Category Archives: Blackpool Bay

Horror stories from, to, around or related to Blackpool Bay.

Blackpool Bay, Horror & Dark Fiction

The Music at Sea

In the late summer, before the storms began to roll in, Mary Antoinette Athelard drowned herself, or so the police said and the newspapers reported. And, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, that is what happened.

In the small hours of the morning when the world is darker than our forgotten nightmares and old fishermen are drunk in the tavern by the docks, the oldest of them tells a very different story. It is a much darker story and one that reaches back to the entwined roots of the oldest family in Blackpool Bay and the beginnings of the town itself.

Many years later and a world away, I write these words in my diary as a cautionary tale. You may or may not believe me, but trust me when I say that you should fear the music at sea.

***

I had schooled with Edward Junior Athelard, who had convinced me to spend summer vacation with him at his family home in Blackpool Bay. Both him and I had a fascination with diving, having done some scuba and spelunking around various places, and he had convinced me about the fascinating underwater ruins dotted around his ancestral shoreline back home.

Junior was the youngest of two siblings and the last in a line of Athelards stretching back to his great-great-grandmother who built both the family fortune and, arguably, their home town. He rarely mentioned his father or what had happened to him; the Athelard family was interspersed with tragedy in each generation and he tended to gloss over many other aspects of his family. Years later, these seemingly innocent omissions make my skin crawl and I find my ears straining to hear if there is any hint of music in the wind outside.

Junior had, though, spoken fondly of his elder sister. They had been a key source of companionship for each other growing up in such a small, isolated town penned in by a dark, brooding ocean on one side and the Old Mountains on the other. With the curiosity of children and the leisure of the wealthy, the two of them had spent many hours looking through these self-same underwater ruins that he wanted to show me and, thus, our first trip to Blackpool Bay was born.

Once we had jumped off the creaking, old boat at the smelly docks, we grabbed our bags and wandered up into town. Residing at number 2 Main Street, the Athelard family home was a wonderful old Victorian house that had probably seen better days but still carried itself well in this quaint setting.

A decrepit, piscine-looking butler with slightly bulging eyes opened for Master Edward and me, taking our bags and showing me to my room. Dinner was served shortly after that and, in this old wooded and quaint Victorian setting, I first met Mary. It would be the first of many times as, all those years ago, we grew close in our innocence as Junior, Mary, and I all explored those ancient, silent ruins so far below the brooding, stormy waters of Blackpool Bay.

We would spend weeks swimming around vast crumbling ruins of strange rock, carved in strong, flowing lines. There were pillars running in the deep from ancient times and for forgotten reasons with architectures intimating a great city with vast buildings and roads that ran up and through the town–if you knew where to look and what to look for–towards the darkest part of the Old Mountains where the bizarre Black Pool is rumored to lie.

We would throw around wild theories about the ruins and, on more than one occasion, I could swear that I heard strange, haunting music in the wild wind or vibrating through the waters far below the surface. But, I am uncertain whether I have merely fabricated these memories, as those eerie, crumbling, seaweed-infested ruins played on one’s minds long after you left them, as did my subsequent experience.

After all, those crumbling ruins were the strange, foreboding structures that distant, alien hands had lade while chiselling dark, twisted decorations with warped fish-like human forms amongst other horrors, all writhing through and around a great civilization whose very name has been forgotten to our mild, modern history books.

***

Those years flew by, but Junior ended up at a different college to me, though I hear that he dropped out after only a year and returned home. Not just the distance but also as he grew older I sensed him pulling away from me and, perhaps in hindsight, the rest of the modern world as he slipped back into the dark, isolation of Blackpool Bay.

For a while, Mary and I also maintained sporadic communication, but slowly, the dark, mysterious ruins below the waters Blackpool Bay receded into my memory and the Athelards receded back into their old Victorian home with all their secrets, money and isolation.

Slowly, I forgot the old, crumbling ruins and their haunt visage and horrific carvings. Slowly, I forgot the music I thought I heard sometimes in the howling, bitter ocean wind or vibrating deep underwater…

If only this had stayed that way. But, alas, the distance was shattered when the phone rang late one night and, on a crackling line, Mary’s voice breathlessly whispered out three short, panicked sentences before the line cut:

“Come, James, come quickly! It is happening to us again. It is hungry and I am not sure how long I can keep Junior safe!”

***

Less than a fortnight later, I was walking out to the docks with a pale, thin, babbling Mary pulling my hand and pushing me into one of the family boats. Junior was gone and I was too late.

Too late for what, I recall wondering?

I was shocked at how much Mary had aged and how empty their had home felt. The old, fishy butler was gone and shadows lurked everywhere in that building. As she cast off from the docks and we ploughed her family boat through stormy swell and cutting, bitter wind against the dark sky and hateful sea, she told me the strangest, most disjointed tale I have ever heard:

“James,” I still remember Mary, her voice edged with hysteria and her eyes wide with fear as she called above the sound of the boat, the wind and the water, “James, we Athelards have been here since the beginning. Did you know that? Did Edward tell you that we were the beginning? They made–we made a deal with them and it has a cost. I did not know, but the butler did–I think he is one of them. I think he keeps cutting the phone lines. Oh, god, James, what a cost! One every generation is taken. They never forget because they have to feed it. It began with Great-great-nan’s husband. He was the first to pay it. Some of the townsfolk are them, you know? They sometimes breed, but we–no, no, god, no, we are pure and just, just, just… You see, James, they took Junior and we have to get him back We have to get him back, and I found the old map in Great-great-nan’s old room and we are going to where the pillars end and their city starts and, god, James, how are we going to get him back? Nan’s said the music calls them but how? Why? God, James, god…!“

At this, Mary broke down crying and I jumped up and put my arms around her. She slumped back and I took over the boat’s steering, though I had no idea where we were going. She sat down, burying her face in her palms and began to sob.

The Athelards are a sturdier bunch than most old minted families, and soon she stood up, pushed me away from the wheel, and took over. Her eyes narrowed, jaw clenched and all she did was to point to the open maws of the Bay where the open ocean started with its wild, primordial water and say:

“That’s where we are going, James, that is where we are going.”

***

From this point, a lot of my tale becomes a blur, though I will try to recount it as accurately as possible.

Once we arrived at what appeared to be a very specific place, Mary took out a strange, metal whistle or flute and, amidst the howling wind and sea spray, she blew deeply into it. Perhaps it was growing on me, perhaps it was an old memory blurring with the strangeness of the present, or perhaps it was truly happening, but suddenly I became faintly aware of that self-same haunting music hidden in the hateful wind howling around us.

Gradually, I realized–and recognized!–that there was a strange, high-pitched melody in the wind. The waves were pounding against the boat became or were caused by drum beats; bass-filled echoes that the haunting, ethereal notes pitched and rolled against out in that vicious sea. It was growing louder and clearer, and my old memories came flooding back to me.

I recalled the strange, foreboding structures far below and around us that distant, alien hands had placed while carving dark, twisted decorations of fish-like horrors, all writhing through and around a great civilization whose very name has been forgotten to our shallow, self-centered history.

My head lolled back and I recall closing my eyes. The music was around me and filled me with unexpected thoughts and alien feelings from a forgotten place. Somehow the inhuman music reminded me of places I had never been and secrets that I did not know. Its darkly evocative and elusive melody was coursing through my vanes and the wild wind, waves, and stormy sky all fell away as I lost myself in it…

“James!”

The cry snapped me back to reality. My mouth was open and I had been singing or humming–or chanting!–and realized that my arms were outstretched for some reason with palms facing up like I was worshipping something.

“James!“

The second cry snapped me into action and I opened my eyes.

Mary was clutching me, shaking and pointing and I was hit by a sickening stench of rotting fish. I had no idea how they got there, but standing in the boat, facing us were two of the most bizarre terrifying beings I had ever seen. While certainly humanoid in shape, their thin, gaunt forms were covered in glistening slimy scales with webbed, wicked-looking claws on both hands and feet with fins running down parts of their bodies. They stood a little taller than me, though their builds were slight and they looked less comfortable on land than I suspect they would be underwater. All these details receded into the background when presented with the cold, fish-like faces that rose up from their gilled necks. Cold, unblinking inhuman eyes of uncalculatable intelligence stared at the two of us from across a gulf that my reason and all my knowledge could not cross without going insane.

These were the fish-men carved into the ruins we had dived through as children. And then it struck me, the ruins were not merely carved with their ancient, wicked forms, but the ruins themselves were the fish-mens’ own! At that moment, I knew as I know now, these ancient abominations from the depths of the sea were the builders and architects of those crumbling, eerie ruins through Blackpool Bay.

But, before I could do anything or speak, Mary darted forward and bowed before them, laying the strange metal fluit at their feet. The haunting, inhuman music on the wind was crescendoing as drums in the deep pushed out like the heartbeat of some giant horror awakening far below us where even the light of the brightest day does not reach.

“Please, please,” Mary begged, “Please can I have my brother James back. Please! Take me instead!”

“Now wait!” I remember shouting at Mary, stepping forward to stop her, but it was too late. The music at sea was crescendoing hellishly as the waves were getting bigger and a lightning bolt suddenly flashed from the blackening heavens, “Now wait, you, stop! Don’t touch her!”

I recall screaming, my voice lost in the music at sea as a fish-man grabbed poor Mary and I lunged at it. The one fish-man–surprisingly strong–batted me off like some buzzing insect while the other scooped up a sobbing Mary and leaped smoothly from the boat into the dark waters of where Blackpool Bay meets the wild, primordial open-ocean.

What happened then? This is a question that I struggle with.

I do not know but, in the darkest hours of the stormiest nights when I sometimes think I hear that strange, inhuman music on the hateful wind, I sometimes recall flashes of images from the moments following this.

I recall struggling with the remaining fish-man but being flung aside like I was nothing. My head hit something and the world began to darken. But something large and dark–sometimes I recall tentacles and teeth but sometimes it is worse–rose from that wild water and towered over the boat and me. I recall Mary screaming and the horrors of the cosmos itself reaching out with the hunger of countless millennium, the hunger of cold, inhuman space and the black depths of the ocean’s hidden floor…

And then I recall being woken by an old, weathered fisherman who helped me steer my listlessly drifting boat back to shore. The wind was silent again but I swear I could feel dark drumbeats rolling in the depths far below those primordial waves.

***

The Athelard family is no more but this is old news. After Junior’s reported disappearance, a piscine-looking policeman with bulbous eyes ruled that a grief-stricken Mary had thrown herself into the sea and drowned. This was despite my protests to the contrary. The newspapers had then reported her drowning, and the old family estate and the rotting town around it had receded back into isolation and brooding silence.

Years later, I write these words from far inland on another continent. Even this far away, I sometimes worry that the inhuman music at sea still lingers on the wind around here, its reach far longer than we can ever imagine. The fish-men and their horrors still haunt my waking dreams as I move towards the same fate that befell the Athelard family.

I am dying and am not long for this world. Junior is gone as is Mary and the entire Athelard family line. Soon, I will be too, though for more mundane reasons. One day, I think–or hope!–that Blackpool Bay will also rot away and disappear from our world.

But, I suspect, the strange, crumbling ruins of the ancient, inhuman civilization that lies below the dark waters of Blackpool Bay shall remain. The fish-men with their wicked, webbed claws and unblinking eyes shall probably slip from our age into another and, perhaps, even another, taking their secrets with them as well as their need to sate that nameless hunger that resides far below and at the center of their twisted lives and at the heart of the music at sea.

Blackpool Bay, Horror & Dark Fiction

The Irritation of Undying

In the summer of 1938, I died horrifically. What is more disconcerting than this fact was that my consciousness remained behind in a disembodied form. As a rigid scientist and staunch atheist, the matter of me becoming a ghost rather irked me.

I had originally been visiting my great-grandmother on my father’s side in her quaint little coastal village of Blackpool Bay. I will not go into the details but the visit took a dark turn when I went for a midnight walk to the pier past the old Church and promptly stumbled on a strange ritual before becoming an unwilling sacrifice of sorts.

Even in this ethereal form, I still pride myself on rational thought and sound reasoning. Just because I was wrong in life about some elements of our universe, does not mean that logic and rational process are incorrect guidelines for one’s intellect.

After the initial shock of ghosthood wore off, I began to figure out what my new state of being meant for me and the world.

The world remained the same and continued operating without my physical body in it. As far as intellect went, I remained the same too. Eerily so. All my memories remained from life as well as any new memories gained whilst a ghost.

In fact, all things remained the same except four rather important facts.

Firstly, given my lack of physical form, I could not interact with physical objects. This included air and light and, thus, I was entirely silent and invisible. Try as I might, I passed right through physical objects, and they through me–with the sole and strange exception of the ground and the sky. I could not pass into the ground nor fly willy-nilly through the air.

In some weird way, a few of the old laws still applied to me: I had to walk upon the ground. Perhaps some residual quantum strangeness still respected these simple laws from the physical world?

But I was not physical, and that was also a fact.

Pondering this state of being, I could only assume that my ethereal form was non-atomic in nature. The question, though, was then what was it? My best theory was that I was stuck in some quantum-shifted gravitational field that held enough form for the electro-magnetic impulses that were my thoughts–in other words, my consciousness–to remain but not enough for any physical manifestation. In other words, I was little more than a self-perpetuating electric echo of my own brain.

Secondly, my ethereal form seemed tied to a radius around where I died. Yes, I was haunting a Church and its cemetery. A ghost in a graveyard, I hear you cry! Yes, I was aware of how painfully cliché I was.

As I wandered further afield, I encountered increasing “gravity”–it could not be gravity as I had no mass, but there is no better way to describe the effect–pulling me back to that spot in space. The spot where I died. Strain as I might, I could not go further than a couple of hundred yards from the Church and its cemetery.

Thirdly, I did not seem to age in this state. My form and its imbued energy neither decayed nor needed sustenance or replenishment.

Finally, I could neither find nor interact when any other ghosts. This may mean that there were no other ghosts in my vicinity, or it may mean that any other ghosts that exists were on other wave-lengths or spectrum than I was and, thus, we could not sense each other.

The lack of ethereal company was a small mercy as the fact remained: I was now a ghost and it was hugely embarrassing.

***

The years went on and I carried on quietly haunting that old Church and its attached cemetery while experimenting with my new state of being.

I grew tired of hanging around in the Church, listening to prehensile fairytales being worshipped by small-minded peasants. Blackpool Bay had grown a little over the decades but, isolated by the wild ocean on one side and the great mountains on the other, time seemed to barely touch it too.

Eventually, I found myself lurking more and more in the quiet, peacefully little cemetery with a brooding old tree covering most of it. The graveyard’s original name had long since been forgotten and its records lost in a church fire that had happened over a century ago. The locals now just called it the Old Cemetery and avoided it almost religiously.

For a while, a pretty young girl would come and sketch the Old Cemetery. She would sit on the old gravestones and sigh deeply as she looked around. I enjoyed watching her skilled work, although the strange things she muttered under her breath bothered me somewhat.

Eventually, though, even she stopped coming.

And so the decades passed and I began to formulate a theory.

What if all life was merely a game and our consciousness were the players uploaded into this simulation? What if when we died, we were merely disconnecting and returning our consciousness back from the game to our own reality and real bodies? What if ghosts were nothing more than a player’s failed disconnection, its consciousness trapped here unable to download back into the real-world? What if my purpose as a ghost was to find a way to end being a ghost?

Being a ghost is quite lonely and, yes, it did cross my mind that I may be going quite mad.

***

The original assessment of my state of being proved consistently correct, but as time passed I stumbled across two new and interesting facts.

The first odd fact was that cats could see me.

One warm, sunny day a black cat was napping on the crumbling gravestone of a certain Sigmond Athelard. Walking by the cat an old instinct–yes, even after decades my ethereal neuro-paths apparently still have these–pushed my left hand out to stroke the beautiful little creature.

While I could not touch the cat, the cat meowed and flicked a paw at me. I froze instantly and bent down to look at it vis-à-vis. The cat lazily opened its yellow eyes and looked straight at me, its pupils following me as I moved around.

After experimenting by moving and talking and after finding a number of other cats and doing the same, I conclude simply that–although I could still not actually touch them–cats could see and hear me. Perhaps even, just ever so slightly, feel me.

This wholly and seemingly random coincidence made no sense whatsoever to my understanding of the world. Why were cats so special? Did any other animals share this ability? What was the point of this?

As I was pondering this newfound fact, I stumbled onto another, greater discovery: electricity. Or, more specifically, the huge amounts of electricity discharged by lightning!

On the side of the Church and earthing into the Old Cemetery ground, an old lightning rod was mounted. The rod was old and perhaps of Victorian design but quite effective against the brutal, raging storms that would occasionally blow in from the wild ocean.

One night shortly after my cat discovery, I was circling the Old Cemetery deep in thought and not paying any heed as to my surroundings. One such great storm had rolled it, its rain was lashing the ground, a great gale was tearing through the Bay, and peels of biblical lightning and thunder were exploding overhead, and it was all lost on me as it all passed straight through me…

Right up until the lightning hit the Church’s lightning rod while I was only a few feet away from it!

I had died in the summer of 1938 and this was some seven or eight decades later. Yet, not a single waking moment had I not been present. You see, ghosts do not get tired, hungry, sick or, pointedly, sleep. Oh, dear god, what I would have given for a mere moment of non-existence!

Yet, some days later, I opened my eyes. It was a crisp, early morning and the storm was long gone. The grass was level with my gaze, dotted by crumbling gravestones and covered by the brooding old tree.

I got up slowly and realized that I had been lying on the ground near the blackened, burnt lightning rod. There was even a faint outline in the dew of where I had lain!

While my present state of being may not have atoms, it obviously did have a charge. Perhaps it was the magnetic field or even just the quantum interaction of the lightning’s discharge–perhaps for the same strange reason that cats could see me–but for the briefest moment, the physical laws of the universe had applied to me.

This was the single greatest thing I had discovered in nearly a century of being a ghost.

And that was when I knew how I was going to disconnect my disembodied consciousness from this torturous loop that is ghosthood! Game or no game, the life of the undying was an irritation that I had now found how to end.

***

I had to wait nearly a whole year. The Winter had just ended, Spring broke, then Summer passed into Autumn and, eventually, the cold of Winter and its wild storms crept back to Blackpool Bay. The ocean grew icy, the days darker, the clouds heavier and then, finally, I saw the flash of lightning out at sea as an apocalyptic skyline began to blow into the Bay.

I had been planning for this day and rallied to the lightning rod mounted on the Church wall. The Church’s wall and stone masonry were breached by its twisting spire, and the old, iron rod and its blackened, weathered surface rose even higher than both to pierce that darkening sky that carried my promising fate.

This time I would not be a few feet away from the rod. No! This time I would be standing with the rod passing straight through my ethereal form, its cold, iron bar cutting right through my very ethereal, unbeating heart.

A smile spread across my ghostly face and I spread out my arms to embrace it as the storm and all its rage hit Blackpool Bay and the Old Cemetery…

***

Pastor Tom was a little later than normal that morning.

The storm the night before had hit the town with a particularly dark vengeance and, in the early morning, he had woken with a cold sweat to what he could have sworn was a man’s bizarre scream. Bizarre, you see, because it sounded like it was filled with both pain and joy. It was hard to tell because it had coincided with a blinding flash of lightning and a simultaneous deafening clap of thunder the likes of which had reaffirmed his belief in a higher power.

Eventually, he had drifted back to a lingering, uneasy sleep and woken a number of hours later to a thankful peace as the storm had blown itself out.

When he had stepped from his little cottage on the backside of the Church, he had found a couple of his old, heavy slate roof tiles torn off. Given that this time of year was prone to sudden storms, he thought it best that he immediately repair this damage before beginning his daily routine.

With his roof now satisfactory protected–he would get a repairman out here later to do a permanent job–he had a strong cup of coffee, threw on his pastor’s robes and walked out from his house, through the Old Cemetery to his beloved Church.

His small cottage was tucked around the back of the Church on a small, adjourning property. To reach the front, he slipped between the back of the Church, rounded it, and had a short walk through the Old Cemetery before arriving on Main Street where the front door of the Church opened to his needing flock.

The moment he rounded the back of the Church–a black cat scampering by him–and stepped into the Old Cemetery, he froze and gasped. The hair on the back of his neck rose and a wholly nonreligious word left his lips.

The storm’s lightning had obviously struck the Old Cemetery and the old lightning rod against the wall of the Church had caught it. It must have been a great bolt of lightning indeed, as the rod was still smoking, parts of it literally smouldering, and its form partially melted, warped and bent–which was no mean feat given the sturdiness of its old Victorian build.

None of these things was what froze the blood in Pastor Tom’s veins and made him mutter a quiet prayer of protection to Saint Christopher.

No, what Pastor Tom saw was wrought into the very masonry of that old Church’s wall. Blackened and burnt into the smouldering stone around the lightning rod, a singed shadow was frozen with its arms outstretched and in the unmistakable shape of a man.

Blackpool Bay, Horror & Dark Fiction

The Hunger in the North

He had been following her for three months as her trail cut across the country. She had started by the coast, moved inland, hit the other coast, and then veered North in what began as a zigzagged-dawdle that steadily picked up pace, intent and ferocity.

He had started about a month or so behind her and, as she went further North, her trail seemed to straighten and her speed to accelerate. He had no idea where she was heading but as she went further North, what had started as a con artist’s crime-spree became a serial killer’s rampage. The trail of bounced cheques that had landed the case on his desk had become a trail of destruction and then murder.

And then something horrifically more…

The murders started to become more vicious, more brutal and more violent. A strangled one-night stand in a dusty motel where a cheque had bounced became a body with multiple stab wounds in the next town.

Her ritual was evolving at a terrifying speed.

As she moved further North, the bodies started to become dismembered, torn apart and cast around the motels and lodges that she stayed in along the way. Bloody stained beds with sliced torsos were her centerpieces and torn-off limbs her ornaments around the room.

And then she started writing with her victims’ blood on the walls. Mad, crazed scrawls repeating the same phrase: IT HAS NO FORM. IT HAS NO FORM. IT HAS NO FORM…

Again and again, she scrawled this on walls and mirrors using her victims’ gnawed-off fingers as grotesque paintbrushes and their blood as the paint.

Even as a federal agent, chasing down someone like her was out of his job description but back-up was far behind him. There were no airports around here and they were about a week or two’s drive back. He rarely did much fieldwork but as the trail grew more violent, his will to catch her grew, and the Directors all agreed with him that he was best positioned to catch her.

He had picked up her trail about a month or so behind her movements but he was now gaining on her. Cheque fraud took a while to pick up–it needed to work its way through the system before getting flagged and reported by the banks–but murders were found and reported within days, thus allowing him to leapfrog forward across multiple small towns and start to gain on her movements.

Her trail was also getting straighter and straighter. It was like something was pulling her into its dark gravity, like a distant black hole sucking her in. The abyssal pull had been soft and indirect when she was far away but as she got closer, the gravity grew stronger, her path grew straighter and her descent into the darkness grew faster.

He had never seen her and, despite vague accounts from sleepy motels clerks and odd cashiers, he also had no idea who she was.

She only ever paid fraudulent cheques or cash, had nothing registered in any name that actually existed and had an uncanny ability to avoid cameras and other recording devices. Despite the growing violence, she had never left an identifiable fingerprint at any scene nor any shred of evidence as to where she was from or where she may be heading to.

But as she went more North, she was starting to run out of country.

He spent more and more time pouring over maps and–purely accidentally when a diner’s waitress asked him if he was heading to “the hippy festival”–it started to dawn on him that she might be aiming for the All-light Freedom Fest. This was an annual festival held in the southern foothills of some mountains that ringed the last dinky little town left this far north along the coast, Blackpool Bay.

The annual “Hippy Fest”–as locals called it–would be perfect hunting grounds for her and he felt his skin crawl at the thought. Naive, intoxicated kids dancing in fields and sleeping with strangers would be easy pickings for a predator.

His knuckles turned white as his grip tightened on the steering wheel of his rental car. His skin crawling and his heart pounding, the steering wheel began to shake slightly as he sped along towards god-only-knows-what…

But he was too late.

When he arrived at the Hippy Fest there was a small crowd of bewildered, hungover kids loitering around. The collection of loosely dressed hippies–a couple of the girls weeping softly, most of the boys pale white with expressions of various degrees of disassociation displayed–were standing around an old, slightly dinged-up campervan in the middle of a wide green field dotted with tents.

He flashed his badge and pushed through the crowd. They parted without a word and one of the guys started weeping too.

The campervan’s door was partially open and he could see a trickle of blood dripping out from it. He mentally prepared himself for what lay inside and carefully pushed the door fully open, stepped over the pooling blood, and entered a scene of frenzy and violence matched only by his inability to describe the horror with adequate adjectives.

The victim has been torn into so many pieces that he had no idea if it was a man or a woman. Blood splattered every surface in that cramped campervan of nightmares with flesh, guts and parts of limbs hurled everywhere.

And, on every surface splattered with blood and gore, she had violently scrawled her phrase that had now expanded to a full, terrifying sentence: IT HAS NO FORM SO NEITHER SHALL WE. IT HAS NO FORM SO NEITHER SHALL WE...

After a few minutes, he stepped from the campervan back into the light of day. Despite this, a part of him would never truly leave that scene. A part of him would always be standing in the cramped campervan amidst that horror. In the darkest of nights and the depths of his soul, he would never quite leave that antediluvian scene of unimaginable savagery.

He closed his eyes and, pinching the bridge of his nose, he breathed deeply trying to calm himself. He knew what he had to do now.

She never stayed in a place after killing, and there was only one place left to go. Why? Why did she want to go there? What darkness there could be pulling her towards it?

He did not know but he did know what he had to do now. He ran from that campervan of horrors to his car, leaped into it and began to drive on the single, winding, old road that cut through the mountains and down towards Blackpool Bay.

She had to be going there. He had no idea why? Who or what was in Blackpool Bay?

***

It was nearly midnight when he descended from the old road into Blackpool Bay. Even on the village’s main road, few lights were on and he slowed the car down as he scanned his surroundings. He was not sure what he had expected? She was not just going to jump out. It was nearly midnight and she had probably found a motel or somewhere to sleep.

Looking around him, he saw what appeared to be a small motel at the bottom of the road near the pier and the ocean’s edge. It was a cloudless, moonless night and the stars looked cold and distant far above. The ocean looked dark and brooding and, as he pulled up beside the motel and got out his car, he found his gaze being pulled to its primordial presence.

And that was when he saw her standing on the edge of that cold, dark pier staring straight out into Blackpool Bay itself.

His heart started pounding in his chest and the hair on the back of his neck started to rise. He did not know how but he knew that it was her. He could almost feel her standing out on the edge of that strange, dark pier at midnight. Despite all he had seen on her violent trail, he suddenly felt like a voyeur peeking at some secret or ancient mystery that he should not be witnessing and he found himself holding his breath.

He swallowed these thoughts, tried to calm his nerves, and grabbed his gun. The cold metal felt real and it calmed him down a little. Her back was still to him and so he quietly crossed the road to stand at the edge of the pier. She had nowhere to go and no one around to harm.

Her trail ended here.

Checking his gun’s safety was off, he started down the pier towards her.

That was when he saw them. How had he missed them? How had they gotten there? Had they been there all along and he had just not seen them?

They were hard to describe and had forms that your eyes struggled to focus on. But, when the horrors of the campervan woke him up at night and before his conscious mind was fully in control, his subconscious would remember that they had looked very much like piscine horrors with scales, slimy limbs and tentacles that could have crawled up from the darkest depths of the ocean itself. Where human heads with human features should have been, slimy, scaled fish-like faces stared out at him with inhuman, unblinking coldness. Long, thin limbs and tentacles in strange places juxtaposed with a bizarre aura of intelligence around them. An inhuman, alien and cold intelligence that revealed itself when one of these strange, slimy fish-like beings lifted a strange, curling trident and emotionlessly pointed at him.

And then he had reached the end of the pier and was standing behind her. He gasped a breath, realizing that he had been holding his breath this whole time and almost gagged as a strange, sharp vileness pervaded the cold, salty coastal air.

She had red hair.

He blinked. Yes, she had red hair and–surrounded by such strange, darkness and alien nightmares–he found his mind latching on this single detail for its normalcy.

All the piscine horrors around her began to raise their wicked tridents, their tentacles and arms swaying in a nightmarish throng around her. The wind began to howl, ferocious waves suddenly smashing against the pier as the surface of the ocean frothed and bubbled like some hellish seascape.

But–calm and cold–she turned to look directly at him. Surrounded by a maddening throng of swaying piscine limbs and tentacles, she smiled slightly and said:

“It has no form for It is hunger. The Great, Old Hunger, and the Chosen must feed It for if we do not, then It will surely consume everything again.”

And then she was gone.

***

He awoke the next morning on the pier, covered in frigid sea spray and cold sweat. His head was throbbing and his body aching. All the bullets were still in his gun and his gun was still in his hand. He got up and looked around.

He did not know how he had fallen asleep or passed out, nor could he remember anything other than a vague horror when trying to recall what had happened after she had spoken.

What had happened?

He did not remember how she had gone or where she had gone. Somehow, though, he knew that she was gone. Somehow he just knew that her murderous trail had ended and he shuddered as a single, horrifying thought crossed his mind.

What antediluvian nightmare could exist whose dark influence could reach across the very land to pull her to the edge of that pier jutting out into the ocean? What dark forgotten god could exist that inspired such a violent trail as she fled into its hungering maw? What horrific leviathan may be lying in the deep and how long had it quietly slept hidden far below the cold, dark waters of quaint little Blackpool Bay?

Blackpool Bay, Horror & Dark Fiction

What Was Pulled from the Sea

In all the dusty annals, sidenotes and forgotten addendums of history, there are few stories stranger than that of ‘Miss Daisy of Blackpool Bay‘. I now reside far inland and, after I have repeated this tale to you, I suspect that you will too.

But, I digress. Apologies. The poppy seed that I indulge in these days may calm my frayed nerves, but it does somewhat weaken my concentration.

I am a scholar of forgotten histories and stumbled across the first reference of Miss Daisy from the old annals of a discarded penny dreadful knocking around an attic in New York. Uncertain as to the accuracy of the story but intrigued by the author’s careful use of real-world places, actual history and the accuracy of everything else in the tale, I decided to travel out to the story’s setting: Blackpool Bay.

***

Blackpool Bay is a somewhat quaint but extremely isolated fishing port cut into the Blackpool Mountains with a dark, brooding bay that curls out into a wild open ocean. A failed highway build a number of years ago attempted to connect the town with the modern-world but access remains via a winding, treacherous single-lane that dates back to before the war or off a boat from the nearest port.

I took the latter and stepped off an old, creaking fishing boat onto the docks of Blackpool Bay. The docks smelt fishy with something truly awful as an undertone, but I ignored it and wandered into town lugging my suitcase behind me. I marvelled at how old most of the buildings must be. While most had not been properly maintained for what seemed like decades and were streaked black with the weather, they were likely built a century or two ago and one could still see the regal imperial stone cut roofed with black slate yawning out over the cobbled streets.

Eventually, I arrived at the misleadingly-named ‘Grand Hotel’ on the town’s Main Road. It was little more than a run-down room with fading fabrics, a gaslight and a heater, but I did not care. I threw my suitcase onto the bed and hastened downstairs again. A rather sour clerk with bulbous eyes behind the front-desk pointed me in the direction of the Old Museum past the Gypsy Market and I hurriedly left.

***

“Where is the Curator?” I enquired of the young, fidgetting man before me, “I did not correspond with you in my letters? Where is the esteemed old Curator?”

“Apologies, Sir,” the young man dressed in a worn-out old suit stammered, “There-there was an, uhm, incident a number of weeks ago. The Curator is, uh, no longer here. But I worked closely with him and can help you. What is it that you are looking for?”

I sighed and told him about my exchange of letters with the Curator regarding the tale of Miss Daisy of Blackpool Bay. He nodded fervently through my explanation, told me to wait and then scampered off into the back.

While I waited, I strode around the Old Museum glancing at the strange oddities kept there. There was a harpoon from whaling days on one wall, its deep scratches belying the death it must have dealt in another, more barbaric age. Some suits of armor from Europe stood around in a corner with some family crests and their lineage back to old European family lines. The most prominent being the Athelard family, who appeared to have founded the Old Museum generations ago when they left the Old World for Blackpool Bay. There were some old, eerie paintings on the wall from strange and exotic places. One particular painting of a Congolese woman in dark oils caught my eye and I started to lean in closer to its examine its violent brushstrokes–

“Here we go, Sir!” the young man piped up from behind me, startling me, “Here are the archives on Miss Daisy. Before my time, but back when this was popular, the Old Museum had a show on it and, uh, well these documents and notes are what is left from that.”

I turned around and took the heavy, dusty folder from the young man. Thanked him profusely and promised to return them before I left.

***

Almost a century and a half ago as the sun was setting, a humble fisherman arrived back at Blackpool Bay docks with a rather unique catch.

According to the fisherman identified only as ‘Horatio’, a freak current had dragged his small vessel out of the bay and into the open ocean. He was an experienced fisherman and had saved his energy by not fighting the freak current. As he had expected, eventually the current had dissipated and he had begun rowing back to the coastline and, thereafter, back into the Bay.

Given that fishing was his livelihood, he had decided to drag his net behind as he rowed. With a bit of luck, he had thought, he might catch some fish making the day not a complete waste.

Let us ignore the fact that a number of other fishermen were out in the bay that day and none of them recall ever either seeing Horatio or experiencing any strange currents. Ignore the fact that the average fishing net was probably too weak for the weight of his catch. And, finally, let us ignore the obvious question of how she got out there or survived at all in the frigid, wild open ocean…

According to Horatio in the local paper at the time, while rowing, his boat had suddenly snagged something heavy with his net. Excitedly, he had pulled the net up into the boat expecting a shoal of cod or perhaps tuna. Instead and to his horror, a slender, well-formed arm had emerged from the dark water as he pulled at the heavy net. The arm was attached to a shoulder and then a well-formed neck. As he pulled the neck into the boat and unwrapped it, the beautiful, naked form of a woman emerged and collapsed into his boat.

The Blackpool Bay Daily had a follow-up article dated from about a week or so after the first mention of this incident. It also is the first time that Miss Daisy’s name is mentioned and the article includes a grainy, blurring black-and-white photo of her standing at the docks with the dark, brooding ocean behind her. While little detail can be seen in such a poor quality photograph, I can attest to something odd but unplaceable about it that makes my skin crawl.

According to the article, Miss Daisy remained mute but had adjusted well to living with Horatio and his wife. She would join Horatio on his daily fishing trips and seemed a natural out at sea. The local doctor had examined her and concluded that she was as fit as a fiddle and no worse for her ordeal. No members of the public or officials had come forth claiming her identity or offering clues as to the events surrounding how she had ended up far out in the open ocean. Thus, the local Mayor Athelard had decided to name her Daisy and the townsfolk had shrugged the mystery off and continued with their daily lives.

From this point, the tale of Miss Daisy of Blackpool Bay starts to take a turn for the darker.

Horatio’s wife was the first to die. Medical records report that she succumbed to a mysterious illness, wasting quickly away and passed late one night. Church records show that no less than a month after she was buried, Haratio married Miss Daisy. But this was not to last long as one evening Haratio’s fishing boat came back to shore without him on it. Miss Daisy–still mute–could not explain what had happened, but the boat had lots of water in it and all items were missing, thus the old fishermen at the docks concluded that it must have been a freak wave or something that had washed Horatio overboard. His two children were then sent off to live with a relative inland and Miss Daisy retired to his old house and stopped going out in public.

The rest of this story–save the ending–is speculation and hearsay. Neighbors reported strange sounds and a horrific smell emanating from Horatio’s old house. A number of pets were reported missing across the bay, particularly in the roads around Horatio’s old house. A mysterious sickness swept the town and many good folk became bedridden with all the symptoms of a vicious bout of seasickness, but not having set one foot on a boat.

And then, late one particularly dark night, a great storm rolled. It’s wind churned up the ocean into a frenzy as the rain beat down on the hapless town. Two neighbors living in the same road and a number of other good folk dotted between the docks and her house all reported seeing that amidst the terrible storm a strange, mishappen group had shuffled slowly to Miss Daisy’s house and beat on her front door.

Miss Daisy had not been seen for many months and, thus, her ragged, wild appearance was a shock to the neighbor–a certain Mr. Humphrey–who saw her throw open the door and confront the strange, shady group on her porch. Her hair was tangled and wild, her complexion pale and taut, and her frame thin and wispy. No doubt confused, ignorant and as superstitious as only small-town folk can be, this neighbor further reported that Miss Daisy was completely naked and, this nakedness, revealed a strange, “scaling” to her skin and thin gill-like slits down her strangely long, eel-like neck.

Irrespective of the details or fantasies of a crazed-mind, Miss Daisy and this strange group proceeded to have a heated argument. This is stranger, indeed, given the fact that Miss Daisy was by all accounts quite muted. But, irrespective, the argument got physical and, at some point, the leader of that mishappen group roughly struck Miss Daisy, she crumpled to the floor and the group quickly scooped her up and started back down the road from whence they had come.

Witnessing all of this through the slit in his blinds and being a good neighbor, Mr. Humphrey had grabbed his old rifle from the wall. According to what he told the reporter the next day, he had rushed out into the howling wind, beating rain and chased after the motley crew as they shuffled down the road with Miss Daisy’s limp form strung across them.

By this time, the mishappen coven had arrived at the docks and was standing out on the edge of the pier. Lightning flashed and the storm raged overhead with a demonic vengeance. What they were planning to do was unclear to Mr. Humphrey, as there were no boats moored there nor any other vessel at the end of the pier. The waves were smashing all around them, seaspray thick in the howling air as the torrential rain made it hard to see clearly.

Mr. Humphrey said that he had called out and fired, hitting one of the figures with little effect, while he charged down the pier. All but one of the group had ignored this and knelt at the edge of the pier, letting Miss Daisy’s crumpled form slip below the raging, black waters. Charging right at them, Mr. Humphrey had taken aim again on the group but–just before he fired–the one that had turned to face him had lept at him and with supernatural strength, overpowered him, ripping the rifle from his hand and closing his hands around his neck…

According to the Blackpool Bay Daily reporter, Mr. Humphrey had passed out at this point. He was found–bruised and unconscious, his rifle lying neatly next to him–the next morning by an old fisherman who had popped down to the docks to check his boat had survived the storm. The storm had blown out in the early hours of the morning and any trace or evidence as to Miss Daisy’s whereabouts and the mysterious group that had abducted her was long gone.

While Mr. Humphrey could not describe the strange group of people that had abducted Miss Daisy, he had gotten a single flash of the mishappen face of the one that had jumped on him. The official description per the police report describes this unnaturally strong man as “…having no face whatsoever but a warped, piscine horror of slime and tentacle covered with a black, wet robe. It was like a hellish, inky jellyfish had pulled itself together into the shape of a man with tentacles instead of limbs, and crawled onto land with the sole objective of abducting poor Miss Daisy before returning to whatever deep, dark crevice it had originally come from.“

No body was ever found of Miss Daisy nor washed up onshore. Likewise, no ransom demands ever surfaced. Of the strange, vile group that had abducted her, no other clues–save some strange, black, inky fluid left at the end of the pier; perhaps the poisoned, wicked blood of the creature that had gotten shot by Mr. Humphrey. There were not even whispers of any kind to indicate what, where and who they were or what their motives with Miss Daisy might have been.

When the police had searched Horatio’s old house, they found very little to substantiate anything. The house was filthy and acrid with the stench of dead fish throughout it. Strange, unnatural symbols were scrawled over its walls and on its floors, in what appeared to be dried blood and some black inky substance. There was a full bath run with heavily salted water in it, a small bottle of noxious, unidentified liquid was recovered from below the sink, and suggestive bloodstains and small bones had been found in the kitchen. Strange scales were scattered throughout the house as if some bizarre fish had been shedding them as it writhed through that dingy abode.

Beyond this, the rest is a mystery. Pets stopped disappearing, the strange plague that had made so many in town sick dissipated and Blackpool Bay slowly went back to its normal, sleepy activity. The sole exception to this was old Horatio’s house, which stood empty and uncared for until it eventually burnt down late one night in a mysterious fire.

***

What terrifies me is not the events in the tale of Miss Daisy, but what they corroborate across a number of other seemingly unrelated stories, folktales and dark legends. As a collector of oddities and bizarre tales, I have stumbled across a range of references to an ancient civilization from a lost age.

This forgotten civilization was plumbing the depths of hidden knowledge and occult sciences when mankind was still sleeping naked in caves. And, in these dark alcoves of knowledge, the race had itself become twisted and mishappen until some horrendous, unnamed event had torn through their civilization and seen the very ocean rise up against them and swallow their cities whole.

But, it is said, some of these dark, twisted creatures still live in down there. Submerged at the bottom of the ocean and shrouded in the blackest waters, these dark, twisted immortals continue seeking out their arcane, heinous knowledge. Devoted to their vile pursuits, they quietly await the day when they can rise from the depths and retake the world from the ignorant, warm-blooded mammals that now laze around on top of it.

Beyond just dark tales, Miss Daisy–or, more specifically, what appears to have abducted or reclaimed her–is the best and closest evidence I have that these demons in the deep do in fact exist. The black inky blood left on the pier, the bizarre evidence and writings of occult nature left in old Horatio’s house and, importantly, Mr. Humphrey’s confused and crazed account of that night all point to a single, horrific conclusion: this lost civilization with its twisted practitioners of the dark arts does in fact exist and, very occasionally, creeps out from under the ocean and into our innocent and clueless world.

***

My research in Blackpool Bay completed and my worst fears confirmed, I returned the papers to the Old Museum’s archives that very night. I checked out of the Grand Hotel thereafter, cancelled my shipping ticket and decided to rather catch a taxi through the old, winding road around the mountains and inland.

I will never again be setting foot near the ocean, nor–in particular–Blackpool Bay. I cannot stress enough that neither should you. Please allow the bizarre tale of ‘Miss Daisy of Blackpool Bay‘ to serve as a stark warning that there are many mysteries in this world that have not been pierced by the keen light of science and reason.

Despite our blissful ignorance of these things–long may it last!–ignorance cannot actually keep us safe, just happy. Someday the horror that hides at the bottom of the ocean will come creeping out and we will pay for our arrogance in thinking that we rule this very old and mysterious planet.

Blackpool Bay, Horror & Dark Fiction

The Lady in the Painting

If you look at me now you will struggle to realize that I was once the esteemed Curator of the Old Museum in Blackpool Bay. I was dignified, respected and well-funded amongst my peers. My current circumstances in this institution seem as pitiful as my constitution but I feel I should emphasize that I did not always look this depreciated.

The Old Blackpool Bay Museum lies on the outskirts of Main Street. The old, heavy building is just below the smokey, deal-ridden Gypsy Market bustling with its menagerie of characters. Indeed, we occasionally used these people to acquire our more challenging and legally-flexible articles for display.

One such article was an old painting known only as ‘Painting of a Lady’. This painting had a long and mysterious history that many of our more macabre patrons found intoxicating. After all, a central duty of a Curator was to research, locate and then procure such items that we could then do private viewings of to our larger donors and, thus, ensure their continued and generous support.

This particular procurement had been two or three years in the planning as I had first discovered mention of the painting in an old Nazi record when they had annexed Belgium in the 1940s and seized it from a private estate. Here is where its named as ‘Gemälde einer Dame‘ or ‘Painting of a Lady’ comes from and it is the only time I have found a direct and officially-written record of this painting.

While noted in the original stocklist of a Nazi bunker after the collapse of the Nazi regime at the end of World War II, the painting vanished for nearly a half-century before our network located a private and anonymous seller who, to be honest, appeared more interested in getting rid of the painting than in realizing any monetary reward.

We used our Gypsy bootleggers to orchestrate the purchase and bring the painting back to us. Given the relatively small sum we had paid the seller, we were generous in remunerating the Gypsies. It never hurt buying forward a bit of loyalty for their future procurement services.

I remember the actual night: it was late and dark with no moon in the sky and an angry ocean roaring in the background when the Gypsy rapped on the Museum’s backdoor. I had immediately noticed his tense disposition but dismissed it as merely a by-product of the circumstances. Once I had opened and examined the exquisite piece, the Gypsy had begun to vocally protest against me taking the painting. I had initially dismissed his concerns and then, when he had started insisting that I destroy the “cursed object”, I had thanked him, dropped cash in his hands and pushed him back out of the door.

The Old Museum now owned the ‘Painting of a Lady’.

The old Belgium family had brought the painting back with them from the Congo where they had run a large plantation with many slaves. After a series of personal tragedies, the family had packed what they could carry and crated the rest home with them to return back to their homeland.

Where the family had gotten this painting from in the Congo is harder to tell? Who the original painter was is even more mysterious? And who the lady in the painting was is certainly lost to time?

What is certain is the long trail of blood and bodies that seemed to follow the paintings. One body, in particular, attracted our darker patrons’ curiosity but I will reveal this detail later on.

Partially-complete Congolese records taken back to Belgium show that the merchant ship transporting this painting back to Belgium saw a raft of deaths amongst its crew on that voyage. One deckhand even went mad–per the Captain’s log, he was ranting about old Congolese jungle fairytales–and attacked and killed another crew member before being restrained and, ultimately, dying of injuries sustained in the process. A number of other men died of an unidentified sickness and a final seaman simply jumped–or was pushed–off the ship into the shark-infested waters near the southern tip of the Dark Continent.

Even before then, the Belgium family’s plantation records–or what is left of them–reveal a series of unfortunate events that took the lives of various family members and key staff. From sickness to accidents and even a bloody, unsolved murder in the family member’s own bed.

Once back in Belgium, the family had barely unpacked when the Nazi’s had swarmed across the border and executed the bunch of them before seizing their estate.

The German General in charge had liked the painting–apparently it had been displayed in the foyer of the old estate building–and ordered his men to take it down and load it into his military transport for his ride back to Berlin. It was a fateful ride as an unknown assassin–probably a Belgium escaping soldier or British spy–had sent a sniper’s bullet through his skull before he had even reached the border.

With German efficiency, the General’s remains and the items in the convoy–including the painting–were sent back to Berlin to be processed. In this process, a high-up in the Third Reich had noticed the painting and taken it back to be displayed in some central building where the Führer, himself, had walked passed it and ordered its movement into his personal gallery in his private bunker.

You see, the German bunker from which this painting was recovered was none other than Adolf Hitler’s Führerbunker where he and his wife committed cowardly suicide. It is even said that the Painting of a Lady hung in the very room where their corpses were found lying crumpled below it.

And then the Painting of a Lady disappeared from history for more than half a century.

I had begun carefully inspecting the old painting. Not just to check for any damage–sometimes non-traditional channels of procurement are not overly careful of their cargo–but also to check for any sign that is might be a fraud.

As far as I could tell, it appeared very real. Just enough cracking in the oils to indicate age, scratches on the frame showing its long journeys and, even, the various indicative colours that would have been most available in the Belgium Congo at the time.

Neither beautiful nor ugly, the painting was nonetheless captivating. Indeed, the colours were haunting with dark, rich blacks swirling with reds and offering sickening beiges and bone whites as contrasts. The lady in the painting was obviously some local Congolese tribal lady, or maybe even one of those witchdoctors of the Dark Continent? She had strange, primal features and odd decorations across her face and down her neck, while she held a hard and angry look–perhaps even proud–as she stared defiantly at the painter.

The more I looked, the more curious I became. The more I looked, the more I also saw and, slowly, it dawned on me that the tribal designs across the lady’s face and neck and some of the bone and ivory jewelry she wore was probably indicative of some rank or royalty. If my understanding of how the Belgium Congo was run was correct, then my sense is that she was likely treated particularly poorly due to this. The bones also were small and fragile, almost shaped like human fingerbones and I was sure that I saw one or two teeth in the design.

It was hard to tell as the brushwork–although talented–was raw and vigorous. While obviously an emotive and impassioned work, the finer detail was frustratingly lacking. It was almost as if the painter had known that his time was limited and wanted to get as much down on the canvas before the end.

Suddenly, I realized how late it had become. The time had slipped by while I studied that painting and the lady in it. It was now the small hours of the morning with true dark outside and the single light on in my office in the Old Museum. I had to open the Museum up in a matter of hours, so I decided to not even bother going home. I hung the painting up in my office, took my shoes off and decided to try and get a few hours rest before morning.

I fell soundly asleep the moment my head hit the cushion on my couch but my sleep was wracked with a vivid dream that still haunts me till today.

I cannot recall how the dream began but I found myself standing before the Painting of a Lady, only I saw it all and more clearly than before. I saw the blood dripping from the whiplashes on her back and ache between her legs from the Master’s forceful, unwanted visit the night before. I saw the tears from when she had buried her younger brother next to her father and mother out behind the plantation. I saw the dark, swirling storm and felt the wet, sticky jungle air as her anger became rage and her rage became something else. Something darker. I now knew of the bargain between her and the demon that lived in the centre of the Ituri Jungle that also hated white man and all his fire and axes, his rape and guns, machines and pollution. I knew of–I felt!–this deal struck of hatred deep in the dark depths of the sacred jungle…

I stood before the painting of a lady and saw all of this, and then she moved.

She leant forward in the painting, grasped its frame with his wicked hands and began to step out of it. She began to smile wickedly, her features contorting beyond human design and towards demonic proportions as her teeth grew longer and sharper.

I screamed and jumped back! I looked around me and saw my desk with my old service revolver in its drawer.

Her contorted, vile face was completely outside of the painting now, dripping bubbling poison onto my office floor. I could smell the rancid jungle and hear her softly hissing like a serpent. Her arm and its vicious nails were scratching my wall as her one leg swung out of the painting and reached down to touch the ground–

I screamed again, my hands shaking and pointed the revolver–which had suddenly appeared in my hand–at her before pulling the trigger! The first bullet hit her squarely in her naked chest, rattling the children’s bone necklace, but it hardly slowed her down.

She howled–a visceral, blood-curdling sound–and lunged at me!

“Give me the gun!” she was screaming, “Stop! Stop! Give me the gun!“

The revolver went off in my hands. Again and again and again. I was screaming and frozen at the same time while I felt the spray of blood across my face and a vast weight weighing me down…

I came around and realized that I was pinned to the ground in the entrance hall of the Old Museum. The large, oak front door was ajar with soft rays of morning sun piercing the large room. The bulky security guard we had hired to man the door was sitting on me, sweating and pale as a sheet while trying to pry my revolver from my crazed-hands. I smelt gunpowder in the air and felt a warm sticky substance splattered across my face and hand. Twisting my head around I saw, off to the side, saw two crumpled bodies of what I now know were a morning visitor to the Museum and the old cleaning lady.

Naturally, I was stripped of my title and carted off in chains to a mental institute in the interior. My family and colleagues have all but disowned me. Honestly, though, I think that my conscience and its torture of me is the worst punishment of all. I can barely eat nor sleep while the unfriendly staff of this institute tell me in no uncertain terms that if I continue at this rate that I will not make the summer.

That might actually be a sweet release and, far from worrying me, I look forward to it. Though, sometimes, I do wonder if whatever horrors we callously inflicted on the poor lady in the painting, whether this is exactly the revenge she sought in her own twisted way to lay on our doorsteps. I wonder about that demon deep in the fetid Ituri Jungle and all the bodies that have followed their painting on its journey to the west…

In reality, though, in an event that the local papers came to call the ‘Museum Rampage‘ and the judge referred to as ‘temporary and disturbing insanity‘, I had destroyed my life and the lives of two other innocents in a matter of minutes. And for what? Why? To make matters worse, I cannot recall nor remember so much as a single detail of the whole wicked affair, other than that single, terrible, vivid and haunting dream of the lady in the painting.

Blackpool Bay, Horror & Dark Fiction

The Black Pool

He woke up in his bed screaming, covered in cold-sweat and his heart pounding in his chest. He sat up straight, gasping for breath as if he had been drowning or swallowed.

What a strange thought, he thought to himself, swallowed?

And just then a single isolated and arbitrary memory flickered in his mind: Blackpool Bay.

What the hell is that, he wondered, chiding himself for being scared of childish nightmares. Where is that? Have I ever been there?

He swung out of his bed, grabbed his phone and quickly searched for “BLACKPOOL BAY”.

“Why would I dream of that?” he exclaimed aloud, I’ve definitely never been there he concluded as he clicked through pictures with no familiarity to him.

And then–in the background of someone’s selfie–he caught a glimpse of the mountains that ringed that small, coastal town and cut it off from inland civilization.

It may have been their rugged, deep-set gorges or the ancientness of their formations, it may have been a half-remembered image he had seen somewhere or something even more arbitrary, but he knew then and there that he had to go to those mountains.

He was an avid mountaineer had climbed most of the great peaks in the world, but he had never read about these great, old peaks hidden far away in uncrowded isolation. They cast their shadow on the town below and the open-ocean raging just beyond it, yet they remained silent and he could find no account nor story of anyone that had ever climbed them.

His google search did throw up some small local news about a failed attempt to build a tunnel through one of the mountains with a connecting highway. The project had met a tragic end. He also found some local mentions of some unique pool far up atop one of the peaks behind the half-cut tunnel.

He grinned widely. He knew where and what he was going to climb next, and he felt the tingling of excitement mixed with fear in the pits of his stomach.

***

The nearest flight to Blackpool Bay took him to a dingy industrial town higher up the coast. From there he had to catch a fishing boat that was going to moor at the small port in Blackpool Bay.

He did not mind. In fact, the journey was part of the adventure in climbing these far-flung peaks.

Stepping off the boat, he breathed in the fresh, salty air of the town. It had a subtle chill to it was colder than he had expected. It was probably air blown down from the frozen peaks of the top mountains surrounding the quaint, slightly run-down town.

He hoisted his backpack and belongings up–as a mountaineer, he prided himself in being both self-reliant and travelling with only the possessions he could carry–and stomped off to the small tavern he had called ahead to book a bed for the night.

If he was lucky, one of the locals there could point him towards the peak with the pool atop it. One of the fishermen on the boat had heard about it and warned against going there, although he could not tell him specifically why. Furthermore, the fisherman had not known exactly which peak the pool was nor could he give any advice about climbing it.

No, he thought, I have to find a land-based local with knowledge.

***

“I wouldn’t do that, lad,” the weather-beaten old man spat and lit his pipe. As smoke began to bellow from it, he continued growling his advice, “I wouldn’t do that, lad, but I suspect you aren’t going to listen to me, are you?”

He laughed and shook his head. The old man had used to run timber out of the lower slopes of the mountains but was too old for that now and ran a small shop somewhere in the town.

“No, sir,” he chuckled, “But don’t worry about me. I can handle my own in the mountains.”

The old man shook his head, drew deeply on his pipe and sighed, “Yeah, all you young folk are the same and I don’t doubt you know many mountains, lad. But,” and he leaned forward, a darkness spreading across his weathered face, “This isn’t just any old mountain. There are strange things up there, lad, and she has her own secrets that she ain’t keen to reveal to anyone. You hear me, boy? I have seen and felt things on those slopes that I cannot explain nor do I care to try. She is a dark mountain, lad, and you best remember that when you go poking around her corners.”

He nodded, trying not to smile or laugh, and motioned to the barman to bring them another round. The old man nodded graciously and leant back, seemingly relaxed again.

“Right, lad,” he said, puffing peacefully on his pipe as the darkness left his face, “If you take that half-built highway and turn off just before the tunnel, it’ll get you to the bottom parts of the peak. From there, you are going to keep your wits about you. Now, lad, let me point you in the direction of the Black Pool.”

***

He swore under his breath and pushed forward. The mist was cold and thick and he could not see much further ahead than the nearest rock. It was a strange, heavy mist and had sprung up quickly as he left the eerie half-built tunnel, the lower slopes and the wild pine forests and began clambering up uncharted rock faces towards the peak with the Black Pool on it.

He seemed to be making slow but steady progress. He also kept an eye on the rocks and a couple key formations that the Old Man had told him about.

Yes, he nodded as a lightning-split, burnt rock loomed up to his right out of the mist, yes, I am definitely going in the right direction.

He shivered as something ran down his spine. He half turned around and cried out, but caught himself. He was alone up here and any strange feeling he might have is just a consequence of this mist and his impaired senses triggering base primal instincts.

And this thought triggered deja vu! He suddenly felt like he had been trapped in this before…

“Goddamit,” he muttered, shaking his head and chiding himself, “I will not be fooled by this mist!” he shouted at the mountain.

The sound fell flat in the thick mist and was greeted with dull silence. He felt stupid and childish.

No, he thought, one step at a time and I will conquer Her. One step at a time…

***

As suddenly as the mist had sprung up around him, he broke through it and saw clear air all around him. He turned around and gasped.

The mist was so thick that he could not see the town below, nor even the rest of the slopes down there. It was as if he were in some foreign land or had stepped through some portal elsewhere?

For all intents and purposes, it honestly looked like he stood at the foot of a steep, jagged peak on a stretch of grey, cloudy plain that reached out towards the horizon in every direction. It was like being stranded on an island somewhere in a bizarre limbo. He turned around and cast his gaze up…

The sheer, raw beauty of the peak winding upwards to pierce the cold, cosmic sky above him was stunning. Halfway up and he could see with much greater clarity the contours and rock-climbs facing him.

He grinned, took a sip of water and tightened his grip on his stick.

Now began his favourite part!

***

His fingertips strained as the icy wind howled through him. He groaned and heaved as he pulled his weight up and over the ledge, to topple on the flat there.

He gasped, his hands and arms trembling with ache. His fingers felt frozen and his heart and lungs were spent.

He rolled onto his back, his rucksack propping him up and he sat from that position.

It was then that he realized that he was on the top.

He had climbed the peak!

All the fatigue was forgotten as the victory electrified him and he jumped up to look around him:

A sheer and steep drop was just behind him on the small ledge. It was the way down. But, more immediately and in front of him, a small scramble up a couple of rocks was between him and the true peak…

He barely noticed the details as he scrambled over these icy, frozen rocks and found himself standing on the edge of a small, circular pool of dark water: Black Pool.

While a thin layer of snow dusted the rocks at this height and some cold corners held real icy, the pool atop the peak was not frozen at all nor did it have any icy in it. Its surface lay serene and calm, untouched by its extreme environment and forgotten by the elements that battered everything else around them. It may be due to some mineral in the water that made it more viscous and prevented it freezing. The mineral in its water, he noted, may also explain its strangely dark colour too. Its water was not black, just dark. Really, really dark. It was almost like light could not pierce it and, even close to the edge, he could not make out anything below its surface.

It was absorbing. Its darkness seemed to suck light into it. He felt himself step forward, his entire gaze trying to pierce the very center of the small, quiet, untouched pool.

And then the dark water rippled.

He cried out in shock. There was something in the pool!

He could not see it but rather he felt it. It felt like some malignant vacuum that pulled at him to come closer. Like some vast, otherworldly hole that needed to be filled. It had a tangible hunger that ate even the light and he felt powerless to its dark beckoning.

Despite his pounding heart and primal fear, he took a step forward, and then another. And then he was at the very edge of Black Pool’s dark water and staring straight down at it. Even at this range, he could not see the bottom nor any distinguishable detail below its serene surface. It honestly felt like he was staring at a timeless-infinity trapping the eternity of the cosmos in that single, small pool…

And then the water rippled again.

He held his breath, his heart hammering in his chest! Something was there! Something was just below the surface!

He leant forward over the water, careful not to touch it and strained to see what might be just below the surface.

And then a huge, terrifying, dark, single eyelid slid back revealing a burning, feverishly-yellow and infinitely-conscious eye that stared straight-up from just, just below the surface of the water. He saw it and it saw him. He could feel it staring straight back up and at him–through and into him!

Unblinking and ageless, he felt the Eye’s malignant desires twisting around him and pulling him into it. Even the wind fell silent as time stopped atop that mountain.

And he realized that he was falling. Falling!

He was falling into Black Pool! His body was as stiff as a plank, teetering forward! He was toppling directly into the dark waters and the Eye just below. Every primal instinct screamed out at him to pull back, but his body–every muscle!–was frozen. All he could do was watch as the dark water rushed up towards him with the burning, yellow Eye just below its surface…

And then, fractions of a moment before his nose pierced the dark water and his entire world was the burning, yellow Eye, he managed to move the smallest of his muscles, close his eyes and a scream erupted out from him…

***

He woke up in his bed screaming, covered in cold-sweat and his heart pounding in his chest. He sat up straight, gasping for breath as if he had been drowning or swallowed.

What a strange thought, he thought to himself, swallowed?

And just then a single isolated and arbitrary memory flickered in his mind: Blackpool Bay.

Blackpool Bay, Horror & Dark Fiction

Nephthys’ Lament

The light was as fragile as a feather as it filtered through the quiet, somber oaks that lined the Old Cemetery in Blackpool Bay. The quiet in that place seemed removed from the occasional car the drove passed and the odd voice or radio that wafted in from a million miles away.

It was as if that sacred ground was just slightly removed from time itself.

The cemetery’s original name had long since been forgotten and its records lost in the old church fire that had happened over a century ago. No one really cared. The locals just called it the Old Cemetery and it’s cramped, over-grown plots were obscured behind Main Road’s large houses, the back-end of the Church with a narrow alleyway running along it.

The Old Cemetery was filled with long-dead strangers with no known relatives left to visit them. Their crumbling, weathered gravestones grew moss-covered as they sank slowly into the ground where their namesake’s rested. Their mortal names mostly worn from the stones and dates all but lost as time’s ceaseless march overtook them.

And this was just the way that Sharon liked it: a rich, captivating tapestry of light and shadow, rough stones and twisting roots with the history and mortality that she sought to capture in her sketchbook.

She would spend long hours in that cemetery drawing or, sometimes, just sitting idly and escaping life amidst the crumbling remains of those that had come before.

This afternoon, though, she had slipped out of her late shift at the Hermetic Museum early. They did not need her there right now, she was only getting in the way.

They were setting up the Ancient Egyptian showcase with an actual mummy. The mummy was a nameless princess from the Old Kingdom–or an earlier age–as the Carbon Dating anomalies in found in her gave contradictory results. The display was not yet set up and her job in the ticket booth would not be needed until the doors opened tomorrow.

Besides, with all the noise and crew moving things and shouting at each other, she was keen to find some quiet.

“Let the quiet and dark wrap around me like clothes of eternity wrought of infinity,” she muttered the inscription on the princess’ sarcophagus to herself while drawing–something about the words really moved her, “A thousand-thousand years are but a mere flicker of time against the absolutes that the Lady of Shadows offers for those willing to pay the price, which I do gladly a thousand times over.”

She smiled, longingly casting her gaze through the quiet cemetery. She wondered how many of those souls resting here would pay whatever price it was that the sarcophagus hinted at? How many of them would pay that price gladly a thousand times over?

The afternoon was now getting late and the light, as usual, filtered quietly into the cemetery. The rest of Blackpool Bay and its Main Street seemed like a distant shore as she sat, floating in the quiet of that hauntingly secluded place…

She blinked and looked down, remembering that she had been drawing.

She had half-drawn a brooding oak overlooking a particularly old gravestone with strange, twisting curves in it–one of her favourites–but her mind was wandering. Her eyes were falling with the day’s light and the shadows in her mind were growing long and longing. A soft, gentle hand was stroking her neck and she wanted to believe every sweet word being whispered to her…

***

Sharon snapped wide awake as the Sun pierced through the oak trees. It felt like a great shadow had lifted and left her just a little bit sad. The Sun’s harsh light made her cry out and she instinctively threw up her hands to protect herself. The light was horrid and baneful!

“God,” she muttered to herself, “I must’ve fallen asleep here!”

The quiet of the Old Cemetery did not answer her but the soft hoot of a distant car as the morning bustle began on Main Street did.

She was late.

She jumped up, dusted herself off and ran out of the cemetery, down the alleyway and towards the Museum just off Main Street. She got there just as they opened the door, the Curator nodded at her and she threw herself behind the ticket booth as the first couple intrigued tourists and pensioners wandered in.

In the rush, she had hardly noticed anything at all and the day was busy as the invited journalists from out of town turned up as well a couple of buses of Asian tourists. Pensioners kept wandering in from outlying retirement homes and asking her silly questions. She did not even have time to take lunch. It was only after the pensioners, the tourists and the journalists had all left and the Museum was shutting for the night that she had a moment to herself.

The doors closed as the Night Guard wandered in. The Curator smiled and nodded at her as he left, and she began casting her ticket sales before cashing up.

When she looked up from the work, she was alone in the Museum.

Sighing, she stood up and stepped outside of the ticket booth. She was just about to leave when she felt the pull… It was like an urge or a nameless hunger that gnawed at her edges, and she found herself walking slowly deeper into the Museum.

She walked by the medieval section with torture devices and by the pre-history with mammoths and saber-tooth tigers. Finally, she entered the Ancient Egyptian area in the middle and walked by its great, crumbling forms and right to the fake tomb. Displayed in the center of this made-up tomb and behind bullet-proof glass lay the decorative sarcophagus of Princess Ankhet-Nebthet with the Princess herself lying therein.

She briefly wondered how she knew the Princess’s name? Not even the Egyptologists that had organized this touring exhibition knew that. Why did she?

And then she was standing before the entombed Princess, bandages wrapping a frail, dehydrated form with little more than sand, bones and mysteries hidden inside the fragile vessell.

“Let the quiet and dark wrap around me like clothes of eternity wrought of infinity,” she read aloud the translation of the inscription on the Princess’ sarcophagus, “A thousand-thousand years are but a mere flicker of time against the absolutes that the Lady of Shadows offers for those willing to pay the price, which I do gladly a thousand times over.”

She breathed out, her heart beating faster as if she was expecting something to happen. What? What could she be expecting from the Princess of Darkness that she stood before?

“I accept your offer, daughter,” whispered an incorporeal, velvety voice gently into her ear, sending shivers of ecstasy running down her spine, “Accept my kiss and we will be one; I living through you and you undying through me.“

“Yes!” Sharon found herself exclaiming, falling to her knees, words tumbling from her mouth as if she had known them all along across a thousand years of an unbroken, mysterious lineage, “Yes! Oh, Nephthys, Lady of Shadows and Purveyor of Eternity, I accept you gladly. I accept your offer a thousand times over, and a thousand times more!”

Darkness stroked her neck and she whimpered in anticipation. Two soft pricks broke her skin just below her jawline on her neck, blood pumping as ecstasy and infinity flowed in and through her. She knew the cosmos from the forging of the stars to the eons of wind and sand across the timeless desert. She knew where all the ancient, crumbling treasures of all the Pharaohs were buried under the shifting sands and she knew all of the lost secrets whispered from the dawn of time. She knew of the darkness of night and pleasure of a million concubines while ruling from a gold-tip temple and fed the endless blood of slaves…

She knew and she was, and now she understood.

Sharon was no more. Nephthys was eternal.

And then the vessel that had carried eternity from an Ancient Egyptian tomb across time and space to find another worthy host was no longer needed. It was cast aside, and time’s ceaseless march caught up with it all at once: the mummy crumbled to fine dust in its display case.

***

The scene was found by the Day Guard slipping into the Museum at first-light to replace the Night Guard. He then called the Curator who came rushing to the Museum before calling the police.

Soon the Museum had yellow-tape across its front door and officials combing over every inch of it.

No one knows what happened that night and the official report talks about a break-in aimed at destroying the main exhibit, the Egyptian mummy. The intruder was likely interrupted or caught by the Night Guard. The subsequent fight undoubtedly ended in the Night Guard death and the intruder hastily exited before breaking or harming any other items in the Museum.

It is a nice story. It is neat and fits into a paper report with proper grammar and a spell-check. The insurance company was satisfied and so were the local police.

But, late at night in Blackpool Bay’s local bar, the gossiping locals whisper over their drinks about what the story does not explain.

The official report does not explain why the mummy was destroyed? Or how it was turned into pure dust without ever opening the display case? Nor does it explain why the intruder only broke out of the Museum and not in in the first place? Finally, and most vexing, the official report of the Museum Break-in does not explain either why the night-guard was drained of every single drop of blood in his body? And how was this done without a single drop being spilt anywhere at the scene?

Finally, the few smarter and shrewder locals might also sometimes ask about what happened to the ticket booth lady? Why did Sharon resign shortly after the break-in? And was it not suspicious when she left Blackpool Bay shortly thereafter, literally in the middle of the night?

But none of the locals–smart or otherwise–would have bothered to pop their heads into the Old Cemetery because, if they had done so, they would have had a number of new questions to ask. All of them revolving around a single, new gravestone placed carefully in a quiet, secluded plot beneath the somber oak trees.

Deeply carved into this newly-cut stone is a single, haunting word: SHARON.

Blackpool Bay, Horror & Dark Fiction

The Sea’s Secret

Despite being late Summer, the air of Blackpool Bay retained a surprising chill to it. It was likely that the ocean’s nearby current cooled the air but none of the dour, weathered locals seemed to notice. By the looks of them, he doubted that any of them cared.

He had read in a National Geographic that a deep ocean current swirled near to the surface along this isolated shoreline. The current was normally further out to sea and deep under the surface but, for some reason, these ancient, unknowable waters surfaced around Blackpool Bay. Maybe there was some underwater obstruction or architecture that guided the water in such a way? Maybe it was just due to the angle that the Earth rotated through space? Maybe it was more bizarre?

No one yet knew nor were we ever likely to know why.

The effect, though, was that this current washed strange and mysterious creatures up on Blackpool Bay’s beaches. Some as simple as foreign, exotic fish–striped, rainbowed and sparkling–from some distant tropical sea caught in a current stronger than them.

Others were far more haunting.

The locals spoke of creatures washing up on their beaches from pale translucent skins to glowing, bulbous-orbed devils. Some had tentacles while a few even had appendices that man had not yet thought to name.

These thoughts all tumbled through his mind as he stepped onto the docks. Ironically, sea travel did not agree with him. He would have flown into a nearby town and then driven but the new highway that was supposed to be built here had been canceled under strange circumstances. That left him only sea travel as the quickest and most direct route to Blackpool Bay.

He briefly pondered what might have passed below his feet as he had sailed here. The thought both scared and excited him while leaving him wondering what it was that they had found washed up on their beach this time?

***

“Where is the specimen?” he asked the technician, “And where are your tools?”

The man stammered an apology and ushered him out of the room and into the next one that lay behind a heavy set door.

The moment he stepped into the next room, he knew he was in the right place: there was a large drop in temperature while his nostrils were assaulted with a chemical smell. The latter hid the smell of decay, whose sickly sweet aroma hid just behind the chemicals.

But this room also smelt of one more thing. One unique flavor: a slimy, salt. Dead fish.

He was in the right room.

“Come over here, Sir,” the technician stooped, motioning towards a slide out slab in the wall of the morgue, “It is here.”

He paused. He had come so far to see this that he was suddenly nervous. He scolded himself for the hesitation and stepped forward. This might make a great chapter in his next book on the monsters hiding in the ocean.

The technician slid open the slab and horror unfolded before my eyes.

“It–it really is special,” he said, almost breathless as he took in the boneless body, its translucent tentacles swirling around the monster’s mouth and its bulbous eyes in their infinite inky depths. Across what he could only assume was the monster’s equivalent of a head, a single occult pattern was embedded into its delicate scales in thin, precise, dark lines.

“If I didn’t know better,” he breathed, unaware that he was talking aloud, “I’d swear that that was a tattoo of quite ancient and evil intent…”

“Yes, Sir,” the technician blurted out, “That is a tattoo of the Devil’s Mark. This creature is from Lucifer himself, an agent of Jones that crawled out of his Locker somewhere out there.”

***

Entrails and three hearts lay around him. Blood soaked gauze rested heavily in his hands as the room grew darker each moment that he stared at what he had found.

Except for its vicious teeth, the creature was completely boneless. Halfway to a jellyfish but with apt and likely very maneuverable tentacles like an octopus. It was large too and likely to be about the size of a man if floating out in the water, though some of the tentacles stretched out almost double that length. At the centre of the monster’s mass was its brain, larger than expected, and a face with multiple–seventeen in total–black, bulbous eyes looking out in a nearly full circle around it. Beneath the mass, circled with tentacles and topped with its ink-black eyes, lay the horror’s mouth. It was a gaping, maw with the only solid items in this gelatinous terror: vicious teeth. Rows and rows of sharp, pointed teeth, hooked slightly backward and leading into the creature’s stomach that fed three individual hearts.

It was in these rows of nightmarish teeth that he had found it. Cutting it out, careful not to damage the rest of the creature, he had laid it before him and now he could not look away.

Before him lay a dental insertion. An implant. Effectively, it looked like it was a filling, much like a dentist would place over a rotting tooth.

A very small item in and of itself torn from the vicious maw of this monster, but it belied a deeper truth. It hinted at something far below and creeping around us that we were not aware of. It hinted at organization and sophistication that we were not aware of and had not documented nor accounted for…

He shivered as he thought about it.

Who or what had put that filling into what was obviously a deep-sea horror before him?

Someone or something had put it there. It meant that something had the intent, means and the ability to put it there. And the consciousness. It meant that the strange, occult pattern in this monsters forehead was likely a tattoo equivalent.

It meant that there was something civilized, organized and unknown out there.

“Forget space,” he shivered, whispering to himself and suddenly aware of how cold it was in that room, “We are not alone on our own planet.”

Another shiver ran down his spine. Where-oh-where did this current sweep the ocean depths from?

The autopsy–he had decided that the creature must have been conscious, so that made this not a dissection and actually an autopsy–was being done over a table at the back of the room. This basic facility had the floor running slightly down to a gutter where the blood could drain out of. Indeed, the creature’s inky black blood was dripping off the table and running down this drain.

He wondered where it drained, and suddenly he felt sick. Were there more of them out there? What did their civilization look like? Why had they never made contact with the rest of us living on the same planet?

He felt really sick. The room began to spin and he lurched toward the toilet…

***

He gasped upwards for air before going back down. Head-first in the mortuary toilet, his stomached convulsed a final push to evacuate his stomach. The creature is all just a brain, a stomach and a mouth with teeth, he thought, imagining the cold, dark primal hunger driving such a creature forward.

Sighing, he stood up, wiped his mouth and washed his face. He was stronger than this. This would make a whole book on its own.

Clenching his jaw, he pushed away from the sink and turned to walk back to the autopsy of the monster. Beast? Creature?

Being…

His mind was a mess as he pushed back the toilet door and stepped out into the morgue.

Tentacles wrapped around a vicious maw atop a scaled nightmare faced him. But it was standing erect on the rippling, slimy tentacles around its floating, black-inky eyes. All seventeen of them, all focussing directly on him. It was holding the remains of what he had carved up in the name of science.

He froze. The creature froze. And the sea outside paused, shadows lurking in its depths…

Then he cried out, stumbling forward to the creature. Only in hindsight did he wonder what he would have done if he had reached it? The creature shrieked–a high-pitched gurgle–as it grabbed it’s fallen, dissected comrade and leaped back to the small, twisted drain that all the inky-black blood had drained into.

Years later, he would still be trying to understand what he saw. But, in the darkest hours of the longest nights, he knew that what he thought he saw.

All that was and should never be, twisted into the slime that fills the darkest crevices of the deepest oceans and, sucked with it the evidence of its dead brethren. Unbelievable and incredible to watch, the man-sized gelatinous being contorted and slipped between the grates of the drain, pulling its falling brethren with its, like an octopus squeezing into the smallest of cracks between rocks.

And then it was gone. Down the drain, through the pipe and lord-knows-where?

But he knew. Yes, in his heart of hearts he knew where that drain led: the ocean. The dark, mysterious current-swept ocean just off the coast of the quaint, chill Blackpool Bay.

The sea had claimed its secret back and he was left with a haunting thought: Maybe they had never wanted to be found? Maybe they chose to remain secret?

Blackpool Bay, General Fiction, Horror & Dark Fiction

The Benjamin Tree

“Oh, the tree comes with the apartment,” the Estate Agent mentioned waving at it as they moved through the lounge area, “The previous owner considers it part of 307’s furnishings.”

The tree was small–head-height–and had a trunk that was made up of what looked like thick, gray, twirling vines that held a clump of large, bright-green, oblong leaves. It sat in a knee-high pot decorated with intricate carvings and strange oriental-looking letters cut finely into it.

“It’s called a Benjamin Tree,” he said, “It’s the official tree of Bangkok, actually.”

“Oh,” the Estate Agent paused in her sales pitch, “I thought it was a Weeping Fig?”

“Yes,” he nodded before moving on with her, “That’s another name for it. I prefer the former name. Say, why is the previous owner selling here? Ocean View seems so quaint.”

“Oh, he used to work at the docks. Import-export or something, I believe. He won the lottery last week so he is returning to his family in New York,” the Estate Agent said, “It’s a pity the money doesn’t ever stay in Blackpool Bay, really. We could use it here. Why are you moving all the way out here?”

The furnished apartment was not massive. They had walked through most of it and were standing back in the lounge by now. It had a window that overlooked the gray ocean with the dingy docks below. He could see a twitchy-looking man loading what looked like diving gear into a small fishing boat and he watched intently for a moment wondering what this man was doing.

“I’m a writer,” he muttered back and then turned and faced the Estate Agent, “I’m a writer and I need a place to disappear to and write. This one looks perfect. The Benajim Tree can stay.”

***

A year and a bit later, he was sipping his morning coffee and staring out of the lounge window. The local morning newspaper lay on his lap. The ocean in Blackpool Bay never changed; it was always gray and stormy with dark, distrusting waters under a brooding near-storm sky. It all just reflected this town’s forgotten place and constantly surprising secrets.

They had even tried to build a highway through the mountains to connect Blackpool Bay to civilization, but a worker had died under questionable circumstances and the funders had pulled out.

The writing had gone brilliantly and his new book had only just been published. He remained here, though, as he liked the solitude of the place. Although he considered himself a city person, something about Blackpool Bay made it hard to leave.

Perhaps born out curiosity or a little boredom, he had begun researching the previous owner. Talking to the neighbors he had found a full name and the Internet had provided the rest: born in New York, Nathan Midlane had moved out to Blackpool Bay for work and then won the lottery and moved back.

It was a simple story, but the newspaper in his lap told a darker ending than he would have expected. He would never have guessed that Nathan Midlane’s story was a tragedy but the newspaper loudly declared it: “Blackpool Bay Man Wins Lottery & Dies“.

It had happened a week ago but only been reported here this morning. Time moved differently out here in Blackpool Bay. The line in the story that surprised him was the opening line: “Another former-resident in Apartment 307, Ocean View, has met a tragic end…”

He found himself looking at the Benjamin Tree deep in thought. The spidery oriental writing on its pot looked faintly sinister. He wondered when Nathan Midlane had acquired the thing? He wondered from whom he had done so? He wondered what the strange language or symbols on its pot meant?

Just then his phone rang. He snapped out of it and finished his coffee. It was now cold but he gulped it down, stood up and walked across to his phone.

“Hello?” he answered, not looking at who was calling.

“How’s the writing?” his Agent’s familiar voice crackled on the other side of the line. It sounded really far away. The reception was not great out here in Blackpool Bay and it just added to this place’s isolation. Sometimes the phones all just went dead and no one knew why.

“Uh, it’s fine, I suppose,” he mumbled, unsure how to respond, “What else is up?”

“That’s not why I am calling,” his Agent started talking, the sheer excitement audible in his faint, crackling voice, “Some major blogger read your book. She wrote about it and tweeted. A bunch more picked up on this and did the same. It’s trending. Your book is trending. They love it. They all love it! Your book is now front shelf and ranked in top ten on Amazon. Go check it out! Rolling Stones want an interview and the BBC has asked for a quote…”

***

He put down the phone and leaned back on the couch in Apartment 307, Ocean View. Even the name had started sounding ominous to him. The twisted trunk of the Benjamin Tree in its sinister pot cover with spidery runes looked back at him. The ocean remained gray under the foreboding sky.

All the rest was silence. It was so quiet out here. It was like man and the entirety of his little civilization was just a brief flicker of light in a cosmic darkness that reached across time and space in crushing size and scope and, far out here, Blackpool Bay was surrounded by endless amounts of it…

While his book continued to reach highs out there in the world, he felt a million miles away from it. Perhaps he was a million miles away living out here in eerie Blackpool Bay.

But none of this consumed his thoughts these days. He had been investigating Apartment 307, Ocean View. He had been digging for the truth and it was far darker than he had ever imagined.

He had reached out to the journalist at the local paper. The journalist had sent him a number of other clippings going back some years.

A couple year ago, before Nathan Midlane had moved into Apartment 307, the previous owners–a certain, Miley and Marc Cohen–had died shortly after moving into a fancy house in Main Road here. Speaking to some locals down at the pub, the best he could piece together was that the Cohens had made a large amount of money from investments. Unfortunately, a strange fire in their new house in Main Road had seen them burnt to death. Strangely, most of the house had escaped unscathed.

Before the Cohen’s, though, a lesser known, Catherine McDougle, had lived a quiet, spinster life here for many decades. Little seemed to be known about her, except that she had died shortly after moving to live with family in Washington. She was old and the coroner had ruled her death natural, or so the article had claimed.

Upon her death, though, to the Blackpool Bay residents’ surprise, McDougle’s fortune had been donated to the Masonic Museum in London. It had been the largest public donation ever on record. The Museum had gone on record thanking her for it. Everyone was flabbergasted at the fortune McDougle had quietly amassed while living in the modest Apartment 307, Ocean View.

He could not find any older records of any earlier owners of Apartment 307, Ocean View. But what he did find in one of the earliest articles of McDougle was quite disturbing: “We will all fondly remember McDougle. My personal memory will always be her sitting in her favorite seat next to her special Weeping Fig tree and recounting her days in the Society abroad where she collected many such wonders…”

He had sat upright when he had read that. He found himself looking more and more at the inconspicuous Benjamin Tree and its sinister pot that quietly stood in the corner of his modest lounge.

***

“So you can interpret it then?” he asked, trying to sound calm, but instead a near-feverish eagerness came through in his voice, “Can you understand it then?”

An old, scholarly Chinese man was in Apartment 307, Ocean View, and looking at the Benjamin Tree. More specifically, the man was bending down and attempting to read the spidery runes cut finely into its pot.

“The writing is a version of Archaic Mandarin from the First or Second Imperial Dynasty. Yes, probably from the Han Dynasty. It is strangely phrased with ambiguity,” the scholar paused, chuckling to himself, “It is actually quite witty if I am correct.”

With that, the scholar stood up and turned to him. He felt his heart pounding and his palms sweaty. Within his clenched fists at his side, he dug his nails into his palms. It was all he could do to stay calm. Outside the gray, foreboding sky and its ominous clouds seemed to be holding their breath as they peered inside the gloomy Apartment 307.

“Could–could you please,” he took a deep breath and tried to continue calmly, “please tell me what you read?”

The scholar smiled and motioned at the pot and its twisted, green Benjamin Tree.

“Old Chinese folktales talk of a Money Tree,” the scholar began slowly, picking up the pace as he spoke, the tree and its pot just sat there listening, “Literally, a tree on which money grows. A woodcutter once tricked a village into cutting down a tree that he wanted. He did this by sticking money on it. But, once the tree had been cut down and taken back to the village, it had regrown, twisting its hacked stem back and pushing out its sickly green leaves. The woodcutter had been angry and had tried to cut down the tree but the villages–still believing the tree to magical–attacked and killed the woodcutter. The village was prosperous for years thereafter, until a stranger had stolen it in the night. Shortly after then, a plague had wiped out all the villagers. It is said that this Money Tree brought luck to those that had it and misfortune to those that lost it.”

The scholar finished his tale with a smile, seeming quite satisfied with himself.

“Yes,” he said abruptly, feeling anger and frustration rising inside himself, “But what does the writing say?”

The scholar nodded and pointed at the pot again, moving his finger as he read it out loud.

“I believe that this is an old Hang Dynasty artifact–probably worth a tidy sum of money!–but it seems to keep referencing the Money Tree folktale with a simple palindrome that repeats across the design here and here and over there too. It simply says: ‘Dead lucky or lucky dead‘.”

Far away, he could almost hear the noise of civilization and his book shooting up the rankings with the steady clink of money flowing in. And, trapped all the way out in Blackpool Bay that distant metallic sound just sounded like chains being tightened around him. One by one, inch by inch and moment by moment, he was suffocating in Apartment 307, Ocean View.

The Benjamin Tree in its sinister pot with spidery runes carried on standing there. It was taunting him, its prisoner, and just daring him to leave…

Blackpool Bay, Horror & Dark Fiction

Being in the Mist

“Hopefully he dies soon. We can’t delay the tunnel anymore and there is less paperwork with a death than a disability. The tunnel must happen.”

Edward Athelard was shocked at the speaker. He just stood in the hospital with his mouth open gawking at her. His Grandmother had taken over the family business after his Grandfather had disappeared. This was before he was born. He had never seen her shed a tear and he knew she could be cold, but this was severe.

“Come on, Edward, let’s go home. There is nothing we can do here,” she turned and walked away without looking back. He instinctively trotted after her, trying to think what to say.

***

The Athelard family–or what was left of them–owned a large, profitable fishing fleet in Blackpool Bay. Edward’s Great Grandfather had started the business with a single boat and his Grandmother had grown it into a small empire with his help while his brother sat as Mayor of the town. Their parents had both died when they were young, so this was all that they had. It was all that they knew.

The tunnel was going to connect the new, shiny highway through the Old Mountains. You need to know how old the Old Mountains were to be called ‘old’, but they predated pretty much everything and wrapped around Blackpool Bay, isolating it on the coast from the rest of civilization.

Both sides of the new highway had been built. It had been agonizingly slow work cutting through the Old Mountain. Some of the construction crew had started fighting and complaining about strange things, but, eventually, those that remained had completed everything but the tunnel. The final tunnel boring needed to be done through a particularly ragged peak in the middle of the range that would connect the two halves of the highway.

Without the tunnel, there was no highway. And, without the highway, Blackpool Bay’s economy–most fish exports and everything else imports–had to either go by ship to the nearest port or take the Old Road. The journey by ship was slow and expensive while the Old Road was an exceedingly long, single-lane nightmare to the nearest town. Neither were good options, but the highway would change this.

Grandmother was right, Edward thought reluctantly, Not about Jim dying, but about the tunnel being completed. He knew the construction engineer who was lying in the hospital on life-support. It was a small town and they had all grown up together. He felt terrible that Jim had come out of the half-finished tunnel hurt. He still did not understand how it had happened and nothing Jim had said since had made sense. But, he knew he needed to make sure that it did not happen again.

After dropping Grandmother off at their family home at 2 Main Road–she was as cold and silent as ever on the drive back–Edward turned the car around and decided to head out to the construction site himself. He wanted to know what happen or, at least, try to make sure it did not happen again.

***

It was late when Edward got to the tunnel entrance. All the construction warnings were proudly displayed there. A single guard was on duty to make sure that no one accidentally–or otherwise–wandered into the dangerous, gaping maw of this hole that was half-bored into the mountainside. He briefly wondered how the Old Mountain must be feeling about this, but then dismissed the thought and put on his safety gear.

He nodded at the guard at the entrance, Joey. He had been to his wedding some years back. If he remembered correctly, Joey had a kid on the way soon.

“Ah, Mr Athelard, are you sure–” Joey started, but Edward dismissed him.

“Don’t worry, Joey, I’m just going to check it out. I’ll be careful.”

“No, it’s not that, Mr Athelard,” Joey stumbled a bit over the words, looking sheepish, “It’s just that something feels wrong about things in there. Just, ah, yes, be careful.” He finished lamely.

Edward smiled and nodded, patting Joey on the shoulder as he passed him and entered the tunnel.

The atmosphere changed almost the moment he was inside the tunnel. The distant sound of the ocean fell away and he felt surrounded by a thick, old darkness. The air was damp and his heart began to beat faster.

He clicked on his headlamp and his hand-held flashlight. Their light did not pierce the darkness very far, but he could see that the walls were wet and there was a faint mist in the tunnel. The mist seemed to get thicker deeper in the tunnel. He shivered slightly, it was cold in here.

He took a deep breath and began to walk deeper into the tunnel.

***

Deep inside the tunnel, the mist was so thick that he could not see both sides at once. The mist seemed to seep out of the very rocks themselves, smothering and consuming everything around it. It even felt like it had a weight, pressing down on him.

He had reached the idle boring machine and the rock face where Jim’s accident had apparently happened. But there was nothing here? It all looked fine as far as he could see. Though, with the mist, he could not see very far.

What was that?

He was sure he had heard someone say something. He swung around and looked, but with the mist he could not be sure. He could not see much beyond a few feet in front of him. He stepped forward and suddenly he could not see either side of the tunnel, nor, in fact, the rock face and idle boring machine. He could be anywhere in this mist. He felt a lump growing in his throat and a primal urge to abandon everything and flee this nightmare.

There! There it was again! What was that?

Now he was sure he had heard something. It sounded so near to him, but he could not make out what it was. It was definitely a voice or something resembling one.

“Hello?” he called out into the mist, “Hello, who is there?” It definitely felt like something was there. The hairs on the back of his neck were prickling.

The mist was getting thicker. He was sure of it. He reached out and he could not find the side of the tunnel. Had it not just been there a moment ago? He wondered if he was still in the tunnel? He suddenly realized that he was struggling to breathe. The mist fell malevolent and brooding, like a predator stalking its prey as he dropped to his knees, gasping for breath, his limbs getting shaky and his heart pounding in his chest.

And then he heard it clearly. It whispering in his ear, or was it directly in his mind? He understood it. He understood the desire. He felt the hunger. Its old, cold claws reached out and touched him, running down his spine and chilling his very blood. He felt his humanity draining out of him. He felt himself growing colder, but he could not move. He was powerless as the mist swirled around him and his eyes slid closed. He was not sure if he was dying or not? He was not sure if he cared or not, anymore.

He now knew what had to be done.

***

“Ah, Mr Athelard, are you OK?” Joey started as Edward suddenly stepped from the dark tunnel entrance, “You were gone quite a while?”

He looked coldly at his employee and nodded.

“Yes, I am fine,” he said, as he strode right past him. He had somewhere he needed to be.

A little over twenty minutes later, he stepped from his car into the hospital parking lot. It was empty, but that was not strange. It was well past midnight by now and this was a small town.

He walked straight into the hospital. There was a receptionist at the front desk, but she was fast asleep. He walked by her and down the passage to the ICU. There were no guards posted there or even a single soul that was not either dying or fast asleep.

In that hospital at midnight, he felt as alone as he had felt in the mist. It felt exactly like he was in the mist. Had he even left the mist, he wondered? Had he even left the tunnel? He dismissed such fanciful thoughts. He had a job to do.

He stood over Jim’s unconscious form lying quietly in the hospital bed. The life-support system quietly beeped away, its lights blinking on and off. Its machines pushed blood through his veins and inflated and deflated his lungs with the monotonous rhythm of life.

He reached out and touched Jim. His skin was cold and wet. It felt like the mist. He now understood. The mist had touched him too, but not in the same way.

He reached out and turned off the alarms. He and Jim had gone to school together. They had both dated the same girl but in different grades. He turned and pulled the life-support’s plug out from the wall. He watched the flashing monitor go dead, all the light go off and everything fall silent. He had dated the girl first, but he could not remember her name anymore.

Jim’s body spasmed a couple of times and then it fell still.

Edward Athelard did not smile. Nor did he cry. In fact, he barely acknowledged what had just happened, other than to bend down and whisper in Jim’s unhearing ear:

“The tunnel must happen, Jim. It must happen, and you know why. It touched you too.”

Blackpool Bay, Horror & Dark Fiction, Science Fiction

Pillars in the Deep

The whole Blackpool Bay dock area smelt like fish. Old, barnacled fishing boats lined its sides as weathered men dourly stomped awkwardly around with seemingly uncertain land-legs. Fish and other slimy things were hidden away in crates and being loaded into small, unmarked vans. Even the old man behind the front desk at the seedy B&B looked a bit like a fish, bulbous eyes and scaly skin around a small, piscine mouth.

He could not wait to be under the waves. He could not wait to be away from all this offputting small-townness.

That night, in his cramped little room, he read and re-read the passages from the old, tattered diary his mother had left him. He had never known his father but he felt a bit closer to him coming here. He could not wait to get under the waves. He fell asleep like that and dreamt about large, looming dark shapes that whispered to him from the ocean’s depths.

***

The world changes the moment one slips beneath the waves. The sound, light and speed of the above world disappear. They are replaced by silence, darkness and a smooth, elegance in one’s movement that he liked to imagine astronauts experienced in outer space. He had always felt very comfortable under water.

All he could hear was his own breath as he descended below the water beside the rock. The locals did not seem to have much to say about it but the old diary spoke about “the lone rock halfway out of Blackpool’s bay”.

This was it. This was that rock.

The top of the rock was weathered and covered in barnacles and seaweed. Even a few feet down, this muck all obfuscated what he was looking for.

And then there it was!

A few feet below the water level, the rock’s form began to smooth. Its surface began to appear square. The flowing, bunched seaweed growing from it ended. And, the rock started to look more like it was a carved pillar.

He sank slowly deeper and deeper, besides the old pillar. He was now sure of this. Like the diary said, as he went deeper, the manmade nature of the pillar became more obvious. At certain points, he thought he even saw indentations like designs–swirling and fluid–that might have been designs carved into this ancient structure. They had likely been weathered away by thousands of years of the ocean pushing passed it.

Eventually, he came back up to the boat. The light and sound hit him first. He instantly missed the underwater but it was time to go back to shore. He had not gotten to the bottom of the pillar. He had not even seen the bottom yet. He could not believe that it went that deep. It was only a mile or two from shore on the edge of the bay. He made a mental note to bring extra oxygen, lighting and some flares tomorrow.

***

That night, while he hungrily ate some strange, seafood stew, the piscine innkeeper politely enquired as to what he had seen out there.

He smiled and recounted the strange pillar that lay nearly outside of the bay. He asked, rhetorically, who could have built it and why?

The innkeeper smiled–with his face, the smile looked like an octopus squeezing through a small hole–and replied that perhaps whoever had built it underwater had meant it to stay there. It almost sounded like a warning or a threat.

He had smiled and laughed at this absurd statement. Obviously, this pillar had been built ages ago on dry land and the ocean had crept inland and covered it up. This much was logical. He snorted at this absurd small-townness and continued with his meal.

Later that night, tossing and turning in his room, he could not stop thinking about how bizarre the innkeepers logic was. When he eventually fell asleep, his dreams were again filled with large, dark things whispering strange things to him from below the waves. One of them, in particular, rose from these dark waters and slithered up onto land towards him.

He awoke in the morning covered in sweat but he could remember no more details of what had bothered his dreams so.

***

Far below the waves, besides the smooth pillar, he cracked an underwater flare. Its red light flared out, casting a hellish, red colour in the darkness around him and the stone beside him.

He let go of the flare and watched it sink slowly further and further down. It was a long time and the red light was a small speck before he thought he saw it come to rest.

He almost felt relieved, but he mentally snorted at himself. Of course there was a bottom to this strange bay’s ocean floor. Nothing went on forever. There was always a bottom.

He had an extra oxygen tank with him, and he began to descend further. His eyes kept glancing at the red light on the ocean floor, but he was more focused on the pillar that slid by him. The deeper he got, the more detailed the designs on it became. He was starting to make out figures amidst the swirls and curves carved into the stone. The figures seemed almost-human but had fish-like faces, gills in their necks and webbed hands and feet. Some stood in strange poses while other carried forked weapons or bunches of other, smaller fish.

What an incredible civilization had produced such vivid art, he pondered as he floated deeper and deeper down. What other wonders could such a lost civilization be hiding? What could have motivated such a civilization to build such a pillar and for what purpose?

He was nearly at the flare now. He could see it resting amidst scattered stones on the ocean floor. Its hellish red light cracking against the darkness down there. It cast eerie shadows that wicked darted through the ocean floor’s crevices. He swore he saw one of these shadows actually slither away. It looked like a silvery humanoid shape for a split second before slipping out of the light and back into the darkness down there. He quickly dismissed the thought. If anything it was probably a fish or octopus or something else that had caught his eye.

The fishmen–as he now mentally called them–carved into the pillar were now clearly visible. Some of the carvings were in nearly pristine cut down here, which surprised him. They should all be equally as worn away. Surely.

Unless someone or something was preserving them down here?

He instantly dismissed this absurd thought and focussed on what was before him.

He had reached the ocean floor. Finally down there, he realized that the scattered stones were not random. They looked like the remains of an old road. This was not in his old diary. Perhaps this was one of those old Roman roads but curiosity clutched him and set off swimming down this old, lost road.

The road led straight out from the pillar at the edge of the bay into the open ocean. He had only a little bit left in his oxygen tank, so he decided that he would go until it finished before switching over to his remaining tank and heading back to the surface.

The old road led to the edge of an underwater cliff. Swimming up to it, he saw the coastal plate fall away suddenly and dramatically to reveal the true open ocean.

But, vastly more surprising, far down there at the bottom, he saw the road continue. It must be a bit less than hundred or so feet further down. It must have been miles away, but, for some reason, there was some latent light down there. It had an eerie blue-silver colour to it. And, amidst this light far down there, he saw another pillar. In fact, the old road went straight out away from the coast and the quiet little bay, and it was dotted on both sides for as far as he could see with these vast, huge pillars.

And then he saw movement.

Far down there, just above the old road and between the great pillars, there was something. It was small and silvery but it floated upright like a man would. He was sure he saw something forked in its hand, or its fin. And it was looking directly at him; directly at where he floated atop the underwater cliff.

For what felt like an eternity, he floated there looking at this thing looking at him.

Suddenly, his oxygen tank flashed a warning at him. He looked down, checking its level on his arm. It was almost finished, and so he flipped it over to his spare tank.

When he looked up, there was just the old road dotted with these huge, ancient pillars leading straight out into the ocean. Whatever thing had just been there looking him was now gone. He was alone atop that underwater cliff but it still felt like something old, dark and slimy was watching him.

***

The next morning, he was still thinking about what he might have seen below the water. He wondered if his father had ever seen something like it. There was no mention of this in his diary. The strange creature that had floated down there felt further and further away from real-life. He was starting to think that he could not have seen it correctly. It was probably his memory embellishing it.

He was sitting outside a small cafe on the docks. It was not fancy but it was in walking distance from his fishy little B&B and it served nice strong coffee. He was still not sleeping well. His dreams kept on being haunted by something that slithered out of the sea to confront him.

He sighed and slouched back in his chair. Soon he would have to leave and go back to the real world. Soon all this would be a distant memory too. He tried to forget the strange dreams and the weird sights below the waves. Rather, he looked around, trying to burn the images into his brain of the quaint Blackpool Bay docks and all its shapes and forms of life. It was strange to think that he, however distant and unknown, had a tie back to this place. He wanted to try and remember every detail.

The old, barnacled fishing boat lined the harbour. Crates filled with fish and other things from the deep were being offloaded most of the boats. Small vans zoomed around the docks, being loaded up with these crates.

And then there were the people:

Weather, old barnacled men stomped around the docks. Many of them looked decidedly uncomfortable walking on land. He chuckled to himself as he imagined them as the relatives of the strange fishmen he had seen carved onto the pillars in the deep. But then the more he thought about it, the more he looked, and the more fish-like the people around him looked. Wrinkled, dried out fish that kept returning to their home waters each morning on their boats. He started looking around for gills in their necks, and many indeed had tattoos there. Maybe that is how they hide them, he pondered, his heart starting to beat faster in his chest. One, two, no, a handful–no every single one of these people had these strangely, round heads with large eyes just a little too far apart, much like a fish’s eyes. Perhaps, he began to think to his horror, perhaps the innkeeper is right and that pillars were built below the waves in the first place. Perhaps they were built a civilization of fishmen who later crawled out from beneath the waves and now hide in plain sight…?

“Hey, you want another coffee or anything, sir?” a voice interrupted his strange musings. He almost jumped out of his chair but regained his composure quickly.

He looked to his side and saw the waitress. She was a small, squid-like girl with long, curly hair much like tentacles wrapped around her bulbous head. He found himself checking her neck for gills but she was wearing an old, red scarf there.

“Uh, no thanks,” he replied, “Just the bill thanks. I have to go home,” and then, to his surprise, he volunteered something unnecessary, “It’s inland. I’m going inland.”

The waitress nodded and smiled at him before turning and slithering back to get the bill for him. He distinctly felt like he a small, defenseless fish floating around dark rocks where tentacles could whip out any moment. A cold shiver ran down his spine and he made a mental note to never come back here, diary or no diary.

Blackpool Bay, Horror & Dark Fiction, Romance, Science Fiction

The Old Man and the Stars

As evening fell in the quiet town of Blackpool Bay, a strange man walked into the General Store. No one had seen him arrive, but no one had been specifically looking. This was all a bit unusual, as few people travelled this far along the coast and outsiders stuck out in town.

The stranger was tall, thin and quite hairless with immensely pale skin. His long black trenchcoat covered him like a second skin while square, functional dark-glasses hid his eyes. His smile was cold when he enquired of the location of Callum Road from the young boy working the desk in the store.

Callum Road ran through the old industrial edge of town and there was only one residential house on it. While other buildings dotted the road, most of them were empty warehouses from an age before the railroad had been diverted inland. Many years ago, an old mayor had tried to rejuvenate the place with a small park in one of the open plots along Callum Road, but that mayor was long gone and no one except the Old Man now used that overgrown park.

The Stranger nodded his thanks to the young boy, turned, and left the store without another word. The boy swallowed and wondered why his heart was beating so fast. And, in Callum Road, the Old Man stepped from his small house, walking stick in hand and began tottering down his walkway to the small park and the even smaller bench that lay down Callum Road.

Even the locals of Blackpool Bay knew little about the Old Man. He had moved to Blackpool Bay many years ago but kept to himself. He would buy odds and ends from the General Store and occasionally ask people awkward questions, but Callum Road was removed from the rest of town and no one ever visited him.

Sometimes, a local passerby would see the Old Man sitting on the bench at the park down Callum Road. He would be just sitting there staring at the night sky. This far from the lights of cities and civilisation, the stars came out in all their glory encrusting the cosmos in twinkling splendour as this small, spinning, insignificant planet spun its way through the Milky Way. The night skies just outside of Blackpool Bay were incredible and they were not the strangest thing to be sitting and looking at.

This was such an evening with the cosmic display twinkling in all its infinite beauty. And, so, the Old Man sat on his bench quietly looking upwards at the stars.

“Why is there moisture on your face? Is your body leaking?”

The Stranger was standing behind the Old Man. There had been no noise of his approach. He stepped forward and took a seat next to the Old Man on the bench. The Old Man never so much as glanced at him, his gaze directed squarely at the stars in the night sky.

“Human’s call it ‘tears’. It is the physical manifestation of ‘sorrow’. If you live long enough amongst them, you start to pick up some of their traits,’ the Old Man began talking slowly, but then started picking up pace like he had wanted to say these things for a very long time, “I have a theory that I actually had those emotionally traits all along, but I was unaware of them. I think we are all unaware of them. Sure, we can travel further and faster than humans and we have better technology, but humans are far more emotionally evolved than we are and we can learn great things from them about this hidden knowledge.”

The Stranger takes off his dark-glasses and holds them in his lap where he neatly folded his hands. He glances at the Old Man–who has not moved his gaze from the stars above–and then turns and looks to the night sky.

“We sent you down in a pair–” the Stranger starts talking, but the Old Man turns and looks straight at him, abruptly interrupting him with a dry chuckle.

“You always send us down in pairs. Always in pairs,” the Old Man leans forward and wipes away a tear from his eyes before continuing, “My other half is gone. My partner’s cosmic light expired when one of the human’s mechanical mobile devices, a Mercedes Benz, driven by an intoxicated driver skipped a red light and hit her crossing a road. This was thirteen years ago. Human’s call it ‘passing away’. She passed away thirteen years ago.”

The Stranger’s face was impenetrable, but his gaze turned from the stars above to the Old Man next to him. The Old Man now had tears openly slipping down his face.

“She passed away in my arms, and thirteen years have passed since then. This body you gave me has aged and it is starting to expire, but all I want is my partner back,” the Old Man wipes his eyes and sighs deeply, before turning back to look at the stars twinkling far above, “Many humans believe that there is life after death, and I do hope so. Even though her body is gone, her cosmic light could still have been captured by one us out there, surely? I keep searching for her somewhere out there in one of our galaxies, or some hidden part of the cosmos that we will yet discover…”

The Old Man’s voice fades and he drops his gaze to the ground. The Stranger is still looking at him.

“I do not understand,” the Stranger shakes his head, “What are you doing? What are you talking about? Perhaps we left you on this planet too long, but I look forward to the full report.”

The Old Man turns to the Stranger and smiles.

“Of all the things I have learnt here and of all the things that humans have taught me, this is the greatest knowledge of all: what I am feeling is love, and we can all feel that too. Love is the greatest of all emotions, and I will teach our people it. Come, it is time to go. I will tell you all about it back home.”

The Stranger nods, the Old Man smiles, and then the bench is empty.

The Old Man will never be seen, nor will the Stranger. But, the next day, local talk buzzes about two particularly bright shooting stars that flew low over Blackpool Bay late that night. A few locals even swore that they saw a third shooting star up there join the passage of the other two.