Trouble at the Mill - New Story

Check out my latest story to be published on the awesome Popcorn Horror website. If you haven't visited it before, you should check it out. It's full of excellent indie horror content from up and coming film makers, artists and writers, like yours truly!

http://popcornhorror.com/trouble-mill/

This is a longer tale than the flash fiction I've been publishing on this blog lately, and is an exploration of a number of ideas I've been mulling over for some time. Essentially, the industrial past meets the corporate homogenised present with some spectacularly nasty results.

Enjoy.

Tonight's Short Story: A Far Greater Pain

A Far Greater Pain

They say there’s no greater pain for a parent than burying your own child. They’re wrong, of course. Hearing muffled screams from beneath the earth after the burial is far worse.

Neil was two, mauled to death by our neighbour’s dogs. He died in my arms while the neighbour smoked weed.

But I heard him thumping his coffin, crying.  I was dragged away from the cemetery, screaming and clawing.

Now I’m home and he’s here with me. Says I left him to die underground, let him down.

He demands milk, he suckles me then bites. His teeth are like needles.

The Great Cull - The lady of the estate hunts vermin on her grounds and unearths something more ghastly than herself...

The Great Cull

The damnable little things live under the Oak at the back of my grounds. Filthy vermin, full of disease. Infect my livestock.

Always hated that Oak, since I was a girl. Twisted, ancient thing.

I had my man, Higgins, procure some gas to address the problem.

It’s illegal, but what rot. Send the little bastards to sleep. Peaceful, really.

Higgins throws it down the dark hole between the roots like I tell him. I can hear things moving under the earth.

Something’s coming up. Eyes flaming red, knowing, angry. Licks its lips, tongue lolling over huge incisors.

That’s no badger.

Hunting? It's a Right Royal Gas

So Princess Anne has decided the way to protect the livestock paid for by the UK taxpayers on her vast estate is to gas any resident badgers, thus eliminating the alleged risk of her luxury moo cows contracting TB.

This is a practise that was outlawed in 1982, but I very much doubt the royal cretin realises, or cares, about that fact. Laws are for commoners after all, to stop any of the great unwashed getting uppity and threatening the lives of the privileged.

I find something about the concept of a member of the monarchy standing by while canisters of cyanide hiss under the ground, filling the homes of innocent woodland creatures with noxious death intensely disturbing.

What would she be doing? Laughing and joking while the 'little chaps pop off to sleep'? Would she be there when they pulled their lifeless bodies out of the ground?

The whole concept is deeply unsettling to me. Perhaps it's the abuse of huge wealth and power to kill a helpless being; the huge disparity between the two protagonists that disturbs me. The brutal elimination of something wild and free by someone who is almost the epitome of the establishment? Yes, I think perhaps that's it.

Because we all have that cyanide canister hissing away in our home, whether we choose to acknowledge it, it's there.