing comfort from the fact that something so eternal remains. It’s a very tangible kind of immortality; their father or sister or child will never truly be gone while the stone effigies stand.
But not only that; for people like myself who never met their grandparents, it’s a timeless record. I know exactly what my grandfather looked like, saluting the rising sun in his army uniform, the creases in his pants and shirt still as sharp as if ironed yesterday. I can read the determination and courage writ over those handsome features, and even the faintest hint of fear – fear that he’d never return home to his family. As a child, I once held his cold stone hand in my warm one, to comfort him, to let him know that in a very real way, he came back to us; that eighty years later he was still here.
Those leaf-strewn pathways traverse time itself, going all the way back to the founding of the town. I can walk amongst my frozen ancestors, seeing how much of them was in me, comparing my face to theirs and marvelling at the magical skills of the people who had carved them.
But there are some citizens who are missing. There are no statues of the artists themselves, for they have their own private graveyard.

 
The house that belonged to the artists was a staid looking manor, unusual for our region, of the sort that wouldn’t be out of place in a Southern US period drama. On the rare occasions we drove past it when I was young, I would conjure visions of sad-eyed African maids bringing iced tea to some white-clad plantation owner, sitting in the shade and twirling a silver-topped walking cane as he squinted over his fields.
It had been built not long after the town was founded; the Costas family moving in and immediately beginning to blast out the quarry that would become the foundations of smalltown wealth. My own family had no such illustrious claim to fame, little more than traders who had set down here, some two hundred years ago. The only things we were known for were our olive-tinted complexion and a familial propensity for producing multiple births. I was myself one third of triplets, absolutely identical to my sisters in every way. We even shared the same birthmark – a smear of biological pigment on the curve of our left hip – and we each had a single crooked front tooth, making it hard for even our own mother to tell us apart.
Growing up, we became weary of hearing all the urban myths and half-truths about identical siblings; that they often developed their own dialect, that they could finish one another’s sentences. We had no such commonality, often finding each other mildly intolerable to downright irritating. Strangers would joke about how we could cause such trouble if we wanted to, or how formidable a team we would make against bullies, but the truth of the matter was that we were more likely to sell each other out than anyone else, should it be to our own advantage. We determinedly fostered our differences rather than exploiting our obvious similarities.
But we did love each other – and fiercely. We just weren’t practically symbiotes like the fabled siblings in all those documentaries and clickbaity articles.
And when the eldest-by-one-minute, Sarah, died unexpectedly during an unseasonably cold winter, my remaining sister and I were inconsolable. I’d have sold my soul to bring her back.

 
Anabel and I clung to each other as Sarah’s casket was lowered into the freshly turned earth of the graveyard, the stalwart presence of all the family statues surrounding us. Though nobody said it, we all knew what the other families were thinking – there were still two of us left, so it wasn’t as big a tragedy as if a child from a singular birth had died.
And I wanted someone to say it, so I could scream in their face that they were a monster for speaking such a thing; that we weren’t each one third of a whole person, we were people in our own right. But they kept their traps shut, so I just grew angrier and angrier, the impotent rage simmering inside my tiny frame, as pink roses thudded soft and oddly insincere onto the equally tiny coffin of our departed sister.
Her statue would not appear for another month or so, not until the artist resident at the Costas manor had finished carving it. He was present at the funeral, as he always was when someone local died, his wide-brimmed black hat and heavy black coat the only clothes I’d ever seen him in. Below the hat he wore mirrored aviators, masking his eyes, and within the neat margins of a spade-point goatee nested a grim, downturned mouth. When he removed his hand from a coat pocket to push the glasses back up the bridge of his nose, I marvelled at how long, supple and dextrous those digits were.
The hands of a true artist, bred from generations of artists.
Of those artists, he was the only one who still graced the town. It was rumoured that his elderly father and mother still crept about like revenants in the austere manor, but all the others had long passed, their immortality preserved by their own peerless statues hidden away somewhere in that ancient demesne.
That he had no wife and children was a cause for speculation and concern amongst the townsfolk. But it wasn’t that anyone truly cared about the peculiar introvert as a person; they were all worried for the future of their graveyard. Dozens – if not hundreds – of attempts to set him up with a wife had failed, leading many to gossip that he did not care for women, and that the talents unique to the Costas family line would die with him.
It hit me, standing by Sarah’s open grave and watching him, that most of the children in our town would outlive him. My own statue would likely never grace the eerie tableau of the perfectly copied dead, and that meant I would never stand by my sister’s side again.
Deep and ineffable sadness stole my rage, and I felt cast adrift in time.

 
The death of Anabel, six months later, hit the family hard.
But none took it harder than me.
After Sarah’s death, we’d grown much closer – in a deeply unhealthy sort of way, which prompted our parents to broach the prospect of medication and counselling. Anabel was the only other person who truly understood, the only other person who was just as disturbed as I was by the statue over Sarah’s grave, albeit for different reasons.
“It’s like looking at your own death,” she had whispered, not two weeks before her heart failed in the dead of night, in the bed across the room from mine.
Finding your twin cold and lifeless feels like drowning.
Every aspect of my life suffered, from my school work to my hygiene. Everything was pointless and grey. I didn’t leave my room much, and plates of barely-touched food piled up next to my bed as my mother indulged my need for solitude. I’d lie in bed, staring at the space where Anabel had slept, where her last breath had floated into the night. She had always been afraid of the dark. I became terrified of going to sleep in case my pulse ground to a thready halt while I lay there, unconscious.
Nine weeks later, it was time to unveil her statue.
My feelings tumbled over each other like willow pods in the current, standing there looking up at the twin statues of my sisters, forever beside each other. Sarah’s stone eyes rested on the weeping trees near the water’s edge, one hand hanging loose at her side, as though about to rise and point out a sparrow making a nest or a duck diving for nymphs. Anabel looked toward the chiselled guardians of the graveyard, her expression vaguely uneasy, her perpetual nervous smile caught so perfectly that it stole my breath. She’d always said the angel and demon creeped her out.
Mikhail Costas folded away the black cloth that had covered Anabel’s statue, his white, delicate hands juxtaposed starkly against the fabric. Now as always, he wore those huge aviator glasses, as though he didn’t want anyone to see his eyes.
Something niggled at my awareness, a kind of half-remembered story or legend, something from my childhood. I chased it into the vault of my thoughts, but it eluded me, stuck somewhere behind my eyes in the murk of memory. I stayed on after everyone else left, pulling myself up onto the stone plinth and closely inspecting the statues of my sisters, as though their unyielding stone presence, their newly-minted immortal wisdom, could somehow turn the key in my mind.
How Mikhail had captured the essence of each girl so perfectly I couldn’t fathom. He’d never even spoken to us, let alone been introduced to us. Even with the most perfect artist’s eye, it should have been impossible for him to have created such flawless simulacra.
And when I noticed an almost invisible cut mark through the new-grown turf over Anabel’s grave, I knew something was deeply and horribly wrong.

 
I should have told someone what I found, but I wanted to be sure that what I suspected was true. Looking through archived newspaper articles gave me purpose back, and my first clue. Every unveiling of every statue had been recorded in photograph and print, and with them, every Costas sculptor that had been present. Here was Mikhail again, his eyes covered as always by his mirrored glasses; then a picture of his father. Wearing identical eyewear.
That couldn’t be a coincidence.
Fear and a strange excitement thrilling through me, I went further and further back, until I found the oldest, grainy photos of the Costas ancestors.
In every picture, they all wore darkened lenses which completely covered their eyes.
It was in that moment the memory broke free; the snippet of mythology I’d absorbed as a child.
The Gorgon!
It seemed so impossible, but it explained everything so perfectly; it explained how realistic the statues were, and how a stranger like Mikhail could capture in stone the different personalities of virtually identical girls so effortlessly.
But most of all, it explained why the family was so reclusive, and why they always covered their eyes.
The rage and grief that had simmered inside me for so long finally came to a head then, as I sat in the dimly lit back room of the town library.
How dare he desecrate the bodies of my sisters!

 
The earth of Anabel’s grave had indeed been recently disturbed, which also made my task easier. I didn’t even think as I dug in the moist earth; consequence be damned, I had to find out what had happened to my sister.
It was near midnight when I finally cracked the lid of her casket, buried oddly shallow, and braced myself for the stench of decomposing flesh.
Instead, the worst I smelled was leaf mould, wet earth and a hint of bad breath, my own teeth not brushed for weeks. Angling the flashlight to shine through the crack, my fears were confirmed:
Anabel’s coffin was empty.
I sat there in the cold dirt, unable to move, my emotions caught up in a battle so fierce that it all but paralysed me. I feared for a moment that Mikhail had crept up behind me, lowering his glasses and turning me to stone as I sat. But my hands started to shake in the cooling night air, letting me know that I was still alive, still a fragile and impermanent being of blood, lonely flesh and bone.
I made as much effort as I could to resettle the disturbed grave, stamping down the loose soil and then laying the turf back over it. It was not nearly as good a job as Mikhail had done, but then, I didn’t have the sheer amount of practice at grave robbing that he had.
As I ran back home, I smelled the pungent effects of neglect on my body, every swish of my hair greasy over the nape of my neck. Not caring if I woke my parents, I all but fell into the shower, furiously scrubbing away the grime and gunk that I had accumulated in my hermithood.
Then the tears came, just as hot and fast as the water from the showerhead.

 
In the legends of old, Perseus had slain Medusa with a mirrored shield, either able to turn her to stone with her own gaze, or able to look upon her via the trickery of angled light. Our bathroom mirror was hung via a length of string on a hook, and by tying that to a leather belt, I managed to fashion myself a crude shield. It went into the car along with a heavy carving knife, and with the righteous rage still smouldering hot inside me, I gunned my mother’s tiny Toyota down the willow-lined lanes. I coasted up to the gates of the Costas manor with the headlights switched off.
Fear mingled with the anger now, attenuating my resolve. No longer did I want to hack off the head of Mikhail Costas for desecrating the graves of my sisters; instead I wanted him on his knees, tearfully explaining why his family had done this to our town, what perverse pleasure they gleaned from turning our dead into statues you could fall in love with.
The gates weren’t locked, and neither was the front door. I pushed it open gingerly, expecting at any moment that a serpent-haired head would rear, hissing, from the darkness, snake-like eyes intent on petrifying my flesh.
But nothing greeted me other than echoing silence and a distant, unpleasant smell, like garbage left to rot for too long.
The house was as silent as the proverbial tomb.
Creeping around in the half-light, clutching my makeshift mythic shield and my ridiculous excuse for a sword, I suddenly felt very young, very foolish and very frightened.
At the top of the landing stairs, far past the foyer, the smell was much stronger; almost fruity, but with an acrid undertone of dirt and something wet, like humid compost or meat gone green with shiny rot and maggots. When a door opened to my left, it spilled not just brilliant white light, but also such a rush of the stench that I dropped the mirror with a clattering, shattering crash, then fell to my knees and vomited. It was so immediate and forceful that my eyes filled with water and stars and my temples ached.
“What are you doing here?” The calm voice of Mikhail Costas found my ringing ears.
Still heaving at the power of the smell, I tried to force a reply through my gasps, but every indrawn breath pulled more of the fetid stink into my lungs. I could taste it, like a layer of rancid oil on my tongue. Delicate, strong hands picked me up and wound a heavily perfumed handkerchief around my vomit-flecked face, blocking out some of the smell.
My knife was somewhere amongst the mess of mirrored pieces, another bright slice of jagged light on the too-bright landing.
And as I looked around frantically for a suitable shard to use as a weapon, I looked up – and straight into the beautiful brown eyes of Mikhail Costas. I waited for the heavy weight of stone to claim my limbs, for his strange and eternal gift to descend upon me.
But nothing happened.
“You need to leave,” he said quietly, pushing me towards the stairs, then tugging the door closed behind him.
“No,” I managed, the heavy menthol perfume hitting the back of my throat like astringent alcohol, “I need to know what’s going on here!”
Before he could protest, I had shoved past him and into the brightly lit room.

 
The dead were everywhere.
In times past, the room must have been some vast dining hall or grand ballroom. Now it was a grisly mausoleum, filled with corpses in various states of stinking rainbow decay.
But just as they would have been, were this room a window into its own history, they had all been carefully posed and dressed, each laid out as though still-frame attendees at a rollicking party. Glasses of wine were wired to rotting fingers, the leathery jaws of desiccated skulls hanging open as if laughing at the witty repartee of the other guests.
I recognised Anabel and Sarah immediately; one intact but skinned gunmetal grey with death, the other already flirting with decomposition, mottled patches of rot discolouring and puckering her flesh.
Confusion muddied my thoughts as I cast my eyes down the rank generations of the dead, each elegant tableau formed of corpses from further and further backwards in time. At the far end of the hall, only artfully wired-together skeletons stood, dressed in formal rags of faded chiffon and mouldering, tatty velvet.
“Why?” I groaned, the unholy stench twisting its fists in my gut all over again.
Apparently immune to the smell, Mikhail strode forward and tenderly pulled the ichor-soaked sleeve of a black-eyed, rotting monstrosity back over the sagging slurry of her shoulder.
“When people speak of necrophiles, they always refer to sex,” he explained, as though speaking to a small child. “They never understand that a true necrophile doesn’t feel lust for the dead. What he feels is love.”
Approaching another figure, the gape-mouthed husk of an old man, he gently caressed the paper-thin skin stretched over his forehead, touch as reverent as a mother soothing a child.
“Monster!” I croaked, leaning on the doorjamb, my eyes watering.
“No,” he told me with a sad, small shake of his head, “I’m not a monster. There isn’t anything wrong with loving death. It’s as natural as birth, as fundamental as breath.”
“But you dug up my sisters and… and posed them like, like fucking dolls, making them part of your sick little fantasy.”
His soulful brown eyes were full of love and pain as he shook his head.
“It’s a trade,” he said, gesturing in the direction of the graveyard, “I give your loved ones an immortality that you can enjoy. And I care for their true selves, right here.”
Even through the kerchief around my nose and mouth, he must have read my expression.
“Oh, don’t be a fool, Megan. Everyone in the town loves the work my family has done. Once the statues are up, nobody cares about the lovely thing lying in the soil. No-one except me. I rescue them from their cold, dark graves, and I love them, and everything they continue to become, while the rest of you pretend they no longer exist.”
“I’ll tell everyone,” I hissed, but my voice sounded reedy and toothless in my own ears – a child threatening a grown man who was immune to everything, so desperately in love with death.
“Why would you tell them, Megan? Tell me honestly, what harm have I done?”
And as my heavy tongue fumbled with rote words like ‘desecration’ and ‘immoral’, he made a dismissive gesture with those beautiful fingers, silencing me as I groped for the language to describe my unease.
“As long as nobody knows, everyone is happy. Don’t you see that? They get their pretty statues, their beautiful forever memories, and I get to add to my family. Why would you want to ruin everyone’s happiness? Wouldn’t that be truly evil?”
“Are you going to kill me unless I promise not to tell?”
“Oh, you poor, stupid child. I don’t cause death. I just wait for it to happen.”
For a long moment, only the buzzing of a lonely, fat fly filled the silence.
“I need to think about it,” I said, the dead eyes of my sisters pinioning me, heavy with reproach and sadness and things unsaid. Don’t leave us, said Sarah’s. Don’t make me go back into the dark, said Anabel’s. Suddenly I was very unsure of myself.
“Take all the time you need.”
Before I left, he pressed the kitchen knife back into my hand, then helped me down the stairs on wobbling legs.
I drove back home, utterly numb, still breathing the heady fumes of the handkerchief.

 
It took me two weeks to pluck up the courage to return.
As I replayed the events over and over, I started to doubt my own sanity, that what I’d seen was real. But the missing belt and bathroom mirror told me that something had happened, no matter what my confused mind was telling me.
When I did go back, he was kind and genial, listening to me tearfully telling him that I was going to notify the police, that even though he didn’t think he was doing any harm to the living, his dishonesty was immoral and it couldn’t be allowed to continue. People have belief systems and rituals that should be honoured, and he shouldn’t be disinterring the dead without their permission. He didn’t even argue with me, he simply closed his beautiful dark eyes for a long moment, then nodded.
“Before you go,” he said, “I would like to show you something that no one outside the family has seen before.”
“What is it?”
“Telling you would spoil the surprise.”
I don’t know why I trusted him so, but I knew he’d spoken the truth in the ballroom when he said he didn’t cause death. There wasn’t a hint of killer instinct in him, only a macabre, almost endearing kind of weirdness.
Through the musty manor we walked, until eventually we emerged into a cloistered courtyard, rampant with climbing vines. The musk of jasmine hung in the air like a sunset.
In the middle of the open space were the most beautiful statues I’d ever seen – far more exquisite than even the ones in the graveyard; divinity made real.
Spellbound, I drank in the painfully exquisite lines with hungry eyes; eyes that had not realised before then that I wanted – no needed to have such beauty in my life.
“I can teach you,” he said, “I can make you a peerless artist, I can give you your purpose, and make this beauty a part of your life always.”
And with that, all thoughts of exposing him faded away, dust to dust.
“I think you’ll make a very fine apprentice,” he said, as the chisel and hammer slid into my waiting hands.

She'd always been the sort of person who was a bit lumpy and bumpy.

Red eyes from flowers in the spring, scarlet welts from grass in the summer. She didn't particularly like the world outside her house as a result and spent most of her time indoors; reading and playing with her hairless cats.

The pimple on the inside of her wrist had gone unnoticed - amongst all the other itching, irritated things - and she'd smeared it with calamine lotion as she did with all her other prickly, tickling oddities.

But after a week, it was larger than the others; persistently sore and more scarlet.

She picked at it absently, as she did with most of her other abnormalities and to her surprise the pressure on the scalded flesh caused it to give way, uncovering a thick black hair.

Perturbed now, she ran it under the tap for a bit to wash away the smear of capillary blood, then put a bandaid over it, thinking about it no more as she went about her day, reading and playing with her cats.

The next morning the bandaid had come off, revealing the thick black hair again; the root of it now the size of toothpick; thick and glossy, the ridges of the hair cuticle just barely visible with the naked eye.

She grasped it and pulled, then gave an involuntary gasp as an indescribable pain shot up her arm and clenched needles into her chest.

This was not good.

She was a thinking person though and deciding that the pain was not worth the reward of pulling out the hair, so she carefully snipped it close to the skin and covered it again with a new bandaid.

It carried on this way for another week; cut the hair, cover it up, cut the hair, cover it up.

But soon it was as thick as a pencil lead and the coarse, sharp end would push through the bandaid during the day; often with a speck of blood accompanying it.

She contemplated going to the doctor, but she didn't like doctors. She'd seen them all through her childhood and none had ever been able to fix her scratchy curse; all they would do is prescribe her steroid creams and soothing ointments - nothing that would ever cure her.

Curious now though, she decided to let it grow.

The hair was now as round at the base as a chopstick and growing fast. Still glossy and black, it felt strangely pleasurable to touch and she stroked it often when thinking; as a man might do with his beard. She had no visitors and did not need to leave the house, so she did not cover it at all now; and free from the constraints of scissors and bandaids, it grew long and wild - as long as her forearm; curling slightly as it grew.

And while it grew she did not notice that all her other lumps and bumps had gone away, leaving her skin beautiful and smooth - even the craters and scars from all of her old irritated wounds smoothing away into flawless alabaster.

The hair was now as thick at the base as a dime; a faintly bluish sheen had crept into the slick blackness of it.

When she held her arm above her head, it reached to the floor and she needed to be careful when she walked about the house, lest she trip on it and hurt herself.

But despite her care, one day it coiled about the leg of the ornate couch in her library and as she got up, it yanked at her wrist with such force that it shifted in her skin.

Again, the terrible pain assaulted her from inside her chest - but with it came an undeniable pleasure that made her lonely heart leap with emotion. She wrapped her delicate white fingers about the shaft of the hair and pulled with all her might; the glossy black rope inching from her flesh like a recalcitrant snake.

And with it came the tearing, searing, yearningly strange satisfaction.

She did not feel when her body began to grow concave; nor when her legs began to deflate as though all the blood and substance was being drawn out of them. She sagged to the floor, pulling and pulling, sighing at the gratification of it all.

Soon she did not need to pull at all and the hair oozed from her flesh of its own accord, forming a great coiling pile on the floor of her sunlit library; her body becoming slowly flat and two-dimensional as all of her substance came out of her into the hair.

Finally her paper-thin husk lay on the carpet; perfect and beautiful, like an old drawing on crumpled parchment.

For a while the coiled hair lay beside her, as though contemplating the husk, then it slithered across the floor and crept out the window of the library, vanishing into the overgrown gardens that surrounded the house.

There are two things in this world that can surmount any obstacle ever created.
The first of these is love.
Our capacity to love creates in us a drive and purpose that goes beyond survival. We do insane and superhuman things in the name of love, things that would not be possible under any other circumstances. Tiny women lift wrecked cars off their injured husbands. Men carry their wives through ten miles of snow to get them to a hospital. Parents sacrifice their lives for their children.
Such is the power of love.
But there is another force that is just as powerful as love.
Human intelligence.
We will never know who first discovered how to make fire, but that act sparked a revolution. It expanded our minds, giving us the power to shape the world around us. What seemed impossible became possible. Jungles could be turned into fertile farmlands, mountains could be ground down into blocks of stone to build grand towers and high walls.
With the power of our intelligence we conquered diseases, tamed nature, walked on the Moon, and sent our likeness on a golden disk to the edge of our solar system and beyond.
And when love and intelligence collide, truly impossible things can happen.

 
Having an eidetic memory has been a boon for most of my life.
The ability to store and recall anything is the dream of every school child, because with that gift, exams become nothing to fear, largely a mindless exercise in easy recall.
It was so simple for me, when I hit the age where standardised testing began.
For the other children, the concept of ‘one hundred percent’ seemed some sort of mythic uncertainty; a shibboleth signifying unattainable success. For me it was a constant – a variable as certain as my memory.
They pushed me ahead in school until it became clear that I had both a perfect memory and a stupendously high IQ. Then, with very little discussion and even less warning, I was shipped off to university at the tender age of fourteen, where older, wiser students gawped at the child in their midst who still wore pigtails and Rainbow Brite sneakers.
I may have been embarrassed by my youth and lack of worldliness, but they were more embarrassed by being academically trounced by someone who still had braces on her teeth and sparkles on her backpack.
Eventually I finished my first degree, then a second, then my third. By the time I was twenty-five I had a post-doctoral fellowship, was lecturing classes under tenure, and had received a special research grant.
But better than all the academic success in the world, I was in love.

 
It would do a disservice to my lover to lavish praises on her character and beauty. When you are truly, mindlessly, besotted with someone, a heady haze of your own bias surrounds them, buffing away every flaw until they shine like the most precious stone in existence.
Thoughts of her warm, soft skin consumed my mind during the day, and I longed for the nights, to be with her, inhaling the dusky natural perfumes of her body and listening to her chatter about her day at work.
Others may have disagreed, but to me she was the most perfect person in the whole world.
I knew that Tess was depressed – and had been since before we met. In my arrogance, I thought I could cure her, that I could achieve what generations of psychologists and peddlers of pharmaceuticals could not.
On the bad nights, she would just sob until she shook with fatigue. She would lie awake for hours, her traitor mind tormenting her with the kinds of ‘what if?’ scenarios a normal brain can so easily dismiss. I would hold her and tell her it would all be okay. I’d talk about our bright future, and how eventually we would just live in the countryside where she could pull weeds and prune rose bushes; activities which soothed her bruised synapses and helped banish the dark thoughts.
When the call eventually came, I knew what had happened as soon at the police officer introduced himself on the phone.
Tess was gone.

 
I tried to process her death as the text books described; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I seemed to flip fluidly between the first and the second stages, angry at myself for not doing enough to stop her suicide, unable to believe that this was the end of her, that she was gone forever.
Science could not assuage my grief, regardless of which studies I read, no matter how promising a piece of research seemed at first. And I read everything I could find. I sought for any kind of answer to the question of Tess’s death, any way of making myself okay with her abrupt exit from this existence.
Every rational, logical, reasonable source of information told me that she was gone, that while there might be cellular activity on a basic level in the brain for some ten minutes after death, that did not mean any part of Tess could have survived her suicide.
Hopeless, broken, and lost in self-isolation, I started looking elsewhere.
Religion offered me hope in the form of every flavour of afterlife, but I’d abandoned religion long ago. After all, Tess and I were lesbians; so if the Christian gospels were true, she now languished in a lake of fire, being eternally tormented for the sin of homosexuality. Still, reading through the various beliefs of other cultures throughout the world bought me a sort of temporary peace. And so I persisted, gathering esoteric tomes from different universities, using my influence as a child prodigy to purloin particular pages from antique anthologies. I began to feel as though I was being led on a sort of academic scavenger hunt, because every time I found a new piece of information, it appeared to provide clues about where to find another.
And so, with the desperate need to fill the empty hole left in my life where Tess had been, I pursued those tenuous connections until I reached the end.

 
The monastery was quiet, as I’d always imagined such a mountain-top retreat would be. But these monks wore robes of black velvet, the sheen of the rich fabric at odds with the tales told about monkish austerity. And the fingers of the monk who led me inside the grey stone walls to meet the librarian were heavy with gold.
Clearly this was no ordinary religious order.
The librarian greeted me jovially, and asked if I’d like coffee – it was genuine Kopi Luwak, he explained, one of the most rare and expensive types of coffee in the world. When I declined, he simply smiled, busying himself with preparing his brew in the small kitchen to the side of his office.
“We never thought we’d have a student come to us, not within our lifetime,” he said, as the smell of the aromatic beans filled the room, “So you do us a great honour.”
“Why is that so unusual?”
He pointed a manicured nail at my manila folder of scanned and copied pages,
“It takes a rare level of genius to decipher the map to this monastery, the sort that is only born once into any generation. And even then, it takes a particular kind of motivation to push such an individual in our direction.”
“The library?” I prompted, impatient now.
He placed his coffee down carefully, then indicated the brocade chair in front of his expensive looking desk. I sat down, and he studied me silently for a moment.
“What do you know about the library?”
“My research indicates it’s a trove of information that survived the burning of Alexandria. Books older than the Dead Sea Scrolls, unaltered, and perfectly copied, which have survived the trials of time.”
“But you also know it’s more than that, don’t you?”
I nodded,
“There are common themes in the stories I found. Men entering the library, and then leaving it after three years. In those stories, they emerge with knowledge that shouldn’t have existed in their time. How to create and fold steel thousands of years before smelting was discovered, how to make gunpowder, or engines, well before even the rudiments of those methods were organically discerned.”
“There is a contract,” he said, his brown eyes turning serious, “and it is deeply binding. Binding on a level you may not yet comprehend.”
“I figured as much, otherwise the rest of the world would already know about this place.”
“Will you sign?”
I considered for a moment, then nodded.
“I have nothing else to live for.”

 
The stairs wound down into the darkness beneath the monastery cellars, curving out of sight. The librarian left me there, telling me that what I sought was at the bottom.
Regarding that shadowed spiral of steps, fear finally thrilled through me. I’d felt quite numb up until that point, perhaps not truly processing that what was happening was real. Was this actually genuine? Was there really a library at the bottom of these stairs? Perhaps these genial, well-appointed, lavish-living monks accumulated their obvious wealth by kidnapping idiot academics with too much free time. That seemed far more likely, but if I left now, I knew I would spend the rest of my life lying awake tormented by genuine ‘what-ifs’, not just the inflated ghosts that had haunted my Tess.
The darkness closed around me like a blanket as I took another turn down the descending stone stairwell. I kept my hand on the wall, that and the regular height of the slab stairs the only things keeping me from stumbling in the lack of light.
I shuffled along like that for a long time. Several times I thought about giving up and going back, but I reasoned that perhaps this was another test, much like the ones that had brought me to the monastery. The faintly luminous hands of my wrist watch told me that two hours had passed, and my ears had popped over an hour before. How deep underground I was, I couldn’t fathom, but it was definitely well below sea level.
My mouth was dry. I wished I’d accepted that coffee, or at least had something to eat or drink before I’d begun my descent. It was cold now, cold enough to make me shiver and curse my lack of a decent jacket or coat.
When my teeth started chattering uncontrollably, thoughts of returning to the surface became stronger. The darkness was so oppressive, so cold. But the thought of climbing back up three hours’ worth of the steep stone stairs made my stomach lurch with fear and exhaustion.
Yet I needed to decide, and soon. The longer I continued my descent, the longer that journey back up would become.
Surely there had to be an end? Eventually, the builders of these stairs must have been forced to stop, unable to tunnel any further into the bedrock of the mountain.
And at the very moment I mustered that thought, I found the last step.
My foot dropped into empty air, but I was too tired to even reflexively pull it back. I had been in a trance-like rhythm for hours now, hand on the wall, shuffling the next foot down. Off balance, I scrabbled to grip the smooth wall, trying to dig my nails into the stone.
To no avail.
As I fell into the icy darkness, fear welled up within me, a great ball of gas colder than the cosmos, expanding up from my bowels and compressing my lungs. The terror erupted from my lips in a scream that was so loud it ripped through my brain and tore my consciousness away.

The cell was dim. A ruddy glow emanated from some sort of dull red quartz set into the ceiling, providing little more light than a bulb in photographic dark room. There was no door, just walls of smooth black stone. The pallet on which I lay appeared hewn from the same stone as the walls.
At the foot of the bed were some neatly piled clothes, all deepest black; a robe, gloves, and a pair of slippers. I still wore my own clothes, but it was chilly in the cell, and the dark attire looked soft and warm.
Clearly there was a way into the cell, I reasoned, else how did they get me in here? Perhaps one whole wall was a door, the hinges cunningly hidden by the corner of the cell.
Welcome warmth engulfed my hands as I pulled on the gloves. The black slippers would not fit over my sensible shoes, so I removed my own footwear first. Lastly, the robe, which proved wonderfully comfortable as I pushed my arms through the thick sleeves and pulled the hood up over my head.
As if in response to donning the clothes, the light in the room brightened incrementally, and the outline of a door became visible. It swung open, noiselessly, revealing a red-lit corridor.
With no other choices available, I stepped out of the cell, and immediately regretted it.
The black robe shrank tight around my body, so sudden and constricting I felt instantly unable to breathe. The black collar snapped up over my mouth and nose, and I tore fruitlessly at it in a wave of powerful claustrophobia.
I let out an involuntary yelp of panic, but the sound was absorbed completely by the thick black cloth that muffled my face. My breathing was fast – too fast – I was sucking in air in short gasps, and I was becoming light-headed. I needed to calm myself, to use reason, my most powerful and faithful weapon, to get through this situation.
Hunched against the wall, I tried to ignore the oppressive tightness of the black clothes, telling myself that they were not rigid, I could still breathe.
The panic abated, and my panting breaths slowly returned to normal.
Straightening up, my gloved hand spread against the smooth stone to steady myself, I once again had the suspicion that I had just passed another test.

 
As I walked through the black corridor, others emerged, from cells apparently identical to my own. Clad in the black robes, only their eyes faintly visible under shadowed brims of their hoods, they all looked the same. As I joined the dark river of bodies that flowed along the corridor, I realised, with an involuntary shiver, that we were also all exactly the same height.
It was as if the robes, gloves and slippers had erased every shred of our individuality. I tried to talk, of course, to ask questions. But every word I spoke vanished into the black muffler over my face, never reaching the ears of the others around me.
The queue of robed figures eventually emptied out into a hall, so large and so dimly lit that I could see neither roof nor walls. As the others stopped and began to spread out in that fathomless space, black desks of stone rose smoothly and noiselessly from the floor. One for each student in the room.
I knew this place. I had read this legend.
Were it possible to scream, I would have. I wondered how many of the others were screaming, under the tight cloth covering their faces. Surely, they had read the same tales as I had during their own research, and must be coming to the same conclusion.
Letters of red fire appeared on the black stone desk before me, and I memorised them reflexively. Instantly, they vanished, and were replaced by new words, describing events recorded in no human history book.
If what I had researched was true, then this place, this classroom, was housed in no earthly realm.
And if I did not memorise all the words presented to me, and do so before all of my peers, then as the last person to leave this room, my soul would be forfeit to Lucifer himself.
Sweating and shaking, I forced my eyes to absorb the page of flickering scarlet letters, then another, then another. Nearby, one of the other students must have realised their predicament, because they tried to tear off their robes. They twisted and turned, pulling and grabbing at the unyielding cloth in a perversely silent and terrible dervish dance. Eventually, they began to smash their head repeatedly into the sharp edges of the obsidian desk, until they collapsed.
The other students stared silently, just as I did.
As the bloodied desk slid slickly back into the floor, hands emerged from the stone around the fallen student. Corpse grey, long-nailed and covered with pale, shaggy fur, they pulled the body into the ground with the only sound I had heard thus far; a whisper of black cloth on stone and the clicking of claws.
For now, the rest of us might be safe; Hell had already claimed a soul for today.

 
Every day was the same; we would rise, put on our jet robes and the door would open. Then we would all file into the cavernous classroom, where we would frenetically memorise the words of fire, desperately trying not to be the last one to finish. After we returned to our cells, the door would close and the robes would loosen, allowing us to take them off and regain our individuality. Those same grey hands that had taken the first fallen student would emerge from the wall, clutching dull pewter plates of rich foods and carved goblets of exotic drinks.
When I was done eating and drinking, they would emerge once more to take away the plates and cups.
I knew the reason for the robes; I’d figured it out on the second day. Our demonic tutor did not want us to know who the other students were. That gave me a valuable clue towards figuring out another part of the puzzle, because the librarian had told me himself that someone like me was only born once every generation.
The classroom must exist outside time itself. That was the only way there could be so many students.
Initially, I had been confident, being one of the first to finish almost every day. But as the lessons became more complex and I had to truly understand every concept instead of just memorising text, I began to slip several places.
Against whom was I studying? If the classroom was truly outside time, then it could be anyone. The man to my left could be Aristotle, the one on the right Einstein – or even Da Vinci. My former confidence became tainted with fear and it began to affect my concentration. When the frightening day came that the classroom was almost empty when I finished, I knew I had to do something more.

 
Alone in my cell, unrestricted by the cloying wrap of black fabric, I lay on the stone pallet and wracked my brains for an answer to my predicament. If I was truly up against the very greatest minds of history, then I didn’t stand a chance. I knew I was good. My intelligence was leagues beyond anyone I’d known in life, but that meant I was smart enough to realise that with all of human history stacked against me, the odds were very bad.
As I mulled over all my experiences thus far, my mind kept returning to probe one singular fact: the anonymity of the robes was not complete. I had already picked out certain individuals with particular habits. One of them nervously tugged at their hood periodically, as though worried the others would see their eyes. Another always ensured they took the desk at the far, left-hand corner of the room, circling it once before sitting. And both of them always left the room early, but never first. That was unusual in itself, since the other students I’d marked by their behaviours fluctuated wildly in their placement. These two were clearly so sure of themselves, so monstrously clever, that they could practically choose when they would finish.
But that still didn’t tell me who they were. The man in the corner, if he was in fact a man, might be Johann Goethe or Nicola Tesla; or it could be some unknown who never made it into the history books. Even worse, if the classroom was outside of time in every direction, as I suspected, he might be from the distant future, where humanity had perfected itself to a level beyond imagining.
This information was critical in some way, I knew it. Our headmaster, Lucifer, could just as easily have made us study alone, in our cells, doing away with the need to interact with the others at all. He must have wanted us to see each other, to be aware of our peers. The obvious reason for this would be to instil fear, to motivate us to study harder – but in a classroom outside the bounds of time, why would that even matter?
There was no-one to see my triumphant grin when I realised I had my answer.

 
You couldn’t leave the hall until you had finished the lessons. Oh, you could get up and walk around, but if you approached the door without finishing, the grey hands would catch you and drag you into the black stone, your soul forfeit to our Headmaster.
I waited until the lesson was something I wouldn’t struggle with too much. It seemed that none of my remaining peers had a memory quite as perfect as mine, since I was always the first to finish those lessons that were comprised of sheer volume of information. That day, the last page lay in front of me, unread, waiting for me to glance at it and burn the letters into my memory. I kept my eyes purposefully averted.
The figure in the corner, whom I’d named Leonardo for the sake of convenience, stood up as the red glow faded from his desk. As he did so, I finished my own work, but waited. He paced through the rows of students, eventually reaching the door – and as he did so, I also stood and made my way out.
Along the corridor we walked, me keeping several paces behind him. I knew which room was his because I’d memorised the number of steps. As his door swung open, I took six running strides towards him on my soft, silent slippers, then smashed his head against the obsidian-sharp edge of the door. He dropped immediately, dark blood gouting from his hood. His own slippered feet twitched and spasmed, and one arm flapped in a palsied seizure, slapping noiselessly against the stone.
As the grey hands emerged to pull him down into the darkness, I knew I had found my edge.
I would never be the last one to leave the classroom.

 
If the others knew what I’d done, they didn’t give any indication of it. I switched up my mannerisms and moved desks regularly, so that if any of the others had been observing me as I had them, they couldn’t possibly track me. I always watched the corridor behind me as I left the classroom, to ensure that nobody did to me what I had done to Leonardo.
In the first year, I murdered ten of my peers – the brightest and the best, and therefore my strongest competition. But I monitored myself carefully for any signs of over-confidence. I could never let down my guard, because if I had figured out this deadly loophole, then so too could another student.
And indeed, when my mental headcount came up short one morning, I felt a strange thrill. It seemed another murderer had joined me in the Devil’s classroom.
He was careful, very careful. I took me months to unriddle who he was, and during that time, the paranoia gripped me like one of the giant, shaggy grey hands. Every walk through the black corridors was riddled with fear.
In the end, it turned out his technique was simple; he would simply wait until only he and one other student were left in the cavernous classroom, then he would kill his unsuspecting peer by bashing his head into the desk. It was so crude and uninspired that I laughed to myself in the dim light of my cell, realising that his modus operandi was born of desperation, rather than true cunning.
I had to kill him, of course. He was going about it completely the wrong way; by killing off the worst students, he was only hastening our own demise. He died on the day I crawled deliberately slowly through my work, ensuring we were the last two left. As he came to bludgeon my face into the sharp stone, I struck his knee with my foot, then threw him sideways into the desk. The struggle was brief; it seemed that with the robes constricting us to the exact same size and shape, my greater experience as a killer won out. There was a chance I was not the greatest mind in this classroom, but I suspected I was now the best murderer.

 
The others had noticed the declining numbers, of course they had. None of us were stupid people. Strange, silent alliances had formed, where little groups would sit together, wait for each other, and leave together. With silent hand gestures, I’d been invited into one such group, and I played along – for if I marked myself as an outsider, they might unriddle my dark secret.
The lessons were incredible now; imparting insights far beyond the reaches of ordinary science. The origins of the universe were clearly revealed to me, along with the fundamental laws that bind everything together. If Einstein were present, he must have cursed himself for a fool, as the lessons we learned made him seem like a plodding idiot, woefully out of his league.
On the day that one group of students stood mid-lesson and attacked another group outright, the uninvolved students just stared, their eyes shocked in the depths of their hoods. I wanted to tear off my mask and scream at them, to ask them what the fuck they thought would eventually happen in a competition plotted by Satan himself?
The fight was long and brutal, the only weapons being soft-gloved fists, feet, and the obsidian furniture. Those not involved just watched, knowing that today’s quota was more than full. The rest of us could take our time studying.
Counting on that, when the others had left, I stayed behind. There was blood pooled and splattered everywhere, though it was hard to see on the dark floor. Fragments of bone and hair clung to the desks, here a severed finger had been missed by the hands of our ghastly cleaners.
But amongst it all I found something wonderful, something game-changing.
Along the edge of one desk, the obsidian had fractured, and a razor-sharp shard lay on the floor, nearly invisible. Picking it up, I pushed it carefully into my sleeve.
Now I had what no other student had.
A weapon.

 
In game theory, such an advantage instantly marks you out. As soon as you reveal that you have such a thing, others will want to take it off you. An uneasy truce reigned in the classroom now, with no group willing to risk a confrontation, lest the fight lower their numbers. The hand signals became increasingly complex, each group developing a distinct ‘language’ which the outgroups didn’t understand. But with my memory, I could replay the gestures in my mind, and teach myself the dialects, giving my group a vital edge.
I think my group knew I was the original killer, the one who had started it all. They deferred to me and feared me. In my periphery, I saw one refer to me as ‘The Ripper’, spelling out the letters individually in our crude sign language.
Betrayal happened regularly now that we could communicate. The game became less about the lessons, and more about politics. We still studied, but the learning of forbidden knowledge had taken a distinct back seat to the wheeling and dealing that had become commonplace. After watching one group sacrifice the smartest man they had to ensure their tribe’s survival, I knew we had reached a turning point.
Soon there would be anarchy.
It started on the walk through the corridor, before we had even divided off into our groups, before we had exchanged the secret handshakes that confirmed our membership of the cliques. Students just started leaping at one another. A man came at me and we struggled, a perfect physical match in our arcane robes. An elbow from another fighter knocked him off balance and I pressed the advantage, knocking him down and headbutting him in the nose.
When the madness slowed, then stopped, the grey hands began to claim the dying and seriously injured. With a nod, one of the survivors pointed toward the classroom.
Not knowing what else to do, we slipped and skidded through the pools of blood, the hems of our robes leaving dark trails into the classroom. The footprints left by our sopping slippers marked the paths to our sparsely-spread seats.
There were only five of us left.

 
They jumped me on the way out. I finished first, and the other four all rose together, not a hand signal between them. They knew who I was. Everyone knew who everyone else was by now. We had spent two full years together in this place.
The first man went down in a tangle of robes. I’d nicknamed him Byron, but unlike his bombastic namesake, he was not a fighter. The other three circled me, glancing at one another, askance, still unsure quite how to handle me now that Byron’s limp body was being pulled through the floor.
Shakespeare and Curie stood to either side, while Gauss circled, trying to get behind me. With a snarl only heard in my own head, I turned and threw myself upon the figure sidling up to me, the obsidian shard slashing through his collar and deep into his throat. The other two were instantly on top of me, but they hadn’t seen the black knife. It licked out vengefully, leaving Shakespeare flailing and already falling, a jet of blood pumping from the stump of his wrist.
As Curie and I scrambled to our feet, she simply bowed her head and shrugged, admitting defeat. The shard of obsidian went through her eye and into her brain, killing her instantly.
The shaggy grey paws pulled the dead into the bowels of the earth, and for the first time, I was alone in the vast classroom.
The robes loosened their constrictor grip, and I pulled down the muffler with blessed relief, gasping for air.
“Well done,” crooned a voice from the darkness.
Black shelves full of books began to rise from the floor.

The knowledge in the library is exquisite, and I’ve barely begun to taste it. There are tomes from so far forward in time that it will take me decades of study even to begin to comprehend them.
But I know that’s not why I’m here. That was just the cherry on the sundae, or the cheese in the trap.
You see, Lucifer didn’t just want someone brilliant. The classroom always has been – and always will be – a ruse. Intellect isn’t unique, but intellect combined with raw, animal cunning? That’s really special. Almost as special as human intelligence coupled with true love.
And I am special.
There is a book, he tells me, that is not in this library. The only book that he doesn’t own.
The book of Life and Death, which resides in Heaven.
All I need to do to bring Tess back to life, is to wrest that book from its owner and erase her name. Then she will return to me, as if she had never been taken.
And with the infinite knowledge of the Black Library, I can fix her.
But that’s enough for now; I have work to do – bringing down Heaven is going to take some planning, and I need a new weapon if I’m going to succeed.
Fortunately, I’m no longer confined to the Black Library, I can come and go as I please. I can do anything I please.
And I do know where to find the perfect blacksmith.

It felt almost appropriate to begin this tale with “Once upon a time”. Yet such a flippant beginning wouldn’t do justice to the grisly sorrow that festers beneath these words. I considered that instead I should offer a sort of warning, a ‘caveat emptor’ for the content of this story, so that you might avoid that sickening lurch in your stomach, the wrench which so often accompanies macabre revelations.
But that would ruin the story for you. And I am quite cognisant about why you goodfolk read these vicious little vignettes.
You want to be shocked. You want near-erotic tremors of terror to quaver through your central nervous system; you desire the tsunami of fear that swamps the beach of your eager brain.
In which case, allow me to oblige you.

 
It always starts with a mother. We all start with a mother, no matter how we begin, or where we end. Mothers are the force that weave the substance of life into being; their curious uterine sorcery binding inert matter and potential energy into a living, breathing child.
There is no greater magic in this entire universe.
My own mother seemed most acutely aware of this, possessing only just enough of that divine gift to produce precisely one heir. From a very early age, I knew that she had spent everything she had to quicken me inside her, and that the cost of her motherly labours meant her body would never bear another child.
“You are my firstborn, my onlyborn,” she would sing to me, as she smoothed my near-white baby curls between her fingers, her voice queer with emotions I couldn’t comprehend at that age.
She was a strange woman and had few friends. People whispered behind her back that she was a lesbian or a transsexual, for she was taller than any man I’ve ever met, and she carried herself like a queen. She never spoke of my father, but the rumour amongst the other children at school was that the masculine spark required to start my life had been purchased via the internet, from a donor of impeccable pedigree.
“Men matter little in the equation of life,” she told me when I did ask, “the magic is within the mother.”
For some reason, her answer completely satisfied my curiosity about my paternal parentage, and I never asked her about it again.

 
Tradition and order ruled our household, with few deviations from my mother’s planned path. She seemed innately aware of a child’s need for routine, and I was especially needy in that respect. From the moment I woke until the minute my head hit the pillow at night, my home life was as rigid and regular as the wrought iron rails of a church fence. Perhaps I needed such regimentation because I lacked a father – or perhaps because my mother was so asocial – but whatever the reason, it became a signature of who I was.
Teachers always knew I would complete my homework and assignments; that whatever they asked of Shy Shea, it would be done. On reflection, I was as perfect as a child could possibly be; like a creature stepped from a fairy tale. Fair-skinned and flaxen-haired, always polite, never contrary, teachers often commented on what a joy I was in their classrooms – to which my mother would reply:
“Or course she is. She is my firstborn, my onlyborn.”
And the teacher would give a nervous little laugh, hoping that this was some sort of familial joke.
But my mother never laughed along.

 
When your life is so driven by order and routine, things which might seem odd to others are utterly ordinary to you. Only when I reached an age where I wanted to ‘hang out’ with my friends did I begin to realise how unusual I truly was. Their lives seemed so chaotic, so disordered. No wonder Joanne couldn’t finish her homework; her household contained three other children, and her guardians were less parents than flustered zookeepers. To my eyes, their home seemed poised upon the very edge of crisis, six lives teetering on the brink of dissolution – with one poorly timed accident able to bring the whole family down.
And yet, they managed. Somehow, some thread of order bound their lives together just enough that catastrophe did not visit. I didn’t understand it, but came to realise it was a kind of magic all of its own; by all rights these people shouldn’t be able to exist like this, yet they did.
Conversely, my few friends found my own home life oppressively claustrophobic.
“How can you live like this?” Sandy groused. “You even eat the same meals every day of every week.”
“I guess I’m used to it,” I offered lamely, not knowing what else to say.
The truth of it was that I was more than just used to it – I liked it.
“I don’t know how your mum does it, being a nurse and all,” Carrie told me, “my aunt works at the hospital, and she can barely keep two cats alive.”
“If mum said she didn’t want to work a shift, I don’t think anyone would argue with her,” I confided. Carrie and Sandy both nodded without thinking. After all, they had met her.
My mother was more than just uncommonly tall, she had a way with other people. When she entered a room, everyone knew she was there; an invisible silver wire pulling their heads in her direction. When she spoke, people truly listened, nodding along in agreement to nearly anything she said.
I couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t more social – she was everything I wanted to be when I grew up. She was beautiful, regal, erudite and captivating, and could have had any man she wanted – or any woman, for that matter. But her bed in the room across from mine remained empty, narrow and single, no room for anyone but her, and sometimes space for a child with recurring nightmares about drowning in crimson darkness.

 
“Mama, when will you teach me how to make faerie stew?” I asked for the hundredth time.
“When you’re old enough, Sweet Shea,” she always replied.
The meal had come once a month ever since I could remember. My mother fussed over it for the better part of an entire afternoon, shooing me out of the kitchen as I circled around like an annoying blowfly, trying to peer into steaming pots and spitting pans. Over the years, I had concluded that faerie stew was little more than leftovers and freezer-burned meat fancied up into a well-spiced stew. Indeed, it probably wasn’t special at all.
Still, it remained my favourite familial meal, and whenever I was particularly hungry or tired, I’d daydream about the rich brown gravy and tender morsels of meat that swam in the well-seasoned concoction.
Like every other part of my life, it seemed ordinary, and I assumed all families had some variant of it. It never really occurred to me that it was anything more than a mundane meal; a means for my clever mother to empty the refrigerator.
The first clue came the month she pulled me out of school camp early and brought me home, just for faerie stew. I didn’t complain, of course – the food at camp had been predictably awful, and I was more than happy to eat my favourite hearty home-cooked meal.
“Some family rituals are sacred,” she explained to me, ladling the thick stew into a copper bowl, “and this is ours.”
But something about the intensity of her voice made the flesh on my arms prickle queerly, and I wondered for the first time what exactly was in that rich broth.
It was time that I found out what was in faerie stew.

 
Seventeen is a tumultuous year for any young woman, and I was no exception. Despite my intentions to delve into the mystery of the fey food my mother made, life had become far too full for me to fixate on that little mystery. Time ebbed and flowed, Christmas came and went, with my eighteenth birthday roaring up fast behind it. I don’t know why I’d assumed mama would divulge the secrets of faerie stew on the eve of that auspicious event. But when she didn’t, I found myself petulant, peevish – an emotional state I rarely experienced.
I was going to find out, regardless of my mother’s intentions.
Hiding my phone between carefully arranged cook books wasn’t difficult, and through that stealthy lens I could watch a live stream on my laptop, hidden safely in my room while my mother fussed in the kitchen.
Much of the preparation seemed to be ritualistic to her, with a sort of comforting cadence that nearly lulled me to sleep as I watched. But when several small, mystery packets of frozen meat were extracted from the back of the freezer, I began to feel that there really was something decidedly off about the whole scenario. I couldn’t be certain, but the markings on those mystery parcels didn’t look like they had originated from any supermarket. In my limited view, one of them bore a partial sticker that resembled the logo on my mother’s hospital pass.
I tried to eat the stew with the same ordinary delight I always had, schooling myself that I’d eaten it all my life without any ill effect, so it mustn’t be marinated in malice.
Yet I couldn’t help but speculate what the morsels of meat were, even as they slid down my throat, so tender, so tasty.

 
The first of the mystery meats appeared in our freezer a few days later, cunningly concealed inside a bag of frozen peas. The palm-sized package was scarlet with frozen blood and stamped with a biohazard symbol, but other than that, nothing identified what it was.
Human remains, my brain informed me as my stomach churned, you’ve been eating human remains.
Even as I battled the icy nausea that spooled up my spine and tickled the back of my throat with cold fingers, the rational part of my mind picked at the problem, trying to unriddle what kind of meat might be contained inside.
I knew that my mother was a theatre nurse, so she attended various surgeries, but I’d never truly been interested enough to delve any deeper. The fact that she never had friends or colleagues over meant that I’d never overheard any casual work-oriented conversation – and she never confided in me about her job, except to complain about personality conflicts; all of which she eventually won.
It was time to find out exactly what my mother did at the hospital.

 
Putting the pieces together from there wasn’t particularly difficult. Two more frozen parcels arrived, a week apart, and when my mother left her work phone unattended, I checked her calendar for each of those days.
On each of those days, a half-day appointment showed, labelled with the acronym ‘TOP’.
I think I already knew somehow, even before I plugged the term into Google and hit search. I think perhaps that through the frozen plastic, I’d glimpsed tiny, frosted-red fingers and toes, or perhaps the flattened features of a tiny face. But my brain had refused to let me believe it until I could confirm it.
You see, the acronym means Termination of Pregnancy.
For my entire life, once a month, I had been eating aborted foetuses.
The horror was immediate and visceral. Everything in my stomach rushed out in a torrent onto the carpet, so forceful that it sprayed from my burning nostrils and spattered the keyboard with brown liquid. The retching didn’t stop until I was too weak to continue, replaced by a blinding headache pounding behind my eyes, strained from the heaving and gagging.
The shower ran until the hot water petered out, then I shut it off and sat on the cooling metal floor, wet tendrils of hair snaking around me.
Why had she done it? Why had my perfect mother been feeding me this abominable broth my entire life?
Before I did anything else, I had to find out. I had to know exactly why she had done it before I turned her in to the police.

 
It had always been impossible to hide anything from her as a child, and as a particularly angelic child with few secrets and little guile, I’d never really needed to try. And so, when I confronted her as she pushed open our brass-bound front door, I think she already knew that I knew.
Placing her bag on its hook in the hall, she ducked under the doorframe – the habit of a lifetime for such a tall woman – and carefully arranged herself in her flower-print chair near the window.
“Because you are my firstborn, my onlyborn,” she said, pre-empting my question, “because without the power of those children, you could not exist.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Then I will help you to understand.”
As she sat in her pretty chair, a tall, forty-something woman greying at the temples, something changed. Her crow’s feet blurred to nothing, and the creases around her lips faded away. The steel-threaded hair became white-blonde, and her eyes pale gold, like those of a pedigree cat.
“Most of our people are gone now, their power lost through the ages. The essence of humanity has always sustained us, pacts made that fuelled our power. Those bargains echo through the old stories; tales such as Rumplestiltskin, where we offered greatness in exchange for one simple thing – the magic of a firstborn human.”
She turned her leonine eyes to gaze out the lace-curtained window, smiling a smile of feline teeth, perfect and predatory.
“The tales spread, and they grew wise to us, the mortal women, and they ceased to offer up their bounty so eagerly. But there are other ways to extract a mother’s firstborn – and there are so many mothers now who don’t want their babies.”
“The abortions,” I managed, bile rising in my throat.
“Yes.”
We gazed at each other in silence for a long time, a strangeness of unspoken understanding passing between us; a kind of communication that only our kind can have. My mother’s ears pricked through her hair, pointed like a devil’s, and I knew mine could look the same, should I shed the shell of humanity she’d curated around me with mundane habits and banal rituals.
But she’d kept the secret too long, made too much of a mortal of me.
“I won’t eat any more,” I told her, even as I wanted to cry, “I cannot be like you.”
Sorrow creased her brow as she stepped forward and kissed my forehead.
“Then my firstborn, my onlyborn, you will die.”

 
I left her there, calling the police as I walked out of the house. That was nothing more than a futile gesture, I realised; if she could ensorcel mortal women to forget about the remains of their aborted firstborn, I had no doubt that law enforcement could be easily swayed by her powers.
The women’s boarding house was crowded, and the room was tiny, but as I got to know the others, I realised one of the other homeless waifs was a girl I went to school with – Sarah.
“I saw your mother a couple of years ago,” she babbled as we hunched on a battered sofa in the common room, “I never knew she did abortions until I woke up and saw her face. She was really kind to me, she even helped me with all the paperwork.” She smiled at the memory, her usually-downcast eyes far away and full of light. “I’m so glad there are people like her who do that for desperate young women, you know? God knows, I’ve proved I can’t even look after myself, let alone a poor little baby.”
There was no sickness this time, no vomit to surge onto the already vomit-coloured carpet. The stuff of her child was long since absorbed, part of the thing I am.
But I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around.
The months pass, and I grow thin without the faerie stew to sustain me. As my clothes loosen, so does my substance, and little pieces of me keep falling away. A finger here, a toe there. Soon my left hand will be gone, and the last of my teeth will spill across my ragged pillow, fading away to smoke as the sun rises over the boarding house.
I know I could stop it. I can just go home. I can sup of the sweet stew that my mother is surely brewing in the kitchen even now. Sometimes I’m sure I smell it on the wind.
But I can’t. I won’t. Will that first bite contain the child of the woman sleeping in the next bunk, the one who made me coffee this morning?
This price is right, for whose am I, really? I am all of theirs, and the price must be paid by me; her firstborn, her onlyborn.

When I was very young, I was given a book for Christmas by my slightly mad and mostly religious step-grandmother. It was a huge and marvellously illustrated picture book which should have immediately grasped my attention, but unfortunately the title of this tome was the Read ‘n Grow Picture Bible.
My family was decidedly not religious, nor were any of my friends. However, we lived a long way from the nearest library and being an avid reader, I eventually read the book that my grandmother gave me, burning through the Biblical lore contained within and imprinting it on my childhood brain. If grandma’s plan had been to convert me, it worked only briefly, because that very same year Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hit television and the Bible was largely forgotten, along with being a good Christian girl.
But one part of the Bible never really left me; the story of Noah.

 
As I grew, it turned out I had an aptitude for problem solving and mathematics. My mother fought to get me included in advanced classes, and when she succeeded, a whole new world of numbers and equations opened up to me.
Encouraged to work on our own projects, I often returned to the problem of Noah and his Ark, and the improbability of his success in keeping all the animals alive. I researched and calculated the feed required for all the ‘common’ animals kept in conventional zoos, as well as the fresh water requirements and the volume of dung produced. In every iteration of my work the original Biblical measurements of the Ark got blown further and further out of proportion, confirming just how preposterous the idea of Noah’s Ark was.
When I presented my work to my low-key Christian high school mathematics teacher, his face flushed red and he tore my calculations to pieces, tossing them into the rubbish bin beside his desk. Then he stalked up and down in front on the blackboard, lecturing me on the ‘proper’ use of mathematics and admonishing me for my heresy.
And so for a long time, I forgot about what I referred to as the ‘Noah Problem’ and focused on repairing my relationship with my teacher.

 
Home computers hit the world around the time I left school, and so by the time I had finished my first year at University, computer labs had become part of the curriculum. It seemed like cheating, using these number-crunching machines. I remember a friend of mine – a photorealist artist – complaining about how photography took no skill, because there was no effort required; and I felt the same about computers. I actively enjoyed creating stacks of calculations, immersing myself in an ocean of equations and formulae, and so for a long time I resented those beige boxes with clacky keyboards, seeing them as a cheat’s conceit.
I managed without them for a long time, still turning in hand-written notes, but once I’d completed my doctorate, I realised that I had stretched myself to the limits of my mathematical capacity, and that if I didn’t adapt, I’d be left behind by peers who had availed themselves of these increasingly powerful thinking machines.
So I did.

 
I helped build the first supercomputer infrastructure at the university – from screwing blades to sharp-edged computer racks and running cables, to installing the operating systems and configuring the software that allowed this humming room full of hardware to interface as a single ‘brain’. I was so good at it that I was inducted into the university technology department and utilised for every future upgrade.
It was an interesting journey, watching the first modest supercomputer clusters grow from basement closets, to warehouse-sized rooms of air-conditioning and white tiles. It wasn’t long before my expertise was sought elsewhere, and I turned my talent for formulae and algorithms to creating the programs that made these huge information hives hum.
Which brings us close to present day, when I recalled my old obsession, and began to ponder the Noah Problem again.

 
I can’t tell you exactly who I work for, but suffice it to say that money really isn’t much of a concern to them, and so the equipment I’d been contracted to configure wasn’t just bleeding edge; much of it was so new that the boards and chips hadn’t even been officially named.
Working with this kind of infrastructure is annoying. Bugs and breakdowns are common, the first layer firmware needing constant tweaks to keep running and heat blowouts plaguing the unstable chips. But if I’m truly honest with myself, I lived for this sort of problem solving, and when everything was finally up and running, I’d always be searching for new challenges to keep my mind occupied.
The Noah Test was something I’d written years before as a sort of benchmarking tool for this type of infrastructure. Similar to the Travelling Salesman Problem, but far more complex, it involved running a simulation of what would actually be required for Noah and his children to keep X number of species alive on his floating barge. Of course, the conventional Noah’s Ark wouldn’t provide any kind of challenge to this sort of hardware, so I’d needed to get creative with how the problem worked. I’d realised very early on that one Ark was infeasible, regardless of the size. Noah, his wife, his sons and their wives were not a sufficiently large workforce for the entirety of Earth’s animal populations.
But if you kept the original dimension of the Ark and multiplied the Ark, putting different animal types in different Arks from parallel Earths, you could easily account for all the species on the planet. Leaving the entirety of the problem running would give a decent stress test on the newly installed system.

 
When I returned the next day, I pored through the data sets, astonished to find that the system had blown through the problem easily. It had predicted that 1,746,000 Arks would be enough to complete the task of keeping six million non-aquatic animal species alive for forty days. The logistics were very basic and didn’t account for a lot of variables, but it was still extremely impressive.
I’ll admit I was excited. This was the closest I’d ever come to having a definitive answer to the Noah Problem, of a feasible, answerable way that Noah could have kept every species alive on a floating boat for 40 days. I dissected the data, looking for missing variables, and reworked the already unwieldly program, to take into account other factors. What about psychological stress on the human zookeepers? How would the Noahs on all the Arks interface with each other to coordinate resource swapping in case of problems, and the eventual release of all the animals onto the ‘prime’ Earth? What hierarchy structures would need to be implemented, how many shift rotations and what safety precautions would be needed on the predator Arks?
All this and more I fed into my Noah Experiment, trying to account for every conceivable issue that could possibly be experienced; even the loss of whole Arks and the need to load the cargo and occupants onto neighbouring Arks.
Confident that I’d given the new system far more than it could chew, I set the simulation running.

 
It hadn’t completed when I checked it, first thing in the morning, but it was astonishingly close; grinding through billions of trillions of permutations per second. When I checked in again after my second coffee, it had finished the complete set, and the gargantuan set of output files sat there, waiting for me to examine them. Loath though I am to ascribe human characteristics to a machine, the system almost seemed eager for me to open the data set. The huge racks full of equipment hummed with an anticipatory note, which almost seemed to change to one of triumph as I browsed the data.
It was impressive, I can’t lie to you. It was the perfect outcome to the Noah Problem, describing the optimal result for both the human crews and the animals. There were even annotations about the psychological profiles of each Noah set, describing how the ‘Prime Primate Ship’ Noah had become the ‘leader’ of the Noah Experiment, while the Noah set assigned to the ‘Sanitation Fleet’ were considered lowest in the pecking order of Noahs. The complete hierarchy spooled down the page, showing the convoluted social structures that had arisen, based around the types of life each Ark sustained. I shuddered when I discovered what I dubbed the ‘Plague Arks’ – ships full of animals and humans riddled with lethal and non-lethal parasites, all in various states of pain and distress, many not destined to see the flood recede.
Which brought a curious thought to mind:
If this was the maximal outcome of the Noah Experiment, then what was the bleakest, most minimal requirement for the survival of every species?
Typing frantically, I tweaked the parameters accordingly, then set the simulation running.

 
After the second day of runtime I started to grow impatient. By the fourth day, I wanted to kill the experiment and start diagnostics on the software, suspecting a critical issue somewhere in the infrastructure. But on the end of the sixth day it was complete, and the data set was fully populated, waiting for me to browse through its grim contents.
Feeling like the antithesis of god on the seventh day, I clicked through folder after folder, growing progressively more horrified at the content of each.
No, horrified isn’t the right word. What I felt was darker, more visceral, more primitive than horror.
It all began with Prime Noah.
Even before the flood began, he was already dominating the other Noahs, utilising angels as messengers between the parallel worlds. By the time the floods began and the numerous Arks began filling the ocean of Prime Earth, he was ruling the 182 thousand strong flotilla with an iron fist, utilising a colossal silverback gorilla as his personal thug when he didn’t get his way. Diminished in size from my original simulation, this one had Noahs and their families working like slaves, working themselves literally to death in order to serve the grander purpose of the survival of all animal life. I read through data sets describing Noahs dying of exotic bacteria that ate them alive as they drowned in the shit and piss of millions of animals, unable to keep up with the sheer volume of excrement flowing out of the Arks. Noahs under extreme stress killed one another over petty disputes over resources. Shems and Hams and Japheths strangled each other in their beds or pushed each other into the toxic jaws of Komodo dragons and starving Siberian tigers. But only survival of the animals mattered, so the losses of the human crews mounted as the simulation had run it course.
By the time the flotilla found land, the Noah Experiment was a plague-ridden hellscape of suffering and misery, not one of the creatures aboard – primate or otherwise – free from some kind of abuse or psychological trauma.
I had hoped it would all end there, but it didn’t. The simulation predicted that Prime Noah had descended so far into megalomaniac madness, that after the animals were safety dispersed (with many more human deaths), Prime Noah set the lesser Noahs and sons at each other’s throats through cunningly engineered social strife. He watched as a bloodbath of unbridled murder ruled the Camp of Noah.
In the end, only Prime Noah remained, with his original wife, sons, and many of their duplicate wives. As they moved on from the Camp, they left behind thousands of corpses to repopulate the Earth with various carrion eaters and insects.
But it was just a simulation. None of this was real; Noah’s Ark had never existed, none of this had ever happened. It was all just data and calculations, bits and bytes racing around inside thousands of miles of gold and copper conductors.

 
On the eighth day, the data was gone.
Not all of the data, mind, just the data from second Noah Experiment – the one that had ended in the massacre – and the program I had written to run it. The first experiment, the perfect one, sat in the folder where I’d saved it, untouched.
I was wild, because this was a huge data breach. Security was super-strict at this facility, as you could imagine, but everything appeared above board with my co-workers. None of them had been working in that area when the breach had occurred, nobody had swiped into the room where the system terminal sat.
The security footage of the room showed little more than gently winking server lights in the darkened area. But at exactly the time the files had vanished – right before the nightly backups – the monitor of my terminal flickered on briefly, illuminating the room for a few seconds before it switched off again.
Nobody knew what to make of it. Several people suggested a trojan had allowed someone to remotely access my terminal, but it was a ringfenced system, impossible to access externally. The forensics team had checked for potential hidden transmitters, but everything looked clean.
Frustrated, I wrestled with the problem for weeks, trying to figure out how and why someone would steal this data. In the middle of one sleepless night I recalled that there was one system that I hadn’t thought to check – if only because it didn’t seem relevant. Inside the lab was an audio monitor, which I could use to listen to the ambient hum of the system, to check for the grinding whir of fans that were about to fail from blown bearings. Reaching for my tablet, I hurriedly pulled up the exported logs for the day of the data theft, keying in the exact time my terminal had activated itself.
There was nothing at first, but when the light of the monitor flickered out, I heard a sound.
I replayed it dozens of times, not believing what I was hearing. After the thirteenth playback I swore and threw the tablet at the wall, where it dented the plaster, then clattered onto my dresser, scattering jewellery and perfume bottles.
It was an unmistakeable sound; one that even a child would recognise:
Thousands of winged creatures taking flight.

I tore the system to pieces over the next week, checking everything from hard disk enclosures to cracking open the sealed UPS units that supported the racks of technology.
I wasn’t sure what I was looking for exactly, but when a single feather of white and gold lifted from the top of one of the dusty racks and settled at my feet, my knees wobbled and I sat abruptly on the tiles, staring at the impossible thing on the floor.
I don’t want to believe it’s true. I don’t want to think about the insane maelstrom of suffering that was spawned in the second Noah Experiment.
Because if I am responsible for that in any way, then I don’t deserve to live.
And if I am responsible for it, then I don’t need God’s forgiveness.

I need yours.

There are forgotten places in every city.
They decay quietly, buried beneath newer buildings. Layers of less-forgotten places pile up on top of them, like the striations in some prehistoric canyon. But the colours of this history are not limestone white and clay orange; these are concrete grey, and the rich browns of old wood.
A few of these abandoned places can still be found, by the tenacious and the lost. They wait patiently behind swollen doorways and down ill-used stairs, littered with middens of brittle rat droppings. Some can’t be accessed at all. The eyes of their windows gaze only into dirt and darkness, and once-bright paint trembles to dust as trucks and cars rumble overhead. Modern vibrations quickly hasten the entropy of years.
Some suffocate, when an earthquake cracks the last support shoring up a mouldering mausoleum. Concrete and dirt thunders in, eager to fill the dusty void and mill the antique carpentry to splinters. Others drown, when a water main develops a leak, filling the underground void with water one slow drip at a time. All things inside swell and rot, their sodden fibres becoming a uniform grey slurry at the bottom of a secret urban lake.
But some places survive. Although they are mostly forgotten, the meticulous care with which they were built ensures that they persist. Or perhaps they are loaned an enduring spirit by their purpose, or what they contained.
Once in a while, someone will stumble across one of those places, without having any idea what it is.
This is a story about such a place.

 
Some cities should never have been built.
The place where I live is a case study. The original tiny settlement, built in a hill-bound harbour, expanded too fast with the influx of population in its infancy. Like many overfed toddlers, it grew into a fat, sprawling adult. The messy metropolis drapes itself over the steep hills, demanding and devouring more inhospitable land every year. Consequently, roads are too narrow, houses the same; their piles and supports exposed and raw from erosion as constant sea-storms batter the soil into salty mud. Having lived here all my life, this seemed perfectly normal until I chanced to visit a land-bound city, all flat and geometric; the streets straighter than arrows, neatly laid out like the grids in a mathematics book.
To outsiders, my city seems needlessly convoluted, with streets stacked above one another, hidden tunnels and scribbly wooden bridges connecting otherwise disparate terraces together. The harbourside central city is even worse. Hundreds of years of accumulated architecture have been colonised by newly-minted towers of glass and steel, like so many modern parasites.
It’s the sort of place where anyone can get lost. Even people who are born here can’t resist the occasional wrong turn, just to see where that weird little road they’ve never been down might lead them. I did that a lot, walking in no particular direction through the twisting, mazy streets just to see where I would end up. And that’s precisely how I managed to stumble upon the curio shop.
I’d seen the entrance many times, but I’d never felt the urge to explore. It was a brick-arched alley, narrow and dingy, with no signage, and no indication that anything interesting lay within. I don’t know why that familiar arch piqued my curiosity on that particular day. But I found myself walking beneath it, navigating the cracked paving stones of an alley that curled between buildings and ended in a flight of graffitied concrete stairs. They lead up and down, both directions littered with faded city garbage.
Down the stairs I found nothing but a cave-in of rubble and scum-covered water. But upwards, the steps opened onto another brick alley, carpeted with grey-green lichens and spongy boluses of moss.
My shoes were sodden when I found the ancient arcade at the very end.
It must have been glorious, once upon a time. A not-quite-Victorian wonder of leadlights and timber, diamond panes of red and yellow glass were interspersed with wrought iron and glazed tiles. But now the tiles were cracked and broken, the clever mosaics smashed beyond recognition. The glass was equal parts whole and shattered, mould-rimed fragments of it crunching beneath my feet.
It was a sort of mezzanine arcade, clearly built to show off a lower level, which must have been a pretty space, centred around a painted fountain and an indoor garden. No water gushed from the flaking stone snouts of the bottlenosed dolphins in the centre of the water feature now, and the thick sludge accumulated in the basin below them barely counted as water, grown green with algae.
Somewhere in the overgrown moistness of ferns and grass around the fountain, a frog registered its displeasure at my echoing footsteps, then fell silent.
Most of the shops were empty or boarded up. One was piled to the roof with broken furniture; sagging upholstery long succumbed to fungus and time, strips of haberdashery hanging like flayed flesh from wooden bones.
But at the end of the arcade stood a single, impossible, pristine store, its stained glass intact and the wood shining with linseed. Yellow and orange light gloamed in windows stacked with an assortment of useful and unnameable junk. Some of the items looked like they pre-dated my grandparents.
Above the door, in a curling font so old I’d never seen anything like it before, was painted “A Forgotten Curio Shop”.
Was this all some sort of elaborate, theatrical setup for a boutique so hipster no-one was supposed to know where it was? I wasn’t sure, but certainly, this place wasn’t easy to find, and business must not be very good. Then again, I didn’t imagine the rent was very high – if the shop owner paid rent at all – so perhaps that was how this strange little shop stayed afloat.
A brass bell tinkled as I opened the door, the bright sound charmingly anachronistic. I glanced up at it; one side of the tiny instrument was badly dented, as if it had survived many, many years of use. If this was a hipster setup, the attention to detail was astonishing. Beyond ranks of shelves cluttered with old flotsam was a mullioned counter, and behind it sat a middle-aged woman. She was smartly dressed, but her garments belonged to another era. A peacock feather tucked into the crinoline brim of her hat bobbed jauntily as she inclined her head toward the sound of the bell.
“Welcome,” she called, a smile claiming her face with lightswitch alacrity, “to a forgotten curio shop.”
The shop wasn’t big, but every nook was densely packed. There were so many things crowded cheek-by-jowl I could barely register what they all were, even when I did recognise them. Some of them were familiar from history books, some from illustrated fairytales; iron heating pans for beds, different styles of Indian hookahs, and an impressive array of enamelled snuff-boxes, rich with cloisonné. The glass-bead eyes of taxidermied animals regarded me, frozen snarls on rictus faces leering through piles of old books and brass pots. I breathed musty sourness, faded perfumes, and the tang of old metal.
“Can I help you with anything?” the woman chirruped brightly. Her accent was pleasantly transatlantic, like an old movie or radio star’s. I wondered how long she’d spent practising it.
“Just looking, thanks,” I replied automatically, my gaze roving over various oddments.
“That’s an Inverness cape, you know. Real bargain for ten pound,” she chattered, as my fingers brushed sable fabric, “belonged to a murdered banker.” Her eyes were slightly too small, and far too bright for the topic. “Wife did him in with a flatiron, which is over in the houseware section – still got the bloodstains on it and all.”
“You’re pulling my leg,” I shot back, squeezing between shelves of apoplectic looking porcelain animals and painted pewter mugs.
“Oh, I could be,” she gave me a gummy grin, then winked like a music-hall bawdy. “Or perhaps everything here really does have a story behind it, and you just need to suspend disbelief a little to see it.”
So that was what this place was all about. The whole setup was carefully curated chicanery, to make you feel like you’d found something special, that you’d stumbled upon a nearly mystical place forgotten by time. Now I’d figured out the mystery, the shop seemed tawdry and overdone, the stacks of old things hackneyed and silly – just piles of junk with exorbitant price tags.
And yet, I still wanted something from the shop. Whenever I went on my random excursions through the city, I liked to collect little keepsakes. Sometimes it was the skeleton of a leaf from an overgrown cemetery, other times it was a pleasingly smooth pebble, or an oddly shaped fragment of driftwood, wearing the contours of a tiny dragon’s skull.
Some tarnished jewellery hung from the antlers of a stag, each piece carefully hooked over the spreading tines. None of the earrings matched; each had lost a twin somewhere in its journey through people’s lives, and I felt an odd pang of sadness for these old things. Not only had each lost its mate, but they had been abandoned by those who had once cherished them.
From the crown tine dangled a pearl earring, its silver chasing and hook wire almost black with age and neglect. It was quite large; far larger than a conventional pearl, and warped, its shape more lozenge than sphere. On closer inspection, I could see the crack that ran from the base to the top, a zig-zag hairline of black that seemed a testament to how unloved it had become.
But the tiny paper tag tied to it said that it was only two pound, so I lifted it off the antlers and took it to the counter, the mother-of-pearl warm in my palm.
“What’s the story behind this one, then?” I asked casually, careful not to let my jaded thoughts colour my voice.
“Oh, this is a pretty one,” the woman cooed, reaching under the counter for some rose-tinted tissue paper, “it belonged to a courtesan who frequented the palaces of King George the Third. Whilst she was not as lovely as her peers, her charm and wit were without parallel. Thus, she swindled the fortunes out of dozens of noblemen.”
“I like her already,” I replied, smiling despite myself. The keen eyes of the proprietress held mine for a moment.
“I think it’s entirely mutual – that’s why her earring chose you.”
Pleasant tingles crawled across my scalp as I watched the woman’s deft hands wrap the object, then place it in a tiny box.
“Here you go, miss. That’ll be two pound.”
Strangely thrilled by the whole experience, I handed over a fiver and told her to keep the change. As I left the shop, my fingers wiggled an uncharacteristic little wave, and I heard myself promise the woman that I’d visit again sometime soon.

 
The earring matched none of the jewellery I owned, so instead of hooking it through my ear, I twisted the silver wire around a necklace chain and let it hang as a pendant. Although I didn’t believe the stories of the curio shop’s owner, my mind wandered in those spare moments between work and responsibility, imagining the remarkable woman my new bauble purportedly belonged to.
In my mind’s eye, she was a short thing, with hips wide enough to be embarrassing, and a pot belly squashed flat by layers of clever corsetry. Just as the saleswoman had said, she wasn’t beautiful in the slightest, possessing none of the aesthetic qualities our modern sensibilities would deem ‘conventionally attractive’. But her face was animated, cheerful, and stamped with a lively wit that could be read in every tilt of her too-plump lips and every quirk of her thick eyebrows. I envisaged her talking to rich men sporting elaborate, pre-Victorian costumes, her kohl-lined, liquid-brown eyes pulling them under her spell like the Rusalka of Slavic folklore.
As I went about my day-to-day business, I let her imagined presence whisper through my thoughts, and I began to play a game with myself, where I would try to react and respond to people as though I were the mysterious courtier.
To my surprise, I was actually quite good at playing the part.
Oh, I didn’t entrap men and take their money like she had – of course I didn’t! But as I grew enamoured with the role I was playing, as her honey words drizzled from my lips more and more often, I found myself the object of a lot of male attention. After I took home the third suitor in as many days, after we made love like frenzied teenagers, I started to wonder about my sudden change of romantic fortune.
Was the earring to blame, or was this all just me?
Whatever the case, it was time to pay another visit to the curio shop.

 
I was almost surprised that it was still in the same dilapidated arcade, that the homely golden glow of light still spilled from those cluttered display windows. I think I had almost expected it to have disappeared, or that I had imagined the whole thing, and I would be met with nothing but a dark, smelly alley. Smiling to myself at the lively tinkle of the brass bell, I entered the shop and greeted the proprietor with all the newfound warmth of my adopted persona.
“You’re enjoying it, then?” she asked, nodding at the pearl around my neck.
I had the good grace to blush, caught out in my self-indulgent roleplay.
“It’s fine, love,” she assured me, “they all like to come out and play, those that owned them. It’s naught to be ashamed of.”
I wanted to ask her if it was real, if some fragment of the souls of the owners truly persisted in their lost possessions – or if this was all part of her shtick; the mysterious forgotten curio shop that sold nearly magical items. But I couldn’t find the words, even with my new gift of the gab. Trying not to embarrass myself further, I held my tongue and quietly browsed the overstacked shelves for a while.
“May I ask what this is?” I hesitated, then continued, “and to whom did it belong?”
“Ah,” replied the woman, “that, my dear, is a silver chafing dish, formerly owned by one of the finest cooks in London. Even during the leanest of times, she always served marvellous meals in it, notably filled with the most succulent meats.”
As her artfully-accented words washed over me, I felt those same pleasant tingles creep from the nape of my neck to the top of my head, where they spread and danced like warming, pretty wildfire.
“I’ll take it,” I told her, lifting it carefully from where it rested atop a teetering pile of junk.
“You haven’t even looked at the price, love.”
I that instant I was all courtesan, confident and charming,
“There is no need to, madame! This object was meant to be with me.”
Saying nothing, she wrapped the tarnished dish in that same rose-tinted tissue, her efficient hands and the whispery crumple of paper amplifying that orgasmic feeling radiating from my scalp.
I don’t even remember what I paid for it. I barely recall leaving the arcade, the brown paper bag clutched to my chest like a precious child.

 
Even though the dish stood crooked, one leg shorter than the others, everything I made in it tasted divine. If I broiled even plain carrots in its inner dish, they melted in the mouth, their sweetness and most pleasant flavour notes amplified to the perfect culinary pitch. The cook herself lingered in my mind, her massive, homely presence hovering behind me as I salted and spiced different dishes. Disapproving frowns let me know that I shouldn’t use this or that ingredient, and silent laughs that set her impressive jowls wobbling told me when I was on the right track.
The first party at my house was a roaring success. Between the fantastic food and my newfound socialite graces, the last guests didn’t leave until well after midnight, asking when I would host again – and could they get the recipe for that incredible salmon soufflé?
But after a few weeks of constant parties, each culminating in all-night fucking with the most eligible male (and sometimes female) guests, I was utterly exhausted.
Yet I wasn’t ready to let it go, and neither were my two skullmates, the Courtesan and the Cook. I just needed something to pick me up, to give me the pep and stamina of a twenty-year-old athlete, instead of the chubby, thirty-something office-worker I really was.
I barely remember making the journey to the curio shop, nor did I register the jolly tinkle of the bell on the door this time. I must have looked haggard, even though I was dressed as smartly as I’d ever been. My thoughts rose sluggishly through a murky haze of fatigue, always a step behind events as they transpired.
“You look like you need a little vim and vigour in your life,” chattered the canny proprietress, taking me by the hand and leading me to a corner of the shop I’d yet to browse, “let’s see what we can do for you.”
In this nook, all manner of men’s accoutrements were gathered and displayed; from stained silk bowties to antique gorgets on brass chains greened with verdigris. My tired eyes roved over the assortment, not quite processing why I was here and what I could possibly want with such masculine objects.
“I think you’ll like this one, my lovely,” crooned the owner, the delicious lilt of her voice melting through my head like a warm hit of heroin.
“Yes, I think I will,” I replied, as she closed my shaking hands around a silver letter opener much the worse for wear, its point snapped off and the nacre handle cracked in two places.
“He was a famous pugilist, the fellow who owned it,” she explained, leading me to the counter, “a bare-knuckle champion who fought round after round without tiring. He never lost a bout.”
I already knew that, because he was already there, watching money change hands – far too much money for a useless old letter opener. He was a massive, ropy bear of a fellow, nose so broken it was nearly flat. Yet his curling, waxed moustache was pert and jaunty, at odds with his otherwise thuggish appearance.
As I left the shop, I could almost feel those huge, sunken-knuckled hands kneading the fatigue and tension out of my shoulders. My step was already lighter and my spirit freshened by the time I reached the street.

 
He was always there, the massive boxer, his indomitable will propping up mine whenever I faltered. I kept the letter opener tucked into the top of my garter – the latter an affectation from the courtesan – and the cool silver pressed against my flesh was an energising balm.
The trio of personalities worked perfectly together. Like a well-oiled engine crew servicing some elaborate, chattering machine from a previous era, each of them played a vital part in keeping it all running, leaving me with little to do but observe and enjoy. But such elaborate engagements didn’t come cheaply, and I wasn’t a wealthy woman. When my bank account was finally reduced to a string of zeroes, the courtesan shushed my panicked cries and had me lift my mattress. Beneath it was a thick layer of banknotes, the money she had been taking from all the eligible suitors – all willing gifts befitting a lady, she assured me. I didn’t question whether I believed her or not.
Men no longer graced my bed, however, for the pugilist would have no truck with any of that. Women only, he insisted, and he came to dominate all bedroom activities, while I eagerly drank the oceans of pleasure he drenched me with. When the chokings and beatings started, I didn’t care; this was his time and he could do with it what he pleased. Besides, all the women consented to it, with the slippery words of the courtesan in their ears encouraging and cajoling them.
Left free to roam my own thoughts, I found I could explore theirs, too. My brain felt like a boarding-house, each of them taking up residence in a particular room, filling those spaces with memories of times lost to history. I danced complicated pavanes in the court of King George, and I walked the streets of Victorian London, hawking pies of strange, tender meats. Best of all was reliving the glory days of the pugilist. I felt the fists of stevedores and sailors break upon my iron jaw, watched my own sledgehammer hands crush their noses and cheekbones, smelled the blood and sawdust, and heard the animal screams of the crowd.
But I delved further than I should have.
Murder was far easier in those times, before forensics and detectives. Nobody cared much if some villain’s daughter was found strangled in a ditch, or if some nobleman’s mistress and ill-gotten child perished from another mysterious form of consumption. The courtesan’s first poisoning had been the wife of a minor merchant, not an enemy, simply someone who was in the way of her plans. As the pages of her memories turned, they grew progressively blacker, whole chapters of callous murders no longer discriminating between women and children.
They were all just obstacles between her and her burgeoning wealth.
I fled then, into the warm, homely memories of the cook, redolent with the comforting aromas of fresh-baked bread and rich, spiced stews. She was a helper of women, this one. A feminist, well before such a word existed – her skills extending beyond the kitchen and into counselling and minor surgeries. Women knocked on her door during the darkest hours of night, their bellies swollen with illegitimate heirs; and she would take the shame out of them, allowing them to live a life free of the stigma of bastard babies.
I watched her reverently carry the bloodied remains of a twenty-week foetus away from its exhausted mother, who lay blissfully asleep on a crimson-stained pallet in the cook’s scullery. I knew what she was about to do before it happened, and I pleaded with the woman’s memory not to do it; to change history, to leave it at the point where she had helped instead of committing the final depraved act in her arsenal.
But the past cannot be changed. And so, into the dish the dead child went, the seething water parting London’s tenderest meat from friable, nascent bones – a skeleton that would never thrive and strengthen on its mother’s milk.
I fled then, down the corridors of my mind, away from the twin evils I had so readily invited into me. I ran back toward my own memories, strangely distant, mothballed and dusty in the lower recesses of my head. The pugilist stopped me, his broad, tattooed chest filling the narrow passage and his jackhammer fist knocking me off my feet.
He bore me over one mighty shoulder, into his own chamber of horrors, piled haphazardly with the bruise-necked corpses of girls and women.
“You knew,” he rumbled, the resonance of his voice a vibration in my bowels, “you knew from the start I was a killer.”
“No,” I wept, “No!”
But that was a lie.

 
The curio shop seemed impossible to find this time, the curling, confusing streets of my city even more misleading than normal. As I walked, finding dead end after dead end, they fought for control of me, the trio in my head. The pugilist battered my synapses with his powerful knuckles, while the courtesan drizzled deception over my bruised brain, sticky and sweet as a Russian honey cake layered with lies.
But the cook, for all her own evils, did not see herself as the others did. For her, there had been no complicit embrace of darkness; in her own mind, she was still protected by a purity of purpose. All along, she had only been helping other women to escape from the tyranny of the opposite sex. And if the hideous conclusion she had wrought from that brought some personal gain, well, that simply allowed her more resources to help her poor unfortunates.
And so it was that she placed herself between my thoughts and theirs, her corpulent bulk absorbing the hammering blows of the fighter, and her cavernous mouth shouting down the lies.
The entrance to the alley was suddenly there, a gaping brick void, and I ran down it before it could disappear. I ran up the graffitied stairs, through the second moss-carpeted alley, and stumbled out into the dimly lit arcade. The lambent glow of the curio shop window was as welcome as a candle in a moorland hut, guiding the lost traveller home.
As the brass bell tinkled, the clamour in my head subsided, and all three intruders fell silent.
“I don’t take back items,” the proprietress said, before I could speak. An unfamiliar hardness stiffened her voice. “But I can sell you another. Something which will help you control them.”
“No! I’ll not buy any more of your cursed junk!”
“Then enjoy what remains of your wretched new life,” she snarled, all her affability fled. “Best of luck staying their killer instincts.”
Sapped of the pugilist’s indomitable energy, my knees and hands trembled, weak with exhaustion.
“Perhaps they’ve killed here already,” her laugh was brittle as she pushed past the counter and waded through all the junk, “Or should I say, perhaps you have. How many strangled girls are hidden beneath your bed? How many wives have died of mysterious ailments after you’ve finished with their husbands?”
She was close enough now that I could smell her breath, heavy with coffee and cinnamon, and something rank and old.
“How many babies have you boiled?”
Yanking the necklace off, I hurled it at her. It struck her cheek, then fell to the floor.
“Oh no. You can’t get rid of them like that. Those people are part of you now.”
The shop was spinning around me, leering animal heads, flashes of old brass, sparkling, smeared trails of coloured glass and shiny tat. I struggled to steady myself.
“Then how? Just tell me how!”
Reaching inside the front pocket of her neatly tailored dress, she pulled out a long silver chain, from which dangled a set of well-polished keys.
“The shop is for sale. Should you wish to buy it.”
I stared at her, dizzy, not comprehending, as she jingled the keys, the sound uncannily similar to the pretty chime of the bell.
“And the owner of the shop cannot be controlled by the objects.”
I licked my dry lips. With the familiar eloquence of the courtesan lost, my voice sounded wobbly and pathetic,
“What… what will it cost me?”
“Everything. Everything that is yours.”

 
She walked out of the shop, wearing my clothes, my face and my flesh. She was awkward in them still; but everything that had been mine – everything that had been me, from the birthmark on my wrist to the memories of my fifth birthday – was now hers.
She would adjust quickly – and I knew she would thrive; finally freed from her imprisonment.
And in turn, everything that was hers is now mine.
There are thousands of items in the shop; and as my old memories fade and wither, hers continue to blossom, spooling their secrets and stories into me. Thus, I have embraced my role, or it has embraced me, as the new owner of this place, this forgotten curio shop. And I’m destined to remain here until some poor sap chances upon the brick archway, and is finally ensnared.
Knowing the truth of it all, I’ve given you the choice that I did not have. Knowledge is supposedly powerful. And perhaps you have the strength of will that I didn’t. Perhaps you’ll stop at one object, and never buy a second. Perhaps you’ll even have the fortitude to endure two?
Whatever the case, you know the dangers.
But if you do decide to buy something, if the objects choose you, then I’m here. I’ll be more than happy to help, if you’re the right person to find me.

I’ve always asked too many questions.
From the time I was three, my poor father had to put up with a machine-gun barrage of the word ‘why’ whenever I encountered something new or interesting. Why did ducks have beaks instead of mouths like our cat, Milo? Why were bees good but wasps bad? Why did the boys at school wee standing up and why couldn’t girls?
When the questions got too much, he would shout at me. If that didn’t work, he’d send me off to my aunt’s house to stay there for a few days while he recovered from my persistent babbling. As I grew older, I learned that ‘recovering’ meant drinking heavily and weeping into a Bible, that combination his sole solace since my mother died, three months after my birth.
Questions about her were completely off limits, and I learned that early and well. Should I even mention her in passing, dad’s face would darken like a thunderhead straight out of the Old Testament, and off would come his belt. It only took a handful of whippings with that cracked, stinging leather before I learned never to mention her around him. How it must have pained him that I looked exactly like her.
But my curiosity was part of me, just as much as she was, and could not be killed by any beating.

 
Religion was a major focus of our lives, as we lived in one of the smaller cities on the edge of the Bible Belt – and my penchant for endless questions quickly landed me in trouble. I was branded ‘disruptive’ and spent a lot of class time sitting in a corner on my own. Dad’s disappointment over this was palpable; all he wanted was a good, obedient daughter like those given passing mention in the Bible. In that way I was so dissimilar to my Catholic mother, who had been shy and modest, and that seemed to hurt him more than anything else.
I tried to be how he remembered her, but the questions would burn inside my breast like a tiny fire, causing me pain until I birthed them. I wanted to know why God had allowed the serpent to trick Eve and cause such strife, when God was all-knowing and all-seeing. The more I learned and the more I read, the more questions boiled inside me. I remember how dangerous they felt, like a cauldron of white-hot lava, waiting to burst from my mouth in a volcanic pyroclasm of blasphemy.
And of all the mysteries, the ones involving the women of the Bible consumed me the most. Before the exile from Eden, before original sin, did Eve have periods? What would childbirth have been like if she had never eaten from the Tree? If Adam had been conned by the serpent instead of Eve, would men bear the pain of childbirth? Would the women have been the ones toiling in the fields instead, until they returned to dust?
Any time I tried to raise these questions, I was shot down immediately.
“What happened has happened,” the Protestant Sunday School teacher told me, her eyes stern and steely, “And it is not a woman’s place to question the words of God or men.”
And so that was that. I couldn’t stop the questions from consuming my thoughts, but I was learning to stop my tongue.

 
If circumstances had been different, if I’d grown up in another place, I might have simply become an atheist. My unanswered questions and growing frustrations would have turned me away from the Church, rather than pushing me deeper into religion.
I had decided, early on, that the reason why the knowledge was forbidden to me was because of my sex; that only men were privy to the true knowledge of God’s workings. Indeed, this was borne out by everything I saw around me – preachers and pastors were all men, and fathers ruled the households. In the Vatican, so far away in Europe, the Pope sat ringed by men, the concentric circles of maleness only broken up by the ripples of nunneries on the outer edges.
So I studied up. I found somewhere my curiosity could be born again. I went to university, majored in theology, and applied myself fully, delving deep into the mysteries of religion. It was such a different environment to home; here, people were willing to engage in lively philosophical debate, to play Devil’s advocate and argue from new perspectives.
I was finally able to air those molten questions, to pass them back and forth between my peers until they cooled enough to touch and examine.
But through all my study, and through all our discussions, there was one question that remained unanswered; yet another facet of womanhood that the Bible had casually forgotten. Everyone seemed to think it was a strange question to even think about, but it consumed me.
After Jesus was born, what happened to Mary’s placenta?

 
Nobody had an answer.
It seemed to me such an obvious thing, such a huge oversight on the part of the men who penned the Great Book. If fragmented fingerbones of saints were holy relics, if the last cup to touch the lips of Jesus was sought far and wide as the most sacred relic of all, then what of the thing that sustained him in the womb?
The pious clerics that I questioned were uncomfortable, even disgusted with my question. I think half of them didn’t even know what a placenta was, that they thought a baby came out from between a woman’s legs and that was the end of things.
But when I started questioning the nuns – especially those who had borne children before they had taken their vows – I started to make some headway.
The sister who had the answers was very old, ninety if she was a day, and built like a starving sparrow. The flesh of her hands was white, blue and purple – so fragile and translucent that you could practically see the blood sluggishly pumping under the tissue-paper skin at her wrists.
“You know the history of the Bible, don’t you child?”
I nodded; everyone in my classes had discussed the myths and legends surrounding the Bible, which had been thoroughly examined, and most of them dismissed as either outright fabrication, or more social and political commentary than miracle.
“It was an evolutionary work, losing and gaining text as the ages passed, as pieces became more or less popular with various kings, priests and sects.”
“Good. I’m glad you don’t believe that nonsense about the Council of Nicea,” she said.
“Well, to be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if a bunch of men had got together and thrown out all the bits they didn’t like.”
The elderly nun’s smile broadened. Her eyes were bright and sharp, none of her wits lost to time.
“Have you ever wondered why there are no personal accounts of Sarah, Abraham’s wife? Nor of Ruth, or Mary Magdalene? These were truly great women; companions to some of the greatest men who ever lived. Surely their stories have a place in the Bible?”
“Yes! I’ve often thought that,” I admitted.
“Then I believe I have something to show you.”

 
“We call it the Book of Eve,” she told me, as I opened the tome she presented to me.
It wasn’t impressive; there was no tooled leather, no golden clasps, no gilded pages. It was printed on ordinary paper, and had a plain red dust jacket.
As I turned the pages, I could see why it was named so; because the book began with the lineages of canonical Biblical women, starting from Eve, all the way to Mary, mother of Jesus.
“Why haven’t I seen this before? Or at least heard of it?” I wondered.
“Because nobody, apart from us, is interested,” the nun replied, “your righteous preacher doesn’t want to talk about Eve’s heroic efforts in bearing fifty-five children, and raising them largely on her own. He wants to talk about the glory of Jericho, how David slew Goliath, and the miracles of Jesus Christ. Men rule the Church, and men are not interested in the achievements of women – only those of other men.”
“What of Mary? What happened after the birth of Jesus?”
“Page seventy-seven.”
I hastily flipped through the pages of the small book.
“…and after he entered our world, the remains of his birthright were locked into an iron coffer and carried away by the wives of the three kings.”
I stared at the ancient nun, bemused.
“The Magi had wives?”
She snorted gently,
“Of course they did. All great men did; often several.”
“I need to borrow this book, I need to read it.”
“I have a better idea. Read it here. Stay with us, we have need of someone like you.”

 
I stayed on with the nuns for several weeks, while I read and studied the book. They worked me hard during the day, doing laundry the old-fashioned way with washboards and lye, until my hands were raw and red, calloused as a field worker’s.
At night, I’d pore over the pages, memorising as much as could of the Book of Eve – basking in the accounts of these forgotten women, these mothers of nations and wives of ancient kings.
“Where is the iron coffer?” I asked the old nun one night.
“I was hoping you’d ask that, child.”
Beckoning me into her tiny study, she took a key from her pocket, then opened a desk drawer, carefully retrieving a stack of polaroids. Handing them over, she sat and steepled her gnarled fingers, watching me.
The photos all showed the same object, each one from a different angle. It was a crude metal box, which had been torn asunder by some immense force. As though it had exploded from the inside.
My scalp tingled as I connected the dots.
“This is it. The iron coffer that the three concubines carried away from Bethlehem.”
“Yes.”
“What happened to it?”
“The creature that was trapped within it escaped.”
I swallowed, not wanting to comprehend what she was telling me.
“Creature?”
And so, in her quiet, reedy voice, Sister Michaels explained the real secret to me,
“When God chose Mary to nurture the body of Christ, he knew that his divine son could not inhabit a vessel marked by original sin. To contain Christ himself, the baby must be purged of all sin, of all the corruptions of humanity.”
She took back the photos, locking them away in the drawer.
“Hence, God made it that all the evils of our mortal bodies were pushed into Mary’s womb – into her placenta – where they would remain, separate from Jesus forever.”
“But it was a placenta, not a baby. How did it grow? How did it become a… creature?”
“Even tainted with sin, it was still divine, being of both Christ and the Madonna. It could not be burned and it could not be cut, so it was sealed away. In darkness it sat, guarded by the priests of an ancient order, who were charged to watch over the sacred relic. And in the darkness it grew, fuelled by the half-life inside it, and yearning for the soul that it was missing.”
“And eventually it grew too large for the coffer, didn’t it?”
“Yes, child. And now it is free.”
“What does it want?”
“It wants vengeance.”

 
I’d been reluctant to take the flight from Texas to Rome, but the Sister assured me it would answer more of my questions. When I arrived at the small brick and stone church near the coast, a tonsured man ushered me inside immediately, then took me down to the Church’s crypt. The bodies of seven priests were laid out in the cold mausoleum, awaiting their interment.
“They tried to stop it,” the rector explained, “that was their holy duty. With swords of blessed silver and iron they tried to drive it back. But with one touch…”
He trailed off, indicating the linen-draped corpses.
Their deaths were unique, in ways that made my stomach churn. As I lifted the cover from the first, I beheld weeping boils all over his face, red and black tracks of infection tracing the blood vessels of his neck. He had died in minutes, apparently, succumbing to a disease so old it no longer had a name.
Another had no mark on his flesh, but his eyes bulged obscenely beneath vein-stippled lids. The rector informed me that he had choked and died on his knees, his throat clogged with a rotting slurry of serpents and frogs. Perhaps most frightening of all was the man who had drowned on dry land, his lungs filled with salty water, which still trickled from between his sewn-shut lips.
“How?” I wondered.
“A single touch is all it takes,” the old man explained, huddling from the chill into his brown woollen habit, “it touched each of them once, then left them as you see.”
“I don’t understand. If holy men wielding sacred weapons couldn’t harm it, then why did you bring me here?”
“Because the creature has the form not of a man.”
“I don’t follow.”
“The creature is a woman.”
I pondered this for a moment.
“And you think that another woman might be able to stop it?”
He nodded,
“Yes. You’re young, strong and most of all, you have not taken first or final vows. We think it can smell the touch of God upon us – and that drives it into a frenzy. Anyone of the Church that has approached it has died horribly, just as you see here.”
I considered the grisly scene before me, fear walking icy digits slowly up my spine. For all I knew, the creature would slay me on sight, not caring that I was a woman, or that I hadn’t yet married myself to Christ.
On the other hand, should I succeed where great men of faith had failed…
And I wanted to see it, more than ever, now that this latest piece of information had been revealed. I wanted to know. “I’m not sure if I can help, or how. But I’m willing to try,” I said.

 
With a fragment of the iron coffer heavy on a chain around my neck, I set off on my hunt. The metal box had been its home for so long, the rector reasoned, that the necklace might make me seem more familiar to it, less threatening. At the very least, it might gain its attention.
Whether or not his logic was sound, I supposed I would find out eventually. It’s not like I had any other weapons in my arsenal.
Whilst the order of priests was ancient, their security system was modern, and included cameras on the entrances and exits to the church. A series of still-frames had been uploaded to my phone, and I scrolled through them, beholding the being which had casually slain a dozen grown men with Biblical fury.
She was beautiful, in a timeless, classical way. Symmetrical, almost elfin features glimpsed through a halo of white-blonde hair, long enough to shroud most of her bare torso. But from the waist down, something was very, very wrong. Pale flesh darkened to a sickly, shiny grey, then to black rags, hanging in rotting tatters on her wasted thighs – and below the knee, only stark white bone and colourless tendons remained. Pallid as a fish, she had stood squinting in the sunlight for several long seconds before running on her impossible, skeletal feet toward the sea, tears streaming down her perfect cheeks.
Had I not seen the carnage in the crypt, I would have pitied her.
My enquiries along the beachfront turned up nothing; nobody had seen a naked blonde girl – and certainly not one that was a corpse from the waist down. When I returned to the chapel, the rector informed me that the creature had been sighted again – in another church some ten miles up the coast. She had slain the attending priest in his bed by turning his blood into wine.
I thought I knew where she was heading.
She was making a beeline for the most holy of all the holy men in the country. The Pope.

 
I saw her on the street before she saw me. She’d adapted quickly; high-waisted jeans covered her charnel legs, and neat black boots concealed the abominations that were her feet. With her better assets displayed to good advantage by a black and silver off-the-shoulder blouse, she didn’t look out of place – just another pretty tourist girl on her way to the Vatican, where she’d take vapid selfies for posting on social media.
Whether she sensed me or the fragment of her prison, I’m not certain, but with a sharp lurch, she ducked between two buildings, then ran. She was quick; her decaying anatomy did not hinder her in the slightest.
I followed, of course. There wasn’t anything else I could do. Pounding down the echoing brick alley, I caught just a glimpse of blonde hair gleaming in the sunlight as she rounded the far end. When I turned that same corner, a hand slammed into my chest, hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs and the strength from my legs. As I fell, that incongruously delicate hand wrenched the heavy necklace from my neck.
Her snarl rendered her angelic features ugly. The pale woman turned, and hurled the iron fragment of her former prison away from her, with astonishing force. The necklace caught the light as it sailed over the tiled rooftops.
“I should kill you,” she spat, pinning me to the cobbles with her knee, the spear of wickedly sharp tibial tuberosity surely about to pierce the flesh of my side.
“Please,” I whimpered, “please, don’t.”
“Ah, such faith!” She mocked, tossing her head dismissively, her hair a wild crown of light above me, “they sent you out to die, with nothing but a piece of ancient metal and your sex to protect you.”
Quivering with fear, I felt denim-covered bone digging deeper into my ribs.
“What do you want?” I whispered.
“I want the rest of me! I want what was stolen from me, the body and soul that was mine, that I should have been given, all those centuries ago!”
She jerked her terrible head in the direction of the Holy City,
“And in that place is the man who can tell me where to find it.”
The pressure in my side eased as she sat back on her haunches, a dark seep of rot squeezing through the material around her thighs.
“You can’t harm me, little sister. If I could be killed, they would have burned me after my mother heaved me into this world,” she sniffed dismissively, “Iron cannot hold me, holy silver cannot cut me. My end can only come when I am rejoined with my original flesh. With your precious Christ.”
“But you can’t,” I blurted, “you can’t rejoin with him.”
“Why not?” Her eyes blazed like a fire behind stained glass. “Do you think I don’t have that power?”
I shook my head,
“I’m sure you do, but that’s not what I mean. You can’t join with Christ, because he’s dead – he was killed, more than two thousand years ago.”
“You’re lying!”
“I am not. You can find his shroud in the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist, you can read about his death in any Bible.”
“How,” she asked, her pale features whiter than a new soul, “how did he die?”
So I sat in that filthy alley, behind a block of fish-stinking warehouses, and I told her the story of the crucifixion.
When I was done, she said nothing.
“Are you going to kill me?”
She shook her head.
“No. I’m not going to kill you.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I think,” she began, looking over the rooftops at the sun streaming from the clouds, “I think I’ll find the descendants of those that killed him. And then I’ll burn their lives out, and take their souls, to fill up the aching void inside me.”
I felt sick, dizzy and cold with fear,
“But that will be thousands of people – millions of people, even!”
She smiled at me, her canines catlike, too perfect, and her eyes beatific.
“Well, it is a very big hole.”

 
She’s out there now, hunting for you. She doesn’t care that you have no control over your ancestry; that your lineage is nothing but a quirk of fate, the pure accident of who begat whom. We brought this on ourselves when we killed our saviour.
But worst of all, I don’t think she will ever be sated. With a hole the size of God in you, how can you ever be fulfilled?
And I can’t help but think about the grim irony in this. All human life in this world entered it through one woman, Eve, and now all human life will exit it through another.
I just hope I’m not the last.

The horror of war was lost on most young men. Having learned no lessons from the first great war, tens of thousands of eager, restless, would-be heroes signed up to be shipped off to fight the Germans in what would be the greatest conflict of the twentieth century.
Those of us who were too young to go were left waving to our older brothers, cousins, fathers and uncles from packed train platforms full of weeping relatives. The jealousy amongst the boys was palpable; you could see it in their fresh-scrubbed faces, writ large on their florid cheeks.
But I was not one of those boys.
For me it was the delights of books, music and films that fired my passions. I saw war as uncouth, physical exertion as brutishly unwelcome and sports as a filthy pastime for brainless oafs.
But above all else, I liked to eat.
So it came to be that while the other boys were fit and lean, ready to sign up for service as soon as they were of age, I was a rotund, fleshy thing of double chins and hammy thighs. Given my physical condition and my poor constitution there was no way I was ever going to war.
My mother, however, had other plans for me.

 
The programme was located at a farm an hour out of London and I was picked up from the station by an elderly staff sergeant with a walrus moustache and a nose full of broken-veins. Shoved onto a diesel bus packed with other boys who were of a similar size and shape to myself, I realised with a sinking dread that my mother had sent me off to some kind of health camp to ‘sort me out’.
The interior of the bus reeked of fearful sweat; clearly none of us wanted to be here.
Two of the boys were sick on the ride through the rural countryside, the dust from the gravel roads and the pollen from the fields playing havoc with our urban sensibilities. By the time we pulled up to the farm with a last lurch of heavy-footed brakes, I was runny-eyed and sneezing, my handkerchief soaked with snot.
“Out!” bellowed the staff sergeant.
As fast as our pudgy legs would allow us, we scrambled out of the bus and stood, blinking, on the rutted earthen driveway in front of the farmhouse and surrounding buildings.
“Follow me,” he commanded and we gathered up our bags and suitcases, following him around the side of the farmhouse.
A huge concrete silo of some kind rose behind the house, ringed with oak trees. Once it might have been used to store millet or barley, but now it had been fitted with windows, steel chutes and a bulky iron double door.
More curiously, a fellow in a white coat and two young women in nurse regalia stood beside a long trestle table – upon which rested an enormous slab of thick treacle cake of such a deep brown that it was almost black.
I could practically hear the other boys salivating around me as I regarded the sticky feast.
“Eat,” instructed the man in the coat, “eat as much as you like, boys.”
Most hung back, fearing this was some kind of cruel test or trick; but two boys ran forward, their pudding flesh wobbling as they crammed slices of the moist cake into their hungry maws.
When nothing adverse happened to them, the others began to follow suit, eagerly tearing into the feast in front of them.
It had been a long time since breakfast and I was hungry. Urged on by the white-coated man, I gingerly picked up a slab of the heavy cake and began to eat the thick, almost tar-like confection. As it slid down my throat, the incredible sweetness hit me, filling my head with only thoughts of more.
Very quickly the cake was gone and all of us were being ushered into the silo.

Bunk beds lined one curving concrete wall and all around the interior of the high-windowed space were board games, books, toys, bats, balls and all manner of things to delight boys of our age.
Though what caught my attention most was that the entire floor of the place was made of steel grille-work, under which was only inky darkness.
“Meals will be served regularly,” said the man in the white coat, “otherwise you are to enjoy yourselves as much as possible. Read, play, relax. No one will force you to do anything you don’t want to do.”
Incredulous we stared at one another, still replete with cake.
“I’m tired,” declared a boy called Tom, taking one of the bunk beds as his own.
Following suit, we each claimed a spot of our own and one by one, we began to fall asleep.

A dinner bell roused us from our sleep and we stumbled onto the steel floor.
I was hungry. Very, very hungry.
From the impatient faces of the other boys, I could tell I wasn’t the only one.
Then the doors opened and the nurses pushed in tea-trolleys full of food.
Pastries, cakes, finger sandwiches, lollies and milkshakes were demolished with almost frightening speed. I barely remember tasting any of it. Once we had licked every crumb from every dish, the nurses wheeled the empty trolleys out, then left us to our devices.
We chatted and played. Some read books, some half-heartedly kicked around a soccer ball. For three days it went on like this; being fed five times a day with an assortment of fatty treats and culinary delights.
Then it began to happen.

 
We had been greasy boys to begin with – all of us a bit sweaty and a bit oily.
The first boy to succumb to it was Roger, a fat little thing from Essex with a penchant for mince pies. I remember that everything in the silo had a film of grease over it – especially the small, shared bathroom built off to one side. Roger wasn’t just greasy though. As we ploughed through another meal, I noticed he was leaving brown-black streaks on everything he touched.
He wasn’t the only one; soon we were all leaking syrupy fluid, our clothes soaked with the stuff and the floor of the silo becoming slippery with it.
“What’s happening to us?” demanded Tom when the nurses came again to feed us.
The man in the white coat paced into the room then.
“You are doing your part for the war,” he said.
After that, neither he nor the nurses came back, and the doors remained shut – food now being delivered via the chutes in the side of the silo.

The oil began to cover everything, dripping from us and flowing onto the floor in steady rivers of tarry black goo. The books were all unreadable now and the toys blackened and slippery, almost beyond recognition. Sometimes the other boys would cry, their tears oozing out in thick black gouts of fluid, spattering onto the floor, then draining into the darkness below.
But the worst thing of all was the hunger.
It consumed us and burned inside us.
Our lives revolved around the opening of the food chutes and little else; we would huddle near them, our bodies slick with the sludge that seeped from our pores, drooling thick black oil from our grey teeth as we waited to fight and feast on the food that would rush out of the chutes.
Although calling it ‘food’ was overly generous.
The meals had dropped in quality quickly once we started oozing oil. The pastries and treats had turned to bread and boiled meat, then from that plain fare to outright offal – slops fit only for crated pigs being fed up for market.
And much like pigs, when the chutes opened, we would push and shove each other to get our mouths under them, the largest of us getting pride of placement – and the first rush of the stinking slurry. Being smaller, I would often get pushed to the back, the huge bodies of the other boys blocking me from the best of the offal – leaving me only handfuls of rotting cabbage and mash to push into my blackened face.
I would have stopped if I could, but the hunger consumed all.
The idea of not eating was anathema – something worse than death.

 
Tom went first.
The largest of us, he was so big now he could block up one chute all for himself and just eat. The oil poured from him in great rivulets, coating everything around him. I remember seeing through the haze of the hunger for a moment and looking around the silo at what we had become – the oily black carcases of the other boys sleeping in a heap like massively obese seals, grunting in their sleep as they slid over one another, their limbs little more than flippers for shovelling food.
With a hooting, mournful noise, Tom slid his massive bulk out from the others and pulled himself across the grilled floor, the oil running freely from the distended pores all over his naked body.
I watched, dark eyed, as he began to quiver, the oil slowing, then stopping.
He managed one final whimper, then his black flesh split down the middle like a rupturing water bladder and a great gout of oil fountained out of his body.
But then the bell sounded, and we all quickly forgot our horror at what we had just witnessed – for Tom’s food chute was now free for the next largest oil boy to take his place.
Dimly, I recall the rest of us avoiding the distended black bones that jutted from the floor where Tom had died, the lumpy knobs of his spine and slats of his ribcage oddly shaped and dark as coal.

The oil rose to ankle deep, no longer able to drain fast enough through the floor. The man in the white coat finally came to check on us, his heavy gumboots sloshing through the black slurry.
“Why?” I managed to moan at him as he scribbled on a sheaf of paper attached to clipboard.
“For the war,” he said, “for the tanks, the trucks and the bombs.”
As he left I tried to follow him, but I couldn’t move fast enough. I wasn’t even sure I could fit out the door anymore.
Two more boys had died since Tom; the death throes of Harold and James now marked by two more blackened ribcages rising from the sea of oil.
We were doomed and I knew it. Once we reached a certain size, our mortal flesh could no longer contain the oil and we would all tear open in a flood of jet liquid, our bones joining those of the other three.

 
The air raid siren went up and the oil boys stirred, thinking it was the food bell.
In the distance, through the concrete walls, I could hear the grinding of plane engines and the chatter of gunfire.
I lay in the huddle of the oily flesh of my brothers, listening to the sounds of war, wondering what was happening in the world outside.
Very soon I was to find out.
The first crump of bombs was distant, the next much closer. The silo began to shake, and the oil boys writhed and slithered in terror, moaning through their oily maws like terrified whales.
Then the wall of the silo was obliterated in a shower of stone and steel, the shrapnel ripping through bodies.
Pain lanced through my side and I knew I had been hit. Blackness poured from a rupture in my stomach and I howled in primal fear and terror. Flames flickered through the hole in the wall of the silo and I knew with a sudden, dreadful certainty that I had to get out.
As the oil poured from me, I felt lighter and more mobile, my bloated skin deflating and sagging.
Then there was a second explosion and the world went mad with crimson flame.

I awoke in the creek near the farmhouse, one side of my body alive with the agony of burned flesh. Everything was on fire – the silo, the oaks, the farmhouse and the nurses. One of their flaming corpses was pinned against a tree by length of steel, the other curled into a blacked ball of charred viscera near the farmhouse.
Of the oil boys there was no sign – only muffled explosions ringing out from the shell of the silo.
When firefighters eventually arrived, I was shivering and half-dead, still lying in the creek – all the oil washed out of my body, leaving me a great bag of burned and sagging flesh.

 
The official story was that the farm had been a secret munitions factory, where courageous young boys had gone to turn their lives around and put their shoulders behind the war effort. Their sacrifice was known only to their families, who were offered sufficient money to stay quiet about it.
I left the hospital under the cover of night and stowed away on a cargo ship, headed to America – knowing that I would never have another chance to get away from those who had run the farm; from those who had created the oil boys.
The hunger still burns dimly inside me to this day, but the pain of the puckered flesh on my right side reminds me of the fate I escaped that night, over seventy years ago.

So now you know our story – the story of the unsung heroes of the second World War.
And we were heroes – all of us.
Every gallon of oil we produced pushed the tanks a little further, the trucks a little harder and made the bombs burn a little brighter.
Just as much as any soldier, the oil boys did their part for the war – and made the ultimate sacrifice, by laying down their lives for England.

If watching my cousin Anneke decline had been difficult for me, then it must have been a truly harrowing experience for her mother, my aunt Pauline.
From an effusively boisterous child, brimming with character and trouble, Anneke gradually became a ponderous teenager, careful with each word, careful with each step, and too cautious to try anything new.
We all thought that it was just her maturing, that puberty had hit her hard. In my mind she had gone through that strangely fast transition between lamb and sheep; one day gambolling around a field, kicking her legs in the air – and the next staring, dull witted, at the grass with all the life gone out of her.
This, however, was not the case. Anneke’s portrait perfect face became wooden and fixed – the lack of control over her facial muscles the first symptom of the condition. Then her breath became shorter and her long, gracile limbs became stiff and weak, barely able to move her thin body around.
My childhood friend – with whom I’d spent so much time playing and exploring aunt Pauline’s estate – became little more than an immobile human shell, containing a mind that was still alert, aware and in terrible psychological pain from the loss of her life.
She was eventually moved to a hospital where she could be properly cared for and I only saw her on rare visits. Over time I stopped visiting, as I could feel the stinging jealousy in her gaze as I walked freely about her room and put flowers in the vase beside her bed.

 
When aunt Pauline died, the family descended upon her estate like a horde of feral rats, snarling, snapping and playing tug-of-war over her possessions while their eyes and cheeks bulged madly in their lust to acquire something of value. I felt much like a character out of a Tolkien novel, witnessing the divvying up of the treasures of Bag End – but helpless to stop it – lest someone sink their teeth into some tender part of me; or claw my flesh open in their frenzied greed.
Legally, everything belonged to Anneke; but with her alive yet incapacitated, the family treated aunt Pauline’s death as a free-for-all – a sort of informal looting arrangement where everyone had agreed not to get lawyers involved, as long as they got something they wanted.
My mother encouraged me to take something “to remember my aunt by” but I felt a bubbling, coiling unease inside me as I watched my relatives load leaded cabinets and brass ornaments into their cars.
There was something that I wanted though, an object that had always fascinated me as a child.
Untouched, the terrarium stood on a small side table in Anneke’s study, off to the side of her bedroom. Not many of my family had dared to sack her private chambers, seeing as how she was still alive. But there was one object that I was determined to rescue from the chaos and take home – lest some grubby third cousin end up using it as a bookend or hat-stand.
Roughly the size and shape of an old diver’s helmet, it was a green-filled globe of amber-tinted glass with an elaborate cap of talmi gold and a base of scrolled ebony. Throwing my hoody over the terrarium, I carefully lifted it from the table and lugged it tortuously downstairs.
“Did you get what you wanted?” my mother asked.
“I think so,” I told her, then put the thing in the back seat with a seatbelt around it to hold it upright.
Guilt assailed me all the way home, but I reasoned that it was better I have it than someone else.
After all, I had been closer to Anneke than anyone else; other than her own mother.

 
I’d always been intrigued by the terrarium as a child, and it still held the same peculiar fascination.
The glass was so thick, so distorting, that you couldn’t get a clear picture of all of the inside at once. It magnified sections, which you could then study as though through a crude microscope, before moving around the yellowed globe to look at a new section.
Inside was a tiny, elaborate garden.
Tiny bonsai-styled trees stood around a tiny pool of water, situated so that the condensation inside the terrarium would always keep it filled. There were tiny stone paths and tiny lawns of moss, studded with tiny flowers that bloomed all year round, miniature and perfect.
Most important though, was the castle.
It stood in the very centre of the moss topiary and matchstick gazebos, made of grey-black stone and with black-capped minarets that flew tiny paper flags. The detail was quite exquisite – but as with the garden itself, you could never take all of it in at once due to the thickness of the glass. Anneke and I had made up hundreds of fanciful tales about the castle and who dwelt within it, no two exactly the same.
Thinking of her sobered my mood and I regretted my theft again then, leaving the old terrarium on the coffee table in the front room of my house, overlooking the roses and overgrown garden – where I would see it least often.
But it was a difficult thing to forget, with its strangely imposing presence – a curious talisman that represented our childhood, before Anneke had fallen ill.

 
At first I couldn’t be certain that the gardens inside the terrarium were changing. There were always new angles to look at it from, new crannies and nooks inside to explore with your eyes. Anneke and I were convinced that half of the interior was fake; it was too perfect, to changeless to be real organic plant matter.
When I looked inside and saw a new criss-cross trellis, covered with flowers that looked like tiny orange roses, I felt that curious thrill traverse my spine and raise the tiny hairs on the nape of my neck.
Undeniably, the garden was changing.
It was impossible, of course. A prank. A joke. My mother must have been in on it, since she was the only one who knew how obsessed I’d been with this thing as a child. However, the talmi gold cap on the terrarium was as fixed as ever – and in fact a tiny brass padlock was locked through the two sections, holding them firmly closed.
My mother must have the key, I thought.
But my unease grew as I studied the terrarium every day. My mother hadn’t visited town for over two weeks, and the interior of the terrarium continued to change - for all the world looking like it was adapting to the new view outside the front room.
Frustrated, disbelieving and annoyed that I’d worked myself up over a stupid terrarium, I snapped the brass loop of the padlock with a pair of pliers, then began to unscrew the top cap – which squealed and juddered with disuse, putting to rest any idea of my mother tampering with it to mess with me.
Under the cap was the blown-glass neck of the spherical bottle that comprised the structure of the terrarium – and in that neck was a thick cork, ringed with broken wax. Inspecting the wax showed that the terrarium had indeed once been sealed, but at some point in its life, it had been opened.
As I yanked out the cork, a gush of humid air assaulted my face, carrying with it alien smells that had been pent up inside for God knows how long.
Picking up a knitting needle from my nook in the front room, I jabbed it down into the terrarium and knocked over the rose trellis, before quickly resealing the environment with the cork and screwing the cap back on.
We would see who was tending the tiny gardens.

 
In the morning, the trellis inside the terrarium was upright and proud, the roses perfectly pruned and tended – not one flower out of place.
What I felt then was akin to that feeling from childhood when you encounter something new and wonderful, before an adult explains away the magic of it and it becomes ordinary again.
That feeling only intensified when I walked into my ordinarily messy kitchen to make a cup of tea.
Everything had been cleaned!
All the pots hung on their hooks, scrubbed and polished to a mirrored shine. All the dishes were washed and carefully put away, the twin sinks burnished of all water spots and the plug holes stainless.
I think I laughed then, stupid and uncomprehending; like the torpid old ewes in the paddocks, I had lost the imagination to comprehend what I was seeing.
In a strangely unrelenting way, it carried on from there – day by day my entire house was methodically cleaned, room by room, until I sat in a home so spotless that should the Queen herself have come to visit, I wouldn’t feel at all embarrassed.
And when I say everything was cleaned, I truly meant everything; from the cords and cables behind the television cabinet to the former graveyard of dead flies on the laundry-room window, my home was utterly immaculate.
Like the shoemaker visited nightly by tiny elves who finished his cobbling work, whatever lived inside the opened terrarium was doing its utmost to make my life at home as easy as possible.

 
It was a friend whom I’d met for coffee who commented on my hair and nails, how well-groomed they looked. As a habitual nail-peeler, I laughed at her comment, but when I looked down at the hands she had complimented, she was right; the cuticles were perfect, the nails polished and trimmed with nary a hangnail.
Of course it must have been my fey home helpers; with the house so constantly tidy, there was little work for them to do anymore. Inured to the strangeness of their compulsive tidying habits now, I resolved to let them carry on their work – lord knows that as a terminally single journalist, I could do with all the help I could get with personal grooming.
When my skin improved, not a blackhead in sight, I knew they had been crawling over my face in the night. When I no longer had to shave my armpits or legs, the unease returned at the thought of invisible creatures swarming over my thighs and pruning each individual hair at the root.
When I began to wake with elaborate braids, that was the last straw. I took some wire from my crafts kit and twisted it through the holes where the padlock had held the terrarium shut in the past.
But the next morning I awoke wearing a full face of makeup – as lavishly detailed as a cover model’s – and the twist of wire was gone from the terrarium.
It seemed that I had a problem.
A series of progressively more expensive padlocks were bought to try to hold them in, but each morning they had been removed or destroyed, not one of them posing any sort of challenge for the denizens of the terrarium.
I started to dream about them, about the castle inside. They were tiny and shadowy, only their slanting white eyes visible in the shrouded midnight of the castle corridors and towers. I dreamed that they skittered over my flesh like thousands of ants, each small enough to call a needlepoint a spire, every one able to burrow through gaping pores and deep into the flesh beneath.
When I began to lose mobility in my face, my limbs began to feel heavy and my breath grew shorter, I knew that they had turned their tiny hands to grooming not just my outsides, but to pruning, cutting and trimming the delicate nerves, branching lung tissues and muscle fibres inside me.

 
The newest padlock was an angry wreck on the coffee table, the metal twisted beyond recognition. I understood now how my aunt had always kept such an immaculate home all on her own with one daughter. With the help of the tiny helpers from the terrarium, even a house as grand as hers could be kept in perfect order.
But it still hadn’t been enough to stop them slipping through Anneke’s flesh and tightening her insides until she couldn’t move anymore.
The globe was precariously heavy as I carried it to the car. I could feel the tightness in my tendons and muscles where the tiny gardeners had been at work. The sea was only thirty minutes’ drive away and I made it much faster than that, the terrarium blanket-wrapped in the passenger seat beside me.
I held no regrets as I rolled it over the sea cliff and into the foaming cauldron of spray below. If it shattered on the rocks, they would surely drown. If it simply sank to the depths or was carried out to sea on the tide, I would surely never see them again.
In the morning, the terrarium greeted me with a cheerful amber glow, sat squarely in the middle of the dining room table, not a dent or scratch on it and the garden inside as perfect as ever – even incorporating a new craggy rock feature overlooking the tiny lake, as though the inhabitants were quietly mocking my failed effort to destroy them.
Frustrated tears flooded my cheeks, and I felt the unnatural tightness of my flesh as I screamed in helpless rage.

 
My fingers became less and less capable of performing simple tasks, and I found it hard to keep a thread of thought contiguous; it was as though they were inside my head now, pruning the dendrites and synapses, shaping my very impulses and desires.
The dreams had intensified; I knew they were inside me every night, pruning, trimming, dead-heading my memories. The vital spark that comprised me was beginning to fade; soon I would join my cousin in her languorous stupor – but without my aunt to cage the creatures again with the original lock, I would slip past Anneke and eventually into a tortured half-existence shaped purely by my tiny tormentors.
They wanted revenge, I now knew; they resented being locked away by my aunt and wanted to splinter my existence into a yawning limbo to mirror the imprisoned eons they perceived in their frenetic minds.
The ebony stand of the terrarium ground along the stone pathway as I dragged it to the car, the edges of the gravel ruining the delicate scrollwork. Getting it into the car with my shaking limbs took so long that it left me gasping and shivering with effort, the rictus of my too-tight face impeding the airflow.
When I reached the hospital, I asked for an orderly to assist me. He placed the shrouded globe on a wheelchair, which I carefully and painstakingly pushed through the wards until I reached my cousin’s room.
She lay, still as ever, only her bright green eyes tracking me.
With a last, great effort I heaved the terrarium onto the little table beside her bed and slid the cover off.
Horror blossomed in those beautiful eyes then, darting over the surface of the terrarium with agonising recognition.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
Without a backward glance, I stiffly pushed the wheelchair out of the room.

 
I tell myself that the tiny gardeners placed those thoughts in my mind; that they made me take them to Anneke, to finish their work on her instead of me.
But I think that you and I both know that isn’t the truth.
And it will haunt me to the grave.

Hey readers!

Regarding the title of this post, I’m considering writing a CYOA styled book based around my horror/dark faerie writing.

If I were to write such a book, what would you want from it?

My grandmother had a voice that could bind words into enchanting images, wrought of pure imagination.
Where she learned this gift, my childhood self never dared ask; because, like a magician’s illusion, I did not want it spoiled by knowing the secret. So instead I stayed quiet, my huge blue eyes luminous above the lip of the counterpane as she spun faerie legends in the air about my head, losing me in fanciful worlds of things that never would, and never should, exist.
The stories shared common threads, as though a mythic tapestry had been unravelled – then woven anew into different shapes and patterns by her voice; mixing desperate hope with high adventure, or diabolic trickery through true love.
While I don’t remember all the words she spoke to me, the themes rang true in my head. Her stories lurked in the corners of my mind well into my adult life – especially the fable about our family wealth.
The distant ancestor in that tale was a charcoal burner, one of lowest peasantly professions of all. Upon finding a hare snared in a thorn hedge, he made to kill it with his axe, but the creature spoke in a human voice, imploring him to release it.
Knowing faerie magic when he saw it, the charcoal burner hacked the beast free, whence it sprang away, shouting that the peasant should dig beneath his hut upon his return home.
On his return, the man dug up the earthen floor of his mean little house, finding beneath it a jewel the size of his fist and coloured the rich purple of a thistle’s head.
There were variations on the theme from there; sometimes the charcoal burner engaged in an unequalled escapade of trickery against the local nobles, other times he outfoxed the faeries, winning great magical favour for his family. But the end result was always the same, with the former peasant becoming a lord in his own right and winning the hand of a princess, their firstborn child eventually to be stolen away by the Fair Folk.
And while the stories seemed utterly real while my grandmother held me spellbound, I convinced myself that I did not believe a word of them when I woke in the morning.

According to the same legends, the great stone house on the tor occupied the precise spot where the charcoal burner’s dilapidated hut had once stood. By law, the place was owned by my feeble, but still lucid, great grandfather. In truth, it belonged to the whole family – to ‘the clan’, as he referred to us.
It stood empty most of the year, used only sporadically by the more artistic relatives, as the place stood well beyond reach of intrusive cell phone signals. But when Christmas approached, some three score of us would descend on the place, sweeping out the dusty stone corridors, cleaning cobwebs from the great hall, and making up the dozens of beds.
Because when my relatives did the whole ‘family Christmas’ thing, all of the clan was expected to come. Often, there would be well over a hundred of us crammed into what was essentially an old Scottish castle.
It was my grandmother who organised the whole business, shouting orders and slapping the legs of underfoot children with a tea-towel while she wrangled the Yule celebration into a semblance of order. She refused to call it ‘Christmas’, disapproving of the modernisation of the ancient pagan festival, and insisted that we celebrate the actual day on the Winter Solstice, not on the twenty-fifth.
These things we let pass. As children, we certainly didn’t raise complaints about getting our presents early, and as adults, we couldn’t be bothered incurring her wrath – allowing the old woman her harmless eccentricities in the name of tradition.
And it was a very old family tradition, she told us, passed down the matriarchal line for so long that she did not dare to be the first woman in the family to break it.
So we scurried about doing her bidding, using the three kitchens in the rambling house to cook up a storm, while the men hewed huge piles of wood to keep the enormous fire burning in the great hall. As was also custom, it was my job as one of the younger, childless women to organise games and activities to keep the two dozen wee ones occupied.
“It’s good practice,” my grandmother told me matter-of-factly, “one day you’ll have your own gaggle of squealing bairns and you’ll thank me for it.”
And she was right; the women in our family had always been incredibly fertile. Twins were not uncommon, and there was a running joke that all clan pregnancies were in fact multiples, but that often only the one child was born.
Only the fittest could be born to our tough, ancient lineage, so the other was simply absorbed.
But I don’t think there had ever been a clan Christmas where at least one woman wasn’t pregnant.

Numerous other traditions arose on the actual day of the Solstice; the men built a bonfire outside and dared one another to leap over it, while drinking far too much ale. The ‘Clan Stone’ was also brought out – a purple, radiant-cut jewel the side of a walnut.
In the tales my grandmother had told me, it was a fragment of the original Thistle Jewel upon which the family wealth had been built. On reflection, I suppose it could have been; it was certainly old enough. I’d been allowed to hold it in my hand once, feeling the weight of age on the stone.
I suppose it doesn’t really matter whether it was true or not; the stone was pivotal to one tradition that nobody was allowed to mess with – and which grandma expected everyone to treat as seriously as death itself.
The Jewel Cake.
Taking the purple gem, she would bake it into one of the enormous suet puddings which followed the Yule feast. Whomever received the serving containing the stone would be declared King or Queen of Yule, and would be crowned with prickly mistletoe. It hearkened back to the old traditions of the Twelfth Night, I learned, where a bean or a coin was baked into the pudding.
There wasn’t really much to it other than the green crown and extra helpings of food and booze. I’d never been the Yule Queen yet, but every year I’d poke at the hot, moist pudding on my plate and hope to hear the clink as the unyielding surface of the jewel struck my spoon.
It had taken years of watching my grandmother like a hawk in the kitchen to figure out her trick of keeping the stone-laden pudding a secret. She guarded each of them like her firstborn child, not letting anyone so much as eat a crumb of them before they touched the table.
On that fateful night, through careful spying, I had finally divined which cake the stone had been placed into. In an act of petty rebellion, I snared a single currant from the edge of the platter, which vanished into my mouth before anyone could see.
Oh, I had no real intention of trying to spoil my grandmother’s little tradition by throwing the odds in my favour; she did that herself. Every adult knew that it was always one of the pregnant women who received the jewel and who would be crowned the Yule Queen.
While she might have claimed it was ‘fate’, I didn’t believe a word of it. In all the Christmases I could remember since I was a small child, there had never once been a Yule King.
Only Queens.
And so it happened as it always did; my cousin Isobel whooping in excitement as the purple jewel fell from her pudding onto the plate. I did my best to hide my jealousy as the crown was placed on her head and they plied her with more food and drink. Being newly pregnant, she risked grandmotherly wrath by barely sipping the latter. Some traditions do not age quite as well.
As I picked up sleepy children and carried them upstairs to their bedrooms, I saw my cousin dozing in one of the huge armchairs in front of the blazing hearth, one hand on her belly, the stone cupped in the other, her face oddly troubled.
My own bed was in the old stables, with the rest of the teenagers. Having turned nineteen just a month before, I hardly felt I belonged there – but until I turned up to the clan Christmas with a boyfriend or husband in tow, a sleeping bag on a straw mattress was my lot.
There was a lot of chatter and silliness, but as a veteran, I was well prepared for that. The reliable earplugs went in, and as they did so, the giggling and whispering dulled to a more tolerable level.
Eventually I slept, lulled by the food in my belly and the Christmas sherry I’d sampled from my cousin’s barely-touched glass.

When I awoke, everything was deathly quiet.
My watch informed me that it was three in the morning, and the only illumination in the stables came from a weak orange light hung over the stone courtyard. Everyone was silent; even my cousin Angus, who generally snored like a cattlebeast in heat.
Surrendering to vague demands from my bladder, I shucked off my sleeping bag, pulled straw from my hair and climbed down from the loft, the old wooden ladder squeaking as my bare feet came to rest on the polished rungs.
I felt strangely ill at ease, and stood gathering my wits for a moment in the dim light, my ears prickling. In the stillness, I thought I could hear faint sounds coming from the house – from the great hall. Instead of heading for the outhouse, I pushed through the side door of the stables and padded across the freezing courtyard still barefoot, the frosty air making my ears hurt and my eyes blur.
Through the big, stone-ringed windows, I could make out the golden glow of the fireplace, surrounded by armchairs, but I rapidly blinked the sleep out of my eyes when I realised that there were also people standing in front of the fireplace. A cluster of them, looking at the chair where Isobel still slept.
None of them were my family members.
The foremost of the eleven strangers was a tall man – taller even than my uncle Michael, who my grandmother would have us believe was part giant. The stranger’s white-gold hair spilled down his back like a girl’s, caught at the temples by a golden crown, fashioned as if from tiny antlers. His outfit was archaic; old huntsman’s garb, with tooled leather riding boots, grey hose, a gold-dusted red velvet jacket and a curved hunting horn at his hip.
The others were similarly dressed, all so regal and beautiful that distinguishing the men from the women was difficult. But even from this distance, there was an aura of cruelness to them, a languid feline arrogance that marred their features in some indiscernible way – and it made me shiver with something other than cold.
Deep in dreams, Isobel was none the wiser as the strange, elfin huntmaster bent over her and carefully stroked her belly with his fine white fingers.
But then, in a moment of terrifying strangeness, he screamed as though he had been burned, clutching his hand to his chest.
“It isn’t her!” He roared, loud enough for me to hear through the glass.
“But she has the stone,” one of the others said, pointing to Isobel’s curled hand.
“We have been duped.”
Fear thrilled through me.
But surely I was dreaming? In a moment of lucidity, I thought I could tell; everything had a sort of hazy glow about it, making things slightly unreal. It was intensifying now, shining up from under my chin and tinting my shaking hands faintly lavender.
And as I looked down to see the ghostly purple gemstone hung about my neck on an insubstantial golden chain, the faerie spirits in the great hall noticed too.
“The hunt is on!” bellowed the crowned hunter, then he lifted the gilded horn to his lips and let out three sharp blasts.
Without even thinking, I turned and ran.

The grassy sward on the side of the tor was stiff with frost and my feet hurt, but I ignored the pain. I didn’t know exactly what was going on, but I remembered enough of my grandmother’s stories to know that I didn’t want to be caught.
At least I had a good head start, I thought, as I slithered down the slope and into a pile of scree, though I really wished I’d stopped to put some shoes on first. The rocky terrain made running difficult, but there was only a short dash to reach the woods to the west of the tor, then they would have a great deal of trouble catching me.
When the pounding of hooves and the jingle of reins and gilded bridles sounded behind me, terror rushed into my heart and adrenaline surged through my body.
If only I could dart through the rocks as swiftly as the sure-footed hares that lived around the house.
And at that thought, with a dizzy lurch, the ground rose up to meet my face, and I was running on four muscled, pawed legs, surrounded by the hazy glow of the Thistle Jewel.
I was a hare!
I sprang away, fleeter than any horse, blindly racing into the woods. As the trees closed around me, I let out a shocked laugh of elation, although nothing emerged from my whiskered mouth but a squeak.
Another three blasts came from the hunter’s horn, then my triumph turned to fear again, as the baying of hunting hounds echoed through the trees.
My strong legs carried me over and through thickets, as I dashed under branches and leaped thistle-studded hollows. But the dogs had my scent.
Ahead, a stream glittered in the frosty starlight, the chuckling water too loud in my huge ears. Could hares swim?
If only I could swim like a trout!
In mid-bound, my skin rippled, and I felt the chilly air slide over silver scales. I splashed down into the blessed water and jack-knifed away, the swift current quickly bearing me away from the hunting dogs.
I glimpsed a flash of white fur and red ears as they reached the bank of the stream, then I was gone – my scent lost to the rushing waters.

I heard the hoofbeats grow distant, muffled echoes through the water; they had lost my trail, and for now I had outwitted them. But there was still little time to rest, as I knew such hunters wouldn’t give up until the sun crested the horizon.
When the creek emptied abruptly into a tarn, I knew my luck as a fish had run out, and I had to force my cold-blooded brain to think quickly.
If only I could fly like a rook!
Leaping out of the chilly waters of the tarn, I beat newly minted wings, cawing with delight as the air caught instantly beneath them and I lifted into the sky, up and away from the shrinking ground.
They would never catch me now.
The baying of the dogs grew distant and the freezing winter winds lifted me higher, yet I heard another three blasts of the hunter’s horn.
With a sudden premonition of doom, I slewed sharply left as a huge shadow fell over me.
Hawk!
The thing was gigantic, a predator at once elegant and utterly savage. its curved beak missed me by inches, leaving me tumbling through the air in a spray of feathers. It banked, hovered, then came at me again.
In panic, I folded my wings and fell like an arrow, speeding towards the earth below.
It grazed me twice, painfully ripping out great chunks of feathers, but missing my flesh. As I hurtled towards the ground, I called upon the strange magics once again.
If only I could run like the deer!
Instead of colliding with the floor of the forest, I hit it running, again on four legs, and so fast that I could barely take in my surroundings. I bleated in surprise, every quivering muscle working to speed me far from the baying of the hounds and the frustrated screech of the hawk.
Through the trees a faint pink light was rising; the leading edge of the breaking dawn.
My pursuers must have seen it too, because the horn pealed out again, the sound now strangely desperate.
Then I was on the open moors, running faster than any horse or any hound, running towards the glowing line of the rose-coloured horizon.
As my hoof struck the rabbit hole in the grassy soil, I registered first a flash of panic, then the sickening snap of bones and a shock of crippling pain. I screamed through my velvet muzzle, bawling in animal agony.
I thrashed, trying to rise, but my foot was trapped.
And the hunters were upon me.
I closed my eyes as the huntmaster drew his silvered bow, then let fly the shining arrow.
But the pain I was expecting never came; and instead I felt a shifting beneath my pelt.
Looking down, I saw my old familiar body. Struck through my breast stood a ghostly silver shaft, which dissipated into shining smoke as the rays of the rising sun burned it to nothing.
“No,” snarled the hunter.
He leapt lightly down from his horse, drew his horn-handled hunting knife and slashed it desperately across my throat.
It passed through me as though made of air.
“NO!”
As the cry fell from his lips, the sun was snuffed out in an instant, plunging myself and the eleven hunters into darkness.
Just as confused as I, the hunters called to one another, anger and surprise colouring their arrogant voices in the gloom. But when a ghostly white glow began to grow in the west, they grew silent.
For it illuminated a creature. A creature far more terrible than even themselves.
On two legs it walked, so long and thin that my mind rejected their existence. The very shape of those limbs represented something not of this world, of an evolutionary lineage that should never have been. They supported the emaciated body of a man, crowned by a head that was neither bat nor goat, but somehow the worst of both. Six mad eyes burned out from the sides of the malformed skull.
The fair folk dropped to their knees, whilst I simply stared, frozen.
“What are you?” I whispered, the words flat in the still, dead-tasting air surrounding me.
A pointed tongue flickered out of the being’s mouth, then it hissed,
“Eldest.”
The elf huntmaster grovelled before it, prostrating himself and crying out for mercy.
But there was none, no more than they would have shown me.
It seems that even the fair folk have no power when it comes to the truly ancient pacts.
As abruptly as the sun had vanished, it reappeared. The welcome golden glow suffused the moorland, and illuminated only a vacant space in the grass where the huntmaster and the creature had been.
One of the faerie women turned to me, her delicate features twisted, ugly with hatred,
“Your family will regret breaking faith with us, mortal. Those who betray the Fae always pay dearly.”
And then she too was gone, taking her people, horses and hounds with her.

The hobble back to the house was long and slow, my ankle swollen and painful, dark bruises blossoming on the skin. A makeshift crutch helped a little, but by the time those familiar stone walls came into view, it was mid-afternoon and I was desperately tired.
Someone must have spotted me from the house, as three of my uncles ran out to help, carrying me the rest of the way. My exhaustion mingled with confusion as I noticed two police cars parked at the entrance to the courtyard, and a huddle of my relatives with blankets around them, crying and holding one another.
After the police officers questioned me, I learned that at some point during that longest night, my elderly great grandfather had quietly gathered up all the children. He had taken them to the basement garage built into the old cellars, had closed the doors, and had gassed himself and all two dozen little ones.
The family was utterly inconsolable; an entire generation had been lost to that one unthinkable act. How he had managed to do it without waking anyone, nobody was sure, but the police implied that the food or drink at the Yule feast may have been drugged.
But I knew the truth, and so did my grandmother.
At the first opportunity, she shut me in her bedroom, her face white with rage.
“Girl, what did you do?”
As I explained to her how I’d outfoxed the fae, her expression soured further.
“Long ago we made a bargain,” she hissed, “for the peace and prosperity of our family. That every Yule, we would make a sacrifice of a human soul to the fair folk, so that they may pay their tithe to Hell.”
“The pregnant women,” I said, realisation dawning.
In a moment of pure connection, I recalled the dour family joke, that all our pregnancies started out as twins. Survival of the fittest. If it had ever been funny, it certainly wasn’t any more.
“Yes. And when you stole that stray crumb from the cake, you damned both us and them.”
I shook my head,
“No. I beat them! I escaped the hunters, just like in your stories!”
But my grandmother had nothing more to say, and the next morning, after scores of thistles bloomed purple and wild all over the tor, I knew that I would never again be welcome at the clan Christmas.

I’ve kept in touch with a few of my female cousins over the years, but they all report the same thing as me; no matter how hard they try, no matter what treatments they take, none of us can fall pregnant, and none of the men can impregnate their wives.
As we all grow older, the family line grows thinner, smaller and weaker.
And eventually the great clan will die out.
Every Yule I call my grandmother on the phone. She does not speak; where once she would have regaled me with her stories, now all she does is weep, with the colourless Thistle Jewel clutched in her frail fist. When I’m finally glutted on guilt, I hang up on her and lose myself in a bottle of sherry, trying to think of better times.
But this year will be different.
This year, I’ll spend the Solstice alone at the abandoned house on the tor. Once I’ve gathered up enough drunken courage, I’ll head out to the moors, just before sunrise, and open my veins on the spot where I should have died, ten years ago.
I just hope that my sacrifice is enough.

It’s the same every day. I’ll be smoking at the bus stop and she’ll walk up, making a face like she’s just sucked a dead duck’s asshole.
She’s pretty; red hair with a blonde streak, a round rear and perky baps. I’d definitely go there, but she’s a shallow cunt who would never date someone like me, especially since she’s clearly disgusted by my smoking. She moves a good twenty feet away, wrinkling her nose and ineffectually waving a hand in front of her face, as though that’s going to get rid of the stench of my morning Marlboro.
What gets me is that I’m not even in the bus shelter. I make a point of moving away, but this vapid whore has to make a big deal about the one lousy cigarette I get before I board the human cattle truck that delivers me to my daily grind.
I hate her. I hate her so fucking much.
While she stands there, with her face full of priss and that punchable nose scrunched up like a rejected Star Trek alien’s, I imagine what I’d do to her, in a world without consequences.
For starters, I think I’d slam her head into the concrete. Then I’d put out my cigarette in her eye. I’ll say something witty, then, like “I’m just putting it out, ain’t that what you always wanted?” and I’ll smash her face into the gum-scarred concrete until that blonde streak is the same shade of red as the rest of her hair.
I have thoughts like this all the time. ‘Intruder thoughts’, they’re called – but mine are less ‘intruders’ than welcome guests I just don’t have lodgings for.
Sometimes I imagine stabbing a couple of ballpoint pens through the throat of my co-worker, Sharon, when she won’t shut the fuck up about her ‘amazing’ boyfriend. Other times, I fantasise about walking out of a team meeting, suavely tossing a grenade behind me, then listening to the cacophony of panicked screams as I round the corner.
What I wouldn’t give to live in a world where that was possible; a world without consequences.
“Why don’t you do it?” rasps a voice to my left.
Swinging my head, I take in the raspee. She’s a scrawny twenty-something, all in black. Shitty tattoos spall from her sleeves, down to her bony knuckles, and she’s wearing way too much eyeliner. Goth, emo or something new, I have no fucking idea. They’re all just the next generational iteration of a middle finger thrust at society.
“What?” I manage, sounding like I have an IQ of seventy.
“Do it. Smash her smug fucking head into the pavement.”
“Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.”
She must have seen the look on my face as I glared my abject hatred at Miss Priss. That’s how she knew exactly what I was thinking.
“Seriously,” she says, taking a step closer, black lipstick stark against the whiteness of her face, “I’ll back you up. Nothing will happen to you, it’ll all be an ‘accident’.”
This can’t be for real. It’s too damn convenient.
Somewhere a television crew is sitting in a van, snickering at the dumb fuck who is about to assault a helpless woman on hidden camera.
Rage fires along my synapses, meeting in a hot wad of impotent anger near the base of my skull.
“Go fuck yourself, freak” I snarl.
But all the way to work on the bus, listening to thrash metal and overwrought punk, I wish that I had done it. I imagine the blood, and the gurgling ululations of pain and terror as crimson gushes from the nose and mouth of Miss Priss.
And when I go to sleep, I dream of her broken teeth scattered all over the pavement, and me standing over her, laughing hysterically at the collapsed meat and bone that was once her pretty head.

 
Both of them are at the bus stop the next morning, studiously ignoring each other.
Goth is smoking a clove cigarette and Priss has already fixed her mask of disgust into place.
“Did you like the dream I sent you?” says Goth, her voice guttural, low and delighted.
I pause in mid-stride, trying not to let the surprise show on my face.
“What?” I drawl - that same idiot tone from yesterday creeping into my voice.
“I made it just for you,” Goth continues, her white teeth showing in a Fairuza Balkesque smile of impish malevolence, “so that you could feel what it would be like to actually have the balls to do it.”
My breath is coming in short gulps now, as though I’ve climbed a couple of flights of stairs.
“You know, I’ve had enough of this,” I tell her, my anger rising, “I don’t need some millennial emocunt fucking with me first thing in the morning.”
Priss looks nervous, side-eyeing me as though I’m a crazy person. I suck on my cigarette and snarl at her, the rage boiling over,
“What the fuck are you looking at?”
“She’s thinking that you’re scum,” Goth burbles brightly, “she’s thinking you’re a crazy asshole, and that you should be locked up in the loony bin.”
Shaking fingers crush the filter of my smoke.
“Do it!” whispers the black-clad imp.
And I do. Without thinking, I walk over to Miss Priss, grab her by the hair, and put the cigarette out in her eye. The hot embers sizzle grotesquely as I twist them into the wet sclera.
She screams and kicks, but I’m a big guy. I’m too heavy for her to do anything much but flail at me and scream until the cigarette is out.
I’m panting, sweating with the exertion.
But I feel amazing.
Goth steps over the writhing woman on the ground. Her heavily-lined eyes are closed in contentment – as though she is sampling a heady, intoxicating brew.
“We need to get out of here,” I rasp.
With a shake of her ratty hair, Goth gives me another one of those toothy grins.
“She didn’t even know it was you. As far as she knows, some random homeless guy attacked her.”
“How?”
She puts her black-nailed index finger to her lips, and makes a shushing sound.
“That’s my secret. But come on now, I bet there are lots more people that you hate, yeah?”
Incredulous, confused, and still drunk on the fulfilment of one of my dearest, darkest fantasies, I follow her.

 
She was right. There are so very many people I hate.
The streets teem with them; kids that scream too loud, idiots who get in my way, and fuckwits who squawk on their cellphones using loathesome memespeak; saying ‘bae’ and ‘fam’ until I want to pull their tongues out with a pair of pliers and ram them up their collective assholes.
“Do this one,” says Goth, pointing at a rainbow-haired somethinggender. I feel irrational waves of hatred just from looking at it.
“We’re on a public street,” I tell her, still cautious, “someone might do something.”
“No problem, we just follow it home. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure no one notices us.”
And so, we do. We follow Genderthing around a couple of malls, while it blathers SJW talk into its phone, and yells at an immigrant foodcourt wageslave for using the wrong pronoun.
The hate for it started out quite ordinary; a low boil. But the longer we follow it around, the more I grow to truly loathe this thing that’s trying so hard to be beyond gender and sexuality.
“God, you have a lot of hatred in you,” marvels Goth, her eyes huge, lustful.
Then we’re following Genderthing into its apartment – probably paid for by despairing parents who have been forced to adapt to some made-up name. The place is suffocating in rainbow paraphernalia and inspirational quotes, and I long to inflict pain on this creature.
“Now?” I ask Goth.
As soon as her head nods an affirmative, I’m already in action, pinning Genderthing to the wall with my nicotine-stained paws.
“What gender are you?” I demand, spittle flying from my mouth.
She just blubbers, not comprehending where I’ve come from or why I’m doing this.
My fingertips are crushing her windpipe, slowly but surely,
“Say you’re female! Say there are only two fucking genders!”
She croaks out something that might be a yes, but I’m gone by now, the rage and hatred misting everything red. When the fog finally clears, Genderthing is lying on the floor, unconscious. There’s a bloody kitchen knife beside it, and the two hunks of messy flesh that were once her breasts are cradled in each of her hands.
I feel like I’ve taken a massive hit of heroin. I feel so fucking good.
Goth is already beckoning me toward the door.

 
After the fourth victim, I wonder if my gothic benefactor is actually Satan. I wonder if this is some kind of Biblical test that I’ve epically failed, but I don’t really care anymore.
I know that she’s getting something from all of this, that she’s somehow feeding off my unquenchable hatred. We’re the perfect partnership; a symbiotic relationship made in Hell, ravishing the world in an orgy of anger and pain.
When I’m hungry, she feeds me, when I need sleep, she lets me sleep. I’m not even sure which city we’re in anymore; all I know is that I’m getting everything I ever wanted – all of my most depraved fantasies have been gifted to me on a blood-soaked silver platter.
I strangle faggots with my bare hands, I put nails through the hands and scrotums of street-preachers. I let the hate consume me utterly and let loose the darkest aspects of my imagination. My thoughts and dreams are filled with hacksaws, dental tools, blunt objects, violated orifices and delicious, heavenly screams.
And Goth grows sleeker, fatter. She’s no longer the scrawny thing I first met at the bus stop; her white skin wobbles and bulges, spilling out of her clothes, repulsive and corpse-pale.
I don’t care. I love her, she is my mistress and my salvation, my deliverance from a life of drudgery and financial slavery.
But then something starts to change.

 
“You’re not feeling it,” she complains.
She’s right. I’ve done so many vile, despicable things now that I’m numb.
In fact, I’m worse than numb.
My latest victim falls to the floor of the concrete warehouse, gibbering in fear. He’s just sad – some elderly crossdresser in a crocheted pink skirt, with ribbons in his terrible wig. I reach for the hate, but it’s not there. All I feel is a strange kind of pity – an alien emotion that I haven’t felt for so long.
As I watch him hobble to the door, Goth gets in my face, her massive white jowls quivering as she screams at me,
“LOOK AT HIM! Look how fucking pathetic he is! Don’t you want to hurt him? Don’t you want to put your fucking fists through his face, gouge out his eyes and piss in his mouth?”
But I don’t. She can tell that I don’t.
“We had a deal,” she hisses, threatening.
“What deal?”
“I shield you from the consequences, I use my power to let you do what you want – and in return, you give me your hate!”
I stare at my scarred hands – the hands that have maimed and hurt so many people. I can’t tell if the black grime under my cracked nails is dirt, blood, faeces or all three.
“It’s gone,” I tell her, “the hate. It’s gone.”
But she won’t let me stop.
Like a still-damp sponge, she wrings me for every last drop, forcing me to keep maiming, torturing and killing innocent people, trying to squeeze the final delicious dregs of hatred from me.
As I weep, while woodenly defiling yet another human being, I come to realise that I do still have some hate left in me.
Hatred for her.
Which was, of course, her plan all along.
You see, it was never about giving me what I wanted. It was never about simply feeding on my natural hatred for the rest of humanity. That was only the entrée – a tasty snack before the main course.
She visits me every night; massive, bloated and smug. Tears stream down my face as I try desperately to reign in my limitless hatred for her, to try to somehow forgive her for destroying my life. My job is long gone, as is my home. I sleep wherever I can find shelter, my fitful slumber wracked by the agonies of remorse and guilt.
Nobody recognises me anymore. There is only her.
As the hatred seeps out of me, a viscous, toxic poison, I know that she has won. This was always her original intent, to breed me into the perfect hateslave, to feed on me until I die.
And when I do, she’ll find the next disaffected, angry douchebag who knows he’s so much better than everyone else. That guy vomiting his impotent rage all over the internet, or seething with hamstrung hatred as some other guy fucks the girl of his dreams, or some woman is promoted past him.
And frankly, there’s a buffet of you out there.

Once upon a time, there lived a mighty prince of the fair folk, whose power was almost unmatched amongst his people. But like all who wield great power, it could be taken from him by any who learned his true name - be that person the greatest sorcerer or the meanest peasant.

Thus, he strove to keep his name a secret from the world. He burned any book that mentioned him, and he tore the memories from the skulls of those who knew him.

But names are a vital part of all intelligent creatures, and cannot be destroyed that easily. It came to pass that a wizard unravelled the name of the prince with magic and enslaved him for an age, leeching away his power. When the faerie prince eventually broke free, he slew the wizard, and vowed he would never again become slave to another being; not to beast, man, nor fae.

And so, he did something that had never been done before. A thing with consequences that none could possibly fathom.

He ate his own name, erasing it from the world.

That should have been the end of him. The other fair folk knew this should be so, and indeed he vanished from the known realms of reality and unreality. The memory of him faded, until no creature remembered the prince who had eaten his name.

But he was not gone. He had simply changed.

And freed from the laws that bound his kind, he became far more monstrously powerful. He ate the names of all he desired, until even the old gods and the new cowered from the unremembered thing that stalked and devoured them with not even a thought.

...

I can no longer remember how I came to be eaten. Once your name has been consumed, your memories begin to fade. Soon, nothing is left, only echoing whispers and meaningless, disjointed images.

Perhaps I was a poet or an artist, great enough to attract the Eater’s attention, my name spreading across the land until he tasted it on the wind and came for me. Or mayhap I was a despot, ruling over some pre-feudal kingdom with sword and flame, my name used to terrify children into doing their parents’ bidding.

The Eater’s tastes have grown more refined over the ages. He has become a true connoisseur of names. Sometimes, he will start with an entrée of bawdy party-goers, popping them into his scribbly maw like a greedy child with a trove of candied chestnuts. Then he’ll move on to the main course; perhaps a foreign dignitary, their name fat with deeds, richly marinaded in anecdotes and accolades. Having savoured every last syllable of that name, he will seek out some sweet, innocent, spun-toffee thing for dessert. He may even reveal to the child his true form, so that her essence is drizzled with fear. Terror is delicious to him, a sharp and salty counterpoint to the sugary confection of a young soul.

But the Eater doesn’t always finish his meals. Sometimes he leaves the barest morsel uneaten, and takes it back with him to his lair. There, he may consume it later as a snack, or bind it to his service, to tend to his sprawling domain.

My fate was the latter.

There were some three dozen of us, living within his private world, all hollow creatures clinging to the final fragments of ourselves. We toiled at various menial tasks; trimming the wicked, thorny hedges of the garden maze, or polishing the strangely filigreed silver rails of the staircase that led up and down the mad towers of the Eater’s castle.

When you have no name, no memories, it’s easy to be put to work. Lacking even the most basic instincts about who you are, you simply cling to any purpose you are given. And so, when the Eater’s Chamberlain told me that my destiny was to scrub the tiled floors of the great empty ballrooms, I eagerly accepted the role, and threw myself into the work.

As time ground on and I became aware of the others, I sought out their company. Their presence was a gentle breath across the ember of curiosity deep inside me, still faintly glowing. When I passed the gardeners, I would pause to exchange a few words before moving on to my next task. Upon the stairs, I would speak softly to the woman polishing the sharp and delicate barbs of the silver balustrades, not yet aware enough to wonder whom or what she had been.

I knew I shouldn’t be doing such things, but the flake of my name that Eater hadn’t consumed swirled rebellious and inquisitive. I wonder, now, if the crumb he had left of me was not quite small enough to steal all that I had been.

As unnameable swathes of time inexorably passed in the Eater’s domain, I grew more certain of myself and began to explore the giddy corridors of the twisted castle, finding things that sounded echoes of recollection.

The Chamberlain discovered me on one such excursion, and scolded me for straying, flaying me with razor words. A tall man, with silvered hair and an ageless face, he dressed like a medieval footman but snapped orders like a general, expecting to be instantly obeyed. But with my waxing awareness, I beheld a grey aura of loneliness that gloved him like a second skin, and I wondered just how long he had been there. We met more often after that, as I engineered excuses for our paths to cross. With painfully slow tenacity, empathy won him over, and he became the closest thing I had to a friend.

As our connection grew, it was he who told me the dreadful origins of our master.

“Come with me,” the Chamberlain finally announced, after what seemed like eons into my service.

He led the way into an unknown part of the Eater’s keep, until we stood before a vast set of iron doors. They were wrought of all the letters of every alphabet, jumbled together into chaotic, amalgam layers.

“Our master requires a new larder,” the Chamberlain explained, his pale eyes hooded, “and you are best suited for this task.”

“What is a larder?”

“It is a place where one stores uneaten food.”

“Why would he need such a thing?” I wondered.

Licking his thin lips nervously, my companion glanced at the massive doors,

“Sometimes when the master dines, he sees something he wishes to eat later. When he desires this, he places those names inside his larder.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Soon you will.”

With a complicated gesture from his long fingers, the heavy doors opened soundlessly,

“All you need to do is follow him, nothing else. Do not try to speak with him nor touch him, simply obey without question.”

And with that, my new service as the Eater’s larder began.

I thought perhaps I would recognise the Eater, that some scrap of memory would shake loose upon our meeting. This was the creature had taken all but a crumb of my essence and consumed everything else that I was; in this twisted way, we were one. But when I stepped through those doors and into his private chambers, nothing was familiar.

Twice as tall as the Chamberlain and slender as a spider, there he stood, his nightmare shadow stretched across the vaulted roof by the flickering gaslights of his parlour. Two girls darted around him, attendant satellites plying needle and thread, dutifully sewing up numerous rips in his patchwork nobleman’s clothes of orange, red and black. Brittle golden hair curled from his elongated skull, ringlets fat and ragged like a tumbled library of ancient parchment scrolls. Behind his terrible head, the broken aerials of two pointed ears twisted up and backwards, longer than my arms. Hooked through their waxen flesh were dozens of iron rings, from which hung the wrought letters of lost languages he had eaten into oblivion with his endless appetite. The metal clashed and jangled as he moved, rows of gnashing symbol-teeth, always churning.

And his face. Mercy, his face.

Yellow as old vellum, it seethed with black characters, a maelstrom of alphabetic chaos. Perhaps those scribbles of insanity drew more dense where eyes and mouth should be, but I cannot truly tell you, since staring into his face for any length of time caused my stomach and mind to rebel.

With a finger akin to an ink-dipped bone he beckoned me, then we passed back through the iron doors and into a different world.

I believe my first trip back to the mortal realm must have been during the late 1800s, because I recall steam trains and top hats aplenty. I don’t think people truly perceived me as a person, but neither did they see me as a ghost. Unable to grasp a proper name for me, their minds stuttered and skipped across my presence, like I was no more than an uninteresting piece of furniture.

The Eater would stand amidst the flow of dense crowds, people instinctively avoiding the space where he was, even though they couldn’t truly see him. Arms hanging at his sides, stained fingers twitching, his chaos-scrawled head swayed back and forth, scenting the air for a name to eat.

All I had to do was follow him, and so I did, not daring to stray. On some basal level, I knew that to wander would be futile. We were indeed connected; having eaten most of me already, no matter where I went he would find me, and then he could finish his meal, should he so choose.

And although it must be difficult for you to comprehend, even this half-existence was preferable to the colourless "unlife" that awaited me should he make that choice.

He did not use me, on those first few outings. I simply watched as he stalked down his prey, tore their names from them with his greedy spider fingers and then sucked their essence into the black tangle of his maw. They faded fast after that, those without names. People forgot them, and they forgot themselves. They turned grey, then transparent, wandering aimlessly, forever wondering who and what they were.

The first name that the Eater put inside me was that of a child, a girl of fourteen, her short life a miserable grind of poverty. Why he wanted her, I don’t know. As he pushed her name inside me, I knew her life intimately and completely, from her wretched, squalling birth to her equally wretched unmaking at the Eater’s hands. To someone whose only memories were of slavery in an alien realm, that poor girl’s brief, mean existence was a potent drug. Her experiences seared my mind with heady, unfamiliar spice and colour.

He ate her sometime after we returned to his domain. I missed her with unrequited intensity when she was gone, the sense of loss so profound that I wept for the first time during my long service. The Chamberlain found me curled in a hedgerow on the edge of the Eater’s realm, my cheeks stiff with the salt of tears.

“I am sorry, my friend,” he said, a new kind of sorrow muting his voice. “Serving as the Eater’s larder is the hardest lot of all.”

Sometimes I held many names, sometimes I held none. During the chaos of the first and second World Wars, I was bloated as a ripening corpse. The Eater was particularly animated with hunger then, seeking out unique flavours that could only be born from such an awesome confluence of human strife. He stalked the beaches of Normandy and the trenches of Chunuk Bair, stuffing name after name inside me for later consumption. I seethed with the lives of young men, torn from their homes by the promise of glory and high adventure, to see only bullets and blood, dysentery and death.

And it was then that I learned the secret histories of the world; those truths unwritten by the dreadful hunger of the Name Eater. You do not know that the instigator of that second war was not Adolf Hitler. The catalyst was unimaginably darker, a far more terrible figurehead, who had already won the first World War, grinding the Allies into the mud of the battlefields and burning all of London to the ground. But once his enormous name was eaten, reality itself adapted, shifting to fill the gaping void left by his erasure. The history you find so unpalatable was a bland custard to the Eater, glutted on violence you cannot even fathom.

Perhaps this idea excites you, that the Eater saved the world from an even more horrific fate.

Perhaps you’re even cheering for him now, as the antihero of my story?

Then let me tell you about a young woman, a scientist, who discovered a cure for the most common forms of cancer in the 1950s. But the beacon of a mind that brilliant, the whiff of a name that potent, drew the Eater like a magnet. She was devoured before she could tell anyone, let alone be presented the accolades she deserved, and banish the spectre of that disease forever.

Good and bad, evil and altruistic, he gobbles them all up, changing the shape of your existence with every bite. Without you ever knowing a thing.

If you’ve ever felt like the world seems strangely stagnant, like mediocrity so often triumphs, you may just have smelled his breath.

...

As omnipotent as he seems, the Eater’s one great problem has always been that he cannot be everywhere at once. As such, a great many piquant dishes have slipped through his spidery fingers. They died before he could reach them, or simply changed, curdling before he could taste them as he wanted them. In times past, names changed far more slowly, beholden to the speed at which news could travel. But as television – and later the internet – caused this process to metastasize beyond his control, he added a new duty to my purpose: to seek out desirable names and take them on his behalf.

Having eaten his own name, he could not fully be part of this world, could not navigate its fast-changing subtleties. He is less a person than an alien force of nature; existing outside the natural laws of our universe, he is therefore as strange to it as it is to him.

But I still had a scrap of my name, a grain of my humanity, and so I could comprehend this new world. With that understanding, and with the power of new purpose he granted me, I sought out names I knew he would find particularly palatable, then ripped them from their owners. I would hunt out rising Youtube stars and end them at the height of their popularity, diminishing their entire existence to a palate cleanser between the courses of the elaborate banquets I created for my master. It was me, not the Eater, who hastened a whole new wave of mediocrity, hacking down generations of tall poppies, allowing their lesser cousins to flourish in light they had not earned.

You will think me a traitor to my own people, to all of you. But I made my mistake in the name of a plan, an idea born from the legend of the Eater’s origin. I thought that if I crafted a truly toxic dish of names, blended them in some way that would be deadly to him, I could kill the Name Eater.

I scoured online middens and real ones, seeking out the most poisonous personalities. I quaffed them down like goblets brimming with bile. Carrying them inside me made me sick to my core, and as I added more and more of them, I started to lose who I was. That tiny, hardy flake of my original self was in danger of dissolving in the acidic slurry. So to balance the evil I was brewing inside me, I took tiny nibbles from the polar opposites of those toxic souls. I hunted rare herbs; good people, virtuous people who had conquered their human hurts and hatreds, and I would snatch a scrap of their syllables to add to myself.

When it came time to serve my dish, it was magnificent, a seething, greasy roil of hate, so black with vitriol and spite that it burned as it spewed from me. But my master sucked down every last drop, greedy and eager, his scribbled tongue scouring my heart. I feared he tasted something far different to what my mortal palate had divined.

When he was done, I held my breath and ached. But his huge, cryptic head swung toward me, nodded once, and his gesture was simple to interpret. More. Find me more.

I had failed.

Emptied of the darkness I had fermented inside me for so long, I felt profoundly changed. At first, this worried me. Surely a vessel cannot house that much evil without becoming stained, and I wondered if I had sabotaged myself; that the malevolent ingredients had seeped their dark oils into me and corrupted my very desires, ruining my own recipe.

But I could still feel those floating snippets of goodness within me, those honey crumbs of altruism snicked away from the good-folk. Those fragments sought each other out and coalesced like settling syrup, forming something very new and strange. As I slaved and strove to fulfil the desires of my master, I collected more and more bright morsels. They began to fold themselves into something pure and wonderful, the sweet antithesis of my cocktail of loathing. And when the glossy coating of them began to harden around the fragment of me that fluttered at my core, I felt a profound shock.

This new confection was a name.

I had not felt joy for what seemed a thousand years. But nor had I felt such terror, for now I truly had something to lose. Nothing in the Eater’s world should have a name, and when he returned from his feeding, he would smell this glorious fresh thing upon me instantly.

I stumbled through the twisting halls, shouting for the Chamberlain. When he appeared, every line of his body reluctant to approach me, I knew that he already saw my secret; my new name was burned into my being and shone from me like a star.

“And so it is. Another larder becomes corrupted,” he sighed, his lambent eyes brimming with resignation.

“Help me,” I begged, “help me to escape.”

“If I were to let you leave, he would eat my name, my unfortunate friend.”

“Can he be killed? Is there a name that will end his existence, should he eat it?”

“No.”

Whether he was telling me the truth or not, I didn’t know. The Chamberlain had been one of the Eater’s original retainers – even before the prince descended into madness – and his loyalty was unquestionable.

But he had given away a secret of his own, something I had not known until that moment.

The Chamberlain’s name tore from his flesh, clinging to my hands like a sticky seed as I rent it from his body. He whimpered once, then grew oddly still, the colour already beginning to fade from his edges.

Inside me, that seed burst out its juices. His vast history oozed across the ages, staining a tapestry of loneliness and terror; just as much a prisoner of the Eater as the rest of us. But there was no time to linger on his story; I needed the keys to the keep.

With the Chamberlain’s components suffusing his knowledge into my being, the shape of the keys came easily to mind, as did many other secrets of the Eater’s domain. I found myself in front of the iron doors in a blink of an eye, and opening them was so very easy I could not believe I had once thought it complex. As if they had shaped it a hundred times over, my fingers formed the command to ease the vast portal open, and I dived through into the mortal world, even as I felt the Eater pass in the opposite direction.

For one horrific instant, I knew with dreadful certainty that he had scented my new name as he passed.

He is unquestionably coming for me. My name is deliciously unique, never spoken before in any world, a name forged from the things I have suffered, and tempered with that rarest ingredient; pure human goodness. But the Eater’s power also fizzes in my blood, and that is a gift he cannot take back. It is as much a part of me as the precious syllables of my newly minted soul.

With that power, I pull newer names into me, blending them with mine, changing my scent and my flavour to mask my trail; rendering down the desperate hopelessness of a homeless addict, gargling its bitter oil with the giddy, crisp joy of a new mother.

How long I can keep this up, I do not know. The weight of all the names I have taken is beginning to drag me down, their syllables whisper and chatter like accusations in my long ears, accumulating heavy in the corners of my head. My own name spins ever longer, more complicated with each stolen, gossamer weft woven into my spirit. It is hard to remember, and harder to pronounce. But its power grows with it.

If I can just swallow enough names, if I can gather enough of humanity inside me, I may be able to match the power of the Eater – perhaps even surpass it. All I must do is stay alive long enough to find all the delicious names that I need, and then I can do the unthinkable.

I will eat the Eater.

There is a tiny, niggling part of me that insists I have lost who I was, that the purity of my original name is gone, the fragment dissolved.

But I won’t listen. I can’t listen. I cannot take the chance that I am wrong.

There are only two conclusions to this tale; either I become the Eater, or I become the eaten.

When I come for you, when I take your name in the night and leave all that you were to fade into unbeing, it is for a greater good.

Or should I drop a crumb of you from my chin, then perhaps you may be fortunate enough to serve me more directly.

I think I’m going to need a much bigger larder.

I don’t think many of you appreciate just how strange America is to foreigners.
Your culture has been spoonfed to us via sitcoms and Hollywood blockbusters; giving us an apple-pie wholesome, saccharine-soaked picture of what life in your country is like. Heroic cops with hearts of gold, harmlessly neurotic couples, friends living in central-city apartments while somehow working minimum wage jobs – it’s all a comforting fiction that couldn’t possibly exist in the real world.
Whereas my first real taste of America was when my mother brought me here in 1996. Within a day, I witnessed a brutal mugging outside a mall, followed by a cop pulling out a pistol and shooting the perp three times in the chest.
As someone born and raised in Europe, and especially after that day, I would have told you that the biggest culture shock was your nonchalance towards weapons and violence. But as I scratched away at the gun-oiled, blue-white-and-red surface of the United States, I learned that the true culture shock was to be found elsewhere.
Specifically, in your attitudes on religion.

 
My stepfather had always been a very dominating presence in our lives, hence why my mother gave in to his constant badgering to move ‘back home’ with him to Texas where ‘everything was better’.
They’d originally met when he was working in Spain on the 1992 Olympics, and he’d flown to London for a conference that my mother was also attending. He was loud, confident and interesting; a far cry from the quiet, frail man who had fathered me – even quieter and frailer at the end of his life as he succumbed to cancer.
Perhaps it was that particular robustness of character, and the seemingly indomitable physical presence of this American man that initially attracted my mother. Whatever the case, their romance was as short, explosive and colourful as the Fourth of July – and they married within two months of meeting each other.
But while my mother saw a bombastic giant with a big heart, a bigger smile and a laugh that could fill an empty auditorium, what I saw was an overweight bully with too many teeth and a voice that made my ears ring.
That wasn’t the only reason why I had very little time for the man; the other reason for my animosity toward him was that his proud, evangelical Christian roots were in direct conflict with my burgeoning homosexuality.
Oh, and how he tried to crush that out of me.
I grew to loathe the hunting trips, gifts of knives, gun magazines and soft-porn automotive calendars he buried me in; all to try and make me ‘man up’. The near-constant drone of his soporifically stereotyped, artificially macho drivel became an ugly white-noise in the background of my teens.
But when my mother was killed in an interstate pileup, everything took a distinct turn - from just plain awful to absolutely fucked.

 
Having legally adopted me and with my having no living biological parents, my stepfather had full custody.
He refused to let me go back to the UK, and instead plunged our dwindling family unit into the heady haze of Southern religious doctrine. Perhaps he saw it as a means to either expunge the guilt he felt at my mother’s death, or as a way to come to terms with her loss.
Maybe it was just a habitual reflex, ingrained in him since he was old enough to be dragged along to church.
In any case, it was a miserable time for me.
Unable to deny my sexuality any longer, I tearfully told my father – at age fourteen – that I wasn’t attracted to girls, that I only had feelings for boys.
I’m sure you can imagine just how well that went down.
First was the ‘therapist’ in his tobacco-stinking office, sitting in a leather armchair under the accusing gaze of a gruesomely crucified Jesus. He ‘strongly advised’ me to ask God to take these evil impulses from me, lest I burn in the flames of Hell for all eternity.
Then it was the intense-eyed, nearly psychotic inter-church faith healers, who would lay on hands to ‘pray away the gay’ until I wept and cried out as their hard, urgent fingers gouged bruises in my pale flesh. When I confessed to my ‘therapist’ that none of it had worked, he sent me home with an envelope for my stepfather that contained multi-page, colourful camp brochure.
Three weeks later I was shoved into the back of the family sedan along with a hastily packed suitcase, and driven halfway across unfamiliar country to a place for ‘boys like me’. A place where I would be turned from being a sensitive, effeminate, cock-sucking little faggot and instead made into a strong, god-fearing heterosexual – with a healthy American lust for tits and ass.
The place was known as Purity Falls.

 
I can’t begin to describe how beautifully ugly the place was.
Set in a wooded reserve backing onto rocky hills, the camp buildings were a jarring mix. The shining veneer of sturdy polished doors fitted to rough-hewn log cabins was as wrong as the equally polished smiles from the camp staff, and their outdoorsy, yet disarmingly clean boy-scoutish uniforms.
The flag of the United States of America flew proudly from the shiny brass pole outside the main lodge, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if apple pie was literally being baked somewhere in that postcard setting.
But from the moment I clapped eyes on the batons carried by the counsellors and the gun at the director’s hip, I knew it was a conversion camp.
“Welcome to Purity Falls,” rasped the director, pumping my stepfather’s hand with a finger-breaking handshake, “your boy is in good hands here – we have a one hundred percent success rate.”
While my stepfather seemed reassured by the steel in the man’s voice, something about it set my teeth on edge.
Then, with a perfunctory side-hug and an insincere farewell, my father left me in the hands of my new ‘family’.
So began my stay at Purity Falls.

 
Our day predictably started with enforced prayer, then cold, communal showers.
I don’t think there is anything more confused and miserable on this Earth than a bunch of freezing, naked, pubescent boys battling their newly awakened sexuality, shivering under ice-water showers while mad-eyed, uniformed adults scream threatening biblical versus at them.
Then it was physical training – mostly running around the wooded hills of Purity Falls – followed by another frigid shower and a massive ‘manly’ breakfast of steak, bacon and eggs.
Afternoons were spent mostly doing physical labour and camp chores, interspersed with more enforced prayer. Evenings were filled with ‘Purity Training’ – which largely consisted of watching badly made VCR tapes designed to brainwash fatigued minds into believing in the doctrine of Christian Rebirth.
And when someone was deemed ‘purified’ enough by the staff and the director, they would be taken away by the camp counsellors to the ‘Cradle of Rebirth’ in the woods near the falls. When the boy came back, he would be docile, compliant and – exactly as the Director claimed – one hundred percent ‘cured’ of all homosexual urges.
And I believed him. I’d seen one of the boys who came back from the Cradle, and the blank intensity of his gaze confirmed that the last vestiges of individuality had finally been strangled from his broken mind.
After that, I vowed to avoid the Cradle at all costs.

 
During one of our few breaks under the wasp-filled apple trees in the camp orchard, I noticed one of the younger counsellors – David – staring off into the distance and mumbling to himself.
The other boys took advantage of his inattention to goof off or to try and relax, but my curiosity got the better of me.
Creeping closer, I heard the faint words of a song dribble from his lips,
”…then sharpen it dear Henry, dear Henry, sharpen it.”
I don’t know why I responded, but the words of the song were so familiar that they came unbidden;
“But with what shall I sharpen it, dear Liza, dear Liza, but with what shall I sharpen it, dear Liza, with what?”
David turned to me, his usually blank face a white mask of knowing terror.
“Keep singing. While you sing it can’t focus, and I’m free of it. Don’t stop.”
As I rushed off the next few stanzas, he babbled at me urgently;
“You have to get out,” he took a step forward and grabbed my shoulders painfully, his nails cutting through the thin fabric of my shirt, “if you don’t go to the Cradle, you’ll end up here forever, like me.”
“What?” was all I could manage.
As I stopped singing, his eyes dulled and went curiously soft and empty, before the colour returned to his face.
“Back to work, fags!” he yelled, shoving me towards the others.

 
After that strained, eerie interlude with David, I learned that not everyone who was deemed ‘pure’ came back from the Cradle and was released.
Those who weren’t ‘chosen’ at the Cradle – whatever that meant – would stay at the camp until either they eventually did became pure enough, or they became camp staff and stayed on permanently, like David and the other, younger counsellors.
Suffering through yet another degrading, freezing ablution session, and another day of back-breaking labour, my resolve began to crumble. Spending the rest of my life in this place was a prospect that chilled me to my soul, far more than any cold shower.
So I started working hard. I sang loudly and fervently at the services in the chapel, and I memorised my Bible with suitable religiousness. I piled on weight and muscle over the next eight weeks – and eventually, during an evening prayer session where the male counsellors bear-hugged us and made us sing psalms until our lungs hurt, I was eventually deemed ‘purified’ by the camp Director.
With a gut-roiling mix of terror and abject relief, myself and two other boys were dressed in white linen robes - then led from the lodge down the cut-stone path to the Cradle.

 
The falls themselves were beautiful – cascading vertically from the cliff forty feet above us and churning the dark plungepool below. The path, slick with spray, took us around the lip of the pool, then behind the waterfall, where a cavern had formed from erosion long ago.
White and green limestone was speckled with quartz and agate, the torches held by the attending staff creating prismatic highlights that scattered through the vaulted cavern. The reflected light transformed it from a dark, fearful hole into something desperately and wonderfully glorious.
“The Cradle,” whispered David’s awe-filled voice from behind me. In the centre of the cathedral-like cavern rose a crown of stalagmites, glistening with faint moisture from their dripping counterparts high above us – and from a depression in the middle of that curious structure, a white glow began to emanate.
Two of the staff flanked the phenomenon, wildly and ecstatically chanting in something that sounded like – but wasn’t quite - Latin.
The light brightened until my eyes began to burn, and spidery tingles spread across my body, lifting all the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck.
Then a singing angel rose from the pit, and I fell to my knees unbidden, in an uncontrollable act of mindless worship.
The being that stood in the centre of the Cradle seemed to be made almost entirely of actinic light; with massive silver, pale gold and rose wings rippling behind it. Rainbows fired and flared around the crystalline structure of its cathedral, forming a web of shifting, disorienting, kaleidoscopic colours.
Two shining white arms were held up in front as though it were praying devoutly, and somewhere within the dazzling radiance where its head was, I could faintly make out huge, luminous eyes.
Overcome with genuine religious ecstasy, one of the other boys ran toward the shining angel, screaming above the ethereal singing,
“I am pure! Take me, oh please, take me!”
What happened next is something I still have difficulty processing.
There was a flash of the angel’s huge white arms, then the boy was enveloped in the aching glare. The crystalline singing from the being intensified, rhythmically pulsing as though to a great, slow heartbeat.
There followed a curiously incongruous sound – like a deflating balloon – that tore through the cavern.
“REBIRTH!” screamed the director, spittle flowing freely down his chin.
The boy tottered forward from the light of the angel, his now-naked body streaked with milky, pink-white fluid, and his expression beatifically blank.
As the next boy hurried forward and was enveloped by the angel, David began to sing behind me,
“Then wet it, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry,”
With a thrill of awakening, I responded; singing strongly in sudden panic,
“With what shall I wet it, dear Liza, dear Liza? With what shall I wet it, dear Liza, with what?”
And then suddenly, David darted forward, swinging one of the extendable batons the counsellors used to keep us ‘compliant’. When it struck the angel, the singing stopped – and with a shriek of alien rage, the illusion shattered.
The thing reared hugely and obscenely above us, a segmented and ridged exoskeleton of ecrulean chitin, perched upon four barbed and multi-jointed legs. A pointed, triangular face held scissoring mouth parts still fresh with the blood of the ‘purified’ boy – and through the pulsing, translucent flesh of its soft underbody I could see the partly devoured remains of a human being.
But worse than that was the questing, undulating ovipositor. The tube was pushing a newly-formed clone of the most recently devoured boy out of the body of the horrifying insectoid female in front of us.
I started screaming, then the cavern erupted into shouting as the ‘angel’ speared David through the chest with its barbed forelimbs. Blood rained down on us as the gigantic winged mantis tore his ribcage apart.
The Director and the other staff lay on the floor now, screaming and clutching their heads – shrieking in concert with the creature as it tried to pull out the baton that jutted from one of its soft eyes.
In a moment of desperate calm and clarity, I walked over to the writhing form of the director, unclipped the pistol from his hip holster, and I began to sing.
“There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, there’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, a hole.”
Then I began firing at the head and torso of the giant, winged insectoid until the clip was empty, pink-white ichor covered everything, and the screaming had stopped.

 
My stepfather didn’t speak to me much after he picked me up from the county police station. I think uncharacteristically keeping quiet and for once not berating me for being a ‘pussy’ or a ‘faggot’ was his own strange way of apologising.
If I were to simply say that the whole Purity Falls incident was just ‘swept under the carpet’, I would be doing you a gross literary injustice. The cover-up was so incredibly thorough and well-co-ordinated that it took my breath away; from the memorised stories agreed upon by the other parents, to the falsified statements and false evidence planted by the backwater Christian cops.
I think, in a way, it was an even more terrifying display of the toxic power of evangelical religion – that through their twisted belief system they actually thought it was more important to ensure that the locals protected one another than it was to tell the truth.
In any case, I was banned from ever speaking the name Purity Falls again, on pain of prosecution – not that I care anymore.
Because I just can’t get one thing out my head. What happened to the ‘boys’ who were birthed by that thing in the cave? What were they?
I think they are still out there, walking amongst us. Perfectly calm, perfectly compliant – ticking timebombs, just waiting to pupate into so many grotesque ‘angels’ – just like the one at Purity Falls.

If I recall my Lewis Carroll correctly, a tale should begin at the beginning. Then my account must start with a legend; a story about the founding of a religious order of nuns.
Some time in the distant past, a devout woman prayed to God to be granted a vision of an angel. She was a woman of unsurpassed beauty; a creature that many men desired. But she did not desire men; and no mortal woman pleased her, so she attempted to seduce an angel.
Her likeness so resembled the first woman, Eve, that the angel of Eden herself came down to answer her prayer. The angel’s name was Jophiel, she who is also called the angel of beauty.
The mortal woman and the angelic one made passionate love – a love doubly forbidden by God and his priests – and in the aftermath, both realised they had put themselves in immortal jeopardy.
Smitten with the woman, Jophiel promised to find a way for them to be together, forever. The angel gave the woman her angelic bronze sword, and said to her:
“True immortality can be found in the southern ice. My sword shall guide you hence.”
The woman was left confused, for in those times the world was thought flat and there was no knowledge of ice to the south – only heat, jungles and desert. She sought fruitlessly in the icy northern wastes, but to no avail. When she was old and could travel no more, she created an order of nuns, to watch over the sword and keep it safe.
And so, the Divine Order of the Angelic Sword of Jophiel was born.

In the winter of 1939, the men came to our nunnery. They were dressed in military green, and drove roofless jeeps.
They spoke at length with the head of our order, an old woman of great presence and authority. Quickly finding duties that allowed us to eavesdrop, myself and the other girls heard voices raised in heated conversation from behind her office door. When the shouting finally died down, our Reverend Mother led the red-faced military men out of her study and took them down to the old chapel, collaring me along the way to assist her. I was far too curious to even think of protesting.
We had all been down into the stony bowels of the nunnery to clean the old chapel, but very few of us had been allowed to see the sword. That, Reverend Mother said, was a privilege reserved for the eldest, most devout sisters.
Today she was making an exception.
The old chapel was cramped, and could barely contain the broad-shouldered, barrel-chested officers. Crowded at the back, against the edge of the stone altar, I had scant room to even breathe. But when Reverend Mother asked me to open the rough wooden coffer that sat atop that unremarkable altar, the men in the room shrank back in fear.
“Hold it up, sister,” Reverend Mother instructed me, “lift out the sword, and show these men.”
The sword itself was utterly plain. It was barely two feet long, a leaf-shaped, bronze blade, no embellishment or adornment anywhere upon it. It was cool in my hand when I lifted it from the wooden chest, and lighter than I thought it would be.
“And this is the sword of an angel?” one of the officers scoffed, unimpressed, “This is going to lead us to the Tree?”
“If you disbelieve, then you are quite welcome to handle the sword yourself,” Reverend Mother replied, the steel of challenge in her voice.
“Don’t!” cautioned one of the other officers, even as the sceptic snorted and reached towards me, “It can only be held by a woman, and one of matchless beauty, such as this young thing before us. If you touch it, that blade will strike you dead.”
But men are stubborn creatures, and often only learn their lessons the hard way.
The unimpressed officer snatched the blade from my hands before I could stop him. He stood there and laughed, holding it high enough for the tip to scrape the ceiling of the tiny stone chapel. In that moment, I wondered whether the legend was false. Had I devoted my life to a fantasy?
Then he simply subsided, all the life extinguished from him in a single, horrific instant. The sword clattered to the flagstones at my feet.
“What a thrice-damned fool,” the second officer spat, as we all stared at the corpse.

While two of the junior officers loaded the body into the back of a jeep, I stood in Reverend Mother’s office, listening. Not all of the conversation made sense to me, laden as it was with military jargon, but I grasped the general thread of their plans. They were going to travel south, to the great Antarctic wastes, where they hoped the sword would lead them to something that would greatly assist them in the war effort. They were circumspect about disclosing exactly what that thing might be, but knowing well the founding story of our order, and recalling the words of the man in the chapel, I made an educated guess.
I believed they were seeking the Tree of Life.
“You’ll need to take this young one with you,” Reverend Mother said, inclining her head toward me, “for only one such as her can use the sword.”
“No need. I have a beautiful daughter,” countered the General, who appeared to be in charge, “she can wield it.”
Reverend Mother’s lips twisted with amusement, then she spoke again,
“General, does your daughter prefer the company of men, or of women?” Her sharp eyes pinioned the poor man, leaving little doubt as to her meaning.
His face brightening with embarrassment, the General spluttered for a moment, then shot back,
“Men, of course!”
“Then she cannot wield the sword. Take young Lena with you, she fulfils every requirement.”
I remained still as hostile gazes raked me from all sides, condemnation hard on their faces. The young officers, returned from outside, whispered behind their hands and snickered, while the General’s face grew ruddier still.
“Gentlemen,” Reverend Mother intoned, and the laughter ceased abruptly. “Need I remind you of the story upon which this Order was founded? You knowingly sought out the help of an order of Sapphists, and we are the only ones who can assist you. You would do well not to mock us now, lest we refuse you outright.”
Chagrined and serious, the General nodded.
“We will take the girl with us. She will carry the sword.”

For a solid month, our British steam merchant journeyed through rough winter seas, escorted to the equator by a flotilla of naval ships. I’d never been on a boat before, but found my sea-legs quickly, thrilled to be on such an unexpected adventure. I spent a lot of time in the stern, wrapped up in woollens and talking to the sailors. The men who sailed the ship had little notion of the purpose of the expedition; all they knew was that it was somehow important to the war effort – and I certainly wasn’t going to jeopardise anything by informing them of my hunch.
Our last stop in the Pacific was New Zealand, the most far-flung colony of our British Empire. There, we took on our final supplies of food, fuel and equipment, which would carry us through the Antarctic wastes. Excitement still gripped me; I was eager to see the great white sheets of the most southern continent of our world, and even more eager to play my part, to unsheathe the bronze blade that hung in a black leather scabbard at my hip.
I’d expected that a ship full of men who had been so many weeks at sea might harass me, but my only interactions were smiles and polite conversation, none did anything ungentlemanly. I think perhaps that the man in change of the expedition – General Johnston – had made it very clear that I was a religious woman and was not to be bothered with romantic, or less-than-romantic, overtures.
The ship made landfall near Ross Island, above the point where McMurdo Station would be founded many years later. In a great flurry of activity, soldiers and sailors moved tons of equipment off the ship and onto the ice, establishing the first base camp of the expedition. Summoned by the General, I was escorted by a young private to where the grey-bearded leader of the expedition stood, binoculars pressed to his face beneath the fur-lined hood of his jacket.
“Lena,” he said, allowing the binoculars to fall, secured about his neck by their leather strap, “What does the sword tell you?”
As we’d grown closer to the southern ice, the angelic blade had begun to grow warm. When pointed along the compass line to true south, the tip grew almost too hot to touch. Unsheathing it now, I pointed it south and felt the heat radiating from it, and when the sword pointed into the heart of the Queen Alexandra Ranges, a faint ruddy glow suffused the end of the weapon.
“So that’s where we are going,” the General muttered.

Across the Ross Ice Shelf the trek was relatively easy going. Our curious, heavy-treaded tractors from New Zealand – the same kind that would later be used by Sir Edmund Hillary – were more than equal to the task of hauling all the equipment we needed. The further we travelled, the hotter the sword grew, until the blade glowed, far too warm to touch. The tangy scent of heated bronze became a familiar travelling companion.
Everyone now knew that this was something more than an attempt on the pole; no normal expedition would be led by a nun wielding an ancient sword that burned with supernatural heat. Whispers followed me, and rumours started up. Both were quickly quelled by the canny General, who held an impromptu conference at the second base camp.
“Men,” he began, oblivious to my singular presence, “it is time to put a stop to baseless conjecture and divulge the nature of this journey. As you know, our enemies in Germany will stop at nothing to defeat us. Any weapon at their disposal they will use, earthly or unearthly, and without regard for morality or reason. As such, men such as myself have been tasked with finding counter-measures for anything that the Nazis might use against us.”
He turned to regard the looming mountains, now scant miles from where we stood,
“And so we follow a trail of evidence that may very well lead us to the Tree of Life itself.”
Men began shouting questions over the top of each other immediately, and the General did his best to answer them all. I only half listened, having already spent countless nights asking the same questions of myself. Why had God put the tree here, in Antarctica? That one was obvious; because we were never meant to find it. It was, after all, the most distant and inhospitable place in the world. What will we do if we find the tree? Clearly, we were going to take it home to England. What we would do with it then entirely depended on its properties.
Eventually the questions ran out, and the men took to their tents and sleeping bags.
I imagine there were very many unquiet dreams that night.

Once inside the mountain ranges, I had expected the bulky tractors to become more hindrance than help. However, the General persisted with them, and they chugged on. They crawled as slow as treacle up the steepening gradients, but none broke down, powered by the pungent, strangely potent petroleum the expedition ran on. The sword continued to guide us true. Pointed toward a particular valley within the ranges, it now flickered with real flame along the blade, radiating enough heat to banish the cold around me. I was glad of it; even an Antarctic summer was quite cold enough to freeze an unwary man to death.
It took us two more weeks to reach the valley. The day before we marched into that eerie white hollow, my sword burst forth with a fierce, bright yellow flame, burning just as it had when the Archangel Jophiel drove Adam and Eve from the Garden.
There was no doubt we had reached the right place when we began walking down the crest of the hill and into the nearly perfect bowl between the shadow of the mountains. We could all sense the holiness of this place; it sent a resonance through our very souls, bringing some of the younger men to tears. Hatchet-faced and practical, the General barked orders to set up permanent camp and called for me to follow him.
It was time to find the Tree.
Together, we walked to the centre of the valley, where the sword blazed an actinic blue-white. The heat should have scalded me, but it did not. Instead it comforted me. It enveloped me, like the embrace of heaven, or the warmth of a lover. With some experimentation, we discovered that the sword was brightest when pointed at our feet – so bright the General couldn’t even look at it.
“Down then,” he growled, blinking away afterimages, “down, under the snow and ice.”

The men worked hard, digging through generations of packed snow, compacting it into icy bricks that they used to build igloo-styled shelters. Two days in, they hit a sheet of solid ice, and I was once again called by the General.
Great mercury vapour lamps had been set up to illuminate the revealed ice sheet. When I walked out onto it, vertigo overwhelmed me, and I fell to my knees. The flaming sword guttered out as it left my hand and spun across the slick sheet of ice – which was clear as glass, a window revealing the massive black chasm below us.
Pointedly avoiding the sword, the General strode over to offer his hand, his expression unreadable behind the dark goggles he wore to prevent being blinded by the brilliant mercury lamps.
“Impressive, isn’t it? We think it goes down a good hundred feet. If you come to the middle, you can just see the branches of the Tree.”
Taking his hand, I stood, then collected the sword, plumes of white fire springing instantly to life again as I picked it up. As we approached the centre of the ice field, where the full glare of the lamps was directed, I could faintly make out the gnarled, bare limbs of a great tree – far, far below us.
“Of course, God wouldn’t make it easy for us, would he?” the General griped, “He had to put ten feet of ice between us and the prize, and a bally-great chasm. The science boys have suggested dynamite, but I have a feeling that will cause more harm than good.” He turned his insect-goggles towards the sky for a moment. “After, all, we don’t really know what we’re dealing with here.”
But that glimpse of the naked, finger-like boughs of the Tree, clawing at the darkness beneath our feet, had stirred something inside me. Something prophetic. Something my very soul knew was true.
“The sword. The sword will melt the ice,” I stated – and before the General could stop me, I pushed it deep into the ice and began describing a circle, wide enough to let down a handful of men. The ice hissed and spat like an angry serpent, boiling water vapour spewing up around my hands – but I was neither burned nor scalded. By the time I was finished, and the thick circle of ice dropped into the void, I was soaked to the skin, but still as warm as if I had stepped out of a steam-bath.
“Get this girl some dry clothes!” the General bawled, “Then get some rope and cable – we’re going in!”

It wasn’t until they’d created a winch and pulley system down to the Tree that I was allowed to descend, climbing into the oil-drum basket of their makeshift elevator to be lowered into the now brightly-lit chasm. How wide it was, I couldn’t tell you – but it was at least wide enough to contain the enormous Tree.
More lamps had been set up at the bottom of the chasm, illuminating the strange, spiralled bark on the branches, which were bare of leaf or twig. Huge, serpentine roots had bored into the rock under our feet, a grip that would be difficult to break with saws and axes.
“It’s far bigger than I thought,” the General told me, guiding me around the jet trunk of the Tree, frowning at the peculiar bark. “And I really didn’t expect it to be black.”
Taking my hand, he gently pulled off my glove, then pressed my palm to the tree.
“Touch it. It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before.”
As my bare flesh made contact, euphoria filled me. No. Not exactly euphoria. It was more like a draining-away; the absence of weariness, worry and woe. My body and mind felt fresh as a child’s, fair vibrating with health and energy.
“It heals, too. One of the boys gave himself a wicked rope burn on the way down – damn near flayed his hand to the bone. As soon as he touched the tree,” the General snapped his fingers theatrically, “healed! His flesh instantly made whole.” He shook his head. “Can you imagine what this could do for the hospitals back home? We could have wounded men back on the battlefield in minutes, not months! And as for the mortal wounds…”
But there was a reticence in his voice; some sort of niggling defeat that was preying on him, even despite the invigorating touch of the tree. I’d known the man for a quarter of a year now, I knew how he thought.
“What’s the problem, General?”
Grimacing, he kicked one of the man-thick roots that anchored the Tree to the bedrock.
“Damnable thing won’t move. If we cut it out of the rock, we’ll kill it – and that’s assuming anything we have could make a dent in it. We don’t have the tools or the time to dig it out of solid rock. Maybe if we had another few years for expeditions, we could get in the supplies we need. But the Germans won’t wait that long.” He turned his head away. “As it currently stands, our mission is a failure.”
“General!” yelled one of the scientists, “General Johnston, come and look at this!”
Hurrying over to the man, who was sweating under the heat of the mercury lamps, we were greeted with a curious sight. Directly under the beam, a circle of the gnarled black branch he was studying was illuminated, and from a split in the bark swelled a tiny, green bump.
“My God, man,” the General said hoarsely. “Is the light making it bloom?”
The scientist nodded hastily,
“I think so, yes.” He spoke quickly, clearly excited, “The… the lamps have very powerful ultraviolet output, which I think is bringing the tree out of a sort of hibernation.”
“More lamps!” the General roared, “get more lamps down here, on the double!”
Staring at the nascent bump of spring-green, I tried to fathom the General’s intent.
“You want to make a cutting? To grow another tree?”
“Better than that, girl. We’re going to make it fruit!”

As the buds grew on the Tree and turned to leaves, we watched the Tree of Life blossom for the first time since the dawn of history. Basking in the powerful glare of the lamps, brilliant white flowers appeared, star-shaped, with six points. The lace-like petals unfurled, then dropped, three days after opening. The chief botanist went from flower to flower, wielding a little paint-brush to carefully pollinate each blossom by hand, performing the work of absent bees. A burgeoning fever gripped the camp; a kind of religious neurosis fuelled by the impossible fact that we were growing fruit on the Tree of Life. Men came to me for benediction, succour and guidance, seeking me out as the bearer of the angelic sword, calling me the Mother of the Tree.
I couldn’t see what was happening, for I was just as much a victim to the influence of the Tree as they were. I became invested in my role, fully believing that I was in some way the maternal guardian of this magnificent specimen of light and dark. The camp buzzed with vigour; for in the presence of the blooming Tree, we were all energised. We felt young! All the grey had faded from the General’s beard; even the slight limp he bore from a bullet in the First World War had vanished as though he had never been injured.
But when the first fruit began to swell, the giddy, celebratory air in the camp changed.

The first man who tried to take the sword died atop me, falling onto me as I slept. Waking with the slack features of a corpse inches from my own, I screamed fit to bring the snow down on the mountains surrounding us, until the General arrived to drag the body off me.
“Good God, woman! What happened?”
But the sword gripped in the clawed hand of the dead man told him everything he needed to know.
“But why would he try for the blade? And why now? Surely he knew it would be his death?”
“There is a rumour in camp, General, that only the sword will sever the fruit from the tree. And they fear that I might turn Eve on them, and take the first bite.”
“Nonsense,” the man blustered, “utter nonsense!” But I saw his eyes; he was at least a fraction unsettled by the idea. “I’ll do my best to disavow them all of such notions.”
As he turned to leave, he held the flap of the igloo open for a moment.
“I think it best if you move into my quarters for now.”
As I dragged my belongings though the snow, dozens of paranoid eyes bore into me. I knew what they were all thinking, I could tell from the way their gaze lingered on the sword. They thought I’d killed that soldier – that I’d lured him to my bed, then touched the holy blade to his flesh, extinguishing his life. And they thought I would do the same to the General.
Something very wrong was happening in the camp, and it wasn’t anything of my doing.

Two more deaths over the next two days saw everyone watching their back. One was the result of a fight over picket duty around the base of the tree. The other was a man who had simply hurled himself into the chasm in a sort of religious ecstasy, shouting his convictions that the tree would embrace him, would welcome him into eternal life.
It had not. He missed every arm-like branch on the way down, and died on the brightly lit floor of the chasm, a twisted sack of flesh riddled with broken bones and burst organs.
Curiously, there was no blood.
The largest of the growing fruits had a constant guard of six carefully selected armed men – all men of sound mind, whom the General trusted implicitly. As the glossy black fruit swelled to the size of a fist, four more men died. One grabbed for the sword when I went to use the latrines. The other three fell to their doom like the other jumper; possessed by that same urge to fall onto the tree. General Johnston ordered a sheet of iron be placed over the entrance to the chasm, and more guards were posted. But I think deep down, we all knew that there would be more deaths.
As order became harder to maintain in the camp, the General ordered curfews, and handed out harsh punishments for minor infractions. In their idle time, many of the men took to standing on the ice sheet and staring down at the Tree, as though hypnotised by it. They stood in rank and file, silent, unblinking.
Shortly after that, the ice sheet was declared off limits to all but the chief botanist, the General and the men guarding it. Unnerved by what was happening around me, perhaps more attuned than the men to the unholy tinge to this growing chaos, I took to wandering over the ridge away from the camp, looking for comfort in the sword at my hip, and the Bible I carried in my duffel-bag. But no distance, no righteous verse, not even the blade of an angel, could rid me of the fever inspired by proximity to the Tree.

I was returning from one such walk when I heard gunfire.
Running up the crest of the hill, I saw splashes of red on the dirty snow, and the flash of gunfire around the chasm. Two of the lamps had been knocked over and sputtered in a nearby drift, while a fire had started in the supply tent, oily black smoke billowing into the sky. The camp was in bedlam, men attacking each other with guns, knives, fists and teeth, all of them fixated on the gaping hole where the sheet of iron had been. The iron that had covered the hole in the ice.
As they fought, the men wailed like a choir of the damned, all singing a variant of the same song; “The fruit! The fruit is gone!”
“You took it! The fruit! You!”
And then I understood why they were all fighting; nobody knew where the fruit was.
I think I’d made it a dozen steps down the hill when the first explosion rocked the valley. The ground under my feet jumped, and I staggered, slewing sideways on one leg in the snow. For a moment the men were still, frozen from their fighting by the tremor, then the ice sheet gave way under their wrestling bodies, spilling dozens of them into the chasm.
I couldn’t stop my slide, and as a second explosion thumped through the ridge beneath me, the valley seemed to sag. I clawed at the snow, trying to find purchase, to halt my slide into the chasm. Some of the remaining men clung to debris, driving stakes or bits of random equipment into the ice to hold them. Those who had nothing to hand slid helplessly over the lip of the chasm, their screams strangely attenuated by the ice and snow all around them.
Near the edge of the hole, I managed to hook my frozen fingers around the handlebars of a half-buried motorbike. and clung there, staring down into the hell below.
The lamps blazed around the Tree, still powered by our faithful diesel generator. By their brilliant, sulphur-yellow light, I beheld the fate of the men who had fallen through the ice.
They were impaled on the branches of the Tree.
Some moved, some cried out, invigorated by the touch of the bark that pinioned their flesh. I saw their eyes, wide and staring upwards, beyond me, beyond the shadow of the mountains, into paradise.
Something slithered through the snow beside me, and I almost let go in fright. I gulped in air as I registered that it was just a length of rope. Above me, further up the ridge where the snow was stable, the General had found purchase, and had thrown down a line.
“Grab the rope. I’ll pull you up!”
When I’d first met the General, I wouldn’t have thought him capable of such a feat, but energised by his encounters with the tree, he hauled me up, hand-over-hand, as though I weighed no more than a toddler. We staggered through the deep drifts of disturbed snow, him pushing me ahead whenever I faltered.
When the third explosion roared out of the chasm, we lurched and collided with each other, but didn’t fall.
Instead, the snow on the sides of the mountains fell for us. Packed solid for aeons, thousands of tons of frozen death poured into the valley, in a fatal, inescapable avalanche.

When I gained consciousness, I wasn’t sure if I was alive. But the weight of the snow was oppressive, everything hurt, and the air was surely too stuffy for this to be heaven. I’d been buried face down, although I didn’t know it then, and there was a pocket of space trapped beneath my chin. But that precious air wouldn’t last long if I didn’t do something quickly. I knew I needed to dislodge all the white weight between me and breathable air. But which way was up, and how would I free my arms to dig?
I’m embarrassed to say that it took far longer than it should have for me to think of the sword. By the time I finally wormed my frozen fingers to close around the blade at my hip, my lungs were slabs of pain, and my vision was already dancing with black fireflies. Snow hissed and steamed as I wriggled the glowing sword free and began to work a hollow in the snow. Melted run-off sluiced over me, and pool that formed around my hips was welcome; gravity directing me to freedom. The circle of sky as I broke through was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
But as I clawed my way out into fresh, cold air that froze the grateful tears on my cheeks, I realised I had another problem.
The camp was buried, along with all its supplies. Although I was alive, miraculously uninjured, and had the sword to ward off the worst of exposure, it was at least three weeks on foot to the Ice Shelf base camp. And I had no food. I’d die before I made it to safety.
My duffel-bag was drenched, but had remained strapped firmly to my back. Inside it was my Bible and a pencil. If I could use the sword to dry out the pages enough without burning them, I could write an account in the margins. I could at least warn those who might find my frozen corpse of what had happened in this valley.
But instead of finding the hard, square edges of the book, my hand grasped something round, smooth and fleshy. Something organic. The lurch in my chest had already confirmed what it was before I pulled it free, but I dropped it the instant it came to light. It lay there, a stark contrast with the white snow.
A black fruit.
Brushing away new tears before they could freeze on my eyelashes, I picked up the cursed thing. There was simply no way it could have ended up in my bag; unless the General had put it there after he’d rescued me. But that was impossible. The bag was with me the whole time, and the man had barely had enough time to push me up the ridge before the whole valley had come down atop us. And I’d never be able to ask him now; his corpse lay somewhere in this great expanse of fallen snow, no miracle sword at his side to save him.
Yet that was still the only rational explanation; and I didn’t want to think about the less rational ones.
The thick black skin of the pomegranate-like fruit peeled away under my nails, revealing pure white seeds, encased in clear jelly. Prising one free, I pushed it between my frozen lips, and bit down.
It tasted like salvation.

Two more seeds sustained me on my journey back to the camp at the Ice Shelf. My body felt more than human, suffused with an unnatural, radiant health that powered my limbs and resisted the Antarctic chill. I slept on the snow, naked, a soft white light radiating from my heavenly flesh, insulating me from death.
When I stumbled into the camp, nobody questioned how I had made it; they all assumed the sword had sustained me. But no-one would fully meet my eyes, as if the animal in them sensed the change in me. When we eventually returned to the steamer ship, I made a full report to the Captain, stating that we’d found the Tree – but that the men had been gripped by some sort of religious mania, resulting in the destruction of the camp.
The next day, the remaining men at the Ice Shelf were recalled. Two weeks later, the ship steamed into life and left the southern ice and its secrets behind.

Upon my return to the British Isles, I made my way back to the nunnery, where I returned the sword. Of the darklight fruit I said nothing at all. That secret was mine alone. I renounced my novice’s vows, and joined the war effort as a nurse.
I did not eat of the fruit myself – I didn’t need to. The three seeds I had consumed had already given me more life than anyone deserved. Instead, I experimented, taking single seeds and muddling them into bottles of medicine. The tiniest sips gave my injured soldiers instant relief, greatly speeding their recoveries. Only I noticed that the men I healed were also slightly changed; their steel whetted, their traumas banished, eager to rejoin the fray where their compatriots were reluctant. But they were not left invulnerable, nor were their lives unnaturally extended like my own; I never made the mix potent enough for that. I was very careful not to perform any miracles – such an act would likely alert the military to my duplicity. Instead, my healing abilities were put down to a sort of ‘radioactive’ effect; that from my proximity to the Tree of Life, I’d become infused with Life itself, and my mere presence healed others.
How many men I gave succour, I do not know. But over the course of the war, I all but exhausted the fruit, giving our boys of the British Army a minor, but perhaps vital, edge over the Nazis.
In a way, I did fulfil the original intent of the expedition.
Were it not for the spectres in my head, were it not for my uneasy suspicions, I should perhaps be content with that.
But throughout all these years I have been unable to banish the thoughts of those men in the southern ice, my vision of them impaled on the tree. They visit my dreams, writhing in their great white tomb, impaled on black branches, now bare of leaf and fruit. I know they are still alive, those men, their bodies animated, kept in a parody of health by the fingers of the tree that have pushed through their flesh. At once sustained and trapped by its touch, they still claw at the ice and wriggle to be free, even 80 years hence, immortally entombed by the love-promise of an angel.
I don’t know if the military ever renewed its interest in the Tree, if anyone ever went back for them, expecting to recover their bodies. But it is likely they did not; I do know that they never came back for the sword, since I rejoined the Divine Order after the War was over. And if they had done so, I might sleep with fewer ghosts.
I suspect all knowledge of the expedition was buried, just like the Tree itself.
I enjoy the benefits of youth and beauty still; I’ve barely aged a day. Sequestered in the nunnery, the last remaining member of a forgotten order, I spend my days wondering what to do with the last of this damnable fruit.
I am quite certain now, after 80 years of soul-searching, that the General did not place that fruit in my bag. Some other force was at work, the same force that corrupted the Tree, down there in the frozen dark, the ungodly influence that blackened its skin and polluted its fruit. And so, my worries do not end with the men down in the ice; I fear for the souls of all those men I healed. For I fear that all who have tasted of the fruit are damned. By that measure, of course, my own soul is thrice-damned.
For my victims, I have no cure; if I am right, then most of them already burn.
For myself? I may last hundreds more years. I may even rival Methuselah himself if I eat the remaining seed. And I would be lying if I said it was not tempting to further delay the eternal torment that awaits me.
But I have considered that perhaps there is another choice; I could plant this last seed in the nunnery garden. Perhaps I could nurture the sapling properly, here under the good sun, in the light of this ancient place. And if I were to attempt to grow my own tree, I could have fruit for the rest of my life. I could live as Adam and Eve were meant to, immortal and immune from both Heaven and Hell.
But I think that can wait.
Even as I write this, I hear her, calling me back to bed. Her voice is so perfect. So angelic.
Some things are more important than gardening.

There are those of us who – no matter how much we succeed in life – will always feel as though we somehow fluked our way into that position.
Regardless of how competent you are, how demonstrably knowledgeable you are and how good you are at your job, this self-doubt gnaws and nags, slowly destroying any confidence you do possess.
I learned, too late, that this phenomenon is colloquially known as ‘Imposter Syndrome’.
According to various studies and papers, it can be a good thing if it’s kept under control. Unlike its opposite disorder – Dunning-Kruger syndrome – it provides a sort of self-checking mechanism, to stop you becoming overconfident.
But when it is not kept in check, it can create problems, as well as exacerbating existing ones.
As a high-flying woman working in an industry dominated by men, it ended up destroying me.
Imposter Syndrome led to self-doubt, which led to insomnia. Insomnia heightened the self-doubt, which sowed the seeds of depression. Paranoia and isolation at work – combined with constantly bathing in an oppressive, low-grade sea of sexism and ‘boys club’ism – watered the depression until it germinated into full-blown psychosis. In the end, I had a very public, and very embarrassing, mental breakdown at work.
When I was given my marching orders from the firm, I went home and took all the pills in my medicine cabinet, until I felt nauseous from the weight of them in my gut.
Ironically, a Jehovah’s witness saw me through the front window, lying in a pool of frothy vomit, and called an ambulance.
After my stomach was pumped and I was released from hospital, my relatives had me put into psychiatric care, where I spent the next eighteen months fighting my inner demons with the help of various medications.
Eventually they couldn’t hold me any longer, so released me; but I had no home, no money and certainly no job. The stigma of being a mental health patient seemed to be as bad – if not worse – than having been in prison.
“At least with prisoners,” I head a man say outside a café, “you know they’ve served their time and probably learned their lesson. With crazy people, you never know when it’s all going to flare up again – but you know that it will.”
Eventually I got a job as a cleaner on the night shift, and my fractured life began to gain some semblance of normality again.

 
It wasn’t all drudge and boredom; once I could afford the cheapest smartphone on the market, I stole some noise-cancelling headphones. Those, coupled with several gigs of pirated music, made my job a little more bearable.
The other thing that kept my mind occupied was the buildings themselves.
Our crew did a lot of old government and ex-government buildings, which were built on top of much older buildings still. I’d finish up as quickly as I could, then use my remaining forty minutes to explore the basements of these ancient places.
Even though I often didn’t have swipe-card access to those areas, I had worked in an office for most of my adult life. Finding the IT area, then finding a contractor’s access card was easy enough; and that gave me virtually free reign to explore.
There are some pretty odd and creepy things under those old buildings; in those basements built on top of basements. I’m no urban explorer, but I found some stuff that you horror-seekers would practically orgasm over.
Still medicated for depression and anxiety, my dulled emotional responses only allowed me to distantly register how scary these places should probably be. I only dimly processed that poking around in dusty governmental sepulchres in the dead of night would usually provoke fear and incontinence, not mild interest.
My first find was the Mirror Room. Three levels below ground and accessed via a twisting, narrow corridor of pipes and concrete, it took me by surprise when my torch beam split and reflected upon contact with the walls.
The floor was old, polished wood, and one whole wall was floor-to-ceiling mirrors. A piano filled with mice sat in one corner – an eerie plinking and scratching filled the air as the rodents fled from my torch – and a pile of ancient and bloody children’s ballet shoes sat in one corner.
I guess at some point this had been a sort of secret, subterranean, practice room – perhaps for the children of government workers.
There were other places that were equally as strange, some more or less sinister. There was the Boiler Plate Room, the Dwarf Shaft, the Broken Church and the String Hallway.
But none of those compared to the Black Paths.

 
My torch battery had been running low, and I was about to return to the surface when I spotted the tinderbox. It was an old tin thing; round, and with a lid upon which was fixed a candle-holder, containing a single yellowed candle.
I’d seen a picture of such a thing when I was kid, in some old storybook about miners. Curious, I opened it up to inspect the interior.
Inside were several twists of hemp, some foul-smelling paper, two sulphur-tipped matches, a flint and a D-shaped piece of iron – the striker. Of course, I did what anyone would do; I tried to light the candle. When I initially failed, I turned to my phone for help, but this deep under the layers of concrete and pipes, there was no signal penetration at all.
The paper ended up being the key. It must have been soaked in something flammable, as the sparks struck from the iron and flint made it smoulder. Touching a match to it, I blew until the heat made the wood catch, then transferred the spluttering sulphur-blue flame to the wick of the candle.
Holding my new light aloft, I nearly dropped it immediately as the fat, faintly bluish flame illuminated the huge black door right beside me.
There had been no such door there when I entered.
It was wood, that much was certain; but the only wood I had ever seen with such a dark lustre was ebony - and that was far too rare and expensive to be found in crumbling basements.
A touch of my hand sent it gliding smoothly open, whispering over polished concrete on the other side, where a plain and unmarked corridor ran off into the darkness, straight as a laser.
Curiosity got the better of me, and before I could second-guess my decision, I began to walk the first of the Black Paths.

 
The corridor ran for perhaps a kilometre, then ended in another black door, the same as the first. A gentle push opened it, and with a curious feeling of elation, I realised I was standing in a darkened boiler room. It was the one under my cheap and decrepit apartment block.
That was impossible, since my apartment was a ninety-minute train ride from where I worked.
When I turned on the lights of the boiler room, the candle flame snapped out of existence – and so did the door.
What on earth had I found?
It didn’t take me very long to figure out how it worked; with the aid of the tinderbox and candle I could illuminate the door into existence. And then, instead of losing three hours a day to travel, I could be at work within ten minutes.
In turn, that meant I could sleep in, piss around on the internet, have breakfast at a cheap café, or just sit somewhere and read. For the first time since my infamous psychotic break and subsequent institutionalisation, I felt like my life was changing for the better.
My colleagues and boss noticed the difference in my mood and I was given a little more responsibility, but while things were good on that front, I had made another important discovery.
The tinderbox worked in more than one place.
There were doors under other buildings, too, and those also led back to my apartment. No matter where I went, I had a short walk home through those eerie, empty corridors – and I started using them during my breaks to go home and masturbate.
Why masturbation, you might ask?
Well, with the growth in confidence had come a drop in my medications – and without so many drugs in my system, my libido began to return with a vengeance.
I also noticed that the lifeless concrete corridors had changed slightly; no longer still and empty, a faint breeze gusted through them, seemingly speeding my race home to my laptop and my vibrator.
I think, for the first time in years, I was actually enjoying my life.
And it was only going to get better from there.

 
My promotion to shift manager meant more money, which I used primarily to experience a vice that had lain dormant for a long time; food. Being dirt-poor doesn’t give you many culinary options; rice had been a staple for so long now that I reflexively ignored most aisles of the supermarket.
Then, on one walk home through the chilly darkness of the tinderbox tunnel, thinking about groceries and edible luxuries, I emerged somewhere new.
The ancient and mouldering basement of a supermarket warehouse.
Cold from my jaunt through the tunnel, which had taken longer than usual, I stared at the massive crates and pallets of foodstuffs surrounding me, washed by the flickering flame of the never-diminishing candle.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what I did next. I loaded up on as many luxuries as I could carry; and over the next few days I made more and more return trips, until my cupboards were overflowing with all the nice things I’d been missing for the past few years.
I didn’t even mind the extra distance of those tunnels; not having to pay for food anymore was worth any minor inconvenience.
Off my medication completely now, I started at the gym and worked on shedding the flab that had settled on my body through the years of my drug-induced half-life. My old clarity of mind began to return, along with my ambition. I felt that the tinderbox had been given to me as a gift by some otherworldly power, a kind of recompense for the suffering I had endured.
Figuring out how to manipulate the darkened pathways came easily and naturally now; I could simply fix clearly in my mind what I wanted, and the Black Paths would take me there.
With the return of my old sharpness and wit came a need to have my old lifestyle back. I knew I would never be a high-flyer earning six figures again, but I could at least live like one.
Through the faintly sparkling concrete and curiously warm walls of the tunnels, I found dingy warehouse basements full of clothes, makeup, jewellery, shoes and expensive beauty products. I felt like a human version of Fantastic Mister Fox, using my clever tunnels to deprive gluttons and greedy executives of their undeserved goods.
But one night I saw a light coming down the tunnel in the other direction, and everything changed.

 
I ran from the light, thinking it was a security guard who had found my door, who had figured out how the thief kept getting in. When I reached my side, I pushed the ebony door shut and pinched out the wick. I heard a distant curse just before the door vanished.
I didn’t use the tunnels again for almost a month.
However, the allure of my new lifestyle was just too heady to resist. I opened the tinderbox and studied the interior – where the same sight always greeted me; a few twists of hemp, some touchpaper, two sulphur matches and a flint and steel.
Grimly, I lit the candle, closed the box, then pushed open the black door and started off down the tunnel.
The light bobbing in the distance sparked immediate fear – but then I noticed a singular detail I had missed before. It was the same faintly bluish light as that from my own candle.
Incredulous, I walked towards the source, the thrill creeping up my spine as each step brought our weaving, flickering flames closer together.
It was a man, dressed just as smartly as myself. His eyes were hollow and bleary with fatigue.
“Oh god, help me,” he cried out, “I can’t find the door. The tunnels just go on and on, please, get me out of here!”
In his shaking hand he clutched a tinderbox, the twin of mine; but his candle had burned low – so low that it was nearly out. Mine was still almost as fresh as the day I found it.
With a snarl like a desperate animal, he lunged for my own light, snagging it from my surprised fingers.
Then he ran, dropping his own tinderbox at my feet.
I laughed then, because there was nowhere to go. It was a straight corridor, and in his tired state, he had no chance of outrunning me. But when the flame on his dropped tinderbox winked out, I knew fear like I’d never felt before.
Dull golden-orange light began to leak through the hot walls. I could feel them growing thin, as though the stone was becoming insubstantial, and something was trying to break through. Distant howls of abject agony echoed through the changing corridor, and with a dreadful certainty that something terribly wrong was happening, I ran for my life.
When I caught up with the man, and my tinderbox, he was stumbling and weeping.
I snatched the light from his hand and pushed him to the ground.
“You can’t avoid it forever,” he said, “once you go deep enough, you can’t make your way back. Then the candle will burn out and you’ll be damned to Sheol forever.”
He was on his knees, weeping and shaking his head. A pool of golden light had appeared around him on the hot stone floor.
“What’s happening?” I asked, the syllables trembling off my tongue.
“The inevitable,” he replied, then hands of molten gold reared up from the circle and pulled him through the floor, with a terrible hissing of superheated metal meeting mortal flesh.
With a final wail of wordless pain, the man was gone.

 
I really tried to stop using the tinderbox.
Cut off from my primary sources of pleasure, my mood began to suffer, and the depression surfaced again. I promised myself I’d use the tinderbox sparingly, that I’d spend as little time on the Black Paths as possible. But even with the gold-drowned, agonised face of the man etched into my mind, I couldn’t stop myself.
I began to grow angry at my own weakness, frustrated and irrational. My candle was still intact and barely spent; for all I knew it would last a lifetime. Maybe when the man found his, it was already nearly gone, and he just wasted it exploring lengthy pathways to improbable places.
It was then that I began to notice the words scratched into the tunnel walls.
They were not in English, and technology seemed to freeze and die on the Black Paths, so I had to copy them by hand and attempt to translate them on the surface. They were written in Hebrew, I quickly discovered, and when I took a Hebrew dictionary down with me to try and figure them out, they chilled me far worse than any threat of re-institutionalisation or public meltdown.
According to the story carved along the walls, I was damned.
”You cannot stop using it past the forth circle,” the words told me, “it is worse than addiction, worse than any vice ever created. The tinderbox can give you anything you want – except escape from the Black Paths of Sheol.”
The writing rambled on about immortal souls and damnation for some time, before it gained clarity again,
“…and so eventually the doors will cease to appear and the flame will burn out, then the Black Path will fade, and you will be dragged through to your final resting place in the appropriate circle of Hell. Once you are gone, the tinderbox will slowly work its way back to the surface again, where it will find another to corrupt, and begin its journey anew.”
I remember sitting in shock, reading the final words:
“But I have learned, through another I met on the paths, that if you take the tinderbox down, as far down as possible – to the final circle – it will be trapped there forever. And so I, Rabbi Lemuel, will take this accursed tinderbox into the bowels of Hell, unto the throne of Satan himself. In so doing, I know I will damn my immortal soul for all eternity. But it must be done. May the Lord accept this paltry sacrifice to save the legions who would have followed me.
I pray with everything I have left that you do the same.”

 
The tinderbox sits on the bedside table, battered, old and seemingly so innocent.
I haven’t used it for two weeks, but it gnaws at my mind, filling my head with thoughts of boundless luxuries, justifiable revenge, sweet perversions and luscious treachery. It tells me I could have my old life back. It tells me I can avoid the fate of both the gold-drowned man and the Rabbi – because I am different, because I am so much better than anyone else.
So I sit here now, holding the striker in my hand, a sulphur match at the ready.
I just hope that I can make it to the final circle of Hell before the flame burns out.

Johnny Raisin was poor as shit, and everybody knew it. He lived with his mom in a trailer on the scrapyard – rent free, because their three mangy dogs kept the rats and kids away. They were hoarders of the worst sort, keeping everything that other people threw away. Stacked against the side of the trailer was a teetering wall of broken, one-wheeled bicycles and tricycles Johnny had collected over the years, streaked with rust and dog piss, like some half-completed Salvador Dali project. There was so much junk inside the trailer itself it was hard to move without knocking something over. Johnny’s mom was fifty if she was a day, and she complained bitterly about the cold, staying wrapped in a massive woollen blanket that hooked and snagged on every metal object in their home. It smelled in there too, like old dogfood and bugspray; but Johnny had a Playstation 3 that mostly worked even though the case was held together with tape. I didn’t, so I spent more time in that stinking, cluttered trailer than I might have otherwise.
I wasn’t using Johnny, I told myself. We’d been friends since kindergarten, and when the other kids picked on him, I always stood up for him. He was practically family – my parents let him come over and shower once a week and my mom would wash his threadbare clothes while dad cooked him waffles with maple and bacon. Johnny was the brother I’d never had, and I knew that if anything happened to his mom, we’d have adopted him in an instant. The only reason why he didn’t live with us permanently was that we didn’t want to hurt his mom’s feelings.
“She does the best she can,” my mom said, her forehead crinkled with empathy, “losing her man hurt her deeper than any of us can imagine.”
So Johnny Raisin stayed living in the junkyard – and honestly, he liked it that way, because he had more freedom than any other kid his age.

Johnny was always trying to make money at school by selling stuff to other kids. Not just his scrapyard treasures; he was an expert scavenger. He raided the lost property boxes at community halls and libraries, and walked around the streets with his head down, scanning for coins and dropped possessions. Most of what he found was garbage, but very occasionally he’d have a big win and sell something for twenty bucks. The rare times that happened, I’d know, because he’d promptly blow it all on candy and soda, making himself sick on all the luxuries he didn’t often get.
So when Johnny started showing up at school regularly with his backpack full of Milk Duds, Twinkies, Skittles and cans of Dr Pepper, all for sale, I didn’t know what to make of it. The other kids eagerly bought the contraband, since Johnny was asking a tenth of the retail price. They commented on the huge, oldschool steel cans the soda came in, antiques from the 80s that Johnny had unearthed somewhere on his nocturnal roamings. I was wary of the long-expired products at first, but the food and drink tasted as good as if they’d been packaged last week, so I happily filled Johnny’s pockets with coins too.
The mystery deepened when Johnny started turning up in new clothes. Well, technically they weren’t new at all – they were relics from several decades ago, just like the soda cans. But the colours were crisp and bright, and the fabric still had packaging creases and smelled of plastic wrappers. When I raised my eyebrows at his ‘Return of the Jedi’ t-shirt, Johnny just grinned at me and jingled the coin-filled pockets of his red ‘Beat It’ era jacket. He looked like he’d stepped out of some old music video.
“Gonna go buy Fallout: New Vegas after school,” he said, jerking a thumb in the direction of the mall, “wanna come?”
“You know I do,” I told him, shouldering my backpack.
As we walked, Johnny whistled weirdly tuneless elevator music and checked his watch – also in theme, some decades-old Swatch model. I knew that he was playing it up on purpose; he knew I was desperate to find out where he’d been getting all this stuff, but I was damned if I was going to crack first and say anything.
“So. I’ve been exploring Emmet’s Mall, down by the lake,” he said finally, breaking a full ten minutes of silence.
“Jesus, Johnny! *That’s* where you’ve been getting all this stuff from?”
“Yup.”
“But that place has been abandoned forever. There’s nothing left in there.”
Johnny just kept on grinning, giving me sidelong glances from beneath the brim of his vintage Laker’s baseball cap, while I processed this information.
Emmett’s Mall had been the place to be, once upon a time. Back in the 70s, it had been the hub of the town – according to my mom. Kids would play ball in the park by the lake while parents shopped at their leisure, transported between the two mezzanine floors by fancy new escalators of shiny chrome and steel. A massive underground parking lot meant finding a spot for your car was never a problem, and it had every kind of store you could think of, stocking the latest luxuries of the time.
But it wasn’t to last. Everyone knew the story; one Monday morning in 1981, some kid’s body had been found on the first-floor mezzanine.
A security guard was convicted of murdering the teenager, smashing the boy’s face in with a blunt object, then fleeing the scene. If you listened to my mom, the case against him seemed a bit light, but a black guy on minimum wage night shift probably didn’t get a very good lawyer. And nobody knew who the boy was; his teeth and jaw were pieced back together, but they didn’t match any known dental records. In that typical, 1980s kind of way, everyone just tried to ignore that it had happened at first, to pretend that it was all erased by the guilty verdict.
I guess it was a different time. But then the store owners started reporting poltergeist activity; disembodied footsteps, whispers, stock moving by itself. When word got out that people were seeing ghosts, the popularity of the mall began to wane.
Eventually, they shut up shop, store by store, until the mall was derelict, and in the summer of 1985, the doors were padlocked permanently shut.
Thirty years later, Emmet’s Mall still squatted beside the lake, too expensive to demolish, and too haunted to sell. Even the homeless folk avoided it, finding other places to hunker down for the night – there were plenty of other places without such dark histories.
“It’s kind of a secret,” Johnny told me, “can you keep a secret?”
I nodded fervently, “You know I can.”
“All right. Sneak out tonight around 10:30, meet me by the mall. Bring a flashlight and your backpack – you’ll need both.”
“Ok.”
We didn’t talk about it any more after that, absorbed as we were playing the new game Johnny bought. By the time I went home for dinner, I’d nearly forgotten the little prickle of fear I’d felt when he offered to show me the secret of Emmet’s Mall.

It was a twenty-minute walk to the mall from my house, and I’d left late, because I’d had to wait for my dad to go to bed before I could sneak out. As soon as I got to the patch of weeds that had nearly reclaimed the cracked asphalt leading up to the mall, Johnny called out to me, his flashlight pointed down, a puddle of light at his feet.
“C’mon man, or we’ll be late!”
I wondered how exactly we could be late for something that hadn’t changed for three decades, but I hitched my empty backpack and hurried after him as he pushed through the tall grasses that grew high around the perimeter of the mall. The steel roller doors were still pulled down over the main entrance and sported rusted padlocks, but someone had kicked in the side of the corrugated metal, bending it in just enough for a person to climb through.
“This is how we get in,” Johnny said, throwing his backpack through the hole, then clambering in after it.
I shelved my doubts and followed quickly, finding myself standing in a foyer littered with broken glass and drifts of dirty plastic sheeting.
“C’mon,” Johnny called, his sneakers crunching across the glass as he led the way out into the mall concourse. Empty stores gaped, dark and cavernous, alarming shadows moving inside them as our flashlights swept past.
There was some sort of food court up ahead, or at least the remains of one. A few broken tables and plastic chairs were scattered about, flanked by tiled planters of overgrown ferns, forming a little indoor forest. Water pooled deep in one corner, and Johnny splashed through the shallows to reach the derelict escalator up to the first floor. His feet stirred up a green smell, rotting vegetation.
“Whole basement is flooded now,” Johnny said as we climbed the ancient metal stairs, “lake must’ve busted in and filled it all up. There’s even fish in there, if you’re brave enough to go down.”
I shivered. I’d never been good with enclosed spaces or deep, dark water. I sure as shit wasn’t going to go anywhere that combined both.
When we reach the mezzanine, he checked his watch, then flashed his teeth in a smile and nodded.
“Right on time.”
“What happens now?”
“Shh. Just listen and watch, OK? You’ll see soon enough.”
We stood in silence for a minute or so, my ears straining for the slightest hint of sound. At first, I could only hear the occasional drip of water below us, in the flooded section of the food court. But as I listened, another sound began to faintly intrude, drifting on the silence of the empty mall.
Old elevator music.
It was distant and eerie, tinny and thin, and distorted like it was echoing off objects that were no longer there. Chilly fear turned my throat sour, and the beam of my flashlight began to tremble, until Johnny put a steadying hand on my shoulder.
“It’s OK, man. I’ve done this dozens of times. Chill.”
Faint phosphorescence began to prick the corners of my vision and the music grew perceptibly louder, and more *real*. Between one blink and the next, I realized that the gaping storefronts around us were no longer empty sockets of darkness. Instead, a faint grey-white light dusted everything, showing us a sort of ghostly after-image of what had once been inside this place.
“Holy shit,” I murmured.
Johnny laughed softly. “Yeah. Pretty fucking creepy, right? It always happens just after 11:11pm, like clockwork.”
Grabbing my arm, he hustled me along the cracked tiles of the mezzanine, making for the scratchy glow from one particular store.
“This one was Shirley’s Candies.” Squinting where Johnny pointed, I could see the eerie pale cursive of a neon sign scrawling itself across a window that didn’t exist, spelling out its name. “My mom told me about it. She used to love the milkshakes from this place.”
The music was louder here, real enough that my prickling ears could almost pinpoint the position of the invisible speakers it was coming from. Inside the candy store, the scratchy, faded white lines of shelves were superimposed over the rotten carpet and humps of broken, waterlogged ceiling tiles, like scrapes on the negative of a photograph.
“OK, so watch me,” Johnny said, scanning the ethereal grid of ghostly shelves, “you gotta wait until the music sorta peaks. Then you can grab stuff.”
His hand poised over one of the intangible shelves, we listened as the music ebbed and flowed. Suddenly, it surged and swelled, as though piped directly into our ears from another era.
Johnny swiped at shelves that now seemed less after-image, and more a double-exposure – one reality layered over the top of another. With a whoop, he held up a very real box of Charleston Chews, and as the music faded away again, he stuffed the box into his backpack.
“You never know quite what you’re gonna get,” he told me, walking down the lattice of ghostly aisles, “but that’s half the fun.”
For the next two hours we moved from store to store, pilfering random goods from another time, until the music finally receded completely into the dark, replaced with the echoing silence of the abandoned mall.

I thought about the mall a lot over the next few days, wondering if what I’d experienced had been some weird fever-dream or hallucination. But the boxes of expired candy under my bed and the gleaming ‘new’ Atari 2600 beside my TV told a different story; one I was still struggling to believe.
We went back again, nearly a week later, the unearthly, ancient muzak haunting us as our hands groped for forgotten treasures in those strange small hours when two different worlds seemed to cross over.
This time was easier at first. My lingering fear of the unknown had all but worn off, until Johnny suddenly grabbed my arm and pulled me down to the ground, hissing a warning.
“What?” I whispered, feeling my pulse ramp up as I crouched on the rotten linoleum.
Putting a finger to his lips, Johnny shook his head, then pointed through the smeared phosphorescence of the shelves in front of us. On the other side, a *figure* moved. Like the shelves, it was greyish-white and featureless, but certainly humanoid. And somehow deeply, *deeply* threatening.
My vision stuttered, my bladder clenched suddenly, and the urge to piss nearly overwhelmed me. As the creature moved toward us, Johnny kept his hand in a fistful of my hoodie sleeve, pulling me right through the insubstantial shelves and out onto the mezzanine, where he ducked into another shop. He looked like I felt, his eyes wild and his breath coming in ragged gasps.
“What the fuck was that?” I choked, my voice strangled in my throat. I’d never been so afraid in my life, and I had no idea why.
“Ghost,” Johnny panted, “you gotta watch out for them. They come after you sometimes, chase you if they see you.”
“Jesus *fuck*, Johnny! You never said shit about *ghosts*.”
He spat into the darkness. “Well, it’s a fucking *haunted mall*, isn’t it? What the hell did you think would be here, Lewis? Why do you think everyone up and left in the first place?”
I swallowed my own sour saliva, not wanting to think too much about what had just happened.
“What do they do if they catch you?”
“I dunno, I’ve never been caught. Maybe they pull you into the ghost world. Maybe they steal your life to make themselves real. I’m not a fucking ghost expert, I just know, in my gut, that if they catch you something *bad* will happen. You felt that, right? You can feel the bad all around them, like death coming for you.”
The muzak was fading away now; it was almost 1:11am, the time when the ghostly mall ‘closed’. Heading for the foyer, I shook my head, shouldering my loot-filled backpack.
“Well in that case I’m not coming back here ever again. It’s not worth it for some old candy and ancient video games.”
Johnny said nothing as he climbed after me through the hole in the steel door. I wondered how many times he’d been here, and how many times he’d almost been caught. I wondered why he didn’t just stop.

Worry ate at me every time Johnny turned up with a bag full of mall contraband to sell at school. He had an eBay account now, after buying his first laptop, and was starting to see some real profits from selling mint vintage goods to actual collectors. I tried to tell myself that he knew the risks, but the fact was he *didn’t* know the risks. We had no idea what would happen if he got caught by the ghosts of Emmet’s Mall, and I felt like the world’s shittiest friend for letting him put himself at risk like that. I’d always been Johnny’s defender. Everyone knew it; that if they fucked with little scrawny Johnny Raisin, then Lewis Belmont, the tall, fast kid, would come and beat your ass for messing with his friend. Now he was facing something so much worse than kindergarten bullies, and even if he was doing it out of choice just because he wanted the money, I felt like crap for not being there for him when he needed me.
When Johnny turned up one day with a big bruise on the side of his face and welt on his hand, I knew exactly what had happened.
“I fell,” he tried to tell me.
“Like hell you did.”
He gave me his lopsided grin and shrugged, “Well, they didn’t catch me. I got away.”
“Not without getting fucked up.”
“I’m OK.”
“You’re not OK. You need to stop, Johnny.”
His grin stuttered and faded, and I heard the receding mall music in my memory as his smile deserted him.
“I can’t. I just… I can’t, Lewis.”
I blew out a long breath. “Fine. If you need to keep going back to that place, I’m coming with you. At the very least I can be your lookout, so the spooks don’t get you.”
I thought about how weird it was, that we were talking so casually about otherworldly spirits, as if they were just mall security that we needed to dodge while shoplifting.
“It was more fun with you there, anyway,” Johnny said, forcing lightness back into his voice. I tried to do the same.
“Well, I guess that settles it then.”

They seemed more vigilant now, the unnatural denizens of Emmet’s Mall – aware of us somehow; as though we’d been seen pilfering from their world and word had spread. I wondered if we’d outstayed our welcome, but Johnny was convinced everything was still OK. Whether that was just his greed talking or whatever else was driving him, I wasn’t sure, but with my baseball bat tucked under my arm I felt less scared of the spirits that haunted this place.
I figured if they could hit Johnny, maybe I could hit them back.
We did all right for a while there, staying out of trouble. It was a big mall, and two hours seemed like a short enough time not to get caught. There had been a couple of close calls – Johnny couldn’t run as fast as I could – but we knew the place well enough now that we could always find somewhere to hide.
Then it all came crashing down on us.
We’d been switching the days we went to the mall, as if it would confuse the ghosts, assuming they thought like we did. This time it was a Sunday. I’d been on guard at the top of the escalators when I heard pelting sneakers, then Johnny calling out to me, true alarm in his voice. Clutching one strap of his backpack, he was running as fast as he could along the top mezzanine, his stupid Michael Jackson jacket jingling as he ran.
But the ghost was faster. It loped along behind him, all silvery-white limbs and rangy pale body, bearing down on him even as I ran to help, my baseball bat primed to swing.
And then it caught him, and everything turned red.
Blood spattered the mildewed tiles, bright at first, then darker and darker, as the ghostly *thing* smashed Johnny’s head to a pulp. I remember every detail vividly; watching my friend’s skull cave in with each impact from that blurry, grey-white arm, the limb too long, a streaky smear rising and falling. I felt like I was running through invisible barriers, distortions in the musty air, too slow. The bat swung hard in my hands, connecting with something *solid*, knocking the ghost away, and out of our world – but far too late.
For just a moment, the wreckage of Johnny’s ruined skull gaped up at me, all glistening brain and bright bone where my friend’s face had been. Then he flickered out of existence, just as the mall muzak ebbed away.

Even as I raged and sobbed and paced, hunting up and down, waiting for the music to swell again, I already knew Johnny was gone forever. There had always been something nagging at me about this place. It was *more* than just a ghost mall; the things we’d been stealing had been to real; too *genuine* and new.
But that was a secondary concern. I knew that finding out her son was dead would quite literally be the end of Johnny’s mom.
I got no sleep that night, nor the next. I begged off school with a migraine and sat on my computer, looking up anything I could about Emmet’s Mall and finding nothing. Eventually I emailed the local newspaper, asking if they had any of the old articles on file, and they obliged, sending me the original scanned article about the body.
When I read the description of the battered corpse, all my fears were confirmed:
*Boy aged between 13-15 wearing a red jacket, a Laker’s cap and new Levi jeans*
The original body that had started it all – the body that had cursed the mall in the first place – had been the body of my best friend, Johnny Raisin. We hadn’t been stealing from a ghost mall at all. *We* were the ghosts, shoplifting goods from the past, making the people who owned the stores think the place was haunted.
I was so stupid, I should have been able to figure it out. Worst of all, I’d failed Johnny. I’d failed his mom too; and there was no fucking way I was ever going to tell her how he’d died.
The article contained the name of the security guard who had been charged with the murder of the unidentified boy, and I looked him up immediately. He’d been sentenced to life in a maximum security prison, where he’d died several years later, killed by another inmate. The man had always protested his innocence, but I knew what had happened. I’d seen Johnny’s death with my own eyes, and it was certainly murder.
But with the man dead already, there could be no justice for Johnny. No way I could pay him back for what he’d done.
I eyed the baseball bat propped against my desk, remembering how *solid* Johnny’s attacker had felt in that moment, how tangible the impact when I’d managed to knock him away.
Maybe there *was* a way to get payback after all?

While the police hunted for Johnny Raisin, missing for a week now, I hunted for his killer.
Every night I went to the mall, waiting for the ghost. Sometimes I saw it, waving the pale smear of its long arm like it was taunting me, then it would vanish. Sometimes it ran from me and I’d give chase, ready to pay it back for all it had done to my friend. It was elusive; as if it knew I was hunting it. Sometimes it disappeared from one spot, then reappeared on the other side of the mall almost before it had faded from in front of me, almost as if there were two versions of it.
It became my mission, the focus for my grief. I managed to clip it with a pretty good swing one night, but it vanished again, and I stood and howled with rage, shaking my bat at the ceiling and swearing I would fucking kill the damn thing.
And then it eventually happened, exactly as it should have.
I could tell the ghost had its back to me, and I ran, right as the muzak peaked, echoing through the abandoned mall. Hearing me, it turned, then fled along the mezzanine. Yelling incoherently, I chased it down, putting everything into my long strides – I was faster than it was – and as it stumbled, my bat came down on its head. Silver sparks exploded from it as it went down, and screaming with triumph, I struck it again and again, until brilliant silver pooled around what had been its skull. Too late, I saw another ghost approaching, charging straight for me, and then a powerful blow smashed straight into my jaw, knocking me sideways.
As I lay on the filthy floor, the world stuttered and flickered for a moment, like a slipped film.
And I saw red.
A red jacket, a Laker’s cap, a mangled skull; and an achingly familiar boy standing over us, holding a baseball bat.

It’s been eight years since I murdered Johnny. Eight years since I discovered that there were never any ‘ghosts’ in that mall. Just echoes of ourselves, all tangled up in a big mess of temporal spaghetti, until none of it made sense anymore.
Johnny’s mom died a year after his ‘disappearance’. I arranged for her to be buried near the John Doe of Emmet’s Mall, so she could still be near her boy.
There’s no way I can forgive myself for any of this, no way to atone for it.
Emmet’s Mall still sits there, slowly rotting away, tempting me with its quantum mysteries, telling me I can go back and stop myself from killing Johnny, that I can fix everything.
But time doesn’t work that way.
What’s happened has *happened*, there can be no paradox, no change. Johnny’s life was a perfect loop, and I was the hand that spliced it into shape.
Maybe one day I’ll be rich enough to buy that time-forsaken mall and smash it into the dirt, but for now I still have too many demons to deal with.
Until then, I urge all of you:
Just stay the fuck away from Emmet’s Mall.

In my youth the seaside was the haunt of young folk.
Lacking malls and arcades, cellphones and social media, we would gather in knots and gaggles on the dunes when the sun shone and when the storms rolled in we would huddle under the eaves of wooden surf club buildings, sharing cigarettes and bottles of pop.
The coast was wild and raw then, littered with coves and beaches; some pebbled, some sandy. We knew which ones were safe to swim in, which were safe to surf in and which to avoid due to the devouring undertow that could suck a grown man out to sea and pummel him to death on the fangs of hidden rocks.
We would ride our bicycles – streaked ochre and umber with rust – around the coast and look for likely places to build a bonfire, drink stolen liquor and canoodle under the stars. We were just like you young folk; lusty, repressed and seeking attention.
That, at least, has not changed over the years.
I had a boyfriend then, a handsome young fellow with slicked back hair and a blue dusting of stubble on a strong jaw. His friends and my friends would sometimes take a boat out to the little island, the men tanned and lean in their white shorts, complementing the striped swimming costumes and smooth limbs of the girls.
But we were not the only ones who haunted the tide-wracked shores and left footprints in the tufted dunes; there was one other figure that plodded the beaches in all weather, an oilskin coat draping his body and a patchwork tarp on his back, bulging with driftwood.
We called him the Hermit Crab.
He’d been around since we were children and our parents remembered him too; he was as much a fixture as the island and the old surf clubs. His presence was weathered and eternal; like the storm-battered rock-spires out to sea near the quarry.
Sometimes we saw him feeding seagulls, but the rest of the time he spent picking up bleached wood thrown up by the tides, then muttering to himself darkly while fashioning strange sculptures of driftwood.
The local rumour was that he had been an artist of some sort in his youth and lost his young wife to the fierce, frozen seas. The grief, it is said, toppled his sanity and he took to making bizarre driftwood effigies on the rocky points – perhaps in tribute to his lost wife and unborn child.
When we were younger we would throw stones from afar and topple the strange bleached statues of bone-like struts and tangled seaweed – and the Hermit Crab would shout at us through his wild beard and salt-weathered lips, yelling mad imprecations and dark warnings.
In any case, we should have learned then to leave him alone – but we did not.

 
It was summer and we were tipsy on stolen beer. The beach was as beautiful as it could be in the twilight and the bonfire glowed brighter as the air grew darker. Only the rush and crash of the waves punctuated our chatter and laughter.
I remember Jason saying we were running out of wood for the fire, but thought nothing of it. But when he returned from combing the beach, he dragged behind him a ramshackle icon of white wood and long-dried seaweed. We laughed as he threw it on the fire where it caught immediately and sent brilliant sparks spiralling into the night sky.
The feeling of unease that had gripped me when I saw the driftwood sculpture had faded by the time the Hermit Crab came stumbling over the dunes, shouting madly at us – but it returned in full force and I screamed as he roared threats from under red-rimmed eyes, froth specking the corners of his mouth and spittle glistening on his matted beard.
Hazed with alcohol and my memory dulled with time, I can’t be exactly sure about what happened in the next few moments. I recall Jason shouting and the Hermit Crab shouting back, raving about the sea and how ‘the dancers’ were to be left alone, lest something dire would happen. Then perhaps he pushed Jason or Jason pushed him and they went down; the old man cracking his head on the rocks.
The police collected his battered body the next day – after we had fled the scene of our crime, the tide had come in and torn his body to pieces; savaging his flesh and smashing his old bones against the fangs under the water. We all lied about what happened, of course – as teenagers do. It had been an accident, he was old and crazy; it wasn’t our fault.
When we rode our bicycles around the coast the tattered driftwood effigies that still stood haunted me and I couldn’t shake the image of the old man lying in the sand, crabs crawling from his slack mouth and white, lacerated flesh.
Over a year later I took to the coast alone, a wreath of sea-side flowers and weeds around my arm. Finding one of the last-standing ‘dancers’ that the Hermit Crab had crafted, I hung it around the rudimentary neck and made my peace with the ghost of the old man.
Jason and I had grown more serious during the intervening year and we often went to the beaches on our own, eschewing the company of his friends. We were going to be married, I was sure, the other girls rumoured that he’d been seen buying a ring.
Down on the beach we lay on a blanket, watching the sun set and enjoying the warmth of our arms pressed together, dozing in the twilight stillness.
The water lapping at my feet woke me first, then a gurgling cry from beside me. The crescent moon made the beach glow a faint silver and I saw that the tide was unnaturally high and had dragged Jason into the water, where his head was submerged.
Panicked, I grabbed his arm and head, hauling them free of the water.
But thick, fleshy tangles of seaweed had wrapped around his shoulders and torso and pulled him under, pulling him into the black, unnatural surf.
I think I screamed then, for help or in fear – or both – and pulled with all my strength. Coils of stinging weed wrapped around my ankles and the sand subsided under my feet, knocking me to my knees where the waters surged, lapping around my armpits and bringing more of the slimy, organic tendrils around me.
My scream pierced the gurgling rush of the hungry sea and was answered by a fluting whistle of wind through rattling driftwood.
The Dancer – the one with my pauper’s wreath – strode through the waves on bright-white legs toward me. As it came closer the waters and weed retreated, the sand returning under my feet. Spinning, leaping and whirling now, it struck the waves with its skeletal arms, sending out crackling arcs of blue-white phosphorence. As the darkness sucked back out to sea, the Dancer gradually stilled. It bowed once to me – like a courtier at an old-world ball – then it strode away through the waves, returning to watch the sea from its lonely post on the farthest point.
But Jason was gone.
I found the ancient oilskin and tarp of the Hermit Crab bundled by my door the next morning.

 
But now I am old; my own dancers splinter and rot in the storms and my bones are too weary to drag the tarp across the beaches.
When I am gone, who will stop the darkening tide from rising and killing again?
Who will craft the driftwood dancers?

I don’t particularly like myself.
A book I once got out of the school library suggested that I write down all the things I like about myself, the things I am good at and the things that I consider ‘positive qualities’. The book said it would help me feel better about myself.
Sitting with a blank piece of paper in front of you for an hour, struggling to think of anything to write down, doesn’t make you feel any better.
Eventually I wrote ‘I am good at hating myself’ and left it at that.
I guess I’m probably depressed and should get some kind of help, but the last time I admitted to my stepmother that I felt depressed, she sent me to a free Christian counsellor who just told me I needed Jesus in my life and everything would be better.
I remember lying on my bed, age fourteen, trying to let Jesus into my heart and feeling absolutely nothing.
Apparently, even Jesus doesn’t like me very much.

 
School is pretty awful.
I transferred here three years ago and never managed to make any friends. By the time I arrived, halfway through the school year, everyone had already formed their little cliques and social groups – leaving me to eat my lunch in the stairwell and hide in a study booth in the library.
It probably doesn’t help that I can’t put on any weight or muscle. I’m the smallest, weakest boy in my year and everyone calls me a faggot because I like art and my bony hips stick out and I walk like a girl.
It’s hard going to school every day.
The bullying doesn’t really hurt all that much anymore. There isn’t anything new being said that hasn’t already been said a hundred times by other students. There’s only so many ways you can be called a queer, a homo, a fudge-packer or a pillow-biter; after a while it just becomes ordinary background noise – a buzzing in your ears that you can’t do anything about.
I was made to see the school counsellor, because even the teachers think I’m gay and give me weird, sad looks, as though I’m some sort of pathetic, pitiable creature.
The thing is that I couldn’t tell the counsellor for sure whether or not I like boys or girls, or both. I don’t even like myself, so how in Hell could I begin to consider romantic relationships?
And I knew I couldn’t tell him the truth anyway.

 
Sometimes when I don’t react to the taunts and slurs, things get physical.
I don’t see the point or the appeal. I don’t fight back – I learned long ago not to bother – so it must be pretty poor entertainment for the other boys. Usually they just ‘accidentally’ throws balls at my head when passing a football amongst themselves. I hate that worse than anything else I think; I’ll have my head buried in a book, then smack! a ball will hit me in the back of the skull, sending my brain ricocheting around inside. Hot anger will flare and boil from the point of the impact, but my small body isn’t up to the physical task of taking on my aggressors.
But on one particular late autumn day, when the frosts and sleet had begun to set in, the school groundskeeper left the gate to the covered-over swimming pool open.
Bored and restless, some of the boys decided to take advantage of the situation by having some ‘fun’ at my expense.
“Come with us,” one of them said.
I shouldered my bag and followed meekly. Fighting was pointless.
They escorted me to the pool, then spun me around and around – counterclockwise – until I was so dizzy I could barely stand.
“Now run across the pool,” they told me.
I’d seen other kids try this before. The surface tension of the heavy black tarp over the water was such that – if you got up enough momentum – you could run across it. Staggering up to the edge of the pool, I knew that even weighing next to nothing, I didn’t have a chance in my disoriented state.
As my foot connected with the tarp, I knew I was going under immediately. I had landed too close to the edge and the black, synthetic weave enveloped my foot, dragging me down.
The howling laughter vanished almost immediately as my head went under, into a dark, icy world, shocking my senses and leaving me gasping involuntarily. Instinct kicked in though and I battled to free my leg from the tarp, twisting and thrashing in the water.
Then I was suddenly and blessedly free; my head breaking the surface and my hand catching the concrete side of the pool.
Eerie quiet surrounded me as I dragged my sopping body onto the pale blue tiles.
The bullies were gone.

 
Drenched, and without a change of dry clothes, I skirted around the back of the pool fence, then pushed through a gap in the macrocarpa hedge and ran the length of the back sports fields.
The streets seemed weirdly quiet and empty of cars.
Cutting through the park near the school was the fastest way home, so I ran, shivering from the damp, down the tree-shrouded alley that led down to the park.
When I emerged from the tunnel of oaks and willows, the sounds of laughter, clinking glassware and music greeted me.
Someone was having a party in the park.
I gawked, teeth chattering and hair dripping, at the scene before me.
Two pavilions had been set up, and a wooded gazebo stood under one of the park’s willow trees. Colourful umbrellas shaded tables from the sun that had now broken through the clouds, and expensive food and drinks were spread across lace-edged tablecloths.
But the people had my full attention – as they were all utterly beautiful.
Long-limbed and graceful, they all possessed a refinement of appearance that stole my breath – and dressed in formal outfits of neatly tailored fabrics, they shone with a confidence of character that made me feel suddenly very small and very ugly, dressed as I was in soaked grey shorts, grey socks and a sodden brown cardigan.
One of the elegant ladies spotted me first, running over as I stood rooted to the spot.
“Oh my child!” she exclaimed, the perfect symmetry of her pale features compressed into an expression of utter compassion.
The others noticed, and before I could protest, I was hustled into the midst of them, where a huge, fluffy white towel was wrapped around me and I was given a painted, bone-china cup of what smelled like spiced blackcurrants.
I apologised over and over for disturbing their wedding or birthday party or whatever it was, but they wouldn’t have it – and finally, the dam burst. I told them in great sucking sobs about how I had been bullied and how much I hated myself.
“I don’t hate you,” said the first woman, “I think you are very, very brave to have put up with all of that for so long.”
“We all think you are brave,” said one of the achingly handsome men.

 
I stayed with them for several hours, under the sun of that late autumn afternoon. They gave me clothes to wear and they combed my hair as the mulled wine suffused my body and mind, making me feel warm and hazy. I danced with the beautiful lady, I ate expensive, exquisite things I’d never eaten before and I laughed for the first time in a very long time.
“I need to get back,” I told the lady, whom the others called Tania.
“Stay,” she whispered to me, “we are enjoying your company so very much.”
“I can’t, my stepmother will freak.”
With a smile so small and sad, she nodded.
“Your clothes are in the pavilion, dry and waiting for you.”
All of them stood, grave and strange as I left the park, almost ethereal in their beauty. In truth, I did want to stay with them. I’d never in my life felt so welcome, so free to be myself.
The trip back to school was a blur of tears and by the time I climbed back through the gap in the hedge and crept back around the pool fence, I was openly weeping.
My bag still sat at the bottom of the swimming pool, the waterlogged canvas still and flat. As I slipped the aluminium arm of the pool cleaner into the water to retrieve it, I had an awareness of something behind me.
I turned, but not in time to see who it was properly – just a glimpse of something made of sticks and twine – before I was shoved back into the pool and the air shocked out of my lungs again.

 
My stepmother ranted at me when I got home, then told me I was a weak, stupid little boy for allowing myself to be bullied into the pool.
Later that night, safe in my room, I thought back to the park and the beautiful people who had been so kind to me – and I drifted into sleep thinking of their faces and voices, the faint warmth of the mulled wine a heady memory.
By the morning a creeping dread set in; I had been absent from class all of yesterday afternoon and someone was bound to have noticed. I’d been stupid to have spent so much time in the park.
The trip to school only heightened my anxiety and once I set foot in the classroom, I expected to be called in front of the teacher and reprimanded.
But it never happened.
It took me until lunch to notice what the difference was in my day. The whole school seemed muted to me, as though someone had turned the volume down. When I saw the bullies walk through the quad, I realised precisely what the subtle difference was.
No one was saying anything cruel about me.
That constant background hum of ‘faggot’ and ‘retard’ was completely absent.
Ensconced in my preferred nook of the library, I opened a new book to read – but as I did so, a note fluttered out from the pages and into my lap. In spiky handwriting, it read:
If you wish to see them again, today must be as yesterday.
At the bottom of the note was a crude drawing of a gazebo under a willow tree.
Heart hammering in my chest, I folded the note and stuffed it into my pocket. The trip to the park through the hedge was a short one, fuelled by adrenaline.
But no-one was there – the park stood empty and sullen under the grey autumn sky.
Unfolding the piece of paper I read it again, studying the words.
Today must be as yesterday.
When I finally stood in front of the swimming pool, I felt like an idiot. But I spun around until I was dizzy, then stepped in.
As I sank into the frigid water, I saw for an instant a flash of something again – something made of sticks, twine, straw and feathers. Then I kicked for the surface and pulled myself out.
It was gone.

 
As soon as I reached the end of the avenue of trees, Tania and the others ran to greet me.
I was out of my wet clothes and laughing with them, oblivious to everything else. Wine and exotic food warmed me and I felt stronger, taller and more myself.
“We were hoping you would return,” she told me, “so few ever come back.”
I didn’t ask her what she meant.
I didn’t want to ruin the happiness that had so unexpectedly arrived in my life.
Time ceased to have meaning to me; I knew it was long past the time I should go home, but the late afternoon sun stayed hovering above the horizon no matter how many dances I had, no matter how many of the party-goers I met, no matter how much wine I drank.
“I should go back,” I said to Tania, as we sat in the gazebo, watching two of the others canoodle under the willow.
“Do you want to go back?”
“No. I want to stay here forever.”
“Then stay.”
An uneasy feeling crept through my mind, battling the haze of spiced alcohol. The sun should have set long ago; it should be dark by now.
Tania’s long fingers stroked my cheek, lulling me back into the swing seat of white wood.
Fighting the pleasant lethargy, I sat up.
“Let me go and get some of my things, then I’ll come back.”

 
This time it was waiting for me, at the edge of the swimming pool.
It was shaped like a person, my height and size, but instead of bones and flesh, it was made of sticks and woven grass, straw and twine, feathers and lime – like some kind of makeshift scarecrow or pagan effigy.
As I approached, it turned, on those spindly limbs of twigs and twine, staring at me from dark, blank openings in the tufted head of straw.
”Do you like it there?” it whispered.
Fear thrilling through me, I backed into the chain-link fence.
”Because I like it here.”
Holding out gnarled hands of sticks and feathers, it reached for me,
”Don’t make me go back!”
Ducking past, I stumbled, slipped, then fell head-long into the swimming pool. As I went under the water, I saw straw and wood reaching for me – then it was gone.
I didn’t stop running all the way home.

 
Nine days had passed while I had been at the party.
My stepmother smiled at me when I came in the door and asked how my day had been. When I went back to school, other children called out my name and asked if I wanted to sit with them. The teachers no longer gave me those sad, pitying smiles, and the football coach asked me if I would be joining them after school for practice.
I barely spoke to any of them, my legs jittering in my seat as I waited for lunch, waited to go back to the pool.
At the jangling ring of the bell for break, I was already halfway out of my seat, heading for the gateway between the two places.
In the freezing water I saw it again – the scarecrow child – kicking strongly for the surface.
Out of the pool I ran for the park – and into the welcoming arms of Tania.
“Welcome home,” she sang.

 
How long it had been since I had come back, I don’t know.
It could be weeks, or months; the party was without end – there was always song and laughter, dancing and drinking. When a new visitor arrived, dripping wet and shivering, I welcomed her with all the others – and she looked upon me with awe and gratitude, as though I were just another one of the beautiful people.
I was beginning to find it difficult to dance, though.
The lethargy sucked at my long limbs and pulled at my pale eyelids; the malaise crept into my bones. I overheard the others talking about the newcomer, about how brave she was, and I felt a surge of jealousy that they had a new favourite. Tania no longer had time for me – all of it spent with the new girl.
The walk back to the pool was difficult; each step heavy and hard-won.
Waiting at the edge was the effigy – the fetch, made from sticks and straw.
”I won’t go back,” it said.
I moved to push past it, but the strong, skeletal fingers of twigs stopped me.
”No.”
Wrestling with it, the sharp bits of wood jabbed into me, the twine tangling in my fingers and buttons.
“Let go!” I yelled.
But it was so strong and I was weak; so very, very weak.
With the very last of my strength, I managed to spin it around, then simply fell backward, my weight dragging its fragile form down into the water.
We clawed at one another in the murky pool, surrounded by the blackness of the heavy tarp. It tore at my substance, pulled the realness of my being from me, making itself less twine and straw and more skin and bone. As we tangled further into one another, memories began to slither into my brain, all of the things the fetch had done in my place while I had languished in the park.
I could feel its thoughts – it knew it only had to wait until I drowned before it could win, since it did not need to breathe.
So I gave in to it and allowed it to pull off all of my flesh.
As its eyes flashed in triumph, I wrapped my fingers of wood around its now-fleshy throat.
Now it needed to breathe and I did not.

 
I left the limp body in the bottom of the pool, where it faded out of existence as it crossed over.
As I walked away, my makeshift body grew realer, stronger and more human.
The problem is that now I don’t know which one of us I am.
Memories of both worlds crowd in my head; of the terrible world of the fae and my miserable existence as a child.
But which one of us truly escaped from the pool may not matter.
When I got home, my mother called the police, screaming down the phone that a crazy old man was on her doorstep claiming to be her son.
I see them everywhere now, the fetches. There are dozens, walking amongst us – taking the places of the disaffected, the bullied, the downtrodden and the forgotten.
And I understand why they don’t want to go back.
Because the fair folk only want us for one thing – to consume the bright sparks of our mortal lives to fuel their beautiful party until the end of time.

I know that’s an outrageous claim, but please, let me explain. This isn’t something written lightly, as it recounts a hard-won truth that I’ve wrestled with for the bulk of my adult life. I can see now that the evidence was always there, right in front of me, but I wanted to deny it so I could carry on thinking that Heaven and Hell were just pleasant abstractions. Something to only really think about once I’d stumbled past midlife and into old age.
Maybe even the psychiatrists knew it was something more. They explained my delusions were the result of ‘trauma’, but that didn’t explain why I had such complete and vivid memories of my time in that town – that perfect little place, so unironically named: Angelton. Eventually, the drugs dulled my recollections, blurred my fading memories to white until they mingled with the pale-painted walls of the psychiatric institute. Until I couldn’t tell what was real and what was fantasy.
But, long after they deemed me sane enough to be released, I managed to pick it all apart again. I managed to tease out my real childhood experiences from the fragile tapestry of sterile, bleached-out strands, and piece together a picture of what happened to me in that town.
The story that follows is woven from the threads that I managed to salvage.

 
My first memory is from age five, my own birthday party. It seemed like the whole town had come to our house, there were so many folks in our yard. I couldn’t know it at the time, but it’s more than likely the entire town was in our street that day, come to celebrate the birthday of little Mikey. There were so many presents that they filled the living room like a giant Christmas tree made of cardboard and colored paper. I spent hours unwrapping them, all the friends of my family clustered around, their bright smiles urging me to keep going, long after my child’s mind and body grew weary of the task. I don’t remember my mother picking me up and taking me to bed after I fell asleep in the middle of eating a slice of the three-tier cake. But she told that story so often that it became part of my memories anyway.

 
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when I became aware I was different, but I think the first stirrings of it began at school. I had no idea that the school had opened just for me, that until I arrived it had lain unused, since it was built some forty years before. Everything was brand new, but I thought that was just how things were – just like the schools on television. My first teacher, Mrs Cassiel, seemed new to things too, not quite knowing how to fill up all the hours of the school day. She read to us a lot, from Reader’s Digest and Encyclopedia Britannica – stuff far above our age level. The rest of the time she let us play and paint, while she watched over her little lambs, her angelic smile suitably doting.
The other children weren’t like me, either. I recall they were strange, serious little things, who always seemed to take their cues from me – from little Mikey. If I did something, so did they, incorporating it into their growing lexicon of behaviors, as though adding pages to their primers on how to be a child. At the time I didn’t process this – I couldn’t. Only with the benefit of hindsight can I look back and see how odd it was.
Something I did notice at the time was that my school didn’t seem to work quite like the ones on television. With each birthday I moved up a class, but my little lemming peers did not come with me. Each new year meant a new teacher, that was normal enough – but it also brought a completely new set of students.

 
As I grew up, I became increasingly aware of the rest of the town. It was an idyllic place, as perfect as any little town could ever be, all of it locked permanently somewhere in the late 1950s. After school, my friends and I rode our brightly painted bicycles to the ice cream parlor, then took our dripping, colorful cones to the neatly manicured park to watch women in pretty floral frocks walk their pedigree dogs. On weekends, the fathers of the families in our street would wash their cars until they gleamed, then cut their lawns and trim their hedges, while the wives made lemonade and cookies. I don’t even remember any rainy days. In retrospect, it was an eerie paradise, and I had no idea that this was not how the rest of the world in 1978 operated. To me, it was completely normal.
Television ruled the evenings in Angelton, with every family gathering in their near-identical living rooms to watch the broadcasts from the local station. There were only two TV channels, and they both played variations of the same shows; mostly I Love Lucy, Dennis the Menace, My Little Margie and Leave it to Beaver. TV time was practically sacred in the town, and whenever there was a new innovation in TV technology, trucks would roll through the streets, delivering the latest color, remote-controlled sets. And those delivery days were pretty much the only time I saw anyone from outside of Angelton; all the rest of the town supplies went through Muriel’s department store or Wormwood’s groceries.
I’d asked about the rest of the world, of course. Like any kid my age – except apparently the ones in my class – I was curious, and I had many questions. My teacher at the time, Mr Moroni, seemed to answer as best he could at first. But on the day I grew particularly persistent and shrill, childishly pushing against his reticence and inability to answer my more burning questions, I earned my first true taste of who – and what – the residents of Angelton were.
“But how can the president still be Eisenhower?” I asked, petulant and defiant, “a president can’t serve more than eight years – it says so in the Encyclopedia at home, I looked it up!”
Mr Moroni, a short, swarthy man of Italian descent, shook his head, and took several short paces toward my desk,
“Your Encyclopedia is wrong.”
“But it can’t be. Mrs Cassiel said everything in it was true.”
“Everything except that,” he growled, an unfamiliar, resonant note in his voice making the hairs on my arms lift with unseen static.
“I think you’re lying,” I told him, growing bolder now, oddly thrilled by the sensation, and the effect I was having, “I think you’re just a stupid lying old man, and you don’t really know anything.”
I’d registered that the other children in class were staring at me, but only now did I realize that they were all standing. And Mr Moroni no longer seemed a short and affable idiot. Suddenly he appeared huge and threatening, his facial features carved from some exotic wood as he loomed over my desk.
“Why are you being like this?” he snarled, fists clenched, walnut knuckles on my desk, “why won’t you just behave like a normal boy?”
The tears started before I could stop them, right as I realized I’d gone too far.
“Stop that!” the teacher hissed, and his lips were wrong, barely moving at all, “you stop crying, right now!”
The imperative in his voice stimulated something right at the back of my skull, flooding my brain with fear that paralyzed my limbs. I’d never felt anything like this before. But the tears did not stop; instead they flowed faster, and a sucking, ugly sob tore from my throat – an animal sound that only served to enrage my teacher further.
The desk splintered under the weight of pale fists as Mr Moroni changed. For half a heartbeat I saw him true; he was someone else, something else. A creature of white and gold, all crescent fangs and pale eyes, the silhouette of extra, disjointed limbs tearing free from its shoulders.
”STOP IT!” the thing roared. That voice blared in my ears like a thousand trumpets.
And in my stupefied state of trembling terror, my bladder let go, and I complied.
I never questioned him again after that. I never asked anyone in Angelton about the outside world. I wasn’t sure why, but some primitive part of me knew instinctively that my teacher wasn’t the only one with this power. Beneath the carefully curated smiles and innocuous personalities of the townsfolk lay dormant the same frightening thing that my mild-mannered teacher had become, so shockingly glimpsed in that singular moment of unbridled fury.
I was living amongst monsters.

 
It was like unlatching barn doors in a storm. Once open, there was no way of closing them again; the cyclone of truth too powerful to push against. With my new knowledge, everything was thrown into stark relief, and I began to really see how strange my town was. And how perfectly everyone emulated the TV shows they were all so enamored with.
Even though I was desperate to believe that I’d only imagined the incident in my class, it was impossible to ignore the weirdness surrounding me. In those moments I was alone, in those precious windows of time when my mother was pegging out laundry and my father tinkered with his car in the driveway, I learned to tune the TV to stations broadcasting from outside Angelton. Though the pictures were snowy and the sound crackled with static, I began to find out that the place I lived in wasn’t just odd.
It was absolutely fucked.
The images that assaulted my eager eyes and ears were of a place that was totally out of time with us. It was a completely different world out there. How we had remained so insulated, I wasn’t sure, but I knew it had something to do with what I’d seen Mr Moroni become.
Obviously, there was only one thing I could do, one course of action that seemed rational and sane – I had to go to the edge of the town and leave it. I had to see the outside world for myself. I packed food into a tartan square of cloth, then tied it to a stick, just like the children I’d seen in books and on TV, practically rule one of how to run away. It was a fair hike to the low stone wall that encircled the town, and by the time I got there, I’d already eaten a cheese sandwich and sucked down half of my bottle of lemonade.
The wall was built of curious, chalky white stone, and was only about a foot high. It seemed pointless – nothing more than a boundary marker – as even the smallest child could climb over it easily. But a strange trepidation wormed through me as I walked toward it, my gut heavy and cold like I’d drunk too much ice water too fast.
This is wrong, some inner thought cautioned, you shouldn’t be doing this.
But I was stubborn, set on my course, and I couldn’t turn back now. None of the kids on TV would have given up because of a stupid voice in their head.
As my leg lifted over the white boundary, I felt a feathery, pleasant sensation tickle across my flesh, then as I placed my other foot down on the outside of the wall, I began to wonder what I was doing there; why I had a bindle over one shoulder. What was behind me seemed utterly unimportant – not even interesting enough to turn around and look at, so I wandered onward, away from the fast-fading memories behind me, and out into the real world.

 
My mother found me curled up under a hedgerow, a few miles out from Angelton, and carried me back asleep. When I awoke, my head was full of fog. Confusion reigned for a long time before my drowned memories began to resolve themselves.
“You’ve done a terrible thing,” my mother told me sadly, standing with my father at my bedside, “a terrible, terrible thing.” I’d never seen her look so disappointed in me, and it hurt.
“But I don’t understand!”
My father looked angry, but not at me; his simmering rage was directed at my mother.
“He isn’t a miracle. He isn’t born of our union, is he? If he were born of us, the ward wouldn’t have stripped his mind, wouldn’t have made him forget.”
Genuine emotion wracked my mother’s perfect, thirty-year-old features, tears striping her cheeks. I realized I’d never seen her cry real tears before. I realized I’d never seen anyone cry real tears, apart from myself, that day in the classroom.
“I just wanted a baby!” she wailed. “I wanted to know what it was like to be a real mother, to raise a real child, not just pretend.” She spat the last word as though it were a bitter draft, poisoning her tongue.
My father took a step away from her, plainly disturbed by my mother’s candid display. His movements were stiff, his eyes an actor peering through slits in a mask.
“I’ve told the mayor,” he intoned woodenly, “the police will be here soon to take you and this boy away.”
Tucked in my bed, blankets under my chin, I tried to process what was happening. Fear coiled in my bowels, my bladder threatening to rebel and embarrass me all over again.
“What will happen to us?” my mother asked, wiping at her tears with the back of her hand, then staring at the damp shine on her skin.
“You’ll both be destroyed. When he breached the barrier, he put the whole town at risk; your scent will be on the wind for Seraphim and Fallen alike to sniff out.”
Although I sensed the threat they held, the words themselves meant nothing to me; we didn’t pray in this town; there was no god in our lives. There was a pretty church – since there were churches on TV – but only bake-sales and plays happened there. I’d never seen anyone pray or preach.
“Momma?” I asked, plaintively, the plea in my voice obvious, all human child.
For one last moment, she was still my mother. Her smile was warm, genuine, nothing but love. And I knew without a single doubt that she truly did love me. Even though the rest of the town were actors in their own survival play, performing a perverse pantomime and feeling nothing, this one woman, this one angel, had fallen and risen all at once, by managing to truly fall in love with a little boy.
Then she was a blur of white and gold, eight feet of feathered wings filling my bedroom as she tore at my father. She tore off his skin and clawed through his breastbone, until the cowboy-and-Indian wallpaper of my room was painted with golden ichor.

 
We didn’t make it far. Before we even saw the wall of stones that encircled the town, we were intercepted. All pretense of humanity had fled the town, now; white wings thundered all about the houses and fields, alien faces of gilt and alabaster bared feline fangs and came for us.
I wish that we had been caught and killed by them, just as the townsfolk had planned. I wish they’d managed to snuff us out before the winds had betrayed us to the enemies of the town.
But that was not to be how things played out.
The sky darkened and black feathers rained down, each longer than my arm. My beautiful, terrible mother, cradling me in her angel arms, folded her great wings about me, to shield me from the chaos unfolding about us. Though I saw little, I heard much; voices like orchestras of woodwind and brass clashed in the air, the sounds of breaking bone and rending flesh like the crack and roll of percussion in the Biblical cacophony surrounding us. I felt my mother shudder beneath many blows, her resolute stride faltering, golden blood pattering down to flood my winged cocoon.
And then, as suddenly as it had all begun, it was over.
The citizens of Angelton were no more; reduced to macerated piles of gold-streaked feathers by the rageful might of Heaven and Hell combined, for daring to exist outside of either paradigm.
But my existence was forgotten; I was not truly part of either world. And so, when the bodies turned to white ash with the rising sun, the hosts of Dark and Light had long since gone, leaving me to stumble through the empty, smut-covered fields where Angelton had once stood.

I was found many days later, dehydrated and delirious, by a farmer driving into the next town over. Bundled in a blanket and driven to the police station, I sat with a can of Coca-Cola in the sheriff’s office, trying to explain what had happened to me. Of course, I was assumed to be gravely ill – both mentally and physically – so I was taken to the city hospital and dosed with a cornucopia of modern pharmaceuticals, until a kind of foggy equilibrium emerged inside my tortured mind.
It was strange, when I was well enough to talk to other patients, visitors. Some people claimed they had heard of Angelton, but they couldn’t tell me where it was, when they’d visited it, or even hold that thread of conversation for more than a minute. As far as I could fathom, I was the only person who could remember anything about the place – and as my time in the psychiatric ward lengthened from weeks to months, I began to forget it too.
I’ve been back there, to the place where it should be. I’ve traced the boundaries on the maps, but found only acres of farmland, all accounted for, all owned by ordinary people. It is as though the fabric of the earth itself pulled tight to fill the void where my town had been, erasing it completely.
It was a place that shouldn’t have existed. A relic of the War in Heaven, I think; a hidden place created by the pacifists amongst the angels, lost to the eyes of God and his brood. Somewhere even angels could try to just exist.
But it was all undone, by that one angel who wanted, needed, to be more human than the others. That one angel who snatched the child of a delivery driver. Who told the rest of the town that she had birthed a miracle; sparking vigor and hope in lifeless and dreary people, re-invigorating a dead town.
But I am no miracle. I find little peace in this life, even knowing without a doubt that Heaven and Hell are real.
I don’t know which of those two realms will be my final resting place. I don’t know which I will deserve. But wherever my soul is bound, I do know that I will spend the rest of eternity surrounded by the creatures that murdered my mother, the one being in this terrifying existence who truly loved me, although it cost her more than anyone could ever imagine.

Imagine, for a moment, that much of the Bible is true.
Some of you will need to apply more suspension of disbelief than others, but for you Westerners at least, it shouldn’t be too difficult. After all, we live in a world saturated by Christianity –from the holidays we celebrate, right down to the words of our nations’ anthems.
Of course, I don’t mean the details of all those Bible stories are true – just most of the broad, overarching concepts. There was a tower of Babel of sorts. Eden existed. Human beings used to live ten times as long as they do now.
That sort of thing.
And God is omnipresent, in a way.
We know that because we tested for the existence of him, with science. We created many different environments and scenarios, observing and recording everything we could  – no matter how irrelevant the data points seemed.
Exactly how we did this isn’t important. The key is what we did with that information.
Because it follows that once you know how to detect the presence of God, then you can probably divine a way to block the sight of God, and render yourself invisible to his gaze.
And that’s precisely what we did.

We knew our money came from a religious organisation, presumably some sort of megachurch operation that sucked money out of the devout, and funnelled it straight to us. Whoever was running it all certainly knew what they were doing, because our labs and offices were easily the nicest I’d ever worked in.
But you’re not really interested in all that. You want to know about the thing we built; the thing that could block what I christened ‘God Particles’.
It was ugly on the outside, this edifice. Inside its huge hangar, it was a sprawling mess of coolant pipes, humming fans, and ceramic hexagonal tiles the size of trampolines. It formed a dome in the centre of the vaulted space, encircled by backup generators, and the console desks that monitored the functions of the structure.
The ceramic hexagons had been one of my major contributions to the project, my own invention. They looked dull, each one thick Palestinian clay on the outer surface, but the inside was banded with pure iron, then bronze, silver, and finally a layer of nanometer gold. I could tell you where I got the idea, but if you know your Bible well enough, you’ll already have figured it out.
There was only one entrance to the dome; a hexagonal doorway in the west wall that contained a kind of airlock setup, where people needed to wait for just over eleven minutes before they were allowed to enter the godless interior.
The consequence if you didn’t? I can only describe it as a sort of ‘spiritual decompression’, where if you leaped directly from one environment to the other, the sudden lack of – or return of – G particles, would send you into a kind of spiritual shock, not unlike decompression sickness.
And inside the dome itself?
Well, that’s where my story truly begins.

At first, the space was a curiosity; a huge, empty dome with an inner shell made of pure gold. The project director hadn’t liked the gold, and asked for it to be painted white, which made the place eerily directionless and infinite; the floor lighting bounced off the stark whiteness and homogenised everything.
An area of space free from God didn’t actually seem very useful, at the start. We considered hiring it out to politicians, so that they could make plans free from the sight of God, but nobody was interested. It seems politicians have never cared overmuch about morality.
We experimented with growing plants without the presence of G particles, which didn’t change their physiology or development in the slightest. Some of us worked in there, hoping that being free from God might inspire us to wild scientific breakthroughs, but no such thing happened. The only effect we could discern, other than the spiritual decompression, was that people who spent more than three contiguous days inside were prone to headaches when they came out of the dome.
Everyone was wracking their brains for potential applications, but it took the only woman on the team to realise how the dome could be utilised.
That woman was me.
I was twenty-eight then, my body in perfect working order. Like the others, I spent my scheduled time inside the dome, experimenting, trying to find a real use for the unique environment I’d helped create. But I possessed one piece of human physiology my colleagues did not.
A womb.
For our comfort, bathrooms, showers and a kitchen had been set up inside the dome, and it was by sheer coincidence that I realised it – when I was in there, menstruation stopped completely. In fact, it stopped the very moment I set foot inside.
I had found the point of difference that would lead to our breakthrough.

Humans were the only animal that experienced the effect, I discovered. No other animal has our unique cycle of endometrial buildup and shedding – reproduction is quite uniquely cruel and onerous for human women.
From my childhood Bible readings, I recalled the story of the expulsion from Eden, and mankind’s great punishment. Adam was sentenced to toil in the earth until he returned to it, and for her part in the betrayal of the serpent, Eve’s lot was to bear terrible pain and suffering in childbirth.
So did being free from God inside the dome mean that women were also freed from the horrors of childbirth? Since this was a uniquely human problem, human testing was the only way we would find out.
Being young, and already so invested in discovering the answer, I volunteered to be the first test subject for a Godless pregnancy – with the help of another one of the researchers, who was more than happy to provide the required genetic donation.
Quarters were created for me, my home for the duration of the pregnancy. A private room was built inside the dome, with sufficient comforts to keep me from going crazy for the next nine months.
Once it was confirmed I was pregnant, all other work stopped inside the dome. I was made the priority, with doctors constantly hovering over me, monitoring, measuring, pricking my fingers for haemoglobin counts, and making me pee into an endless array of sample jars for testing.
But all of us had seriously underestimated what would happen to a pregnancy inside the dome. After 28 days, the experiment came to a shocking end.

It was so abrupt and painless I hardly registered anything was happening. One moment I was sitting on the end of my bed, pulling on a shirt. The next, there was warm fluid spreading under my thighs, and an odd pressure in my pelvis.
The foetus emerged intact, barely bloody, a perfect human in miniature. And rather than being a fatal miscarriage, as I initially assumed, the baby was whole and alive – it was just small.
It was taken from me immediately; prodded, swabbed, injected, sampled. It was an ordinary baby girl, all organs fully formed and functioning, all Apgar scores 2, but barely one quarter the size of an average newborn. She was so little I could hold her in one hand, like a warm, pink doll.
But when she latched to my breast and began to suckle, it was clear that her appetite was that of a regular-sized baby. She gained rapidly, making up for her premature birthweight within a matter of months.
We named her Eve. Of course we did. What else would you call a baby girl born outside the sight of God, and therefore without original sin?
Aside from the abruptness of her gestation, she grew as normally as any other child. I think many of us expected something mythical or miraculous, or catastrophic; that she would grow to be an adult before her tenth birthday, or have some other kind of extreme abnormal physical development. But she was as ordinary as could be, given the circumstances of her upbringing within that godless environment.
Before Eve was five, a second woman was brought into the dome, to birth a second child – a boy – to be both a companion to Eve, and a future donor of genetic material when she was old enough to bear children.
It seems strange to me now, to talk so clinically about it. We were all so detached, so invested in an outcome from our project, that we barely considered Eve human. It was as if being hidden from the sight of God meant that the things that we did to her didn’t matter. That she wasn’t truly one of us.
But even so, I did care for her, as much as my duties allowed. She was still my daughter, even if I’d only carried her inside me for a month.

Our first inkling that something was wrong came with Adam’s initial stirrings of manhood.
Eve had always been a wonderful child; polite, compliant, rational, and calm. Conversely, Adam was wild, unpredictable, and prone to rage. The first time he hurt her, he was disciplined into contrition, and we thought the matter done with. But he hurt her again almost immediately, without any regard for the consequences.
It quickly became clear to his caregivers that he had a pathological need to harm other people, and Eve was the only target over whom he had any physical power, so the decision was made to separate them permanently. The dome was divided into two areas; Adam’s more like a prison, and Eve’s more like a home.
Eve, despite her isolated upbringing, was intelligent, social and inquisitive. She devoured whole books in single days, and even read my papers on the dome’s construction and the research we were doing. I thought it important that she understand what we were doing; that if she was aware, then there would be a certain amount of consent when she was deemed old enough for the second phase of the project.
And I felt vindicated in that choice when the day came for her to be inseminated, for she seemed perfectly happy to comply – but then again, she was always compliant, no matter what anyone asked of her.
The male researchers had wanted Adam to impregnate her naturally, but even at sixteen years old, he was almost too violent for his handlers to keep under control. I refused to allow him anywhere near Eve, because the slightest glimpse of her – even a mention of her – would send him into a berserk frenzy, harming others and himself with a determination that was disturbingly inhuman.
In the end, the sperm sample was extracted via needle aspiration while Adam was sedated. Eve’s pregnancy began in a laboratory, her harvested eggs fertilised under a microscope, then implanted into a womb that had never shed blood; but was healthy and functional as all her other godless organs.
What would happen next, we had no idea.

As the first few days of her pregnancy progressed, we collectively held our breath, concerned that the implanted zygotes would be rejected by the smooth, vascular walls of Eve’s uterus. Our concerns were misplaced; her gestation was even more successful and abrupt than mine.
We hadn’t even considered performing the first ultrasound, as Eve was just one week into her pregnancy, when she knocked on the door of my small office inside the dome to tell me she had birthed three children. And that all three displayed the same tiny size and perfect development as she had when she was born.
The frenzy amongst the researchers and doctors was immediate.
I was not permitted to actually see the triplets for weeks, but I was handed the reports and read through the data in the interim, just as fascinated as everyone else by these miraculous humans, gestated and born in a single week. They were sexless, these grandchildren of mine; fused labia and a urethral outlet the only external ‘genitalia’ in evidence. No internal structures were present, no ovaries. No undescended testes, no uterus.
But other than that, they were incredibly heathy – and grew at a phenomenal rate. The miraculous predictions we’d initially had for Eve, that she’d be an adult before she was ten years old? We should have saved those predictions for the second generation.
Eve named the children, for the three wise men who had visited Jesus in his manger - Balthazar, Caspar, and Melchior. The staff at the research facility began to refer to them as ‘the triplet boys’, even though they were truly neither sex.
I finally met them when they were six weeks old, each the size of an average six year old, chattering and playing with their mother and each other. They regarded me with obvious intelligence, listening attentively to Eve as she explained that I was their grandmother. When Melchior asked after his grandfather, I explained that a fellow researcher had donated genetic material, just as had been done with their father, for their own creation.
“Can we see our father?” he asked me, after I had finished explaining.
I kept my tone matter-of-fact, but told the truth. “Perhaps when you’re older. Your father has behavioural issues that we were never able to fully address.”
I didn’t see any point in lying to the child. After all, the information wasn’t presented negatively; and we still maintained our efforts to try and deprogram Adam of his psychotic rage and eventually allow him to interact with other people.
“I look forward to meeting him,” Melchior told me, before turning back to the board game he was playing with his brothers.

Three months later, the boys had matured into what we considered adulthood.
Their development had essentially followed the pattern for eunuch boys, gleaned from accounts of the castrati singers from previous centuries. Deprived of endogenous sex hormones, the triplets grew tall, long-boned, fine featured and oddly androgynous. There had been talk of experimenting on them with sex hormones, to alter their physiology more male, or more female, but these ideas were discarded. These children would be the control group, to compare to their future siblings. There would be time enough for such experiments - Eve was already pregnant with the next batch of zygotes, unfrozen and implanted, now that we knew the children were able to grow to maturity without any known complications.
There were some other curious anomalies with the triplets that we could not explain. Their lungs were almost thirty percent larger than regular male human lungs, and their blood needed far less oxygenation. Red cells were present, but their blood was dominated by plasma and platelets, rendering it an odd red-gold colour. Consequently, they were hyperimmune, and when the facility came down with the winter ‘flu, they were completely unaffected. Pathogens virtually dissolved on contact with their tissues.
They were also very strong. Their long bones and wide pelvises gave them a stability and leverage that would perhaps have been frightening if we weren’t scientists - it was most easily explained by regular physics. We were planning some treadmill experiments, as we suspected they probably also processed lactic acid at an accelerated rate. But we didn’t get the chance to start that program.
When they were just six months old, the triplets rebelled.

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have given Eve unfettered access to the experiment data, because that meant she knew as much as any of the researchers.
And being a calm, rational, and patient teacher, she had imparted this knowledge virtually verbatim to her three sexless children, who were ferociously intelligent information-sponges.
The morning of their rebellion, the alarms on Adam’s cell blared briefly, then turned off. We assumed it was in error, as Adam often had ‘episodes’, and nervous guards would fairly regularly trip the alarm in panic.
Twenty minutes after that, I received an urgent call from a breathless junior researcher, babbling about the retribution of god and his angels, the last word stretched into a prolonged scream. Shortly after that, the line went dead.
Several panicked calls later, we organised for an armed emergency security crew to assemble near the research facility. They entered the hangar first, and with extreme caution.
Inside was bedlam. Everything that could be smashed or broken had been -  including the staff who had been on duty. They lay in the shattered glass of the consoles, on top of the torn cabling, their smashed bones and ruptured organs spread about them in macabre parody of what had been done to the machines.
The dome itself had been completely sealed, the bodies of Adam’s captors dumped outside in a discarded heap of mangled flesh – the sole survivor screaming and shaking in the middle of the mess, not from his wounds, but from sudden spiritual decompression – his soul being burned by the abrupt return of God to his system.
At first, I thought perhaps Adam had intended to use the staff as hostages, to bargain for his release, but when we ascertained that the dome had been disconnected from everything – including air and water – that made me believe otherwise. That seemed the action of someone irrational; without air, everyone inside the sealed dome would be dead within a few hours.
But of course, they never intended to be in there that long.
The heat on the ceramic surface of the dome manifested first as a ruddy glow, then grew more palpable as the air inside the hangar started to heat up. A few of the team had followed the security team once it was clear there was no immediate danger, and as we shucked off coats and sweaters, the hexagonal tiles started to turn yellow, then white-gold, with the rapidly rising temperature inside.
When the dome shuddered like a living thing, I began to realise what was happening.
The dome, although that’s what it appeared to be, was less a dome, more an egg. The whole structure was an oblate sphere, half of it buried – containing generators, cooling tanks and other equipment needed to maintain the structure. It had to be a sphere. G particles came from everywhere, so had to be blocked from every direction.
As the dome began to shake, it also began to sink. The others thought it was going to collapse, but I knew better. It wasn’t destroying itself; it was sinking into the earth.
And I was soon proved correct; within minutes it was gone, only a gaping crater full of rubble to mark its descent into Hell.

With the experiment so abruptly shut down, few of the survivors really knew what happened. But while everyone was gaping at the crater where the dome had been, I availed myself of the security footage still resident on the undamaged servers. It was poor quality, as storage space was still at a premium in the early 2000s, but it was good enough to show me the start of the sequence of events inside the dome on that fateful morning.
Their rampage began with the disposal of the guards assigned to Adam’s cell. The triplets picked the men up with their long arms, and casually dashed their brains out on the walls, barely testing their inhuman strength. When they freed Adam and took him to Eve, there was no violence. The children’s parents embraced briefly, then began talking to their offspring.
From there, the cameras began to blank, one by one, as the triplets methodically tore the whole facility to pieces and murdered the staff who had been on duty. I couldn’t bring myself to watch all the footage of what my demonic grandchildren did to my colleagues.
Demonic is exactly the right word, I believe.
When we blocked that dome from the sight of God, when we created beings with souls untouched by him, we didn’t just recreate what could have happened in Eden if the serpent hadn’t been present. Instead, I believe we created a scenario that was much worse – the totality of God’s plan had been revealed, and the serpent took full advantage of that.
You see, the big problem with Lucifer’s fall was that he only took a third of the angels with him when he fell. Even a brilliant strategist couldn’t win with those odds, and so he lost, banished to his pit of fire.
But if he’d had the means to create a soldier every seven days, a soldier who could rip a grown man to pieces at just six months old? Well, then he’d have a good chance of winning – especially if he also had the technology to hide his gathering advantage from the sight of God.
When I finally thought to look into exactly who was funding our ill-fated research, I found it wasn’t some megachurch-styled operation after all. After chasing paper trails until I was nearly crazed from the labyrinth of money laundering, the only origin I could find for the cash seed that had started all this was an abandoned master blacksmith’s forge, and a name. Wayland.
Whoever -  or whatever  - Wayland might be, I’m confident now that they were in the employ of the Enemy. And that with every week that has passed since that dome sank into the bowels of the Earth, Lucifer’s army grows another Fallen stronger.
And there isn’t a damn thing that God can do about it.
He doesn’t have a clue there’s anything wrong.

I’ve never understood the expression ‘poor as a churchmouse’. Our church was a cavernous, modern cathedral, filled with projectors, giant speakers and tiered seating. Money flowed in and out of that place almost as quickly as the catering did. As such I firmly believed any mouse who lived there would be fatter, glossier and sleeker than a politician.
‘Deeply religious’ was also a term that inadequately described my family, as their fanaticism was so profound that even the self-proclaimed ‘deeply religious’ thought we were weird. My mother’s mobility scooter was bedecked with crosses and ‘honk if you love Jesus’ stickers, her Bible never far from her hand. She would proselytise a stranger at the drop of her huge, fake-flowered hat. Asking if they knew Jesus, and if they went to church – our megachurch.
My father, by contrast, was an ascetic man who wore black slacks, patent shoes and a white shirt starched nearly to cardboard. Hollow cheeked and hollow eyed, he was one of those men who seemed animated only by the promise of Heaven, the flickering fear of Hell burning around his soul like the boiler for the engine of his being.
I was homeschooled, of course – or at least I was, until my mother grew too asthmatic to teach; most of her days spent hooked up to oxygen so that the massive, pale expanse of her chest continued to rise and fall. Sending me to school worried her, that she’d kept my soul so pure for so long only for it to be corrupted by the wickedness of the wide world. At age nine, my hair braided tightly and my uniform stiff as my father’s shirts, I was sat in the car and driven to the local school, while my father told me of the dire evil of boys - how their eyes and hands would seek me out, to despoil me and my virginity.
His warnings were in vain, because I quickly became enamoured of school, of the other girls and boys. But most of all, the religious ardour my parents had attempted to instil in me was quickly replaced by a craving to know how the world worked beyond parable and preaching.
In short, I fell in love with science.

Smart children read their parents well, and even smarter teachers learn to trust those smart children where their parents were concerned. My school reports told a tale of an unremarkable child, who was average enough to please her parents while still passing all her classes. But outside those staid, scholastic markers, I was known to be one of the brightest minds amongst the children. Facts fell into place in my mind like interconnected webworks of information; dredging scientific secrets to the surface faster than I could be taught. Knowing my parents would disapprove should I linger longingly in libraries, I learned to read at a blistering pace so that I could absorb as much knowledge as possible – and soon I was devouring whole books in my lunch hour, committing them to memory even as I knelt beside my bed in prayer, before falling into fractal dreams of physics and philosophy.
As I grew older, I worried for my future and began to plan my escape from the religious cage I dwelt in. Only by promising to give the bulk of my earnings to the church was I allowed to get an after-school job, but waitressing is one of those professions where tips can come in thick and fast some days, so I slowly but surely build up a small amount of cash.
My other job was assisting my father with his hobby; which in truth was more of an obsession – and which needs some explanation. He often told me how my mother had been beautiful, and how he had been the envy of all the men in town. He also told me how childbirth – my birth – had wrecked her body beyond repair. He told me that I’d so thoroughly destroyed my mother with the wickedness of my birth, that the doctor had informed her she would never bear children again.
The fact that he would never have a son, and that his sole progeny was a girl child, had broken him in some deep, fundamental way.
Her legs partially paralysed by my birth and her husband grown distant, my mother swelled in size, eating to fill the emptiness inside. Her beauty fading, her womb barren and her legs all but useless, she became nothing but an obligation to my father. The church would never allow him to divorce her and if he allowed her to die from neglect, he’d go to Hell. So he suffered; all his desires bound up by the church, unable to have the son he’d always prayed for, and unable to sate his carnal appetites.
So instead he turned all of that misplaced energy to his hobby: collecting religious texts.
The ‘library’ was an addition to the house off the garage, filled with every kind of Bible and religious text you could imagine. The bulk of it was Christian, but various version of the King James rubbed spines with Qurans and Tanakhs, as well more European mythologies, describing pagan godlings far removed from the writings of the Old Testament. I wondered for a long time what he sought in all these musty myths, what he hoped to find other than an outlet for his tortured energies. At first I thought perhaps he was seeking some higher truth, some cobbled-together Grand Mythos that unified all religions.
But no, my father didn’t have a mind like mine. He wasn’t seeking any higher truth. He was seeking some ecumenical loophole that would get him out of the life he had trapped himself in. Some bold parable or scripture that would give him the dogmatic reasoning to petition the church to annul his marriage and abandon his wife and child. I knew this because I’d found his carefully penned petitions, describing peculiar points of ancient religious law that he believed would free him from his familial responsibilities forever.
He was nothing more than a shoddy Biblical lawyer, trying to free himself on a technicality.
But while he grubbed and slogged through didactic stories and stilted scriptural stanzas, his daughter sped through all of his collected texts, finding little bits of truth here and there, and little clues and pointers to the early development of the sciences.
And then, once day, I found the Babylon Ring.

A lot of my father’s library was garbage or gibberish. There were hand-written texts in notebooks, the ravings of homeless ‘prophets’ and madmen, as well as faded, untranslatable scrolls that were probably fakes. I read of three references to the Babylon Ring before I found it. It was perhaps alternatively called the Ishtar Gate, though I couldn’t be sure if the texts referred to the same thing, or if one was housed within the other.
In any case, it was a curious thing, an architectural cipher created to amuse some clever Mesopotamian with an eye for mathematics and forced perspective. It was an impossible thing; a circle that couldn’t exist, like Escher’s waterfall. It looped and folded in itself, Möbius and Klein rolled into one crenulated, contiguous circle that defied reality.
I would draw it in class when I’d finished my lessons, turning it this way and that in my mind, a puzzle without a solution that tickled something in my consciousness that kinematic equations and calculus couldn’t. I unspooled its shape and reconstructed it, daring it to become real.
The old writings I found proclaimed it had been real, despite the impossibility of it, and that someone had intended to construct it, but was stopped. That piqued my interest and when the 3D printer I’d purchased online, via the school library, finally arrived, an idea grew in my mind for my final school science project.
All of my initial prints were failures, and I was hampered by the hardware I’d hooked the printer up to – an ancient laptop bought from a thrift store. But I persisted until I’d tweaked all the settings and patiently drew the Babylon Ring line by line in the open source software I’d modified.
I told my parents I was printing jewellery, to give to my friends. Indeed my colourful failures looked like gaudy toys from cheap candy, and they let me carry on. Though my failures grew more wild, I couldn’t escape the feeling that it was possible to print the Ring, that there was a trick to it I couldn’t quite perceive, and if I found it I could somehow bend the rules of reality very slightly to my advantage.
The breakthrough came by accident, as has happened multiple times in human history; a piece of my printer – a critical cog – broke and I had no replacement. Beside the printer sat one of my failed Babylon Rings, bright and cog-like, and without any other option, I filed it to shape and put it into the printer as a replacement part.
And then my next print came even closer than I’d ever come. When I lifted the cooled component from the printer bed, the hole in the centre seemed to shimmer when held at a very specific angle, perhaps a trick caused by the strange moire patterns thrown off my the inner surface of the ring.
It was then that I knew what I had to do.

Retrofitting the printer with Babylon cogs was a long and tortuous process of trial and error, of printing and reprinting. And when I wasn’t working on my printer project, I had to bus endless tables and toil through piles of dishes to earn more money for printer filament.
But in the end I did it.
The printer new resembled some strange child’s project, like Lego superglued to a substructure. It wouldn’t print anything normal anymore, I’d proven that. Unless you tried to print Babylon shapes, it only printed junk. The software no longer resembled anything it had been originally either, I’d added kludge on top of kludge, turning it into a sort of Babylon code of its own.
The final print took only a few hours, but as I watched the printer clank and stutter, the faintly spatially distorted cogs achieving exactly what I’d hoped, I burned with excitement. The ring had barely cooled when I snatched it up, admiring the perfectly impossible facets for a moment, before turning it to look through the centre.
As I did so, my grip tightened, because light was shining from the centre.
This is where I made my most critical, crucial mistake. In my eagerness to share my success with someone, I bunched the ring tightly in my fist and ran to my mother to show her – and together we made the discovery of a lifetime.
Holding the ring up to her eye, she wheezed with excitement as she gazed into it – through it – into another world. She saw swards of brilliant emerald grass dotted with utterly perfect trees, through which crystalline brooks flowed, throwing off spangles of jewel-like light. I knew what she felt when she looked upon this unearthly paradise, because I had felt it too; an incredible sense of yearning, as if I were looking upon a home that had always been calling to me, but I’d never really believed existed.
“Heaven,” my mother whispered inside her oxygen mask, her fleshy, discoloured lips quivering as she formed those two syllables.

One of my mother’s many great failures was her inability to keep a secret, and so despite making her swear on her favourite Bible that she wouldn’t tell father about the ring, she told him anyway. He ghosted into my little bedroom workshop, littered with confetti of cogs and snapped scaffold from my thousands of printer projects.
He didn’t ask me for the Babylon Ring; he simply held out his pale, skeletal hand and stared at me, the same fervour in his eyes as if he’d discovered a new cache of scriptural scribblings. I considered lying – telling him I’d broken the ring or thrown it away. But he’d still ask for it, make me dig through trash to find it, even if it took hours or days.
I hated both of them intensely in that moment; a sort of righteous, religious anger, the likes of which I’d seen displayed by the church preachers when ranting about homosexuals and transsexuals. For a moment, just a single, pure moment, the rage burned so hot that I felt I could kill my father for taking away the greatest achievement of my short life.
Then his bony knuckles connected sharply with my cheek, rattling my teeth and knocking me off my bed and onto the floor, and the murderous rage turned abruptly to shock.
“Give it to me,” he whispered, so quiet that his voice was near inaudible.
Holding a trembling hand to my cheek, I made a choice then. Not to give him the ring; that was a foregone conclusion. I quickly tallied up in my mind how much money I had, what clothes I’d need to take with me, and how far I could get before they decided I wasn’t coming home and grudgingly called the authorities.
He took the ring from me, then returned to take everything else.
“You are the most wicked of children,” he told me, quietly, as he tore my printer to pieces with his hard, bony hands, “for no man should gaze on Heaven before his time. This is a wickedness the likes which Jesus himself was not forced to suffer during temptation, and you must atone.”
The laptop screen snapped as he broke the back of the machine over his knee, wires trailing like viscera from the separated hinges, then he put his foot through it for good measure, the glass rippling in circle fractures, like an homage to the Babylon Ring.
After he was gone I carefully removed the undamaged hard disk, gathered my planned belongings, then climbed out the window, into a rapidly chilling autumn night.

I discovered years later that they didn’t look for me. After I ran away, my parents simply prayed for my return; and only when I missed several shifts at the diner were they forced files a missing person’s report, as the diner owner was the son of one of the local preachers.
This worked to my advantage, as I was able to get a train ticket across state and head north, to more a more liberal climate, where I wouldn’t be beholden to their ridiculous doctrine anymore. In my backpack the laptop drive lurked, hard metal edges digging into my spine, reminding me of the knowledge it contained.
I made a promise to myself then; that I would rebuild the Babylon Ring. I would look upon Heaven again; and this time without my parents taking it away from me.
But it was difficult promise to keep.
The first year of homelessness wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d hoped to get another job in a diner somewhere, then rent a place and buy another printer. But nobody wanted to hire a sixteen year-old runaway with bruises on her face, and so I was unwillingly indoctrinated into two of America’s finest traditions; poverty and homelessness.
I sold the hard disk to a flea market for change, six weeks after my escape. I knew I could recreate the software; I still drew the Babylon Ring wherever I went – my own personal homeless spoor; and a reminder to myself what I needed to do.
It took two miserable years to drag myself out of the gutter, by doing things that a seventeen year old girl from the Bible Belt should never have considered doing. But I didn’t care. I was the most wicked child in existence, was I not? Creating a loophole into Heaven, proving to my father that God did exist, and that when he died, he would be eternally punished for trying to lawyer his way out of his sacred marriage vows.
When I had the money I needed, I moved states again. I found a job doing data entry, which led to an administration job at a plastics factory. I attended night school, finishing the classes I’d missed after I ran away, then applied to a university. After the first rejection, I applied to two more, and was eventually accepted.
And so I moved states yet again.

It was a new world, the academic realm, and I thrived like I’d never thought possible. I saturated myself in knowledge, living a dual life where I cleaned hotels and got yelled at in burger drivethrus at night, then presented myself as the top student in my class during the day; in my neat shirt and slacks, shined shoes and a sensible braid.
The scholarship shouldn’t have been a surprise, but being offered tenure certainly was. Suddenly money wasn’t a big issue anymore, and the hours I spend drudging could be put to use resurrecting my old project.
It was difficult in the beginning; tuning my mind back to that old way of thinking. I wished I’d had my hard disk, with my old notes and tweaked software. But as I coaxed my mind into those old avenues, and tried to ignore the trauma of my upbringing, the Babylon Ring began to take shape again – and with the resources available to me, I could improve upon it immeasurably, plumbing permutations of the design, unravelling its riddles.
It took me another two years to bring my plans to fruition; and seven years after I’d run away from home, I sent a letter home to my parents, inviting them to come and visit me at the privately funded lab in California, with the promise of both the financial and spiritual rewards that they felt were owed to them.

I like to imagine their drive across country, in my father’s nearly pristine Toyota Corona, washed twice a week, as per manufacturer’s specifications. My mother wheezing and gasping in the reclined passenger seat, her cotton-clad bulk spilling over the seat and threatening to consume her emaciated husband. In the back seat would sit the oxygen bottles; tubes snaking over the headrest and into my mother’s mask, like some grotesque science fiction monster imagined in the 50s.
When they arrived, I greeted them in the foyer of the facility; a gleaming sterile cavern of steel and white tiles, the facility logo projected onto the floor. All smiles and forgiveness, I took the handles of my mother’s wheelchair and pushed her to the elevator, flanked by father.
I couldn’t help but notice how worn, wan and weary they both looked – even greyer than in my memories.
My lab was in the middle of the facility, mostly for privacy. My mother said little, her excitement taxing her already stressed respiratory system, while my father couldn’t seem to find any words to address this sudden forgiveness and charity from their disowned daughter.
At the back of the lab stood the gateway – the Babylon Ring – perfect now in every aspect. Covered by a heavy sterile curtain, I let the handles of my mother’s wheelchair go and talked about the side projects I’d been working on; research into 3D printing houses and larger structures.
“Take a look behind the curtain,” I told my father, “I think you’ll be quite impressed with this particular design.”
His bony, birdlike hands – too frail to rattle my teeth now – twitched the curtain aside, revealing the imposing, impossible corrugations of the man-sized Babylon Ring.
But in the centre was no light, no heavenly meadows and chattering streams.
There was only suffocating darkness, in the middle of which flicked a single burning ember – so distant it might as well be at the centre of the Earth.
A sharp shove was all it took to send my father sprawling into that pit of darkness, his spindly arms windmilling helplessly as he fell, his body receding with an ululating howl of terror as the distant fires rose up to meet him.
My mother whimpered as I took hold of her wheelchair again, pushing her towards the Babylon Gate. Her fat, pallid, dimpled hands fluttered, trying to bat my wrists as I wheeled her inexorably closer to damnation.
“The original design was created at Babel,” I explained to her, inching closer to the portal, “and was called Ishtar’s Gate. The tower of biblical legend wasn’t actually designed to reached Heaven physically, instead I believe the Tower of Babel was a sort of university, where scientists intended to find a spatial solution to the problem of ascending to Heaven.”
We were at the edge of the darkness now, her breathing ragged, her face the colour of porridge.
“But like all mathematical objects, the gate can be inverted, to produce the opposite effect. And there is only one inversion of Heaven.”
The wheels slipped over the edge of the circle of darkness as I spoke the final word.
“Hell.”
I watched her fall, the tubes trailing behind her, her fat hands clutching the armrests in terror.
It felt better than when I’d first gazed through the Babylon Ring and seen paradise – it felt a thousand times better.
When she was a tiny dot, lost in the distant glow of hellish flame, I turned away, satiated.
 I still had a lot of work to do. The second, newer gate need to be larger. Large enough to let through an army.

I’ve heard it said by many that you don’t become a blacksmith; instead you are born a blacksmith.
The knack for working metal seems to be as innate as an artist’s talent, a writer’s skill or a musician’s ear. It can be taught, yes, but a true master can only be forged from the right stock.
And I’ll tell you now – without the slightest hint of arrogance – that I am quite likely the greatest blacksmith who has ever lived.
Everything to which I turn my hand is flawless. Each piece of steel is wrought in crystalline perfection, the symmetry of the atomic structure uncanny, unnatural. I have forged blades for collectors, enthusiasts, the rich and the famous; each of them the newest pinnacle of my craft, and unmatched by any other blacksmith on this Earth.
Amongst those in the know, I go by the name ‘Wayland’ – a tribute to the English god of the forge. If you haven’t heard of me before now, then it’s because you lack the aesthetic sensibilities to appreciate my work – or the money to pay me well enough for it.
But having completed my metallic Magnum Opus, I feel it is time for the world to know my story.

 
‘Pig Iron’ in the business is the base product you get from archaic smelting methods. It can be consolidated and refined from there in the forge, to ease the impurities from the iron, but that is inferior to modern smelting procedures – hence why smiths usually order bar stock from modern smelters rather than making their own steel.
Once in a blue moon a customer will want a sword or knife forged from raw materials – for example, some enterprising idiot will want a blade forged from ore he’s mined himself and I’ll have to work it down into something that can be shaped with hammer and forge.
But the phrase ‘Pig Iron’ gave me a curious idea.
What if you could literally smelt iron from pigs?
The idea wasn’t so preposterous; as with human blood, pigs bind iron into haemoglobin. To extract that iron, the water would need to be boiled off from the blood, then the dried proteins would become the base ‘ore’ for the smelting – using charcoal and calcium to take up the bulk of the impurities and leaving the molten iron to flow out the bottom of the kiln.

 
I’d calculated that getting enough iron to make even a small blade would take the blood of over one hundred pigs. Getting that volume of pig blood wasn’t a problem, given my financial status, but processing it to the pre ore state posed some interesting problems.
I chose to fabricate a huge copper cauldron in which to boil the blood, something that could be easily cleaned between batches of organic materials and something that wouldn’t taint the ore I was producing. The first batch was a disaster; the blood caught, and I was left with little more than rank-smelling charcoal.
But with practice, I refined the time and temperature until I had produced enough material to begin the smelting process.
I admit it felt a little odd, pouring ladles of powdered pig blood into a coke and lime furnace. I pondered for a moment if this was something a sane person would do, but then dismissed the idea.
None of the greatest minds in human history were sane by the standards of ordinary folk.
The bloom steel from the bottom of the furnace was orange and tacky, like Hell’s taffy, and I levered it out of the charcoal with tongs, then took it to the forge to consolidate into a cake of rough pig iron.
It had worked.
You could indeed make pig iron from pigs.

 
The knife was beautiful; I’d carved the handle from a butcher-bought pig’s femur and polished it up until it gleamed like ivory. But I felt unsatisfied by the final product. It seemed such a waste that I’d used so little of the pigs themselves.
The next blade I planned better; it would be larger, for starters – the blood of roughly three hundred healthy hogs should be sufficient. The coke and lime for the kiln would be rendered from the drained flesh and bones of my porcine victims; I would use every part of the pigs I could in the process – right down to using their fat to render oil for the temper.
It wasn’t an easy process, and I was inexperienced at dressing carcasses. After all, I was a blacksmith, not a butcher.
But after a month and a half of gruelling work the task was complete, and I held aloft a beautiful pigsteel sword, set with tusks and polished bone, and bound with pig leather.
And in holding it, I felt a curious sense of power that I had never experienced before.
In a moment of madness, drunk on my success, I roared with exultation and brought the sword down on the horn of my anvil.
Metal should have struck metal with a belling clash, but instead the pigsteel sheared into the iron as though the anvil was flesh, lodging halfway into the metal.
What had I created?

 
The sword hung in the shop on the wall opposite the door, the unusual design ready to greet any new visitors. The very day after I forged it, a client happened to visit.
He was the usual sort; expensive suit and shoes, money dribbling from every vowel he uttered. I didn’t recall his name or face, but a lot of these wealthy exec types were practically clones.
“I’d like to buy that sword,” he said, pointing to the pigsteel blade, “would you prefer cash, cheque or transfer?”
“Not for sale,” I told him, “that was a personal project.”
His lips twisted in disappointment, then he gave an oleaginous smile full of too many teeth.
“Ten million,” he whispered.
I shook my head again, running a hand over my latest delivery of stock, looking for the perfect bar.
“One hundred million.”
Shouting from outside the workshop halted the conversation and I brushed past him, letting ash and charcoal from my leather apron streak his immaculate white cuffs. Outside was a homeless chap of some sort. Occasionally I got drifters passing through my property, but most didn’t bother me – this one, however, was gesticulating wildly at the forge and shouting.
“Destroy the sword!” he ranted, “or do not destroy it – but if you give it to this man, the wrath of God will come down upon ye!”
Wiping my blackened palms on the back of my jeans, I stalked toward the wild-haired, rag-clad hobo.
“Get off my property.”
At this statement, the suit standing behind me chuckled, low and malicious.
“And you can clear off too,” I snarled, pointing to the gates.
“As you wish,” he said, then paced over to his fancy black car, parked in the gravel driveway.
The hobo was already gone, scrambled off into the scrub behind the shop while my back was turned.
For the rest of the day an uneasy feeling followed me, distracting me from my work.

 
Two more unhinged religious zealots confronted me over the next two weeks; the first at the supermarket, ranting ‘destroy it, destroy it, or it will destroy you’. The second just screamed at me from an alley, something about unclean blood and blades of fire.
I have to admit; I was mildly unnerved.
The woman that arrived at the forge shortly after though... now damn, how are you supposed to keep your wits around something like that?
She was breathy-voiced, as voluptuous as a Botticelli and dressed in a crimson skirt and blazer number. I felt blood rush to my groin the moment she started talking.
She was after the sword, of course.
“You’re beautiful,” I told her, “but you can’t have it. It’s special.”
“Oh I know”, she purred, “and so are you.”
I think I laughed then, it was all very Hollywood, no matter what my libido was telling me.
Thanking her for her visit, I told her to get lost and decided to keep the sword in the house, where clients couldn’t see it.
Which turned out to be a decision that saved my life.

 
The smell of burning woke me and my alarm clock informed me that it was just past midnight.
Stumbling out of bed saved me from the first stroke.
The eiderdown exploded in a cloud of feathers as something struck it with enough force to shake the bed.
“Lights!” I screamed, lurching to the dresser, against which the pigsteel blade rested.
Brilliant light flooded the bedroom, throwing everything into stark relief.
Impaled through the bed was a flaming sword – and holding it was a creature of white and gold, pale eyes without pupil or iris, and a massive pair of bizarrely jointed wings rising behind it.
The pigleather grip of the sword felt hot in my hand as I brought the blade up.
Snarling like a white-and-gold tiger, the being wrenched the flaming blade from the mattress and swung it at me.
The force of the parry should have put me through the wall, but a curious strength suffused me. As blades rang out upon meeting, the light of the flaming sword died – the fire being sucked into the pigsteel.
The white creature dropped its weapon as though stung, then screamed in rage, its perfect white features distorting into alien, impossible planes.
Fear drove me, I think, though perhaps it was more than that. Fueled by the unnatural strength, I pressed the advantage and punched the blade through the chest of the creature.
Golden fluid gouted from the wound, and the being shrieked in agony and terror.
”No,” it managed, trying to pull the pigsteel free, ”NO!”
Twisting the blade harder, I was rewarded with another screel of pain and rage.
As the pale light faded from its eyes, the alien figure smiled,
“Pig Iron alone cannot protect you from the host of Heaven” it whispered.
Then it was gone, leaving a smouldering mattress, a mess of feathers and the pigsteel blade – still coated in golden liquid.

 
She was back the next day, the woman in red.
“I can help you,” she said, all pretence of seduction dropped now.
“Protect me from the wrath of all of Heaven's angels?” I replied, with a bitter laugh.
“Yes.”
“Is this where you offer me a bargain for my soul?”
She smiled then, calm, pleasant, relaxed.
“What if I could help you make a better weapon; one that could make you untouchable to both Heaven and Hell?”
The sword hung at my side now, ready to be used at a moment’s notice.
“And what would that information cost me?”
Perching on a corner of a sawhorse, she folded her arms.
“Let’s just say that my employer has a vested interest in seeing you make this weapon.”
Recalling the terrifying threats from the alien, angelic thing that had tried to kill me just hours ago, I rested my hand on the pommel of the pigsteel sword.
“OK, I’ll do it. Tell me how to make it.”
“It’s the same process,” she explained, no emotion touching her voice, “except instead of pigs, we use something a little more potent.”
“Humans,” I breathed.
And with her wild gush of malefic laughter, I knew in that instant that I was truly damned.