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.

A note about tonight's story

After yesterday's post about Britain's most common phobias including Coulrophobia, the fear of clowns, I couldn't resist dedicating a story to our custard pie-flinging slapstick friends.

Maybe after writing this short piece, I do understand how people can fear clowns. The idea of a smiling, loveable and innocent children's entertainer hiding a malevolent and murderous soul beneath the grease paint is a very disturbing concept.

I mean, just what do those clowns get up to once the show is over, the people have trodden away from the big top across a muddy field, and the campsite lies quiet? Perhaps there's still the smell of popcorn and candy floss on the air, a few lights twinkling in the performer's trailers, the stillness only broken by the sound of lunatic cackling from the clowns as they prepare their evening feast....

Tonight's short but certainly not sweet terror tale: Fears of a Clown

Fears of a Clown

The corporate world was no place for me. It broke me. Took my livelihood, my wife, and for a while, my sanity.

The circus took me in, offered me a new life, a new identity. A clown. Something I’d loved since childhood.

The other clowns aren’t as I imagined. Away from the big top, they change. They frighten me. After the show, strange voices, singing, demented laughter can be heard from their trailer deep into the night.

Last night, I peered in the window. They were cutting strips of flesh from a living child, putting them in hot dog buns.

On writing, my 100 word flash fiction stories and the great fears of the British public.

I hope somebody out there is enjoying my flash fiction horror stories, I'm certainly enjoying writing them. I am going to try, whenever reasonably possible, to write one every day. I'm doing this to help get me into good practise of writing every day, to hopefully encourage people to regularly view my blog, and also as an exercise to hone my skills.

You'd find, if you really wanted to count, that every one of my flash fiction terror tales is exactly 100 words long; not 99, not 101, precisely 100; a century. To write any kind of story whilst adhering to that rule is challenging, but to send a little frisson of fear through your reader's breast is very difficult indeed. Hopefully I've succeeded in doing that with my stories, or at least in provoking your interest.

Either way, feel free to leave comments. I've set this blog up so anyone can post on it, you don't need to log in with a username/password. Whether you want to lavish me with praise, or unleash a torrent of hellish abuse on me, I want to hear your thoughts!

                                                                          ****

An interesting article in today's Independent about a survey conducted on the yougov website to discover the nation's greatest phobia. Fear of heights proved to be number one, which I found rather surprising. In fact, I feel rather cheated that the nation's greatest fear could be something so mundane. Heights? Come on, show some imagination!

A couple of more interesting phobias cropped up in the top 13 (see what they did there?) such as Ophidiophobia (fear of snakes), Hemophobia (fear of blood), but by far the most interesting for me was Coulrophobia, the fear of clowns. Clowns. They are quite macabre and scary beings in many ways, and yet can reduce people to fits of laughter. What does this say about what we find funny and what we find frightening? Is there a very fine line between the two? Is this why many people laugh at those 'home videos' of people falling over, or stand up comedians that single audience members out for abuse? Because they're actually afraid of it happening to them and relieved it's not?

Clowns. Interesting.