C.M. Rosens's Blog

October 18th – Everill Worrell – ‘The Canal’ (1927) – Read and listen to it here. Find the full challenge list here.

I honestly read this thinking the first-person narrator was a woman, and this was a deeply sapphic story. I think that made it better. Think about it: a 1920s he/him lesbian dressed in dapper men’s fashion wandering about the canal bank at night, and meeting a vampire living on a narrow boat…

And I can’t help but imagine the vampire girl as a character in a Jean Rollin film…

The iconic scene from Fascination dir. Jean Rollin

Come on, tell me these visuals don’t make this story better…

But I also really like PseudoPod’s summary at the end of the episode that this is a story about the world ending, an outbreak of vampires coming for humanity, and nobody has quite twigged that this is the situation yet.

I need to write the ending of this story again to give our 1920s lesbians a better ending… or just retell it as f/f?? I think the clues are there… even though the narrator is referred to as he/him/his by others, I think that can be explained by the clothes and style, and the way certain clubs allowed for butches and trans mascs to be he/him in those queer spaces at the time.

I think this calls for a [short] sapphic vampire story in response, surely…

The Narrow Boat

I lie down, and listen. On the other side of the creaking boards, the water is tar-pool-still, a slick sheet of undisturbed shadowglass, reflecting dimly the polluted orange of the city, and the pale, cheap coin of a lovers’ moon. I see nothing but wood, poorly painted, the once jaunty colours of blue and yellow cracking and peeling. I lie in the smell of bilge and rot, as the narrow boat rests heavy in the water, a floating coffin carrying the dead and undead, and me, the dying, holding us in place.

I am lying on my back, and waiting to be kissed.

I longed for nothing but her red lips in the darkness from the first; she drew me in with the blaze of her eyes, cat-bright and brilliant, arresting me in the path of my life and anchoring me here. I could not go back to my life before I met her. I cannot. I won’t.

Tonight, she comes to me, velvet-footed and soft, and tonight, we shall see if I am her victim, or her lover. Does it matter? There is scarcely a distinction between the two, but I am willing for both, and waiting for both, and wanting all of her.

I took her pale hand in the moonlight and promised to serve her – so gallant, I know, so sincere, and my heart was hers forever. She is my goddess of the night with diamond eyes, serpentine ringlets falling over her delicate shoulders, capable of calcifying my doubts and fears with a mere look, a single breath upon my cheek. She is my Lady of the Water, who needs no sword to cleave my breast in two and take my heart as hers.

And now she comes, her mouth still hot and lurid from the lured souls now decomposing in this lonely berth. I lie in repose, composing my farewells in my head, but I shall never say them to another living soul, for I am no longer among the living.

Now, she comes, and her lips drip cherries, her breath sweet with all the things my nature craves and calls for, all the excitements and freedoms of the night. I have lived my miserable days only for the sultry pulse of the nights, where darkness has been my true friend, and the favoured time of my dearest adventures and fellow adventuresses. I am about to forego the wretchedness of the cold daylight, where the watchful eyes judge and accuse, forever chaining me to their ruts and grooves, and their well-worn tracks of nonsensical nothingness. I will embrace my love, whatever she will do with me, and I will fly into my friend, the night.

She is here. She has never looked so beautiful, that face so sweet and sated, her death’s head visage now more human and humane. She leans over me, and I see in her eyes the hatred of all that binds me to the daylight, and the love that will lead me into the embrace of the dark.

Her mouth hovers above mine. She is warm with borrowed heat, basking against bodies she has drained of their vitality, leaving the fleshy shells for the crabs to make homes in.

I soak it up, that heat, that warmth, that vitality, the essence of death, and discard the shell of life which no longer fits me.

We kiss.

I drink her in, and she drains me. It is sharp and sacred, this unholy kiss of peace. It is the peace of the grave.

I am hers – but she is mine, and we are one, now, together.

I taste her on my tongue, and she licks my life away, and we lie together in the bobbing boat on the shadowglass waters, as the dark and sleeping city beyond remains in ignorance of our love, and squanders its dreams.

October 17th – Agatha Christie – ‘The Mystery of the Blue Jar’ (1924) – Read and listen to it .
Challenge list here.

I really enjoy Christie’s short stories, they are like slipping on a very comfortable glove. In this one, I really liked the portrait painting of the main character in the opening paragraphs, and the scene setting, and the mystery as it unwound. The ending was also quite funny in a dark way, which is very Christie.

It also has those touches of spooky and macabre that you know must have a rational explanation, and as you wait and see, it all becomes clear.

For this one, I think I’ll set out the Christie novels and shorts that have had the greatest influence on me as a writer, and a person. I was an avid reader of Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Marple series as a teenager, and I collected as many as I could – all, unfortunately, now lost in a house move.

Character Studies:

Character sketches are one of Christie’s main strengths, I think, and today’s story exemplifies that in the opening paragraphs where we’re introduced to the main character. I love the way she draws a clear picture of the people she is writing about without describing their physical characteristics hardly at all.

For the novel that drew me to actually deep-dive into the psyches of my characters, and delve into proper character studies, I would have to say it was Cards on the Table (1936). This has the usual problematic elements of representation in certain areas, which I was beginning to notice the more Christie I read, but the parts of this book which really got me were the deep studies of each character, made to determine who was psychologically most likely to commit the crime.

The histories of the characters were considered, their backstories fleshed out, their actions scrutinised for motive, and a picture built up of each of them, so that Poirot might make his determinations. Of all the bridge players in the room that night, who was most likely to stab their host through the heart unseen by everyone else? Who was most likely to take that calculated risk?

There are more characters in Murder on the Orient Express (1934), where something very similar happens, and which I would say is the more famous of the two, but this later novel feels like a condensed, intensified version of this one.

Evil Under the Sun (1941) was another novel that has stuck with me for some time, not just for the intricacies of the murder plot, but also because of the awkward, nerdy teenage girl with the library books about poisons (Linda Marshall). I really appreciated that Christie wrote awkward, autistic-coded girls into her books as well as practical women, sensible girls, and so on. In the 2001 David Suchet adaptation, the role was gender-swapped, and played by Russell Tovey as Lionel Marshall, instead of Linda. I think that’s partly why I prefer the 1982 adaptation with Peter Ustinov, where they kept Linda as a girl, even though I prefer Suchet in the main role.

Both adaptations leave out the witchcraft subplot, where Linda overdoses on sleeping pills believing that she has killed her stepmother through dark magic and a wax poppet. Look – let autistic teenagers with body issues have creepy hobbies.

What I love about the subplot is that Poirot sits her down and tells her the difference between wanting to kill someone and actually doing it, and tells her that in destroying the poppet, what she really killed was her hatred for her stepmother, and not her stepmother in reality. Linda says she did feel better after destroying the doll, and that’s what she has been struggling with as much as the murder itself.

(I do love the way Gothic elements are woven into the novels like this, and the way things take random left-turns into folk horror. The adaptations often lose a lot by not leaning into this. I think the one exception is the Kenneth Branagh version of Hallowe’en Party (1969), renamed A Haunting in Venice (2023), which is more Poirot’s war trauma version. This adaptation leans fully into the supernatural and occult drama of the setting and the text, and goes beyond it, making it almost as much a horror film as it is a mystery/thriller.)

Other books that really stuck with me in particular were The Moving Finger (1942) and Sparkling Cyanide (1944), again for their character sketches; A Murder is Announced (1950), with its couples (plural) of obvious lesbians; and At Bertram’s Hotel (1965), for its mother-daughter drama. (I adored Miss Marple – she was definitely one of my heroes growing up, and something I aspired to grow into, along with Granny Weatherwax (from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series).)

And Then There Were None (1939) also ranks very highly for me as a novel that really concentrates on its characters, and their psychology. I really enjoyed the 2015 mini-series adaptation version of this book. I think there’s a real skill in limiting the movements and actions of characters, reducing them down to the confines of a predefined, rigidly delineated space, and then sustaining suspense and interest almost entirely through character interaction and development as the plot unfolds.

Without that skill, nobody would really care who lived, who died, or when the next kill would be. It comes to matter, because you start learning about the characters themselves, and the title is its own awful promise to the reader that whoever you become attached to is not going to make it out.

Those are my picks, the ones that have had the biggest impact on the ways I think about character building; others impacted the way I think about plot, and atmosphere, and so on. But I will leave it here for this post!

Let me know your fave Christies in the comments!

October 16th – Meredith Davis – ‘The Accusing Voice’ (1923) – Read it here. Find the full challenge list here.

I actually didn’t realise that Project Gutenberg had the Weird Tales magazine volumes, and that this was published in Vol. 1, 1923.

This one I kind of liked, but found a bit underwhelming. It’s a supernatural-explained sort of story, it’s more what I’d call a thriller, or proto-noir, perhaps, but it’s a fairly good ride.

I struggled a bit to think of something to respond creatively with, and I thought I’d give you something with Ricky Porter (an unseen experimental bit I wrote in a What If exercise).

For this, The Accusing Voice is Ricky’s, to himself, and it’s in the way of him improving his skill as a bard as well as a Soothsayer. It’s a Ricky in the Otherworld snippet, not sure if it fits anywhere yet. It is not edited or fully fleshed out – this is purely as is, experimental and without context.

Experimental Writing: Ricky & the Bards

Ricky was a light sleeper, and the music woke him. At least, he thought it was music. A song like ice, like the dance of chaotic matter, rang through his head. He opened his eyes, and he wasn’t at home anymore.

“He is with us,” a silvery voice proclaimed. “Welcome, Soothsayer.”

Ricky blinked, and rubbed his face. He was standing in a circular, stone-walled room, set around with burning torches. A slab of rock like a rough-hewn altar stone was in the centre, and surrounding it were robed figures, all in mistletoe-white.

Banners of blue and green hung on the walls – Otherworldly livery, Otherworldly hues. This wasn’t the Outside, but something connected to his cunning-man inheritance, the deep roots of his family that went back further than the tentacles of Grandad, that had their origins in a soil steeped with myth and faerie tales.

Ricky smelt pomander and honeysuckle, roasted meat and fermented fruits.

“No,” Ricky said, shaking his head. “No, no. I’m not playing.”

“Good, because this isn’t a game.” The speaker wasn’t looking at him. He didn’t want to guess their gender, but he suspected that was a moot point, given none of these people were strictly human.

“You’re about to come into your powers,” another speaker said. “Let’s see if you’re worthy of them.”

Ricky made no move to enter the circle of figures. He wasn’t stupid. He knew he didn’t belong here. “An’ if I’m not?”

There was a pause. “We’re just curious. You’ll come into them regardless of our opinions. But maybe you have what it takes to be a bard, and if you do, you can stand here, with us.”

He looked around for the figures he might recognise, but those with beards looked much the same. Half of them were shapeshifters, anyway. Some might be present in the dancing flames in the torches, some might be stones in the wall, some might be droplets of sweat on his own brow for all he knew. He dashed the perspiration away with the back of his arm and scowled.

“Out of my own curiosity, what am I getting?” Ricky cocked his head. “Something powerful. Must be, for you lot to pay attention.” He misliked being pulled from his world into another without notice.

“What else would you be getting, but words of power? Let’s hear your own words, first. We want to see what power they have on their own.”

(Mad old bastards. What right have they got to drag me out of bed?)

Ricky set his jaw. “Right, well, am I not worth a formal introduction, or what? You got me out of bed for this, I never asked t’ come here.”

Someone in the circle heaved a testy sigh. “If you want our respect, show us what you’ve got. Then we’ll see if you qualify for a formal introduction.”

“On the stone,” someone else said from beneath their white cowl, and slammed their staff on the ground. “On the stone. On the stone.”

Ricky rolled his eyes, shouldered his way through to the middle of the circle, and climbed onto the altar stone. “If I do this, will you all piss off?”

“You straddle two worlds, Soothsayer,” said a voice he knew better than the others. It had a strong Welsh lilt, and made him remember things he would rather not. “None of your family are any better than they ought to be, so let’s see how good you are. Tell us who that is.”

“Let’s see if’n you start making sense,” Ricky retorted, but his chest squirmed.

He was a man with no education who liked the sound of words he’d read and mimicked accents he heard. He’d never spent years in caves crushed by stones, reciting epics until they embedded their cadences and modes into his brain so deep that he understood them as their own language-within-a-language. 

He’d never learned the forms of poetry that could kill a man, never learned how to praise a king by inventing words whose meanings were so obvious in context they needed no explanation, and yet fitted perfectly with the rhyming structure that once birthed from his lips they existed in perfect harmony as if they had always been. 

He had never sung of the prowess and skill of his patron for hours on end without repeating a single phrase or compliment. He had never learned how to sweeten his tongue on command, or to sour it enough to fill the ears of his listeners with fatal venom. 

He had not been a multitude of shapes, a tear in the air, a word among letters, the light of the lanterns, a hundred tormented souls, the string of a harp, a shield in battle. 

He was not Taliesin with his knowledge of animal speech, or any of the other bards he’d heard about, he was not a bard, he was not Myrddin’s equal. 

He was not even really a god, and he shouldn’t be here. 

Unless…

Ricky rolled his shoulders back.

He wasn’t anything like this gathering, who came from other worlds, other times, other legends. He was something else, and maybe that had its own power. Didn’t he know pain, like they did? Didn’t he know loss, and that prey-feeling of fear, didn’t he know how to look inside himself now, even if what he saw he didn’t fully like or understand, and didn’t he know how to hold on to something he loved?

He raised his chin and looked at them.

“Allus been better with other people’s words,” he admitted. “These’re my own.”

An expectant hush fell.

The torches guttered.

Ricky closed his eyes and thought of home, the only place he ever wanted to be, surrounded by her walls, supported on her foundations, sheltered under her eaves. He thought of her personalities and lives, room to room, and how they coalesced within her avatar. He thought of his cousins, the barbed wire of family around his heart and guts, perforating and impossible to disentangle, but a part of him he couldn’t cut out.

“Hear this!” His voice echoed around the chamber, and the music swelled in the back of his skull. Out of him poured a stream of alliterative verse, his mind always two steps ahead of his tongue, until he didn’t know if he was composing two lines ahead or anticipating the pattern that the poem wove for itself.

He could see the words, and where he misspoke in his hurry, painting the air in quickstep-time. His stumbles lessened as he relaxed into it.

When he came to the end, there was silence.

A staff thudded on the floor, and kept going. It was joined by others, until the whole circle was vibrating with percussive applause.

Ricky’s head was bursting with pressure now, a single tone slicing through his head and pressing against the back of his eyes.

He stepped forwards and fell face-down on his bed, stomach flipping over as he plummeted onto the mattress, and woke with a start.

October 15th – Conrad Aiken – ‘The Vampire’ (1916) – Read it here.
Follow the challenge here.

Another war trauma poem – I absolutely love this one. There’s so much going on here. I really think this is one of my favourite depictions of the war, and of the chaos and visceral sorrow, and of the horrors of it.

And darkness fell. And like a seaOf stumbling deaths we followed, weWho dared not stay behind.There all night long beneath a cloudWe rose and fell, we struck and bowed,We were the ploughman and the ploughed,Our eyes were red and blind.

I love this image of people following the basilisk-eyed pale woman, demanding their allegiance, and how they all die for her, and fight for her, and search frantically for her before ‘drenching sweet daisy fields with death’. The imagery is so evocative and powerful.

I think my favourite stanza might be the last one:

Until at dusk, from God knows where,
Beneath dark birds that filled the air,
Like one who did not hear or care,
Under a blood-red cloud,
An aged ploughman came alone
And drove his share through flesh and bone,
And turned them under to mould and stone;
All night long he ploughed.

Honestly, the aged ploughman stuck with me longer after reading the poem for the first time than the actual vampire did, but I do love the spectre of war, or war-ravaged Europe, or honour/glory perhaps, as a vampire-woman.

The imagery of the vampire woman definitely brings Jean Rollin to mind, though. Fascination, and Lèvres de sang / Lips of Blood, for sure. The allure of something seductive, beautiful, and dangerous, drawing people to their bloody doom is married in my mind to Rollin’s imagery.

(I’ve actually started a Letterboxd list for myself on vampires I enjoy in films, which is public, and here, if of interest.)

For this response, I thought I would recommend some of my favourite war metaphor horror and war/military aggression and oppression trauma movies that I’ve seen to date. It’s not always a vampire!

El páramo / The Wasteland (2021) dir. David Casademunt. Lucía and her son live isolated from society in a flat place where there’s practically no life. The small family unit formed by mother and son hardly ever receives visitors, and their goal is to lead a quiet existence. At first they succeed, but the appearance of a mysterious, violent creature that starts stalking their small house will put the relationship that unites them to the test.
~Saloum (2021) dir. Jean Luc Herbulot. Three mercenaries extracting a drug lord out of Guinea-Bissau are forced to hide in the mystical region of Saloum, Senegal.
~His House (2020) dir. Remi Weekes. After making a harrowing escape from war-torn South Sudan, a young refugee couple struggle to adjust to their new life in a small English town that has an unspeakable evil lurking beneath the surface. (Also on my Emigration Horror list).
~ The Lodgers (2017) dir. Brian O’Malley. (Adding this one as it’s an allegory for the Irish struggle for Independence and Home Rule set in the aftermath of WWI). 1920, rural Ireland. Anglo-Irish twins Rachel and Edward share a strange existence in their crumbling family estate. Each night, the property becomes the domain of a sinister presence (The Lodgers) which enforces three rules upon the twins: they must be in bed by midnight; they may not permit an outsider past the threshold; and if one attempts to escape, the life of the other is placed in jeopardy. When troubled war veteran Sean returns to the nearby village, he is immediately drawn to the mysterious Rachel, who in turn begins to break the rules set out by The Lodgers. The consequences pull Rachel into a deadly confrontation with her brother – and with the curse that haunts them.
~In My Mother’s Skin (2023) dir. Kenneth Dagatan. Stranded in the Philippines during World War II, a young girl finds that her duty to protect her dying mother is complicated by her misplaced trust in a beguiling, flesh-eating fairy.
~ La Llorona (2019) dir. Jayro Bustamante. Accused of the genocide of Mayan people, retired general Enrique is trapped in his mansion by massive protests. Abandoned by his staff, the indignant old man and his family must face the devastating truth of his actions and the growing sense that a wrathful supernatural force is targeting them for his crimes.
~Ilargi guztiak / All the Moons (2020) dir. Igor Legarreta. During the final throes of the last Carlist war, a little girl is rescued from an orphanage by a mysterious woman who lives deep inside the forest. (I am including this one because I think you can read it as the consequences of war for children, and how trauma in childhood can trap you forever in one state, until you find the key to releasing yourself. It’s not purely about this, this is only one [partial] reading of the film, but I think this can be read into it.)
~ Cold Skin (2017) dir. Xavier Gens. (At its heart, an anti-war film.) A young man who arrives at a remote island finds himself trapped in a battle for his life.
~زیر سایه / Under the Shadow (2016) dir. Babak Anvari. After Shideh’s building is hit by a missile during the Iran-Iraq War, a superstitious neighbor suggests that the missile was cursed and might be carrying malevolent Middle-Eastern spirits. She becomes convinced a supernatural force within the building is attempting to possess her daughter Dorsa, and she has no choice but to confront these forces if she is to save her daughter and herself.
~El laberinto del fauno / Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) dir. Guillermo del Toro. In post–civil war Spain, 10-year-old Ofelia moves with her pregnant mother to live under the control of her cruel stepfather. Drawn into a mysterious labyrinth, she meets a faun who reveals that she may be a lost princess from an underground kingdom. To return to her true father, she must complete a series of surreal and perilous tasks that blur the line between reality and fantasy.
~El espinazo del diablo / The Devil’s Backbone (2001) dir. Guillermo del Toro. Spain, 1939. In the last days of the Spanish Civil War, the young Carlos arrives at the Santa Lucía orphanage, where he will make friends and enemies as he follows the quiet footsteps of a mysterious presence eager for revenge.
~불가사리 / Pulgasari (1985) dirs. Shin Sang-ok, Chong Gon Jo. In feudal Korea, a group of starving villagers grow weary of the orders handed down to them by their controlling king and set out to use a deadly monster under their control to push his armies back.

Like a crow in a field of broken glass, Brian Johnson (he/him) is an educator, writer, photographer, and storm chaser. He’s an evil version of Robert Fulghum. His photographs have been published by NOAA, the National Weather Service, and NASA.

He also has a podcast with a writing partner called Tikiman and the Viking, where they interview creatives and discuss their processes and talk about writing.

His works include Middle-Aged Man in a Trashcan, The Dark Cry of Aristid, Hell to Pay.

Author Links:

Storm Website: ruminationofthunder.com
Author Website: fatherthunder.blogspot.com

Book Link: MIDDLE AGED MAN IN A TRASH CAN
Amazon Book Link: B006LD5XAM

On social media as @Weatherviking

What drew you to Sci-Fi-Fantasy as a genre blend, and what were the main inspirations for your Science-Fantasy novel,  Middle-Aged Man in a Trashcan?

I grew up in the time of Star Wars, Star Trek movies, Flash Gordon, and, yes . . . Battle Beyond the Stars. I was also a huge comic book and mythology fan growing up. As for Middle-Aged Man, it was born in the classroom. It was an idea started by a student that turned over the reins, and several groups of student and other writers workshopped it over the years. I was working at a National Writing Project site when I did the original webbing (plot and character brainstorming) for the novel. Then when COVID hit, I wrote it on my back porch over 3 months. Scifantasy has always been a comfort for me.

How did the humble trash can become your chosen portal for Joe to travel through the multiverse?

It was originally an Oscar the Grouch joke. Then it evolved over the years with Interstellar and SNL’s David Harbour dark Sesame Street skit. I had also read and taught Holt’s Anthology of Science Fiction for several years. There’s a story in it called “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers” by Lawrence Watt-Evans who talks about multiverse travel and nexus points. Then it all came together. A lone trashcan, in an alleyway, next to a skyscraper, that sometimes glows.

What were the challenges of worldbuilding for this novel? Can you tell us a bit about your worldbuilding process?

I wanted a mid sized city and found Fort Wayne, Indiana. I looked up local history and read a lot about what was happening in the city. Then I started thinking that great question . . . What if? I started thinking about key points in history and changed them. I also looked at my city, similar sized Wichita, Kansas, and played with some of the changes here over the years. Throw in a couple apocalypse versions and you have your Groundhog Day setting but where there are small or very large changes (moon crashing into Earth).

Introduce us to your protagonist, Joe: how did you develop him, and what came first, Joe as a character, or other elements of the story? How did Joe become the right character to be the protagonist in this novel? 

Joe came first. I wanted an unassuming, non-heroic, everyman that was broken. He can’t remember things, might be PTSD or Traumatic Brain Injury, but he wants to find his way home on a travel system he can’t control with no maps. Joe is a generic protagonist that builds in the story as you find out things. He’s more apt to have things happen to him than control it due to other things that build in the novel. For some reason, I love tragic, redemptive heros, and Joe was born.

Did any of your storm chaser background and knowledge get transferred into the book, and if so, what? 

Storms in one way or another find their ways into my books. I think the biggest thing is always have an escape route with multiple exits. Joe has one, but he always knows how to get there.

What are you future project plans?

Middle-Aged Man has a choose your own ending. I plan to write sequels based on these. I’m also working on a dark viking berserker epic fantasy series based on Norse myth and folklore. There’s a couple YA horror and urban fantasy stories I need to finish and get out there. So . . . many future plans that I treat like a crow in a field of broken glass. Oooooh, shiny!

Like This? Try These!

October 14th – Lord Dunsany – ‘Charon’ (1915) – Read it .
Catch up on the challenge list here.

I love this, it’s so sad. It’s 1915, so peak war trauma, with no end in sight, and thousands dying in one day. It reminds me of all the apocalyptic ‘last person on earth’ literature of the Cold War era, a bit. I remember having to read Z is for Zachariah (1974) by Robert C. O’Brien at school, and it is giving me those vibes. It also reminded me of The Book Thief (2006) by Marcus Zusak, with Death as a character, carrying the victims of the Holocaust and the Second World War in his arms.

For the response to this, I’ve dug out a Ko-Fi letter that members had as a reward in June 2025, as part of the Egg & Gwen continuation. It’s the opposite problem here; in the spirit of the folktale, The Soldier and Death, and is just as horrifying. What if Charon were to find people stopped coming to him? What if people were not allowed to cross the river? I’m sharing this as it’s also set in 1914/15, so it fits that time period as well.

Let Them Go is an experimental piece related to the spin-off Pagham-on-Sea books that will be set in the early 20th Century, with Eglantine Pritchard vs the Pendle Sisters. This is part of Eglantine’s backstory, before she comes to Pagham-on-Sea. 

Members can read  her school days and a version of her childhood here.

This is a letter from a sister at the field hospital, much of which has been redacted by the censors, and goodness knows what they made of it.

CWs: description of injuries from shelling and gassing, casual-toned reference to Allied war crimes, surgery, body horror.

NOTE: A VAD / V.A.D. was a nurse with the Voluntary Aid Detachment and may not have had any prior hospital experience except the training they undertook prior to being shipped out. They may have been in other professions like teaching or retail, but perhaps with some St John’s Ambulance training or experience, etc.

======

Dear Kitty,

I am writing to you from our new quarters, a monastery that has been taken over for the needs of the hospital, some ==== miles from the front line, near the town of ===============. Something deeply unsettling has happened, and I feel I must write you and explain as best I can, as I cannot alarm anyone here with what sound like wild fancies. 

We are too busy for such things, and I want my nurses and V.A.D.s on top form for the next push, when we will undoubtedly find ourselves busy! We have convoys coming through every day now, with more cases of gas-gangrene, and currently we are making do for some 140 men when we scarcely have room for 80, but we have made it work, of course. 

Among those we’ve had through recently, and making good progress, are some sweet boys – ‘Canada’ is of course a Canadian, a fur-trapper, and he keeps the others in good spirits. There is ‘Curly’, a bald Australian who is great friends with his fellows on the ward, and also little T====, who cannot be more than fifteen, but says his military age is nineteen. That poor boy has pneumonia and shrapnel on the lungs causing ulcers, but he is still fighting through it. He is not well enough to be shipped home, and he will likely die in the next week or so, but for now he clings on. His poor mother! 

Currently we have some 20 whose wounds have healed well but who cannot return to duty – these are the ‘head cases’, and they will be served their Blighty tickets soon, to be sent back to England with the more severely wounded who are now fit enough to travel but need more prolonged nursing care than we can provide. 

Among our 140 are also some surrendered Germans and Prussians, although ‘Canada’ was surprised to hear that we have these at all; he said that they were told not to leave them alive, even if they surrender. I am not happy about nursing them, and we are so busy I cannot spare my nurses and V.A.Ds to take care of them, so I do it myself with what we have left over once our boys have been seen to. 

I suppose all this is mere preamble to the story I want to tell you, but you will think it very strange. I could fill this letter instead with details of my walk to town and what I bought there, and for how much (unbelievable prices, as, apparently, there’s a war on…!), and going flower-picking in the woods as our big gun fires on enemy aircraft above us, or sound of the shelling at night that rattles the windows. The enemy got our range all right in our last place, and we lost several batmen when a shell went straight through their tent. Here we are a little more distanced from the artillery, at least, but you can still hear the sounds of the big assaults when another push is coming. 

All of this to say that I am quite used to many things I never thought I would become quite used to, but when we moved to the monastery and received a new batch of nurses, four from Blighty and newly qualified, and five other experienced nurses from =====, Egypt, and how pleased we were to see them! 

Among the newly qualifieds was a doughty Welsh girl, around 19, who had started nursing at 16 and so had a few years of training and experience but was the youngest of the lot. She is a solid sort of creature, not the sort of girl one would really look twice at in a crowd, except if she were to brush past you or step on your feet. That is not to say she is clumsy, but she is rather hefty, and while she gets on with all her work in a very dependable way, one feels it is best to give her a wide berth in which to do it. 

I was fully expecting her to be one of the more emotional girls – the Welsh being what they are – or perhaps one of those fervently religious types one tries to avoid. We have one of these already, a perfectly lovely and very earnest sort, and I am quite ashamed to say that I find her immensely irritating. I did not relish the idea of having two such girls on the wards, as they might find common ground and become insufferable together, or else fight like cats in a bag over some small point of doctrine. 

At any rate, I decided to split them up as far as sleeping arrangements went, and to put them on different rounds as far as possible. This is how Nurse P. ended up in a small monk’s cell with Sister E., whom I trust a great deal, and admire for her level head. 

P. did not exhibit any emotional instability, and while she seemed to be a good, God-fearing sort of girl, and attended Sunday services when duties allowed, like the rest of us, she was not at all pushy about it. However, there was something strange about her. 

Whenever she would see a new case, or hear a story the boys told about their experiences, many of which I cannot share in a letter, a queer sort of expression would cross her face, her chest would rise, and a strange feeling sweep over whoever was near her, like pins and needles all over. 

I myself experienced this twice, and cannot account for it. One minute she was rubbing a Tommy’s feet and he was telling her about how he had bayoneted the enemy until he couldn’t stand, and the next this queer feeling rushed over me, causing all the hairs on my arms to rise. 

He felt it too – he fell silent, and suddenly screamed out for his rifle, and begged for the stretcher bearers, and we couldn’t quiet him for half an hour. 

So, when Sister E. came to me in the middle of the night and said she could not bunk with P. anymore, part of me was not surprised. It was why that surprised me.

Sister E. saw P. slip off from her rounds after a particularly nasty gas-gangrene case, and we had four deaths in succession on the same ward within minutes of one another, from the same convoy. My, the batmen were busy that night! And I remember we were all rushed off our feet with boiling water, fetching fresh bandages, and emergency surgeries. I was assisting with these in another part of the monastery, and we got through 30 in one night. 

As soon as I was finished, and exhausted, Sister E. found me, and she was in tears. Not from the situation in the ward, but because she had been so badly frightened. 

After following P. to see if she was all right, as one of the nurses had fainted badly the night before and had needed treatment herself, Sister E. saw her standing outside, and there was a strange feel to the air. 

“it was like trespassing,” Sister E. said to me. “Like stepping into a place one shouldn’t be. I don’t mean a house. I mean a sacred grove, or something like that.” 

(I am recording her words as best I can recall them, as that phrase seemed so odd to me – ‘a sacred grove’. It put me in mind of old stories and all those savage, queer things of the past, those standing stones and so on, where if one is walking alone on a lonely grey morning, or out too late at night, one’s imagination can run wild, and picture all sorts of dreadful things.)

Sister E. did not call out or announce her presence to P. because of this queer feeling, and then P. began to speak. She had her back turned to Sister E., so could not have been speaking to her, but also she was speaking in her own language, and Sister E. had never heard it before and did not know what any of it meant, only it had a rhythm and rhyme, like poetry. Sister E. became deathly afraid, “like something was coming,” she said, “like a shelling, only shells we couldn’t hear or see.” 

Finally, P. stopped, and addressed something – Sister E. could not say what – in English.

“I will have no more death on my ward.”

Well, naturally, I thought poor old P. and Sister E. had both succumbed to mental and physical exhaustion. 

P. may simply have been praying in Welsh, and Sister E. attributing something sinister to it simply because her nerves were stretched rather thin, and it was unfamiliar to her. 

But after this, something terrible happened. 

Nobody died. 

Now, Kitty, I know you must think this a good thing, and a testament to our nursing and surgical skills. I believe some of it certainly was. And yet, I must impress upon you – nobody died. 

We had a boy gargling his own brains as they leaked down the back of his throat, and a case of gas-gangrene so bad that he had to be put in a different room to the others because of the smell, quite off his head most of the time he was awake, and a Tommy blown to bits whose passing should have taken moments (it was a miracle they got him to the hospital at all, and by the time he was on the ward, there was nothing we could do for him). And none of them died. 

They hung in place for two weeks. 

Fourteen days. Fifteen nights.

There was nothing we could do to make them better. 

And the worst thing of all – a batman reported that as he was moving a body from the ward, the last of the four to die that night and the last of them to be taken away, the man’s heart started beating again. 

I cannot begin to describe the extent of this man’s injuries, the internal bleeding, and the damage caused by the shrapnel that had worked its way into his heart. Every pulse of that tired organ shredded it further, and it should not have been beating at all, that was quite impossible.

He was the 31st surgery of the night. They brought him down as soon as the batman found his pulse, and Sister E. had only just finished her macabre tale. I forget what I said to her. Some platitudes, perhaps I told her to get some sleep. I went back to assist with this new case, and I cannot describe what we found when we opened his chest. 

His heart was beating, although the extent of his injuries were such that it couldn’t possibly be. There were holes in it. The ulcers in his lungs and the smell was diabolical. He was rotting already, a lump of necrotic flesh on the table, and there we were, taking out shrapnel in an operation that would surely be the death of him, and yet his heart would not stop. 

He was bleeding profusely, but the blood didn’t seem to end.

I can’t explain that either. He lost more than five pints of it on that table, his heart pumping and pumping and pumping, and we couldn’t stop it, he leaked everywhere, and yet he always seemed to have more blood in him. 

Well, we patched him up and put him in a monk’s cell on his own, but nobody could explain what we had all seen. Of course, we had been at this all night, we were all exhausted, and we couldn’t be sure of anything. It frightens me a little to think we performed surgery in that state at all, looking back, if this was indeed a shared delusion that all of us there experienced. 

But the fact remains: that poor man was not dead, and he would not die. 

Yet we could not make him any better. 

We dealt with this state of affairs for two weeks, while I exhausted every rational explanation I could come up with, and Sister E. avoided P. the whole time, and trembled whenever she saw her.

Then I remembered what Sister E. had said about P., that phrase, “I will have no more death on my ward”, and I made up my mind to talk to her. She seemed most distressed by the state of the men, as were we all by then, and her usual stoicism was clearly under strain. 

“I don’t understand why I can’t just tell it all to go away, and make them better,” she said to me, and her voice, normally a lovely rich alto, was harsh and almost a growl. And then she started to cry. 

It wasn’t because she was upset at death or that she was simply overworked. She scrunched her face up in this furious sort of grimace, gritted her teeth while baring them, and tears rolled down her cheeks, as if she was too angry for words. 

Well, I don’t know what she meant by ‘tell it all to go away’, but once more, I felt that rush of something radiating from her to me, and all the hairs on my arms stood on end. 

I do not know if you have ever been in the presence of something or someone who is truly dangerous, Kitty, but now I can say that I have. And I don’t mean dangerous in the way that bombs are dangerous, or in the way infection is dangerous. I mean dangerous in the sense that not just your life, your world’s very existence, sits outside of one’s control, and is entirely in the power of the one standing not two feet away. 

You might think this an absurd exaggeration, but I truly felt in that moment that if she wanted to, she could erase us all as if we had never been, and Belgium too, and France, and Germany, and England, and wipe us all off the map forever if that was what it took to end the war. 

And she was angry. I decided I did not want to know what she could do if she was angry, and I did the only thing I knew how to do – I treated her like any other overwrought nurse in my hospital.

“Now then, nurse,” I said with all the authority I didn’t feel, “Pull yourself together, there’s a good chap. No crying in front of the boys. You chose this profession, and you must accept death as part of it. It is not our business to decide who lives and dies – it is our task to nurse them. You are part of this hospital, and you must learn to work with others: the world is not on your shoulders alone, although I dare say we have all felt like that at times. Just remember, there is no room for ego here, and you must learn to lean on your fellow nurses. Now wash your face, and do your job. No one is asking more of you than that.”

I do not know where I got the courage to say such a thing to this girl, and I do not know what part of that worked, but there was a moment of dead silence, where all the sounds of the hospital ceased. 

I could hear nothing, save my own pulse, and P. was staring me right in the eyes. 

I could not move a muscle. I felt if I did, I would fall, and keep falling forever.

Then she blinked, and everything came back in such a rush, the sounds, the smells, the reality of it all, that I was suddenly dizzy. It was almost as if, just for a moment, I had been somewhere else.

“Yes, Sister,” she said meekly, or as meek as I have ever heard her, and she marched off to wash her face and get on with her work, and that was that. 

But after that night, as she visited the men and did her rounds, they started dying again. It was as if whatever had them bound to their beds in its unrelenting, cruel grasp, simply let them go. 

And I am telling you this, Kitty, because I simply can’t explain it. Please write back and tell me I’m imagining things, and I will happily believe you. 

Your loving sister,

S.

October 13th – Vachel Lindsay – ‘The Spider and the Ghost of a Fly’ (1914) – Read it here. Catch up on the challenge here.

I enjoyed this short poem – a bite size thing I read about four times.

It reminded me of a really old cartoon about two flies on honeymoon and the evil spider luring them into his hotel – I don’t know if anyone else remembers that one, it was called ‘The Cobweb Hotel’ (1936)

The images of the poem – the doomed love, the inevitable destruction of the lover, the disappointment and heartbreak, and the femme fatale ‘spider’ – worked for me.

I didn’t know anything about the poet, and had never heard of him before, so I looked him up; there’s a lot of discussion around his poem “The Congo”, for example, criticised by contemporaries like W.E.B. Du Bois, who had praised his story “The Golden People”. His poems never gained academic interest and his popularity faded after his death. There is more about him here.

Here’s an extract from The Poetry of Betrayal, Part 1 of the Egg & Gwen backstory that is only available to my Ko-Fi members. The full novella is 18K words. This is how it ends – but there is more to come, particularly Egg’s experiences as a nurse in the Great War (1914-1918), and how she met Gwen again, and their reconciliation before they move to Pagham-on-Sea as ‘companions’. So this is the crush-to-lovers-to-enemies part of their arc, which is in draft and could be expanded.

I’ll work on this and more of the Egg & Gwen story for something to go on general sale, but until then, it’s all Ko-Fi member-exclusive.

[Chapter 8 of 9]
The Island

The next day, Gerry put himself and the girls into his automobile, and they set off for the lake, where Gwen explained there were pretty row-boats and plenty of swimmers, and they should bring a picnic. 

Gwen did not mention the sleepless night she had given Egg, and seemed entirely unfazed by it, although Egg had told her it was the first time anyone had touched her like that.

Egg was still in a daze, thinking Gwen was the loveliest, most exciting creature in the world, and yet still did not quite trust her.

She didn’t know what to think. Could one even have a ‘best girl’ instead of a best boy, outside of school? Forever? Not outwardly, of course, but that didn’t matter so long as there was an understanding, like in the novels she wasn’t meant to read. If yr Arglwydd Dduw wished to voice any objections, He ought to do so in tongues of fire right now, or else Egg would have to exercise her own interpretations, as was her right as a Nonconformist, and add the usual kind of courting to the long list of things she did not conform to.

Egg clutched her hat with one hand and held on to the seat with the other, while Gerry yelled over his shoulder that it was a twin-cylinder engine and an improved model to one that had taken out the 1907 Tourist Trophy Race, which Egg had never heard of. Gerry drove as if he was determined to take out the race for 1912. 

The speed was thrilling. Gwen only encouraged him to go faster, and Egg’s stomach did somersaults on the dips in the road, as they sped along at a faster whack than she had ever gone in her father’s cart. 

They went inland for a few miles, horn sounding at sheep and walkers and farmers alike, much to their annoyance, as well as other motorists, who seemed equally annoyed, and finally came to the spot Gwen was so excited to reach. 

She had almost forgotten the real reason for the trip. It was all she could do to recall the mysteries of the visit in order, and fix them in her mind; Gwen had kissed them all away, winkled them out of her thoughts with those dainty, clever fingers, and left her blank as a washed slate or a page of untouched paper.

How Gwen could go about her day like this, as though everything were normal, Egg couldn’t fathom. Well – let her, then. It wasn’t as if Egg didn’t have other things to think about, too.

As Gwen chattered gaily to Gerry and they unpacked the picnic, on the shore of a picturesque lake fed by a merry river, Egg forced her thoughts into sensible things.

One: the mirror – but that’s solved, she thought. The only mystery really is what Gwen wants to do with it.

But seeing wonders was a temptation of its own, so she ruled this out as a serious mystery. 

Two: Gwen mentioned ‘She’, who seemed to know me, and cannot be conjured by the mirror, so who is ‘She’? And where?

This did seem to be a real mystery, so Egg mentally re-numbered it as Mystery One. 

Two (actually two, this time, or possibly 1b): what happens on this island, and what happens if I can’t say the right words? What if the mirror englyn doesn’t work after all? Will we be stuck on an island that disappears, or stolen off somewhere else?

That made her shiver, despite the warmth of the sun. 

She determined to focus on her composition now, and hoped an englyn would be enough – if it required a cynghanedd, then they would be in trouble. She needed considerably more time to compose twenty-four lines of complicated internal rhyming schemes and set numbers of syllables than she did to compose only four.

“You’re so serious, darling!” Gwen teased her, pulling her down to the blanket. “This isn’t a test of your skill. I’m the one who should be nervous.”

“I wish you’d tell me what’s really going on,” Egg complained. “You keep changing things, and saying one thing when you don’t mean it, or saying another when it’s not really true. I can’t keep up with you.”

“I haven’t told a lie,” Gwen said, eyes wide and hurt. “And I have tried to, but I can’t. Really. She won’t let me.” She said the last part almost under her breath, but Egg heard it distinctly.

“Can’t you write it?” Egg asked, lowering her voice, too.

Gwen shook her head. “You’ll see why not. But not yet. She wants you to know. She knew someone from your family once, long, long ago.”

“Gwen, why am I here? Is that the only reason you invited me, because this – this She person insisted?” Egg glanced around for Gerry, but he was stripping off his scarf and goggles, and rooting about in the automobile for the flasks of tea.

Gwen recoiled from her with a sharp, indignant hiss. “Of course not, silly! How could you think so?”

“I don’t know,” Egg said, fighting the maelstrom of emotions that were quite outside her realm of experience. “I don’t think I know you very well, and at the same time, I know you far better than I expected to, and I don’t know how to—”

Gwen kissed her full on the lips. 

Egg was so startled, and so delighted, she couldn’t say another word. 

“There,” Gwen said, as if this settled everything. “Don’t be such a date. Unwrap these sandwiches, would you?”

If Gerry had seen anything, he didn’t pass comment on his return with the tea flasks. “Ladies, shall I be mother?”

Gwen held up her cup and smiled at him, squinting up as the sun blazed down on them, and Gerry gallantly poured the tea and set up a parasol. 

“There we are.” He threw himself on the grass in the full sunlight, arms behind his head. “Don’t mind me. We shall take a boat out shortly, there’s plenty of time.”

“What are waiting—” Egg started to ask, and Gwen kissed her again. 

Gerry closed his eyes, a smug smile playing on his lips, and Egg forgot all about the picnic. 

After a while, which wasn’t long enough for Egg, they did indeed find a row-boat tied up at a spot along the lake shore, and somehow Egg ended up being the one to row. It made sense – she was far stronger than Gerry, and it hadn’t even occurred to her that Gwen would do it. 

“Perfect timing,” Gerry said as they were out a little way, with no island in sight. “Keep close to the shore, but keep left.” He checked a silver pocket watch and tucked it back into his breast pocket. 

Egg didn’t question this. She hoped nothing would happen at all.

The trees grew more thickly around the lake to the left, and as Egg rowed them around the edge, trying not to bump into rocks or drift into the shallows, not entirely certain of what she was doing, the wind caught up and set the branches shivering. 

Nobody said a word.

Cascades of dry applause echoed around them, as the leaves shivered and shook.

Lines of Skene’s translation of Cad Goddeu, The Battle of the Trees, came to Egg’s mind, his translation of The Four Ancient Books of Wales deemed of enough merit to have in Tregaron’s school library, although Egg doubted the headmistress had actually read it herself. It wasn’t very poetic, and Skene didn’t have the ear to reproduce the rhythms of the original, Egg thought uncharitably, but the English lines still stuck in her head.

When the trees were enchanted,

In the expectation of not being trees,

The trees uttered their voices

From strings of harmony,

The disputes ceased.

“Don’t go any deeper,” Gerry warned, checking his pocket watch again. “Hold steady.”

Egg focused on the strokes, and the poetry. 

To her left, the trees bowed in the wind and whispered, and she almost fancied she heard words in the rustle of the leaves, the susurrus intonations of dry, sibilant voices. 

If I come to where the boar was killed,

He will compose, he will decompose,

He will form languages.

What will we form, if we’re killed? Egg found herself wondering. Is that how things rot in the Otherworld, can things die there too? I think it’s a cycle, an endless cycle… like the cauldron of rebirth in the old stories… but we’re flesh and blood, and all that will come from us is food for the worms.

It was such a terribly morbid thought, she missed a stroke and had to readjust her oar. 

Auntie Olivera had a copy of Thomas Stephens’ The Literature of the Kymry at home, and there was plenty more about the poem in there, but once Auntie had seen the author refer to Myrddin as ‘fictitious’, it had been placed somewhere out of the way, to gather dust. 

There was a difference, Egg was told severely, between something being fictional and not being true, and the author of that scholarly tome clearly did not know what that difference was. Egg was not entirely sure that she understood it, but if Lewis Carroll’s White Queen could believe six impossible things before breakfast, then so could she. 

All these things swirled in her mind, all mixed up, anything to distract her from the cacophony of the trees, and Gwen’s infinitely distracting presence opposite her, and the looming spectre of the unknown. 

“Listen,” Gerry said, breaking through her determined thought-jumble. 

They were all very quiet, and Egg put up the oars briefly to let them bob while she listened, the hair rising on the back of her neck. 

A low humming was coming from the trees, and spreading across the water. Egg twisted around to see what the other two were gaping at. Ripples were spreading across the surface of the lake from the shore, as if something large but invisible had entered the water some yards back, and was slowly, lazily, making for their boat. 

“Row,” Gerry whispered, and there was a gleam in Gwen’s eyes that showed she was not frightened but terribly excited, and Egg felt a surge of anger at being put in this position, where something might tip them into the water and pull them under to drown, and all the time be too cowardly to show itself.

A mist was gathering.

Egg put her back into it, pulling longer strokes and letting the oars bite deep, bracing with her feet and compressing like a loaded spring. The boat shot off, and Gwen’s cheeks grew pink with the thrill of it, and Gerry was quite pale beside her. 

“There!” Gerry said, pointing off to the right. 

Egg manoeuvred them in a curve, and there, right in front of them as if it had been there all along, was a densely wooded island wreathed in mist. 

Something shot behind their boat as it turned, making them rock. 

“Row, Miss Pritchard, for the love of God!” Gerry cried, while being a fat lot of good himself, and Egg rowed for all she was worth. 

There was a dark shape in the water, just below the surface, that she could just make out in her peripheral vision. 

It seemed to keep pace, but the mists swallowed them, and they lost it in the shallows of the island’s shore. 

Gerry jumped out with a splash, trousers rolled up to his knees, and heaved the boat further into the shallows. He helped his cousin out first, then Egg. 

Egg looked back over the lake, but there was nothing to see now but the rolling grey wisps, building into a thick blanket. She couldn’t see the lake shore anymore, and there was no shape in the water. She recalled Gerry’s story of a traitress and her maidens all drowned, and Gwen’s Aunt’s tale of a naked maiden with a dark shadow spreading under the waves, where her legs ought to be. 

“What was it?” she asked. 

“A drowned girl,” said Gwen, and there was a cruel twist to her smile that seemed too wide and too big for it, as if it wasn’t her mouth at all. 

“Stop it.” Egg brushed by her to investigate the spot they had landed up in, but the others didn’t follow her. “It was probably an otter, that’s all, and we were frightened for nothing. Where are we? What is this place?”

“Say your englyn,” Gwen entreated, clasping her hands in front of her. “Say it quickly.” 

Egg started with the Lord’s Prayer, in Welsh, of course, and the englyn she’d composed for the mirror, and she repeated that four times. The Lord’s Prayer was only necessary once; the Almighty was not moved by repetition, but the poem needed a little more emphasis, a repeat for each line, or it felt incomplete. 

In answer, the mist seemed to lighten and thin around them, retreating to the lapping water and not encroaching any further. 

“It worked,” Gerry whispered. “I mean, I was sure it would, but it’s one thing to think it, and another to see it, don’t you know.” 

“Oh, darling, you really are a bit wet. I’m amazed you even came at all. Come on.” Gwen picked her way across the little beach to the trees, and waved them over. “Tie the boat up, this spot is perfect.”

“Perfect for what?” Egg didn’t trust Gerry to tie the boat properly, but his firm knots made her reassess her prejudices. 

He shot her a supercilious look, eyebrow raised. “Does this pass mustard, Miss Pritchard?”

Egg flushed. “It will do.” She turned from him and followed Gwen, who was making herself comfortable in a spot where she could look out over the small bay where they had landed. “Won’t you please tell me what we’re waiting to see?”

“It’s my Becoming,” Gwen said sweetly. “And I must have two witnesses, or I shall not survive it. Gerry has got quite good at reanimation, in case something should go wrong. But I think with you here, nothing shall.”

“Reanimation?” Egg repeated. “You mean… like Frankenstein?”

Gerry laughed. “Oh, not at all. That’s all very impractical. Not to mention incredibly hard on one’s shirts. All that surgical butchery.” He pulled a disgusted face.

The first part of what Gwen had said caught up with her and overshadowed this information. 

Egg turned back to Gwen, trying not to show how flustered she was. “What are you Becoming? What on earth do you mean?”

“I was chosen from birth,” Gwen said, serene. “I was born with the caul, you see, and my mother drew her last breath the moment I drew my first. It passed from her to me. It’s a very great honour to be a vessel.”

“A vessel… for…? Not the things in the mirror, surely? Do they enter into you?”

“One in particular.” Gwen smiled, and her eyes seemed a different shape, a different size, a much clearer, more piercing shade of blue. “I have already accepted her, but now I must welcome her with witnesses, and others may try to get in. They can be frightfully jealous if they have no vessels of their own.”

“But – who is she? What is she?” This was the closest Egg had ever come to being frozen to the spot, a wicked chill shuddering through her, but she was not afraid for herself. She was afraid for Gwen.

Gwen only smiled, as if they were talking about commonplace things like a new girl at school, or a replacement for the Latin master.

“She is immortal in our world, only if She lives within another living body. Together, we could do great things. I am strong enough to hold Her, but I must also accept the mantle of power, and it might be too much. That’s why I have Gerry, in case someone needs to bring me back, and why I have you, in case the horrid things from the other side try any funny business.” Gwen gave a little shrug, hands delicately folded in her lap. “Isn’t this exciting? You don’t mind, do you? I did tell you it was dangerous. I was sure you would understand. But I couldn’t possibly explain. Not until we were here. She wouldn’t let me.”

Egg didn’t know what to say, but there was no opportunity for further words.

Gerry held his hand up, checking his pocket watch again. “It’s starting,” he whispered.

A low humming, the same note as before, came from the trees on the island.

It was a single tone, but so loud and so constant that Egg began to hear different tones and strange rhythms embedded within it, resonating in her breastbone as it rang through her ears. It wasn’t intolerably loud or even intolerably high-pitched, but so insistent and queer that she clapped her hands to her ears and still heard it boring into her head, as though she did not need ears to hear it at all. 

It filled Egg with a terrible desire to do something awful.

What, she didn’t know.

The humming filled her with vibrations that made everything feel too tight, too restrictive. She wanted to strip her clothes off, corsetry and all, and fling herself into the lake. 

She wanted to take an augur and bore holes into her skull, to release the pressure building behind her eyes and forehead. 

She wanted to throw herself on the ground and tear open her arms and chest to release the awful sound from her bones, and bleed and bleed and bleed until the sound was no longer a part of her. 

She wanted to take Gwen by her pretty throat and squeeze until her eyes popped like ripe berries, until the humming stopped. 

The wind sent a stray leaf careering into the side of her face, and the unexpected scrape of it brought Egg to her senses.

Gwen had her arms spread wide, and her beautiful face upturned to the sun, her buttercup curls straying from their pins and winding into loose tendrils around her face. She was pale as a daisy, pink-tinged as a rose, her dress the shade of blooming lavender, a maiden made of flowers. 

Soulless as flowers, Egg thought, dazed, remembering the story of Blodeuwedd, the flower-girl. And she shall be an owl, the loneliest of birds, the shunned huntress of the woods, and never again be softness in the sunshine.

“No, she is mine!” Gwen said, in a harsh voice so unlike her own, and a change came over her. The appearance of blossoms fell from her skin as the wind picked up, as if they were blown away, and a shadow surged to the surface, a dead, pale being looking out through Gwen’s eyes, wearing her skin, turning her hair to dusty black, and her eyes to an arctic blue. 

“No. This vessel is mine. None of you can have her.”

Egg realised they were not alone. 

She was pressed around on all sides by things she couldn’t see, angry waspish things, all of them ignoring her and Gerry, who was trying not to move or make a sound. He had his pocket watch open, and Egg wondered if it was a watch at all, since she had not seen its face. She hoped he knew what he was about, as she had no idea what to do.

The humming intensified. Egg couldn’t bear it. It was a sound that wanted possession of her, mind, body and soul. She recited her englyn to herself, over and over, forcing the invisible crowds to part around her and give her room to breathe. She could feel things older than time, pressing against her flimsy net of words and finding weaknesses, trying to get at her, to get at the three of them, and take them for their own.

“I welcome none but you,” Gwen said in her own voice, staring into space above Egg’s head. “None but the striker of the fatal blow, she who began the Battle of Camlann, none but Gwenhwyach.”

As soon as the name left Gwen’s lips, the hum became a scream.

Egg felt her englyn break, syllables unmoored, lines flapping freely, as she forgot the words. 

The air sucked at them, rocking them where they sat.

Egg closed her eyes tightly and held on, but all she could think of were the first two lines of the Lord’s Prayer, and nothing else.

Ein Tad, yr hwn yn y nefoedd

Sancteiddier dy enw.

Ein Tad, yr hwn yn y nefoedd

Sancteiddier dy enw.

Ein Tad, yr hwn yn y nefoedd

Sancteiddier dy enw…

Egg had been the tender age of eight during the Revival of 1904, and she had grown up with the passion of the ministers, chapel twice a week and three times on Sundays until she won her scholarship to Tregaron School for Girls, and Auntie Olivera telling her of an elderly deacon in the back row so overcome with ecstasy and holy terror that he shouted out, “No more, Lord Jesus, or I’ll die!”

Now Egg understood how it must have been, the terror in that place, the feeling of being on the very limit and edge of what a person could stand, that any more pressure would burst her flesh and render her entirely spirit, and that she would watch something else stand in her place, wearing her body while she wandered free of it, lost forever. 

She was not sure that this island would permit people to go to heaven. She was also certain, in a sudden moment of conviction that rendered her iron and steel and stone, that she would not allow anything to steal her life from her, eternal or otherwise. 

Her insecurities were gone.

Egg opened her mouth, not knowing what would come out, and turned her prayer into poetry. 

The humming stopped. 

The air was dead. 

Egg’s ears rang with the sudden, empty silence, the wind also ceased, the trees unmoving. 

Gerry clicked his pocket watch closed, and tucked it back into his pocket, looking pale. 

“Gwendoline?”

Gwen blinked, as if restored by a good night’s sleep. She smiled her same smile, stretched, and stood up. 

“I feel wonderful. She is safe inside me, now.”

Egg didn’t like the sound of this at all. She knew nothing of this person, this dead thing under Gwen’s skin, but the name sounded familiar.

She stood up, dusting off her skirt. “Gwen…”

“Don’t worry. You did wonderfully. I knew you would.” Gwen’s smile suited her now. If before there had been some vying for supremacy, now there was pure symbiosis, a melding of forms and souls, and Egg had the strangest feeling she was looking at two people at the same time. “Don’t worry, darling. She likes you, too.” 

That made Egg shudder.

Gwen laughed. “I promise, when we’re alone, it will only be me.”

Egg wanted to believe this, but she didn’t feel reassured. 

“We should leave,” Gerry said, making for the boat. “The island will disappear as the mist clears.”

Sure enough, the mist was thinning, and Egg could almost see through to the other side, where the lake shore was waiting for them. 

They got into the boat and began to row out into the lake, just in time – as Egg looked back, only once, thinking of Lot’s wife as she did so, the island was no longer there. They bobbed in the empty lake, for all the world like three people on a gay boating trip, as if nothing preternatural had ever happened. 

[Chapter 9 of 9]
Parting

“You will be simply marvellous,” Gerry told Gwen when they returned to his car. “You’ll restore our fortune, I know it. Just think of all the tiresome rich old men you can enslave, and the empires we can build together.”

Egg turned cold at Gwen’s tinkling laugh, a twist of terrible jealousy and hurt in her heart. Had they gone through all this, only for Gwen to throw her over for some greater scheme? And hadn’t Egg known this all along, known that Gwen was using her for her own agenda? And yet she had still accepted the invitation like a lovesick fool, and now Gwen had put them all in harm’s way and come out the other side unscathed, or at least, with the outcome she had desired from the first, and now – where did that leave Egg? 

She was quiet all the way back to Aberystwyth, where they went for tea at the hotel once more, and walked for a little while along the seafront, and Gwen bloomed as gentlemen doffed their hats to her, and glowed brighter than ever. 

“Don’t look so glum, Pritchard,” Gwen teased, threading her arm through Egg’s. Egg noted she had dropped the terms of endearment. “Everything went perfectly.”

For you, Egg thought. I’m sure everything will always go perfectly for you.

“You and I aren’t like the others,” Gwen whispered in her ear. “We can make our own way in the world, and the world will bend to us. We have powers, and we should use them.”

They passed a sign that read VOTES FOR WOMEN, and Egg took a pamphlet on their way passed.

“Isn’t that frightfully selfish of us?”

Gwen tittered. “Don’t moralise, darling, it’s so boring. Let other people have their struggles. What do they matter? We can do as we please.” 

Egg couldn’t stand to hear Auntie’s passion reduced to something petty and small.

The way Gwen said it made everything sound so pointless, an offer of an empty world where Evan’s sacrifice for her schooling meant nothing, just as Auntie’s fervour meant nothing, and her father’s quiet debates and steady convictions meant nothing, either.

Egg couldn’t have that.

She released Gwen’s arm.

“I think I should like to go home,” she said.

“If you like. But it’s far too late for regrets.” Gwen smiled at her. “You’ll see. When you accept how powerful you really are, you’ll see. I can wait.”

Mysticism, the Otherworld and miraculous sights were all very well, and the ordinary kind of girlish wickedness that everyone got up to after lights out, but this was a level of real wickedness that Egg couldn’t stomach. 

“I don’t think so, Jenkins,” Egg said, and Gwen drew herself up and stared at her. Then she turned on her heel and caught up with Gerry, walking some way ahead, leaving Egg alone near the lady handing out suffragette leaflets.

No tears, stop your silliness, Auntie Olivera admonished her as Egg tried not to break down on the promenade. Pritchard women don’t cry. That nonsense won’t get you anywhere.

She sniffed back all the confusion, but the events of the day were so strange and awful, and Gwen had confirmed all her worst fears by saying exactly the wrong things, that she may as well have scooped out all Egg’s insides like a fish and left her out in the salty air for the gulls. 

Serves you right for wanting to be wicked, said imaginary Auntie Olivera, who in reality would also make her cocoa and put her to bed after her admonishments, but Egg wanted to be punished.

She was furious with herself.

She had known from the start that Gwendoline Mostyn-Jenkins was a special sort of trouble, and she had walked straight into it with both eyes open.

Not again, Egg vowed. You’re a nasty piece of work, Jenkins. You won’t catch me out twice. I’ll not use my powers for anything but stopping you being so selfish, and whatever other little schemes you cook up. You’ll be sorry you ever tried to use me like this, you’ll see.

Thus ended Egg’s trip to Aberystwyth, cut politely short on the pretext of a fictitious telegram relaying a family emergency, which Gerry claimed to have received while his Mama was out. Egg was grateful for that, even if she still wasn’t sure if she liked him.

Soon Egg was back on the train and weeping bitterly all alone in her compartment, letting out all the emotion she couldn’t show once she got home, if only because she couldn’t explain any of it.

As she ruined her handkerchief, drenching it through and through, Eglantine Valmai Pritchard determined that this was the only time in her life she would cry over a girl, and certainly the only time she would ever cry over Gwendoline Mostyn-Jenkins.

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October 12th – Madeline Wynee – ‘The Little Room’ (1907) – Read it .
Catch up on the challenge here.

Really digging the East Coast American Gothic, to be honest, with its liminal spaces and things that do and don’t exist at the same time. I really like the way this plays with the vagaries of memory vs. imagination, the way it feels like two different timelines are crossing one another within the house resulting in different sets of experiences blending into one, very confusing timeline, and the ways people try to explain or understand the unreachable, unverifiable bits of their own remembered histories.

I find stories like this personally disorientating because I have no sense of direction or spatial awareness, and I have actually encountered alleyways that genuinely, to my child-mind, didn’t exist the next time I tried to find them. Here’s a childhood memory of my own about a place that, to me, only sometimes existed…

Here’s some lore for you.

I used to live on Paros, a large island in the Cyclades, and grew up in two of the largest towns on the island, moving from Naoussa to Parikia. I had a lot of freedom in the off-season, and basically wandered wherever I wanted to go, and would disappear for ages on my little expeditions. I think I was about five or six, so everything was much bigger than me, and had that air of mystery that I think as an adult I wouldn’t see anymore.

One time, I found a very narrow alley that I had never seen before, leading at an odd angle (as these things often do on the islands) and I headed down it and found a totally deserted beach. There was a little park on the sand, with a fence, and swings, and a roundabout, where I played by myself until I got bored, and wandered further away. I found half-finished concrete houses or flats, just the bare shell of them with the frames up and nothing else, and the beach rounded away below a cliff in the middle distance, which seemed to me at the time like it was miles and miles away. (I think it was a short-ish walk, in fact, for a grown up).

I tried to show my mum another time we were in the area and I couldn’t find the alleyway at all. I remember trying to find it on my own another time, and still not being able to, like it never existed and I had dreamed the whole thing. But I do that to this day – I get so turned around and confused by basic directions that I can’t find easy landmarks, or cafés I’ve literally just left, as if parts of the map simply dissolve as soon as I step outside of some forcefield around them.

Then, I found it again.

By now, this beach and its alley had become almost mythical in my mind, so when I actually did stumble upon it while playing in the streets again, I was already half-convinced it wasn’t a real place. I found myself back on the deserted sand, with no tourists, no locals, except maybe one woman walking a dog, who looked oddly at me when she saw me playing in the empty park by myself with no other adults around. At the time, I thought being alone was completely normal, so I always hated it when adults who didn’t belong to me tried to interfere in my autonomy. I ignored her, and she went away.

Again, I got bored, and wandered back to the shell of the unfinished building project, and looked up at the cliff. On the cliff, looking down at the beach, were three figures dressed in black. They were Orthodox priests, of course, with their hats and long black robes, and they stood so still and silently that they also didn’t seem real. I wasn’t scared of priests, because I liked Papa Petros very much, and I would always go into his small, windowless church to see him, and he would lift me up so I could light a candle. I also liked his wife, but their faces are just smudges in my memory, not from the distance of time, but because I think they were always like that.

These three men in black were also faceless, and silent, and I thought they had seen me, and suddenly I was very scared.

I ran back to the desolate skeleton of the unfinished concrete house, and hid there. It felt like hours – but I’m also timeblind, and I have no idea how long I stayed crouched in the building site, listening for their footsteps on the sand.

They did come down the cliff, and they did walk along the beach, and I saw their sandals under their robes, and I didn’t come out until they were gone.

Then I ran all the way back to the alley, and back up through the narrow winding streets, and back to wherever my mother was, and told her my latest adventure. I don’t know if she believed me, and I don’t know how I told the story, or anything that happened after that. I don’t remember ever finding the alleyway again, but perhaps I chose not to see it. Perhaps I did, but I simply don’t remember.

But there’s a true story for Day 12 that I think works with the story for today. A bit of Greek Island Gothic for you.

October 11th – Emma Frances Dawson – ‘An Itinerant House’ (1897) – Read it .

Catch up on the challenge here.

“Houses seem to remember,” said he. “Some rooms oppress us with a sense of lives that have been lived in them.”

A cursed room in a house… a lady scorned by her lover who marries someone else… it’s all very dramatic. I enjoyed the galvanism aspect, used here as a form of early defibrillation.

I toyed with the idea, because of the cursed room, of re-posting Love Song for The Crows for this day, but then I thought I’d play with the resurrection aspect.

“‘Better dead than alive!’ True. You knew I would be glad to die. What right had you to bring me back? God’s curses on you! I was dead. Then came agony. I heard your voices. I thought we were all in hell. Then I found how by your evil cunning I was to be forced to live.”

It reminded me a lot of Wake Not The Dead by Ernst Raupach (often misattributed to Johann Ludwig Tieck in English translations, as it is in this version linked here).

I thought I’d have a go at a necromancy scene for this – this isn’t attached to any plot or story, I just had the idea and wanted to see where it went. I’ve used French names as a stand in for now, as I have no idea where or when this should be set, but perhaps it would make sense in the world of Yelen & Yelena.

I also wanted to think about how necromancy might work in different ways, to avoid the agonies of being dragged back to life. So I came up with something just for a short scene, and here it is:

“This is sex magic,” Gaudin said, stopping abruptly as the thought occurred to him. His shovel bit the dirt and remained there. “You mean this is for fertility rites.”

His companion, a shorter, fatter man, continued to dig by the light of their dim oil lamps.

“It is, isn’t it?” Gaudin, the taller and stronger of the two, had been making better progress, and now without him the effort of his companion was doubled. Gaudin wiped sweat from his weathered brow and frowned. “I wouldn’t have agreed if I’d—“

“It’s never been done before,” his companion grunted. “Nobody thinks of it. It’s always blood, and skulls, and dribbly candles, done by some red-eyed horse-wit who looks like a rabid squirrel. But think about it – we’re calling something from the earth, like seeds long-buried. The dead don’t like being woken anymore than a sleeping acorn does, but there’s ways of making that waking feel natural.” He stopped, out of breath from his speech on top of the physical exertion, and panted over the handle of his shovel. “And,” he said at last, “It’s not just anyone. It’s for Isabeau.”

“She’s been sleeping for four hundred years,” Gaudin said softly. “Shouldn’t we let her sleep?”

His companion, Faubert, shook his head, but there was doubt and sorrow in his eyes, the shadow of it caught in the flicker of the lamps. “I can’t,” he whispered. “You know it.”

Gaudin sighed. Ever since Isabeau Montclerc’s portrait had been rediscovered in the Chateau, Jehann Faubert had been a man obsessed. Lady Isabeau had been known only in fable and story prior to this discovery, and her powers greatly feared. It was said that she won the Battle of Montparnasse with an army of skeletal warriors, commanding the dead to rise from the field and come under her dominion, until the opposing army found themselves a third of the size and fighting the corpses of their own comrades. Isabeau Montclerc rode a immense black stallion called Bright Eyes, whom she had raised from a colt, and whose hide nothing could pierce.

Not only was she the most talented necromancer of her age, or of any age, and skilled at the art of defensive magic, she was also a wonderful pianist, painter, and dancer. The portrait uncovered at the Chateau was one the Lady Isabeau had painted of herself, while facing the great gilded mirror in the Blue Salon.

Faubert had never been the same man since that day. He was convinced that Lady Isabeau was the only salvation for their province as it stood on the brink of total destruction, the armies advancing through the land as what had come to be colloquially termed the Cousins’ War raged on. Gaudin, for all his education and common sense, had come to agree with him. There were no other choices, and the attempted resurrection of the greatest warrior and magic practitioner of a bygone age was the best chance they had.

Still, the methods Faubert proposed for the resurrection were– unorthodox.

“I’m not sure about this,” Gaudin said. “I’m not saying you’re not good. As far as soilwork goes, you’re the best, in my estimation. Ah! Well, you know what I think.” He looked about them at the silent forest, and shrugged himself deeper into his cloak. “And what if she doesn’t want to be woken?”

“You saw her painting,” Faubert cried, ruddy-faced. “Those signs, the symbols, the hidden clues, tell me I imagined it! She left instructions. And the look in her eyes, tell me I imagined that.“

In truth, Gaudin was not sure what he had seen in the face of Isabeau Montclerc, and could not answer his friend. The portrait’s eyes were painted so skillfully that they captured every speck of light, and so alive that they spoke to one’s soul. But what the painted Isabeau said to Gaudin, and what she said to Faubert, were clearly not the same things. For Gaudin, standing before that glorious artwork, Isabeau appeared as a terrible queen, and spoke to him in imperious, wordless visions of willing servitude. It had chilled him to his core – for in that moment he knew he would bend the knee only to Isabeau Montclerc from that moment on, and his life was in the hands of a woman long dead, and his heart ached with the melancholic weight of that dreadful knowledge.

Faubert, as always, took things further.

Now they were here, in the depths of night, digging up an ancient forest.

“We need four more layers of soil,” Faubert insisted. “And then we shall have enough. Four more layers down and we will be at the level she may have walked, think of that! And then we can begin.”

Gaudin cast a look at the samples of earth already recovered and put by in boxes. He nudged one listlessly with the toe of his boot. “But then you’re proposing fertility rites…”

“She must waken layer by layer, like a plant, you cannot simply drag someone back through all this distance of time, things go wrong.” Faubert began digging again. “Like those deep water pearl divers, you know, when they return to the surface too quickly.”

“But fertility rites…” There was something that Gaudin couldn’t shake about that, about what he and Faubert would be doing later on, that distressed him. The idea that anything about his own profane body would be involved in the rites that would raise the Lady Isabeau – he was unworthy, for all his lineage and good name, so desperately unworthy, that it appalled him.

“We are following her instructions,” Faubert snapped, out of patience. “Really, how can you be so prudish, when you have done so many of them before? It is only soil.”

“But it will be sprinkled onto her,” Gaudin mumbled, blushing hard. “It will touch her skin…”

“Her bones,” Faubert corrected. “It will become her skin.”

This was nearly too much for Gaudin, who felt himself swooning as if the trench they had dug had cracked open the Lady’s grave. He leaned heavily on his shovel. “Please,” he said faintly, “Why not try the traditional way after all?”

But Faubert only scoffed, and kept digging. “That is not how she wanted it. After all this, at this moment of crisis – after all we have seen – wouldn’t you do anything for Isabeau?”

Gaudin couldn’t understand how Faubert used her name so familiarly, like a close, departed friend, and realised that while she saw him, Gaudin, as a vassal, she had spoken to Faubert as a peer, a fellow practitioner. For the first time in all their ten-year friendship, the claw of envy pierced Gaudin’s breast.

But – those eyes, the portrait, the approaching doom.

“For Isabeau,” he said at last, “And for us, too.”

Faubert nodded, and Gaudin resumed digging.

I enjoyed this poem – it ends on a hopeful note that the narrator’s ‘Dark Angel’ will be overcome, and he may transcend his fleshly, earthly nature in the Name of God. I really liked the imagery – I think “apples of ashes” is a lovely, evocative turn of phrase, and possibly my favourite bit.

October 10th – Lionel Johnson – ‘The Dark Angel’ (1893) – Read it .
Catch up with the challenge here.

I think Wes is the perfect way to respond to the Dark Angel, and the internal struggle Wes regularly has. He tries hard to be better, but there’s always some temptation to face, and he’s very aware of his own limitations.

Here’s an extract from The Day We Ate Grandad, where Wes and his internal battles are introduced.

The Day We Ate Grandad – Extract

Wes woke up with a start, sweat pouring off him, sheets in a frantic tangle around his calves. He’d hit himself so hard in his sleep that he’d not only woken himself up, but his cheek was sore and stinging.

LET ME THROUGH.

Grandad’s terrible demands echoed through his dreams and into his waking moments, skin crawling with grave maggots raining down from a sky boiling with blood.

It took him a few seconds to work out where the fuck he was; the damp patch on the opposite wall was unfamiliar, the bedclothes were cheap, and the whole room was a cluttered, narrow, low-ceilinged affair with a single window and a storage heater.

He wasn’t in his own flat in Chelsea. It certainly wasn’t his boyfriend’s Kensington penthouse, and his girlfriend wouldn’t be seen dead in a place like this.

It was Tina Harris’s bedroom, in her poky, rented cottage in Pagham-on-Sea. Shagging his oldest friend and unofficial sponsor was probably all kinds of stupid, but it wasn’t like they hadn’t had a bit of fun before.

He’d been friends with her since childhood. When her family moved away, she was his first pen pal. First lots of things, in fact. She’d kissed him once at the bus stop, a peck on the lips that nine-year-old Wes had been baffled but delighted by. Granny Wend had let their friendship be, encouraged it, even; she always said Tina’s family had old power in them. Maybe she’d only said that because even at that tender age Wes had been a sucker for power, but now they were pushing thirty, Tina was still his friend.

He checked his phone, and saw her text.

:Thanks for last night, stud. Call me if you need a check-in.:

He sent a heart back, indulging himself with a moment of self-satisfaction. He didn’t have to rise to the occasion for it to be an occasion. It was just temporary trouble, he reassured himself. It would improve with time, he was sure. Time, and maybe a clinic on Harley Street.

He swiped on something accidentally and opened a video he’d sent to everyone last month; the last thing he’d sent, as it turned out.

“You call me a fucking Judas?” his own wasted voice slurred at him as his face glitched and strobed violently, sliding in and out of his head before he could close it, “Just fucking – fucking kill yourselves. Do the job for her, why don’t you.”

No wonder he’d been thrown out of all the family chats.

He deleted it. There was no point in torturing himself with how much of an arsehole he’d been. He was twenty-two days clean, and the only way was forwards.

Don’t you want to be a god, in complete control of yourself? Don’t you want to have them worship you?

He struggled out of bed and tried to shrug off the Voice in his head.

“No, no, no.” If he said it out loud, he might believe it. “No.”

He could kid himself the Voice was part of the withdrawal process if he tried hard enough. Or he could face the fact it was Grandad, projecting into his sleeping mind while he was weak, probing his innermost desires.

Good luck with that, old man, Wes thought, applying his concentration, and grounding himself in his current reality.

Wes had already rejected the bastard once. There was no way he would allow that monster to enter his world and destroy the life he loved.

I do love it, Wes reminded himself, getting dressed and heading to the bathroom. I still love it. Things are tough right now, for everyone. They’ll get better.

And yet, the offer of worship, the idea of ultimate control, ate away at him, even as his subconscious poked him with warnings of maggots and death.

They threw you out of the family group chats, a spiteful, hurt part of him whispered. Don’t you want to make them sorry?

“That was my fault,” Wes reminded his reflection in Tina’s bathroom mirror. He forgot his own face each time he blinked, constantly confronted with a brand-new person, eyes bloodshot and mouth ringed with toothpaste like rabid froth. He grabbed a towel. “I fully deserved that. If I ever go back to that place, the only thing I’m using that power for is to cure Charlie’s addiction. That’s it.”

I’d make a great cult leader, though.

He shook that thought off with a splash of cold water and started his skin routine. You couldn’t afford to skimp on that, if all you ever made on people were a string of first impressions.

He whiled away the morning trying to quell the feeling of impending doom, but distractions only kept it at bay. There was no shifting the feeling that something wasn’t right.

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