Flock of Shadows Read online

  A Flock of Shadows

  13 Tales of the

  Contemporary Gothic

  Edited by Claire Houguez and Rebecca Parfitt

  Foreword

  Sick of sighing at the namby-pampy vampires and hipster witches in mainstream fiction? Of the supernatural stoically resisting its own evil? Parthian and The Ghastling decided to take matters into our own hands with a call to arms for some proper gothic fiction.

  In poured ghost stories, the macabre and the spine-tinglingly strange, with clipped contemporary prose and classic, expansive tones. A Flock of Shadows gathers and celebrates current gothic voices – after all, there’s safety in numbers.

  Let us now appear – out of nowhere, cloaked, by your elbow – and, like a mysterious hawker, spread our exotic wares before disappearing into the night again…

  No gothic anthology is complete without a brooding house, but you’ll find no mist-veiled moorlands here. In Kate North’s ‘Fifteen Arthur Crescent’, this is an ordinary street; the events of this story could happen to any one of us. North unfolds a tale that disquiets and unnerves the reader as they settle into an armchair in the cosiness of their living room… and brings a whole new meaning to ‘house proud’.

  Who cares that a house isn’t a conventional lover? Allow the entrapped inhabitant of Carly Holmes’ ‘Piece by Piece’ to show you proudly around a rather captivating home. A strange, obsessive relationship emerges during the tour of gleaming colours and caressed cornices.

  Rhys Owain Willams’ ‘The Office Block’ is a drift through somnambulant days and quiet night hours plagued by insomnia and the steady oppressive torment of the watchful building opposite. In A Flock of Shadows, buildings come to oppressive life, demand more than lovers, pursue their own malevolent intents.

  Fans of classic ghost stories must hasten to Jo Mazelis’ ‘Storm Dogs’, which brings a word of warning to the traveller: beware of the seemingly kindly intentions of strangers, as what at first appears charitable may come with a heavy price. In this strange and hypnotic tale, set in 1950s France against the backdrop of a magnificent chateaux, a charm befalls the travellers and as events unfold so does a terrible accident… or is it?

  There’s also murder and madness aplenty in this collection. Mark Blayney’s ‘The Wednesday Ghost’ dips us in the dreamlike space of an artist attempting to come to terms with having murdered one of his models. But is all really as it seems in this shifting space of subjective reality and artifice?

  Paula Readman’s audacious ‘The Gardener’ drops us into the chillingly reasonable narrative of a single-minded botanist that, guided by her knowledge of the rare and poisonous, will stop at nothing to protect her beloved borders. But then the rumors begin…

  In Alan Bilton’s unsettling, darkly comic tale ‘The Alphabet’s Shadow’, a couple struggle to communicate through the separate liminal spaces of grief, a beloved lost pet may have returned in a twilit park, and mysterious maps appear in strange places. But where are they leading?

  Morgan Downie’s ‘Enter the Petal Throne’ collects the fragmented experience of the absinthe drinker. A story, swimming with vivid imagery, evoking opulence akin to the smoke-filled jazz era, that assures: ‘To know what we want [...] is merely a matter of admitting to oneself.’ But what if you don’t know? An ‘indecisive’ goes in search of the future, seeking advice inside a peculiar place – a shop that sells dreams and fortunes. The seeker surrenders his own reality and enters a place that he later finds he is unable to leave.

  And we’ve a host of otherworldly creatures for you. Can a woman really ‘intoxicate’ with her charms? In Amanda Mason’s ‘Mia’, yes, and the victim, who only tries to save the seemingly vulnerable young innocent, ends up seeking darkness himself.

  Shirley Golden’s ‘Singing a New Song’ is gothic horror of a different kind: it confronts the monstrosity of war. In the misery of the trenches, soldiers fight for survival against bullets, wire, rats and fleas. But one soldier is less concerned with mortality. The smell of blood excites his senses. This story unfolds between the blurred lines of good and evil, the monstrous reality and the monstrous imagined. In war, all horrors are believable, all horrors are real... ‘The shadow of absolute evil is no longer the fear. Good or bad depends upon which side of the parapet your head appears’.

  Howard Ingham’s tale ‘Why the Others Were Taken’ blends the everyday horrors of a dysfunctional family with the truly incomprehensible, unleashed by the arrival of an unexpected and grisly visitor. This story blends the best of the classic and contemporary gothic fiction forms, and it’s slow build of emotion is truly disquieting.

  Is the figure of the beautiful, hair-combing mermaid really an accurate representation? The beauty of the creature of Laura Wilkinson’s story ‘Towards the Sea’ certainly seems firmly lodged in the eye of the beholders, who regal the local barmaid with the tall tales of their lustful encounters. But the barmaid has her own intimate knowledge.

  And last but not least, as they say, come the exotic monstrosities of Bethany W. Pope’s ‘The Silver Wire’, in which a bored nanny torments her charge with stories – and not the good ones. Stories of crones and the Aswang, whose eyes are red from not sleeping because at night they turn into black dogs and eat children and corpses. And of the Manananggal, the baby-stealing creature that just may come for the child’s own pregnant mother.

  We hope to have piqued your curiosity – a trait that never lead anyone into real trouble… The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear and what we each fear says so much about us. Which story will leave you haunted?

  Why the Others Were Taken

  Howard Ingham

  –You have to understand, says my father, that your grandmother was not a bad woman. She saw a lot of tragedy in her life.

  My father is standing in his sitting room holding an open Tupperware box, in which he has deposited broken bits of cheesy Quaver, limp white cucumber and lettuce sandwiches, abandoned party-size sausage rolls harvested from the coffee table and the settee. Beyond practical arrangements for the funeral, this is the first opinion that Dad has expressed regarding his mother-in-law since I got back here.

  My father’s house — I grew up here — I stopped thinking about it as ‘home’ a long time ago — has been more or less silent for half an hour. Now that the wake is over, we are making the house presentable again.

  Dad doesn’t have a dishwasher. My hands are red and a bit wrinkly. I have splashed water on my dress. I came back in to ask him where the salad bowls go. The cupboards are all arranged differently now. I haven’t lived here for a long time.

  I put the glass bowl down on the coffee table. I can’t think of an appropriate response. He’s been crying. I have never seen him cry and it takes a moment to recognise it — the red eyes, the shininess on the cheeks.

  — Dad, I say.

  I know he isn’t crying for Nan.

  Bang. The sound of a fist on the front door echoes through the house. Dad stiffens. It comes again, bang, and he looks away from me, face contorted. A third time: bang. A fourth: bang. Four more: bang, bang, bang, bang.

  — I’ll get that, I say.

  Four more again: bang, bang, bang, bang.

  — No, he says. I think I’d rather you didn’t.

  *

  The last time I had spoken properly to my Nan was on the day of my mother’s funeral. This was six months ago. I had been up to talk to her a few times already, and I had told her how sorry I was that her daughter — not my mother, her daughter — had died so suddenly. She had been dismissive and cold. I had brought her several cups of tea; she had not thanked me
. I had come to offer to drive her to Mum’s funeral, to push the wheelchair; she had refused.

  I had left her sitting up in bed in her room at the top of my parents’ stairs, staring at the gaps in the yellow wallpaper on the wall opposite, hand clasped in her lap like a little heap of kindling. I had stood at the lectern in the Chapel of Rest and had read the fourteenth chapter of John’s Gospel to the assembled mourners: In my house are many rooms. If it were not so, I would have told you. I go now to prepare a place for you. I imagined Nan, the whole time, in the bed, scowling into space.

  After the burial, when I returned, she was still in that position. I said, Hello, Nan, and she didn’t move, so I repeated myself, and she said, without looking at me,

  — I ‘eard you the first time, maid.

  — How are you, Nan?

  — How d’ye bleddy think I am, ye bleddy fool?

  I bit my lip. I rested my hand on the back of my neck, looked down at a stain on the carpet.

  — Nan, I said, Uncle Derek is here. He wanted to come and see you.

  She stared at the wall.

  — Derek, Nan.

  She sucked on her lips for a moment.

  — ‘E can pess right off.

  — Nan—

  — No, ‘e had his chance. ‘E coulda come back any time. Too late for ‘im now. Too late. ‘E can’t come back begging now. ‘E en’t tekken anymore from me, you ‘ear me? He can pess right off. Tell him to pess off, maid.

  I wanted to hit her. I wanted to say, get yourself a sense of proportion, you evil old baggage. I wanted to say, it should be you who died. I said,

  — All right.

  And I went downstairs, and I left Dad to deal with her, and three days later I went home without once opening the door at the top of the stairs or saying goodbye.

  And the day after I went home, Nan had the first of a dozen or more minor strokes, and her mind and the last of her control over her body went, in the space of a week. Dad, denied the time to mourn Mum, spent the next six months nursing her.

  I wondered sometimes if Nan was punishing him for loving her daughter.

  *

  When the echo of the knocks has subsided, Dad sits down on the table, holding the plastic box on his lap, and presses the thumb and first finger of one hand into his eyes. He sighs.

  Then he snaps to, puts the box on the table, stands off, walks out of the room.

  — I’m making tea, he says. He heads to the kitchen.

  I follow.

  — Dad, I say, What just happened?

  — It’s probably just kids.

  — So what, it’s happened before?

  — Every so often, yes.

  — And you never answered it?

  — No.

  — Oh, good grief. How long has this been going on, Dad?

  — Since your mother went. Two or three times a week.

  — Have you called the police or anything?

  — No. They just bang on the door. Nothing ever happens. No one does anything.

  He’s shaking. Some of the tea spills on the worktop.

  — Oh, Dad.

  I leave it for a moment. Then, I try to sit him down with his tea while I finish the tidying. He isn’t having any of it.

  *

  Nan had been in the bed in Mum and Dad’s spare room for about a year — there was no question of being able to afford a place in a home — when Mum re-established contact with Uncle Derek. She never told me how, just that it was an accident, a coincidence. In the space of a minute, an older brother Mum had not seen for fifty years stumbled, politely apologising, back into her life.

  Mum had gone, still in tears, to tell her mother that she had just seen Derek, and Nan had said, So what? And Mum had said, But it’s Derek, and Nan had said that what is buried and dead must remain buried and dead.

  Nan lived by that phrase, or claimed to.

  *

  — It was good of Derek to come, I say. After... everything.

  — He couldn’t do any less. Dad puts his mug down. He grew up using tea leaves and even though he’s used teabags for years, he always leaves a bit at the bottom.

  — He’d have been justified in not coming.

  — It was his duty. It doesn’t matter what she did. She was his mother.

  — I thought she wasn’t to blame for what happened.

  — Oh, your Nan had her part.

  I am surprised for a moment at the depth of feeling in my father’s statement, that he, a man so cautious, so softly spoken, so unwilling to speak ill of the dead, especially the dead, might be able today of all days to say something about that vile old woman that is true.

  — So what actually happened, Dad?

  He leans over and picks up the mug, looks into it, puts it down, looks at me. His fingers twitch like he is about to light a cigarette, but he gave up years ago, so he looks uncomfortable and licks his lips and says,

  — Well.

  And then the banging on the door starts again.

  *

  At some time during the Second World War, when my mother was barely even walking, all of her four older brothers and sisters were taken away by the Social, and put into an orphanage.

  Mum was an evacuee. During the Blitz, she was sent to the country, and when the bombing raids were over, she came back home to a home she was too young to have remembered the first time, and to the first of three younger siblings. Before her evacuation, she was the youngest of five; now she was the eldest of four. Her mother was not even thirty when the youngest was born.

  When they had come of age, the four elder children, now grown, came back. They argued with their parents and bullied my mother, and then, as soon as each found some place to go, one by one they went away and did not come back, and only they and my grandparents knew why this had happened. But they had gone away, and Nan and Grandad would not ever speak of the others again, or even admit that they had existed.

  *

  Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

  Dad puts out a hand, but I am on my feet and sprinting for the door and I am furious, ready to thump someone. I snatch the key off the hook and fumble with the lock and ball my fists and draw in breath ready to scream abuse at my father’s tormentor.

  The smell hits me in the face, stops me in my tracks. I recoil, back of my hand to my mouth, eyes immediately watering.

  The figure on the doorstep judders; clods of earth fall on to the doorstep. I do not recognise her. Dad is behind me; I did not notice him there. He pushes next to me and says, in a small, sad voice,

  — Moira?

  For a moment, I wonder who Moira is, if my father knew another Moira. Dad says the name again. And I choke and hold my gorge down as it comes to me.

  — Mum, I say.

  Dad is leaning on me. He is swaying. I put my arm around him, prop him up.

  And then Mum, six months dead and standing on my doorstep, with the earth of the grave on the tattered dress and her fingertips ripped and bloodied, with the little mole on the side of her nose and the two rings on the third finger of her left hand... Mum begins to scream.

  I am unable to move beyond supporting the near-dead weight of my father, and it is his weight that brings me back to myself, and my mum stops screaming. She judders again. More earth thuds to the ground, explodes on the doorstep.

  The head turns a fraction, and eyes the colour of month-old milk stare at me. She opens her mouth, as if to speak. Nothing comes out apart from a wet rattle.

  Dad straightens up, draws in breath. He pushes me gently to one side and takes Mum’s hand gently in his, leads her past me. She stumbles, rights herself, drags one foot. Dad leads her inside into the lounge. I look up and down the street and shut the door.

  — She’s cold, says Dad. She’s really cold.

  He sends me ups
tairs to get a blanket. I stare at him for a minute, but I cannot think of anything else to do, so I go, and soon Mum is sat on the sofa with a blanket around her and we are at a loss as to what to do next.

  We sit with Mum until dawn, and she says nothing, and stares into space, and sometimes she rattles. The lights are all on, but the corners of the room seem very dark.

  *

  At about nine in the morning, I make some tea. I am not thinking. I pour four cups, put three of them onto a tray, take them into the lounge, turn to go back into the kitchen.

  — I was just— I stop myself.

  — What? says Dad.

  — I made another cup. For— I was going to take it to— I shake my head.

  Dad is staring at me.

  Making sure not to look at the door at the top of the stairs, I return to the kitchen, pour it down the sink.

  Mum doesn’t drink hers. When it has cooled down a little, Dad tries to get her to drink some by holding the cup to her mouth, but it trickles out the sides.

  — Right, says Dad. This can’t go on. She’s smells awful. She’s filthy.

  It’s the damp metallic sort of smell that earth has, the smell that grits up the back of your throat, a taste that reminds you of things you would never willingly eat, like mould and earthworms, all mixed in with something else, something unfamiliar and queasy. She smells like she’s crawled out of the ground.

  What can we do? We lead her upstairs and we give her a bath. I leave Dad to undress her — I can’t, she’s my Mum — but it’s up to me to pick her up like a baby and lift her into the water. She is very light. Fragile and awkward, like an armful of swept-up leaves. I keep expecting her to fall apart in my hands. When she hits the water, she begins to scream again. Dad steadies himself on the door frame, turns, stumbles, falls to his knees on the landing, vomits on the carpet.

  — Dad? I don’t know if I should leave Mum or go to him. I try to call out over the screaming. Dad, are you OK?

  He is already on his feet and heading for the stairs. Mum stops screaming.

  — I’m going to get some disinfectant and a bucket, he says.