A note about my 'latest' story

My most recent addition to this blog is in fact an old story I wrote a few years ago that I recently came across again. It's one of the first stories I ever wrote, and was decent enough to be runner up in a short story completion. Although there are things I would now change, I am still very proud of it, and have fond memories of writing it.

Whilst it's not a horror story like the rest on this site, it is seriously fucking dark. I mean darker than the deepest point of the blackest black hole in the outermost reaches of the darkest part of the cosmos.

It's inspired by an incident in the Yorkshire Evening Post around the time I wrote it about a raid on a Leeds brothel. It occurred to me that slavery and sexual violence and exploitation for profit exists amongst the wealth and commercialism of this modern city; the poor, the lost and the dispossessed live out lives we can't imagine, far beneath the cracks, and I guess I wanted to tell a little bit of their story.

Hope you like it.

Short Story: Voiceless

Voiceless

By

Nick Harkins

 

 

From The Yorkshire Echo

A young woman of unknown identity died of stab wounds in Leeds City Library yesterday evening. It is believed that the woman, aged between 16 and 20, could be of Eastern European origin. Police speculate that she may have been a victim of the sex trafficking phenomenon which has exploded in Leeds in the last five years. It seems that she was stabbed as she entered the building, stumbled through the doorway and collapsed. Police are appealing for witnesses, or anyone who may know the woman’s identity to come forward

They promised me work in a nursery looking after children in a big, modern city in Britain with one of the finest Universities in the country. I’d be getting good pay; more than enough to cover my living costs, and my hours would leave me more than enough time to study. I could take evening classes in anything I liked, and I would have unlimited opportunities.

A bright, beautiful girl like me could be anything I wanted there. Anything. The woman put her hand on my shoulder affectionately. Her cold blue eyes peered into mine and seemed to soften; melting like the ice in Riga when the spring comes and the Russian winds stop their remorseless assault.

The couple had approached one night me as I’d finished work at the bar I worked in in Riga. I’d seen them watching me throughout the evening as I moved between the wooden tables, carrying huge trays loaded with flagons of foaming beer for the tables of British men. They scared me these men with their flushed, leering faces and their harsh songs, bellowed at the tops of their guttural voices. Whilst some of the other girls at the bar openly flirted with them to get better tips, I would collect the bills and scurry back behind the bar.

The man and woman were sat alone at a small table in a quieter part of the bar; smartly dressed and polite. Sipping vodka and talking quietly hand in hand, sometimes kissing and often laughing together. They looked to have been in their late twenties, around ten years older than me. I remember thinking of what my parents might have been like at that age, and thinking they would probably have been much the same. My parents had died many years ago, leaving me with just my older brother to care for me.

After the bar had closed and the men had lurched off to the strip clubs, hooting and snorting like hogs, I set off on the short walk back to the tiny apartment I shared with two other girls. As I opened the door and stepped into the street, there they were. Them. The nice couple from the bar that had smiled at me, and given me a large tip and told me to treat myself were waiting for me.

I was already planning on getting myself an IPod so I could carry around all the records that reminded me of home before my parents died. My father had loved The Beatles and used to tell us that they were his brothers. We would sit in our small living room on Sunday afternoons, listening to the illicit cassette tapes my father had kept from his youth behind the Iron Curtain. Warm and happy as the snow drove against the window; big, beautiful snowflakes dancing swiftly through the chill air then tapping softly on the glass. We would laugh at father and ask him how four men from Liverpool could be his brothers, and he would laugh with us and say there were his brothers in his heart.

The lady told me her name was Velna, and introduced the man as Peteris, though as he spoke only Russian in a harsh accent I found difficult to make out, it was Velna that did most of the talking. Velna was blonde and pale skinned, with a slim, graceful figure. Her eyes were an icy piercing blue, and I felt even then that there was pain behind those eyes. I wondered what this beautiful woman had been through in her life, and felt an almost sisterly affinity for her, feeling that she was someone who had suffered like me, knowing that she would never harm me. We were the same. She had seen something in me that made her want to help me, and I was willing to do whatever she thought was best for me.

Leeds was the place, she told me. Leeds. I’d never heard of it, but that night we set out for my new life. I had nobody to tell I was going. My brother was serving in the navy; my parents were dead. I went back to the apartment and threw together some clothes, my few cd’s and the framed pictures of my family together in happier days, and set off for my new life in Leeds.

******

Velna told me eventually I’d become numb to the pain, numb to the degradation from the monsters who came to me. I didn’t listen. I would learn to switch off and take myself away somewhere I couldn’t be reached, she assured me every day.  Then before I knew it, my debt would be paid and I’d be free to start my new life. She never wanted to tell me how much of my debt was still outstanding, just that it would be soon. I would search those cold blue eyes for any trace of the kindness I had once believed in, but found none. I knew that she had done the same things many times before, and had pushed the buttons she needed to.

Her face was a brittle mask of cruel indifference at all times, hiding behind the cheap makeup she wore to disguise her diminishing looks. Only once did I see the mask slip, when I asked her how she came to be involved in such things. She had screamed at me, the vilest abuse coming from her once pretty mouth, and tears running from her eyes, no longer blue, but reddened and puffy.

I didn’t ever want to become numb. Comfortably Numb. A song my brother used to play in his room when we were young. His room with its bright, striking posters and strange books; his beloved guitar he had saved for as a teenager, and his paintings. It seemed so magical to me as a child. Dark and wonderful; a place of haunting, psychedelic music and creativity where my brother would paint or read and play his guitar, sometimes showing me how to play the chords of songs I liked, or letting me lay on the floor reading the stack of Marvel comics he loved. I was too young to understand much of the English they were written in, but I loved the vivid, colourful characters that flew through the heavens or climbed skyscrapers, punishing the bad people.

I know about bad people now; real bad people. I knew as I lay on the filthy sheets of the bed in the room they kept me in that no costumed hero was coming to save me. Nobody knew I was there. Nobody. I had wanted to call my brother before I left Riga, but Velna told me I could call when we got to Leeds. But, on arrival I was shut in this room and watched at all times with no contact with the outside world, other than the men whose lust I endure, is forbidden. They told me they know where my brother is stationed and if I try and leave, they’ll kill him. I believed them.

Every city has those who fall between the cracks, the dispossessed and the wretched; living shadowy twilight lives amongst the cafe bars and the huge corporate temples of tinted glass and concrete. I had known this even in Riga, and now I knew I myself had become part of this voiceless underclass. Would any of the countless people that walk past this house of illicit lust every day, oblivious to its true purpose, care if they knew I was here? In the three months since my arrival, each day of abuse had further confirmed my belief that they would not. Voices such as mine are not to be heard.

******

I have no idea how long I languished in that place, losing any hope of release. I rarely saw daylight, and was never allowed to leave the building. Like all the girls, I ate my meals, such as they were, in a squalid basement beneath the parlour. I was allowed one meal a day, and was given six hours to sleep between each shift. At these times, I would huddle under my thin, drab blankets and picture those days in Riga with my parents and my brother.

I soon realised it was pointless to resist the men who came to my room. If I did, I was beaten by Peteris and warned that my brother would be harmed. The men varied in age and appearance, but I rarely saw any spark of kindness or compassion in their eyes. The worst were the married men. The men in smart suits. Men with wives and children and nice houses in nice streets somewhere in the suburbs of a city I had barely seen. I always knew they were married. I knew they wanted to do with me what they wouldn’t with their wives who raised their children; raised them to be cold and cruel and to feed mercilessly on others like their fathers. They forced my flesh into submission and took me without a flicker of emotion, hating me and hating themselves and their wives and the careers they eked out in the cold, featureless towers I’d seen when they brought me here. I was the outlet, the pressure valve that stopped them going crazy; the voiceless, unseen keeper of suburban sanity.

It was one such man that unwittingly afforded me my opportunity of escape. A tall, grey haired man with dark, narrow eyes that burned with malice, I had come to recognise him as a regular visitor. Believing himself to be something of a tower of attraction to women, he had paused in the doorway on his way out to flirt with Velna. Knowing Peteris to have already gone out and that I was safe from his wrath, I fled to the doorway and burst into the street. I gulped in the chill, fresh evening air.

Running frantically, I hoped to find somewhere public I could get help and the safety of a busy place. I made my way through past shops, now all closed for the evening, I passed bars but was afraid to go in and face the kind of men that had been my tormentors. At last, I saw an old official looking building and thought it may have been a police station or a courthouse. As I burst through the doorway, I heard Peteris’s taunting voice as the cold blade slid into my back.

I look down on my body lying in what I can now see is a library. The ambulance crew are trying to revive me, but I’ve gone. I feel no sadness, for now I am free. Nothing can hurt me again. I got to see Leeds after all, but I won’t stay. Snow is beginning to fall; I can see the first flakes dancing in the amber light of the city outside, falling lightly on the passing cars and tapping gently against the windows. I can hear music playing somewhere close; the slightly muffled sound of an old, much-loved bootleg cassette.

 

 

 

 

 

Mummy Dearest - a brand new 100 word horror story

Mummy Dearest

I assumed if I could contact dead loved ones they’d be just like they were in life.

Ask me how I am, tell me not to worry, they’re happy. Inter-dimensional pleasantries; something to alleviate the loneliness since Mummy died. Just me and Molly now; Molly and her grey muzzle.

How wrong I was. Mummy has changed and not for the better. Didn’t think the Ouija board would work, but it did. She spelled out the words with my finger.

S-H-O-U-L-D

B-E

U

Then Molly’s heckles rose. Her growls guttural words. She sunk her greying muzzle into my throat and tore.