Short Horror Story Keep Walking By Part Two

  I try not to think back to what I saw the next morning but when I do I remember it as a bad dream. One of those waking nightmare type things or food poisoning. I certainly do not like to think it came out of my imagination.

It was such a bright warm day I woke up to. The sun shone on all the pretty peach and pink colours I had painted my room with a white light that ought to have been stark were the colours not all so sweet.

It happened so fast it was like my mind split in half instantly to deal with it.A sense of dread fear intruded upon me, even whilst my head was still on the pillow my whole body was overcome with the cold clamminess of it.I knew there was something horrific in the room. Something dreadfull.I found myself hoping it was a huge black spider on my wall next to the door at the end of my bed and I do not like spiders.

I sensed  where it was and was trying to force myself, still half awake to look.I had to look or I could be frozen with the fear of it.I felt it was something I couldn’t deal with.Something I had no hope of dealing with and it was going to paralyze me with terror .It was with a sense of hopelessness that I peered slowly over the edge of the duvet.It took my breath just to look at it and it appeared to be peering directly back. Only it`s eyes and the top of its head visible at the end of my bed.

It was a vision so horrible as to be almost unbelievable. All I recall thinking was “Why?” “Why me?Why here?”It was simply the most unnatural thing I hope I never really saw and yet I knew I was not imagining it,just because I could not have.

It was only a vaguely human shaped thing.The spiked hair and wrong eyes vaguely Craig.My brain was scrambling to explain the inexplicable. It was blacker that soot in a way that defied nature.It was a blackness that was more like a void than a colour.The light could not hit,it seemed  to absorb light.The eyes were bigger than human eyes are able to be,there seemed to be constant movement in the deep blackness within them.

Anything natural and human as in the previous Craig had utterly gone.What was left was this unspeakably gruesome thing that made no sound and had no recognisable expression.It appeared to be moving a little as if in a breeze of it`s own but with the only window right next to my head I knew there was no breeze and the door behind it was shut.I hid my head under the duvet repeatedly but it was still there when I looked again.It was too horrible a thing to know of it`s existence let alone acknowledge it`s appearance at the end of my bed.I kept on hiding and looking and eventually I looked and it had gone.


        The odd things that began happening around the house after that just seemed amusing at first.I would be in the Kitchen and putting  the lid on the sugar jar only to find it taken off again a second later.Lids,forks knives kept being moved.Milk I had put in the fridge moved to a cupboard.Things from cupboards moved to the fridge.It was just like we had an invisible idiot living with us and it didn`t especially bother us. My mother would shout “What on earth are you up to!” at me but I would be shouting it back just as often.

     At school Tracey and I ignored each other cautiously.I didn`t want to be the first one to say anything and I suppose neither did she.I had no evidence to accuse her with and it all seemed too silly at that point.
The annoyance grew however,moving all over the house until one day I came home from school to find my mother sat on the sofa,she was shaken up.She refused to explain what had happened but it was obvious something had. After that I could hear her from my bedroom shouting at something angrily ”Get lost!” was the most commonly heard part.When I went to find out who it was, there would be no one there. After a few days I noticed she was shouting at something all over the place but it turned to laughter on my approach.Ginger George caught some of the blame but he was  asleep so often he escaped most of it. George himself had developed a wary swagger when approaching the kitchen.

The nonsense of it all gradually became more destructive. The invisible idiot not remotely amusing. Missing things were broken when you found them. A lightbulb exploded over my head.I had bare feet and could not move until I realised there was a way of sliding myself onto the bannister and along it away from all the broken glass. The house was darker than it had ever been and it was not far enough into winter for that. Even on bright days the sun did not seem to come in through the windows as it used to. I found myself shouting at the dark shadows, telling whole empty rooms to “Go Away.” And laughing at my own insanity.


My Mother brought in a vicar who said blessings and prayers over things. I sat on the floor of my room listening to the murmured sounds below. A moment or two after the vicar had departed a barely noticeable tremor began to run through the house. It was just a silent vibration and I thought it would pass. It did not. It grew and grew, gradually and quite slowly till it seemed like a train was passing by the front door and the nearest railways lines at least three miles away

“What are you doing!”

My mother  shreiked at me

“It`s the house!”

I shrieked back .Ginger George looking at me as if I was mad

“It`s an earthquake !” I yelled.I don`t think either of us believed it.

As the tremors slowly began to subside for a brief moment they did a different thing. They juddered instead and the whole house throbbed with it. It felt for just a moment the house had laughed. A dark disturbing cynical laugh. It all faded silently away. A deep unnerving uneasiness refused to leave after that. It was as if the thing that was watching,hounding and pestering us had found a voice and all it had chosen to do with it was laugh.

My mother  did not believe it was Tracey “She hasn`t got the brains”She argued. She had been questioning all the neighbours for awhile and it was at this point that someone from across the street sent over “the family priest.” I came home from school to find him exiting the front door as I was about to enter.

I had really been hoping that it would all turn out to be some dumb trick Tracey was pulling and that maybe the neighbours were in on it. As much as I preferred to live in denial and not know what was happening even I had realised someone would have to be living very nearby to do the things they were doing. I wanted it all to turn out to be smoke and mirrors. For Tracey to have found someone who was very clever but with too much time on there hands and no common sense…
Facing this priest really pulled all my thoughts apart and I couldn`t look away…

As I stood in  the drive  listening whilst my mother thanked the Priest for coming I found myself transfixed to the light brown painted fence at the back garden end of the driveway. A shadow fell across the right side of it nearest to the house. It was as tall as the fence at around five foot. The unnaturalness of it grew in my mind very slowly and entirely unwillingly from the first suspicion that there was nothing at all casting the shadow and yet there was the shadow. As I continued to watch, it moved along and behind the fence with no natural light hitting or directing it. It moved behind the fence as slowly and deliberately as it had moved along the front.

The smiley priest laughed confidently informing her “It can`t get back in the house” as he slid still smiling back into his car…

When I looked back at the fence the shadow was still encircling the fence but had sped up its strange manouvers and was beginning to spin angrily around and around as if trying to consume it.
The thought occurred to me that Traceys hairbrained illusionist might be a genius but he was dangerously out of his mind too.He was going to menace the garden as he had menaced the house. Maybe Tracey was possessed now too or just crazy.To do all this and for what?! All the accusations I wanted to throw at her were drowned out that night.

A violent storm shook the whole house all night long without let up. Countless times the rain roared down on us with outrageous loudness shaking the house with the force of it`s blows. Trees that were not there whipped and tapped windows and walls all night long. Thunder hammered,lightning shook us. The manic wind  seemed set on a furious revenge that it could not find a way inside. Windows and doors all rattled, the house was shaken as if a box. It was all a bit biblical.

Answering the phone my mother found  the concerned neighbours from across the street on the crackly line. Our house looked like it had disappeared they said

“What do you mean ?”She asked;

“ what is it doing?”

 Adding “Your house looks under sea”

She attempted to lighten the moment shouting up the stairs to me

“Are we still here?”

“Yes”I replied.



     It was with a heavy sense of relief that I stepped out onto the dry grey driveway the next morning, not least just to find it still there.I decide to tell Tracey whatever she wanted to know.Not finding her I left a message with one of her friends.Whatever was going on had to end. I couldn`t stand to have any part in the darkness of it any longer. The unnaturalness of it repelled me.

    Tracey turned up at my house later that evening.Sat on the carpet she explained Ann Marie`s absence “She`s not having it anymore.” I couldn`t blame her.Before I could say anything Tracey sprang into a defence of Craig`s mother;

“She just wanted you to tell her everything”

“How are the family ?”I asked suprising myself by giving them grounds in reality.Tracey shrugged

“They are all acting strange anyway…grief maybe.The father not talking to the mother. The other three children think that their mother has lost the plot...”

Tracey sounded a bit bored with it all

“She just wanted to know what happened to her son though.That much always made sense didn`t it?”

“She knew what happened. Wasn`t it her that told us?The car crash?” I argued

“She knows that wasn`t all though Karen..what you saw...

I cut her off  “What I saw was not anyone Tracey. Was not anyone human anyway”

I tested her.

“What you saw was him and wasn`t him.His mother said he never smiled like that unless he was scared. His sister said he never smiled like that unless he was scared or about to screw somebody over. They faught over that. He was never scruffy, dirty and would not have known the first thing about plastering. They faught about that. His jacket would never have been battered. He never wore that jacket.They faught about that.They thought he was trying to return,some thought he should and some that he should not…

“Fight?” I asked.Tracey nodded,rolling her eyes

“Well if he was a bit of a trouble causer in life he certainly did not let up in death.”

I was going all in.Getting it over with one way or another. Tracey looked at me expectantly.I continued;

“The first time I saw him his eyes looked wrong,too dark to be real somehow.With an extra coloured ring around the brown.Tracey didn`t understand and gave me her `your`e talking greek` look

“Just a bit demonic”

“Oh god” She groaned breathlessly in reply

“I saw him staring at me as I was on the bus home. His eyes looked even worse. Dead. I thought it was a wind up. Please tell me it was a wind up...

Tracey was shaking her head slowly.I had been hoping to see a smile  a sneer a snicker.There was nothing.She looked down still shaking her head,surprised and trying to take it all in.It appeared she might be finally sensing the danger rather than just the opportunity for drama

“You should have told me!” Tracey spat out.Her mood spinning on a hairpin into anger

“I got bored with all that wind up stuff years ago and have not done it since.Oh God !You should have told me” She repeated shaking her head

“It`s been more of an evil entity than anyone`s son Tracey” I admonished

“It`s still flitting around out there in the garden.Waiting to scare the crap out of someone and the driveway is not safe either”

Tracey looked surprised. Asking if it was dangerous

“YES!” I almost shouted

A glimmer of what I hoped was guilt passed across her  face .But I didn’t care anymore.I would never forgive her for the way she so blindly dragged me into it all.I didn`t think I would or could really believe she had not been up to something. I think she meant it when she said she had given up pranking people but I often wonder if it was then that she gave it up.

  Several days later i had arrived home from school and was still in the hallway when i saw a young looking middle aged blonde lady in the centre of our dining room. I could hear my mother talking to her from the kitchen, saying how nice it was to have met her in a tone that suggested it was not at all nice, it was unnerving to have met such a crazy person.
There was nothing at all right looking about the blonde lady. I stood and watched her, knowing somehow that she couldn`t see me, although i was only around four feet from her and had pushed the door halfway open to look in. She had not looked at me at all,she stood staring forwards. It was a scene of overwhelming oddness and i had enough with oddness. Something snapped in me and i fled up to my room.

   The thing seemed to be over. Seemed really to have gone. Ginger George always took a swipe at the fence whenever he passed it. Otherwise the house became peaceful,lighter,calm.
My mother said the next day that the odd lady had been Craig`s mother but i did not want to hear anymore about it at that time and when i finally felt like asking she denied there had ever been any odd blonde lady.

A Short Horror Story,Keep Walking by,Part One

I was in my early teens at the time that late summer. I remember feeling ten tons lighter for not being in my all girls High School during that holiday. I was roaming around Leeds City Centre still enjoying my freedom. I had just passed a street sign ;”Swinegate” and recalled that school and all its  hateful teachers were fast rearing back into view.
The bright sun had streams of little clouds rushing across as if frantically trying to block tithe effect was dizzying, like driving past a row of trees fast with the sunlight coming through.
Leeds was not that busy a place back then. There were quite a lot of people passing me by as I made my way up New Market Street. I was about to pass the entrance to the Victoria Quarter but I don`t recall anyone in particular and I would certainly have forgot him.

My bus stop was at the lower end of the Headrow,which always struck me as aptly named, it being head of all the rows of streets. A landmarked sized longboat of a road, all the streets full of shops it`s oars. It goes from one side of Leeds to the other. Slowly mind you.

I was a shy but not immature teen. Living with my mother only a mile outside the city centre. I minded my own business and kept my head bowed when anyone passed unless there was some reason to look.

There was in the first instance I saw him more reasons than I wanted to know about to look at him. Something was not right about him I was not in any doubt even though I didn`t immediately spot what it was. His age group alone as a scruffy young man inclined me toward distrust. Yet he didn`t quite disturb me in the loud loutish way that type of ruffian disturbs everyone. Something about his eyes was actually wrong though I smiled and nodded politely at his odd grin i was relieved when he had passed.

“KAAAAAREN!”
“KAAAAAAAAAAAaarRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEENN!”
“KkkkkKKKKAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN!”

It was Loud Tracey from school. She was stood outside the entrance to Kirkgate Market being absurdly loud and disregarding of innocent passers by
“KKKAAAAAAAAARRREEEEEEEEEEENNNNN!”
Loud burst of teenage girl shouting moanilly loud. Then angry and short
“KAREN!”
Then drawn out and loud again
“KKKKKKKKKAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEN!”
I did giggle a bit at first. Everyone facing going back to our oppressive School with it`s barely sane teachers would be looking for something to take their mind off it but I didn`t want to  be Loud Tracey`s diversion. I hoped there was another Karen about who would soon answer. I couldn`t look in her direction anyway, without being blinded by the sunlight.
Loud Tracey, frustrated with shrieking rushed across the road with her friend Ann Marie, both still shouting and breathlessly yelling

“There was no one there Karen!”
“KAREN!”Hollered Ann Marie right in my ear
“There was no one there!”
They kept repeating
“You just said Hello to no one Karen “Insisted Tracey
“I never said Hello to anyone “I confirmed
YOU GREETED SOMEONE”
“You know what I mean. No one was there “Ann Marie said
I was a bit confused
“He looked there to me”
“He was obviously there or I wouldn`t have seen him “They shook their heads at me and recovered their breath.
“You didn`t see him, you mean? “I argued to deaf ears
“He was there but you couldn`t see him”
Tracey went looking for back up and tried to get a couple of disinterested looking men stood outside a pub drinking beer in the sun involved. Starting to sense a wind up was underway I began to walk away.
Loud Tracey lept in front of me insisting I describe who I saw. The man I now suspected she was pulling the prank with.
I played along taking a credulous tone to get the thing over with. Describing the man I had seen;
“He was in his late teens probably early twenties. Messy light brown and blonde spiky hair. He had dark ringed brown eyes. Toothy smile.Scruffy.Washed out pale blue t-shirt,battered light brown or tan leather jacket. Light blue or grey trousers. He was covered in some kind of white ish dust or powder. Maybe he was  a plasterer. His workmanlike boots were the sort that are usually black but his looked light grey I think”
Tracey listened carefully considered this and announced
“I don`t know him”
Ann Marie nodded her head ,then shook it in agreement. Tracey disappeared back into the pub.Ann Marie followed me as I made off for my bus stop again,asking
“are you sure you saw him?”
“What are you winding me up for?” I didn‘t  really have to ask it was just something to do.
As I reached the corner onto the Headrow Tracey reappeared
“It‘s CRAIG!”She announced.Suprised at her own triumph
“That’s exactly what he wore and this is where he drank.It`s` him. They knew him”She took a breath;
“He`s dead.Died a few weeks back in a stock car racing accident. He wasn`t a plasterer  he was an economics student at University. They said if his mother believes you saw him she will want to speak to you Karen.”
Tracey said my name with admonishing seriousness. It was weird  set up for a fall
“He didn’t look dead to me so it can`t have been him” I argued. I would do almost anything to avoid thinking about school but this didn`t look like fun.
“THERE WAS NO ONE THERE!”
Screamed Ann Marie at me in frustration.
“THERE WAS !My BUS is due!” I fled. Leaving them both shouting “THERE WASN`T! “ at my back

Sat upstairs alone at the front of the bus was the best seat for some of my favourite sites of Leeds. I was as relieved to be going home as I was happy at the sunny sights before me.As the bus lumbered slowly up the Headrow there would be rows and rows of streets full of busy shoppers to watch. I loved people watching and to be sailing above it all in full view was never dull.
No sooner had we set off than the bus stalled at a crossing, a welcome pause between New Market Street on the left and Vicar Lane on the right. My attention was drawn into a crowd stood in front of an orange and black signposted newsagents, as people waited to cross the road a sensation of unease began to overcome me.I felt  a cold dread even before I saw him. He was stood in the centre of the crowd. Not just still ,somehow immobile. Looking as real as anybody in a 3d sense but neither light nor wind seemed to be hitting him. His eyes were so wrong now I could barely look at them and he stared right at me unmovingly fixed on me.The blackness of his eyes was a different kind of black,a flat empty void of no feeling .The pupils and irises were much larger than was possible and there was no sign of light or life in them. If he had blinked  it might not have been so horrifying but nothing about him moved at all he was not even perceptibly breathing.
I was so fixed in a moment of fear I did not notice the people around him moving away. When I did I took that moment to snap my head in the other direction,swearing at myself
“Oh my god.I mustn’t fall for this crap!”
I looked searchingly up Vicar Lane to see if I could spot where Tracey and AnnMarie were hiding.I would have laughed out loud with the relief if I had seen Tracey and Ann Marie bent double with hysterics.I didn`t see them.
Looking away the realisation of just how unnatural and unpleasant a s sight he was sank deeper and deeper within me.I found I could no longer look left.I felt physically frozen. The thought he might still not have moved threatened to fill me up with a horrifying terror
Where on earth did she find him!?And WHY? I asked myself.it was an awful nightmare of a joke I thought to myself bitterly.
The bus eventually lurched forward. I was nervous to look anywhere. The further away from where he had been the more anxious I was not to see him again. I thought I saw what may have been  him several times from the side in the crowd and from the back but I felt happier passing it off as temporary insanity and looked away immediately so as not to confirm anything. He couldn`t run that fast could he? I asked myself ,as the bus rolled pass the Town Hall suspecting he probably could. Ann Marie and Tracey wouldn`t want to though so there was no point I reassured myself.

High School was an ever increasingly grotty and dilapidated oppressive 1950s building with bright classrooms and dark warrens of corridors. It was painted a grim shade of green inside and out. The teachers were a bizarre vindictively inclined set of characters whose behaviour never veered toward normal or even  explicable. I tried to pass the incident off as one of Loud Tracey’s wind up’s. Her friends insisted it wasn`t but that was to be expected.
Tracey had a long history of trouble making, a vast and wide variety of trouble  over many years, which she was forever just running into.
Ann Marie I remembered from primary school as a sort of limpet of a girl who trouble never stuck to. Her ever present thin blonde bob was now made fashionable by one single accessory at a time. It felt like she was finding life so easy she had decided to seek out difficulty just to see what it was like in teaming up with Tracey.
Tracey`s wild barely controlled brown hair was as often as wilfully out of place as her. She had always been as tuned up as Ann Marie was tuned down. Tracey could look animated and loud just sat thinking. She had a cruel streak too.

If Tracey was trying out some new line in annoying pranks then Ann Marie, who could look, like butter wouldn`t melt when she wanted to was the perfect ally.

The teachers at my High School For some reason never divulged really had it in for me.I hoped that the story Craig had been at University might bring out the snob in them and keep them out of it.If they were going to accuse anyone of insanity it would be me, regardless of what the story was. I tried to head off any future grief by accusing anyone talking to me about it of going crazy
I knew I had to make the thing go away as fast as possible so I just dismissed it.Began to treat it as if it was already over.Tracey and Ann Marie were persistent.Tracey insisting I was going to become a medium.I laughed and said not if I could help it
“Who wanted to see his like again?”
I asked,hoping this might upset his ego enough to get her to back off.Ann Marie was telling anyone who would listen;”Karen saw someone no one else could see. She described Craig exactly”
Almost inevitably someone turned out to have known Craig. I was shrieked at from a classroom further down the hallway one day that Craig was a great bloke and I was a bitch if I didn`t help his mother. I hung anxiously in the doorway of my classroom listening intently for laughter, Tracey or Ann Marie`s voice ,any evidence of the hoax but it was inconclusive.

I didn`t really need this drama at all. A few years earlier my father had died suddenly. The little house my mother and I shared though light and sunny still had an emptiness to it.

“BUT WAS HE HAPPY KAREN!?”
Loud Tracey kept asking me

“HOW DID HE SEEM IN HIMSELF?”
Always a frustrating question

“SHE WANTS TO KNOW KAREN.SHE.IS.HIS.MOTHER!”
I was in a rush packing up pens and books from the lesson just ended. Trying not to be late for the next one
A frustrated Tracey had cornered me exactly at that moment to see if I would crack under pressure. I might get something not much short of a death sentence passed on me by the teachers for lateness. It was her prank I felt she knew very well what I had seen. Were both frustrated at this point

“No he didn`t look happy Tracey!”
I snapped at her. Most of my own class had gone now and  the new one was starting to come in

“You can`t tell her that though can you “I stated
 “That would be really horrible of you. Really mean Tracey”
Tracey looked shocked by the suggestion that she could do any wrong
“His mother is grieving …”I explained. Even if I didn`t believe in them I could still do right by these fictionally suffering fictional  people “…she is in mourning for her son and he aught o be R.I.P”
“WHAT!?” Tracey cut me off mid sentence
“…He ought to be RESTING IN PEACE.Not wandering about Leeds appearing to schoolgirls.It`s not what the grief stricken mother need hear about her son is it?” I inquired quite honestly .Tracey began speaking to someone else about something else as I rushed off down the corridor.
     Later that evening,sat on the carpet in my bedroom at home long shadows were starting to fall across the ceiling.The cold was creeping bitterly up my shoulders but I persisted in pestering my little kitten Ginger George. Whenever I looked away I could see out of the corner of my eye one large sharp green eye pop open to see what I was doing. Snapping shut when I turned back.
He pretended to sleep curled up on his furry matt and I dangled a little feather on elastic around his whiskers and paws .His eyes were just open the slightest bit. Someone knocked on our front door .I heard my mother Harmony let someone in, shut the door and shriek “TRACEY!” up the stairs, she didn`t know AnnMarie,Footsteps came thundering up,they burst into my room.I switched on a lamp as they sat on the floor backs to my wardrobe  on the floor opposite where I sat back against my bed. It appeared it was all deadly serious now.
“The whole  family are UP IN ARMS Now Karen.”
Tracey announced the moment she was sat. In a tone that informed me it was all my fault.
“Craig`s father has gone to stay with his brother”
Said Tracey to confirm her accusation, cut off by Ann Marie backing her up but not backing her up with
“but he wasn`t getting on with his wife anyway…”
“They haven`t got on in years”
Confirmed Tracey seeming more in the know briefly. Continuing with the accusational tone;
“Craig`s two sisters and brother HATE YOUR GUTS NOW KAREN”Tracey just carried on not aware that might have any impact  “His mother wants to meet you. She wants you to tell her everything “She paused for breath
“YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY GOT TO TELL HER EVERYTHING!”
It was a serious sounding loud statement as possible. Tracey rolled her eyes at me, looking toward Ann Marie for help
“Every Single Detail. Even if you don`t think it is anything “added Ann Marie
“YOU HAVE GOT TO TELL HER EVERYTHING “Loud Tracey confirmed
“EVERY SINGLE DETAIL”
She added especially loudly. Repeating it twice with Ann Marie saying it simultaneously the second time around. Both nodding;
“She won’t` be happy and she won`t even try to get over it till you do”
Ginger George had risen and was now stood with his back to my pale pink bedroom door. His tail totally upright and all the fur along his spine on end. He made no sound and was staring unmoving toward the window
“What`s wrong with him?”
I was startled. Ginger George seemed to me to be asleep as a rule. Tracey outright yelled at me
“YOU HAVE GOT TO TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY!”
Before I could ask why Ann Marie added
“Look at what you’ve done to this family Karen!”
They both tutted exasperated. What I had done was be entirely straight with everyone and anyone fictional or otherwise. I rolled my eyes at them. I was committed to helping  Craig`s possibly real mother by letting her get on with the grieving process and not letting whatever I had seen get in the way.
There were still no traces of laughter on Ann Marie or Tracey. Not a smirk. I understood grief better though and felt you didn`t need all this drama and nonsense from strangers
“Just tell us everything and we will tell her”
Began Ann Marie reasonably as she twisted her arm to open the wardrobe behind her and tugged on a cardigan questioningly. I nodded and she pulled it down and slipped it on. Tracey and I stared at each other fixedly whilst Ann Marie had the wardrobe door open there was too deep a black void in there to look. We didn`t acknowledge it.It was an unnatural darkness that had a presence of its own you just did not want to know about.
The uneasiness turned quickly into a cold hard glaringly unpleasant atmosphere. It seemed like someone else was in the room. I opened the door to let Ginger George out and to see if there was someone in the hallway. There wasn`t and George wouldn`t   move. I  wondered if they had brought someone with them and left him downstairs, Craig maybe. They said it was just the two of them.
Sitting back down I saw Annemarie shudder. There was an urgency in Tracey`s mood too. I felt a sudden pain in my chest, like someone had just punched all the air out of media gasped at them they looked back questioningly.
I knew I could get away with saying nothing now. Ann Marie and Tracey clearly wanted to leave. I just had to wait them out. The room seemed darker and oprressive,shrinking somehow.I started to explain that I felt it was wrong to offer false hope to the family,to interfere with the grieving process.I had to keep looking around the room it had changed so much. They were both fixedly struggling not to look at the window. Ann Marie could barely look away from the door.
I couldn`t escape the feeling someone else was watching me and almost jumped out of my skin when I thought I felt someone tap me on the shoulder
“The grieving father…” I continued. Ann Marie and Tracey looked glued together at the shoulder as they stared wide in horror at George. He started to hiss, trembling all over. I called my mother who came halfway up the stairs stopping  halfway to complain about the cold.Taking a towel from the bathroom  I covered George up completely and plucked him off the carpet passing him to my mother explaining something had spooked him.
Back in my room the fear was really getting to Ann Marie and Tracey. AnnMarie looked like she had just announced she was leaving got up and been pulled down and talked out of it by Tracey. I darted over to the window to tear the curtains shut.It looked so pitch black outside it appeared more like the window  had been painted black.I shuddered and sat down shakily everything so dark my spot on the carpet obscured.
“The grieving siblings…”I carried on. Ann Marie`s head shot forward with such force she almost hit the floor with her forehead. It looked like she had been punched square in the back. She just got up and bolted. Flung my cardigan over the bannister and ran down the stairs and out without a word.
The atmosphere was beyond weird now ,claustrophobic,dark.The cold almost immobilizing but to my surprise and dismay Tracey spoke with  a sense she was in control
“Karen..”She began solemnly. It was odd to see her so quite. She knew it was and didn`t like to show it
“Craig`s brothers and sisters have been a bit odd about it really. They could just  be upset though…”She was becoming distracted
“Is your room always like this?”
I Felt what she ought to be doing was freaking out and the fact that she wasn`t freaked me out. What did she know? This whole joke was so far removed from anything vaguely comic. Was she trying to set herself up as some kind of prankster mastermind…
I had enough and explained curtly that I didn`t want to believe I had seen someone dead. Didn`t want to believe it, know it, accept it or think about it. She left telling me I ought to think about his mother.

Valeria A Short Horror Story Part Two

...I tried to speak to Valeria at first possibly on more than one occasion but the only time that I recall I approached her in my friendliest most convivial manner and was simply brushed past and ignored. Clemency was incensed. MS Halisted could never even find Valeria`s name when calling out  the register and after several weeks had still not added it.

Both Valeria`s set of friends and Clem`s and mine where soon edgy with each other. Uneasy and unsure how to end this thing that hadn`t really started yet.

If we had been hoping for a distraction we were in luck. Our whole year was filed one wet and wild morning up to the primary school hall we usually only visited at dinnertime. The assembly was held by the not often sighted head teacher Mrs. Goldgren. Always struggling to tone down her naturally imperious style she reminded us at great length in her most authoritative public speaking tone as we all sat crossed legged on the heavily varnished hall floor, trying not to feel the wet in our clothes that we which already knew. Stay away from the upper level railings.

 You stayed away from the upper level railings because they overlooked the sheer drop down to the school below, everyone said they were not safe and because the view through them whilst oddly thrilling could be equally terrifying and got you screamed at by teachers and friends alike.

At even greater length Mrs. Goldgren went on about the space behind the lower school, the mere mention of which sent more than a few shivers up spines. It was a dim,grey,airless,colourless space with an unusual emptiness. Nothing grew there not even the weeds despite the absence of many feet  to trample on them. You didn’t go there because it creeped you out of your skin and the view upwards was as unnerving as the view from above. The impossibly high wall loomed over you oppressively, the railings at the top barely visible.

With a powerfully commanding tone confident of unquestioning certainty Mrs. Goldgren then informed us that there were no rabbits living in the high wall. None Whatsover.It would be an entirely unsuitable and inhospitable environment for such a species, domesticated or wild. There was not now nor had there ever been...

I stared blankly at Clem and she stared back in equal disbelief.

Apparently there was a "Mass Delusion" of rabbits going on that we knew nothing of. If people had been too embarrassed to talk about it openly then how was it a mass delusion we wondered. As we walked to the stairs on the way back a boy in front of us who had been staring at his feet began to stamp down each footstep getting heavier and heavier and louder

"What are you doing!?"

Yelped the boy next to him giving him a shove to stop it

"Do my feet look real!?"

Shouted back the stomping boy

"The rabbits looked as real as my feet"


Which had everybody in a mood of utter puzzlement looking down to study their own feet.

People had been keeping quiet about rabbits for fear of being accused of "imagination”. The silence broken about rabbits meant of course great excitement about rabbits. Everybody who wanted to see them went en masse to the back of the school where primary children had been seeing them from above too. The teachers then spent for ever herding everyone away.

Clemency and myself were glad everything was not about Valeria for a while, but  it was  then Valeria let us see or developed  the habit of appearing to feel  superior to her friends. She told them they were imaging rabbits. It was "the power of suggestion" she said smugly. She laughed at them and our dislike deepened. Nevertheless her friends defended her

"You can`t pick on people cos` there foreign!"

They would throw at us

"When did we?"

We would throw back. Valeria never said anything herself. Never said she was foreign. We would be glad if she had. It would explain those strange times when Valeria who had become quite comfortable at her table would sometimes when we had forgotten ourselves forget herself too .She liked to talk. The more comfortable she became with the sound of her own voice and the odder and stranger that voice became.

Words she knew how to pronounce ordinarily became wrong, although still seeming to sound right to her. Mrs. Halisted seemed most taken with Valeria in these moments. It was always obvious she favoured her. She would study her totally absorbed.

We all wondered what they were not telling us about Valeria, was it for our own benefit and how? Was it a condition? Often Valeria`s only real struggle seemed to be within herself. Sometimes she wanted to scare us, her black looks lingered too long, then at other times her better side won out. “But she should`t be able to scare us so much..."Argued Clem
"But...But..."


VALERIA available to purchase for Kindle here

Part One is HERE

A Little Light Ghoulishness to offset All The Frilly Dolly Loveliness

I have thrown out a lot of the rubbish i had up on Ebay alongside all the pretty ragdolls and beautiful colourful jewellery and dug out some fresh rubbish.Some of which is really quite interesting.This book about the Kray twins by John Pearson is a good read;


-A Profession Of Violence The Rise and Fall Of The Kray Twins John pearson-

and if you like that,then this Ronnie Kray book is unmissable

-Ronnie Kray A Man Among Men by Laurie O`Leary-

Since this post seems to be all about balance,some very bad women seem in order.This old book has no dust jacket but some really fascinating stories;

-The Worlds Worst Women-



A little light ghoulishness to balance out all the frilly dolly loveliness that has been and all the flowery brooch post prettiness i have coming...


Favourite pic`s from a book of Horror Movies;


This is supposed to be the invisible man

I have been reading"The London Dungeon Book of Crime And Punishment by Richard Byrne"which is fab.It`s about the development through history of crime and punishment in London and had some appropriately dark pictures;
Chap on a rack.Apparently your hips and shoulder sockets come apart first,that was why Guy/Guido Fawkes could barely sign his own confession.
This man Jonathan Wild is here because i am still thinking about what Michelle Obama said to some schoolgirls on the news awhile back-how if they worked hard they could achieve anything.The English reporter then pointed out that the statistics suggest they cannot.

It reminded me of this dark book about the history of London and all the shocking similarities between the haves and have not`s of back then and the priviledged,wealthy and poor of today.How we seem to the Americans and yet only on rare occasions to ourselves so accepting of these inequalities.

Jonathan Wild would probably have agreed with Michelle Obama.He started out as an apprentice to a buckle maker and ended up running a vast criminal Empire.He was the King of the Underworld in 1720`s London and if you ignore his frilly hairdo looks a bit like one of the Kray twins!