WHAT HIDES IN THE DARK | EP 3 | A TERRIFYING SUPERNATURAL HORROR PODCAST | Audio Fiction
FITZMARBURY WITCHES | An Unmissable Kindle Best Selling Book Series of Dark Historical Fantasy
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Declan's landlady turns the house upside down, seeking the source of a mysterious malodorous stench –one that triggers unwanted memories. Declan feels a ghostly noose tighten around his neck.
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THE HAUNTED SILK COTTONS OF ST. PHILIP’S CEMETERY
02.30PM
“Declan! Declan!” Vanessa’s voice boomed from the atrium.
“Noooo!” Declan groaned, muffled under several pillows. He prised himself from his drool-sodden recess, agonised.
“Do you still want a lift to the cemetery in St. Philip’s parish?” she shrilled. “I’m headed over to Speightstown now, but if you give me the petrol money I will run you down there on the way.”
“Right now?” called Declan. He jumped up, fought free of the mosquito net and thrust his legs through his shorts. “Shiiiit.”
“Yes, in five minutes. It’s a bit of a detour but I can drop you off on the way and pick you up a few hours later. If you want.”
“Yes, please!” he shouted, throwing a cap on his bed-head. His cut finger oozed blood, as did his toes, painfully ruined on the coral earlier that day. “I’m coming!” He winced as he pushed his feet into his loafers.
* * *
“Are you sure you don’t want to come with me?” asked Vanessa as she weaved around the local roads. “We could go straight to Speightstown and then I could drive back the long way and stop briefly at the church. I’ll still need the money though.”
“No. I’d rather go to St. Philip’s, thanks. I need time to do a few things.” Declan eyed the Tiffany-green Fortnum & Mason bag between his feet. Inside were candles, matches, crystals, incense, rosary beads, several origami cranes and a pencil and paper.
He had no desire to go back to Speightstown. He was still counting the pennies since Christmas when his friend Chiggy, Vanessa’s son, had dragged him there, to the town’s newly opened Nikki Beach resort, a heaving heaven for showy yacht owners, champagne-quaffing financial-services crooks and the nubile upwardly mobile of every gender. Though Declan had hardly touched a drop of booze there, a posturing loud-talking charlatan had managed to hold him and Chiggy to splitting the bill three ways for his entire ravenous family. For weeks afterwards Declan ate like a Dickensian stray.
Vanessa’s sleek Land Rover veered past a hamlet of humble plank houses of vivid and pastel colours. They reminded him of the old residences in the French Quarter of New Orleans, to where many French colonists and plantation owners had fled from slave reprisals in Haiti, taking the Caribbean building style with them. He remembered staying there, in an old converted stable close to the famous cemetery where Marie Laveau was buried, after driving twelve hours from Lubbock. He leaned his head out of the open window, his mind still in New Orleans. He wondered if the pebbles he’d left on the Voodoo Queen’s tomb were still there – carried by him from Egypt, via London and Lubbock. In the side mirror he watched his cheeks balloon with the onrushing air. His nose was bright red, blistered and peeling from the sun. He smiled.
“What are you going to do in the graveyard?” asked Vanessa for a third time, her tone edged with frustration.
Declan stared into space. Her words slowly broke through.
“Sorry? The graveyard?
“Yes.”
“Trees!” he blurted.
“Trees?”
“Yes. Mama Myrtle said that’s where the two biggest silk-cotton trees on the whole island are. I just feel like I need to see them while I’m here.”
“Mama Myrtle? Oh gosh, Declan, you really shouldn’t be listening to her. She will fill your head with all kinds of hocus-pocus. I mean, she keeps trying to move the bloody land boundary as it is.”
“Oh, really? She seemed harmless. Friendly even.”
“She had the cheek to promise me my fortunes would change if I gave up part of the old coconut plantation, where it falls away into the valley.”
“I’m sure she meant well.” From the time he had arrived Vanessa had incessantly complained about her atrocious luck.
“Did she tell you about her husband?” asked Vanessa, turning to glare at him.
“No,” he said. “Should she have?”
“Hmm,” ruminated Vanessa. “No, it’s nothing. Forget I mentioned it.”
Declan watched her clamp her lips shut, ending the conversation, but his curiosity burned.
Vanessa revved over the last hill and screeched to a stop by St. Philip's church. The gargantuan silver silk-cotton trees were there, their arms like colossal octopii tentacles, protecting the dead. Their roots wound and spilled between the gravestones, some of which they had attempted to swallow.
“Thank you,” said Declan, extricating himself and his Fortnum’s bag.
He glanced around. The village was dead. Not a soul stirred.
“You’re welcome,” Vanessa replied. “Now just don’t get yourself into any trouble with whatever it was Mama Myrtle told you. People can be quite traditional here. They don’t always appreciate superstitions, especially around their churches,” she paused, “and their dead. Are you sure you don’t want to just come with me?”
Declan hesitated, momentarily tempted. Vanessa drummed her fingers on the steering wheel.
The weight of his bag reminded him he had work to do. In his pocket was a scrap of torn paper with instructions noted down from Mama Myrtle.
“No, I’m fine really,” he said, slamming shut the door of the Land Rover.
“OK, see you in three hours sharp,” said Vanessa. She ground the clutch then sped away.
Declan exhaled, his shoulders relaxing as he watched the vehicle disappear over the crest of the hill. He hurried towards the church gates, whose rusted metal had crumbled like pastry under their white paint. Stepping into the graveyard, thick silence enveloped him, broken only by the dead leaves crushed beneath his feet on the root-cracked paving slabs. Thankfully still no sign of those white snakes, he thought. A breeze rustled the living leaves high above him. He cocked his ear to their whispers. He stood, humbled, under the gargantuan silk-cottons, the temperature cooler in their immense umbra. Like mythical beasts their arms strained in every direction, some longer than the trees’ height. They stretched covetously over the cemetery and its many nameless tombs. The breeze became a wind, a flock of shadows shifted on the ground around him.
Into their midst several dark smudges melted that had sniffed at his footsteps since he stepped through the gate. No suncast shadows these, they moved in their own way, immune to the burning light that fought to reach the soil of the burial ground. In a gloomy corner, in a contorted crease between two root buttresses, the smudges’ tendril hesitated, then reached into a crusty aperture – a perforation in the earth. They slithered down into the lightless clay, to awaken something, to coax it up to the surface. The thing stirred, unfurled its limbs and listened. In its nest of bones it sniffed the stale air as the crunch of human footsteps echoed through the earth.
At times the atmosphere of Bathsheba and the wilder wooded Atlantic side of the island, where Le Papillon was concealed, weighed on his shoulders as heavily as that of Fitzmarbury. On the touristy Caribbean half of the island, by contrast, the air felt almost absent, vapid. Except for the occasion he risked penury at Speightstown’s Nikki Beach club with Chiggy, he had crossed the island’s interior only once before to escape his isolation. A jarring yellow bus ride – following the same route as that which had plunged that other bus into the Bathsheba ravine – had summarily deposited him in Bridgetown, the capital. No longer in the solitude of the wind-blown Eden and rocky wave-beaten beaches, he felt like a visitor from a past century, arriving in a foreign cacophonous world of roaring traffic, music and laughter. He had walked all day there, avoiding crowds by keeping to side streets in his hunt for places of historical note. He sat and read at picture-perfect beaches where scantily clad people frolicked in limpid crystal water. He dipped his toes in the Caribbean Sea, observing all around him, but not joining. He was always apart, a stranger, even in places he called home. However, there was a palpable and undeniable lightness in his limbs when he crossed from the isolated Atlantic side of the island, much like how other parts of London felt when he escaped Fitzmarbury, but thoughts of his imminent return clouded any sense of relief.
He had eventually found the great Bridgetown baobab tree, the original reason for his journey. Its vast bulging presence sprouted among playing fields and a park. He had read about its miraculous arrival, hundreds of years before when it germinated from a drifted African seed. Through the centuries millions of such seeds must have sunk to the ocean floor, for every one that made it. Under the colossal tree’s canopy the cries and horns of the city became muffled and distant. In the shadows of its great boughs he pressed his hands to its house-sized trunk. Though he was filled with peace, he shuddered to imagine all it had witnessed, how many hundreds of people had sat in its shade in despair at their lives. Slaves and prisoners of every shade, from across the Atlantic. Perhaps the last of the indigenous Arawaks and their conquering Caribs had known the tree.
When his hands fell to his sides, Declan heard murmuring in his ear. He had turned but was alone. He listened again, waiting, but the only voices were those of kids kicking a football a field away. Fear flickered over his face, as some invisible cold force pressed into his back, but when he touched the tree’s silver bark again it disappeared. There were no more whispers in his ear as he peered up into the branches, looking for baobab fruit. Almost concealed by the leaves, the silent eyes of an iridescent scarlet ibis looked into his own. Seconds passed before a ruby flash launched skywards. In the bird’s sudden haste its wings beat leaves from the branches, which dropped to Declan’s feet. What a shame I scared it off, he thought, stepping away from the tree to watch its progress. As it disappeared from sight, its ghostly calls faded. He turned and stepped towards the baobab. Are there other creatures sheltering there? He stared up, deep into its leaves.
Either side of him dark shadows rippled over the ground and converged. Translucent figures broke through the soil, pushed themselves up and massed at his back. Declan did not know it, but it was their presence that had compelled the wise ibis, a religious symbol of ancient Egypt and Carthage, to take wing.
SCENT OF DEMON INTRIGUES
January 18th, 2017
06.00AM
Just after dawn, Declan was roused by Vanessa’s familiar shouting. She had hiked up from what she called her “cosy cottage” further down the steep driveway. The night before, the house had been plunged into darkness by a power cut, after which he tossed and turned until the first rays of light. His face was pale and drained under the mosquito net, haunted by dreams of what he’d seen during the prior day’s visit to St. Philip's parish cemetery. He fingered his amulet as he scanned each corner of the room. I must find Mama Myrtle, he thought, knowing further rest would be impossible with Vanessa’s racket and those of the yapping rescue hounds glued to her side, not to mention the echoes of fury from the dozen dogs she had left down the hill.
“I will root it out, even if it kills me,” Vanessa said, below the verandah, of the pungent stench that permeated the house. “Everything has a source. Something has died in there – I know the smell.”
“Yes, it’s definitely rotting flesh,” said the gardener. His honeyed voice seemed incongruous to the subject matter at hand.
Declan hung on the man’s words as he voiced his suspicions of a sick feral cat, or the skittish elderly monkey he had glimpsed around the property.
“Maybe that old man of the woods has crawled up on some shelf and breathed his last,” the gardener suggested.
“I feel like an old man of the woods,” Declan said now, as he sighed and wrenched himself from his bed.
He emerged like Lazarus from behind his mosquito net, every joint and muscle still screaming from his ocean trials the previous day. He tugged open the shutters, blinking into the light. His palm then pushed the window open as his chest swelled, attempting to flood his lungs with fresh morning air.
All week he had flung open the doors of the large rambling house, to let sea air flow through every space, but somehow the foul odour persisted. He hadn’t managed to draw a deeply satisfying breath for days – the kind of deep breath that makes the blood tingle. His chest felt constrained, crushed. Hidden in the permeating putrefaction, Declan’s wary nose again detected sulphur, a familiar scent to him after years of adventures and nomadic living around Asia’s ‘Ring of Fire’. He’d inhaled it too many times, in Japan, Indonesia and the Philippines – at Sakurajima, Pinatubo, Bromo, Taal and the ‘Gateway to Hell’ boiling mud pools of Mount Unzen, Japan’s deadliest volcano, where the Hidden Christians of Kyushu were brutally tortured for a new faith that threatened the nation’s foundation. His throat had burned as he heard their screams on a fierce wind that whipped up the dry dust around him on Unzen’s slopes which were a graveyard to renowned volcanologists and mother to mega-tsunamis.
In Bloomsbury the same sulphuric scent had at times haunted him, making his skin crawl and his pulse pound, its stench exuded by seething unnatural inhabitants beneath and upon the city streets, some trapped there and others raised from scars in the earth’s surface – entrances to the Underworld. Events there had compelled him to seek knowledge of demonic phenomena. Declan had leafed through many books in Treadwell’s and Atlantis bookshops where authors spoke of Alchemic secrets and hell’s dark elements of sulphur and also mercury. He learned that fearsome entities were forged in the brimstone of sulphurous fires, their shapeshifting forms then betraying the tell-tale malodour in their myriad physical manifestations. Some long-dead authors claimed that such corrupt spawn had lived on earth long before mankind and all his religions, with sulphur as flesh and mercury as blood in their demonic veins. They speculated on unknown events that had forced the entities to exist in shadows and netherworlds, where once they had owned the world.
Declan greeted Vanessa from the main door, forcing a smile. Her three yappiest terriers guarded her feet as the gardener wandered off. Two flat corgi-esque mongrels and one pugnacious Yorkshire terrier that constantly scratched at the ground.
When he mentioned that he had detected a mild sulphurous scent on the road nearby, Vanessa poo-pooed the notion and, with her dogs, set to her search. “That is the rare aroma of putrefaction, my dear boy,” she declared insistently, as if providing an emphatic assessment of a fine perfume.
No good can possibly come from them poking about, he thought, his heart shrinking in his chest. They had the safety of daylight hours, but each of her steps forward chilled him for what she might still find or provoke. He resolved not to tell her more of what he’d seen by the pool, in the house and at St. Philip’s graveyard the day before. She had already labelled him a “kook” after his seeing spectral hallucinations at her New Year party. She declared her suspicions confirmed when salt crunched beneath her feet in every doorway, crystals clustered every windowsill and pungent herbal stews simmered eternally on the stove. The New Year party divulgence was enough, thought Declan. It doesn’t seem fair to tell her about the other shadows if they haven’t bothered her personally. Within a month she’ll be here alone when I’m back in Worcestershire . . . or even Bloomsbury if it’s safe.
To Declan, Vanessa approached the house with an innocent enthusiasm akin to that of an amateur spiritualist who tries to cleanse spirits away with sage.
But the figure, my god, what if she angers it? he thought, unnerved. Everything’s fun and games until a powerful entity takes offence at some interference. One that otherwise might not even have noticed the person, and just left them alone.
The corgis were oblivious to everything but each other, but the Yorkie stared up at the house, growled, fell silent and would not enter – even when its mistress and two friends barrelled past Declan without him. Its sharp desperate barks of warning would not stop until they reappeared.
Le Papillon became a raucous carnival during the canine search, high and low – all to no avail.
Rats were finally blamed. “They burrow under the floors and inside the walls,” sighed Vanessa. “One must have got trapped and starved. I don’t know why, but they have been coming in a lot more lately.”
“Maybe they’re hiding from something,” said Declan. That smell isn’t rats, he thought, as the dogs drilled fruitlessly under another bed. She’s right about putrefaction, but it’s from something else, from the skin and innards of something demonic, the like of which neither Vanessa nor her hounds have ever experienced and I hope they never do.
When all the investigation had been exhausted, Declan headed to the kitchen alone.
The distant yapping of the hounds receded down the driveway. It’s fine for her, he thought, down the hill surrounded by countless dogs. It’s me that’s up here in the house alone now, barricaded into my room at night. God help me if she has pissed it off.
02.00PM
Later, close to the kitchen window, under the languid revolutions of the ceiling fan, Declan dropped his pen and paused to listen. “Tomorrow evening Barbados is to be struck by another rare storm of unseasonable strength,” a sing-song voice announced from the gardener’s transistor radio. “It is expected to be even more powerful than mid-December’s hurricane-like storm, with hazardous conditions. All residents and visitors are advised to stay indoors.”
“Finally!” the unseen gardener exclaimed.
A smile broke through Declan’s troubled face. Finally indeed, he thought. After ten sweltering days of insufferable humid tropical calm and burning sun. The approach of cleansing winds held the promise of relief at last – from the heat and, he hoped, the stink.
Declan’s eyes wandered down to his notepad. He’d picked up his pen and begun his unconscious doodles again. He winced. Yet another macabre figure had emerged in his absent-minded scribbles, which themselves approximated child-like storm clouds. There it is. He gulped like a garden skink. Now the daylight doesn’t even keep it out. My last sanctuary.
A nearby anole lizard stamped its feet in seeming celebration at the news. A chorus of chirping echoed in the rafters. Declan noticed the lizard’s tail was missing, the wound still raw. It too craved an escape from the still air’s deathly grip, and from whatever had pursued it.
He reached deep into the vintage refrigerator. The antiquated machine hummed as he lingered in its open jaws, savouring the chill air. Soon cold crimson acerola cherry crush cascaded from a carton, filling the glass until it licked at the rim.
Drink in hand, Declan squinted through the window at the blinding tropical sun, still high in the sky and ringed by fork-tailed frigate birds. He wandered the house, leaving his laptop open. That damned smell! His hands swatted at gnats as he strode onto the broad middle balcony. Relief came with each cold sip of juice as he soaked up the view. Karmically, a mosquito, legs askance, drank from his forehead. A red pinprick swelled after the bloated bloodsucker’s ungainly departure.
His eyes swept over the verdant slopes, across the wide endless ocean, and then settled back on the three tallest of the nearby coconut palms. The subtle dance of those ‘Three Sisters’, so christened by Vanessa, signalled confirmation of the radio’s warning of the approaching weather. The first breeze! The rim of the glass touched his lips as he paused. Is that typing? He turned his ear to a clickety-clack that echoed from deep within the house’s interior.
Slam! The bullet-crack of the bamboo side gate shattered the moment. Declan bit the glass in shock, then hoisted it aloft for inspection. He blinked as the sun shone through the remaining cherry crush like some mythical gemstone. Thank god it didn’t break.
He listened. The click-clack had ceased. As if the scribbles weren’t enough, now I’m hearing things.
As he headed back to the kitchen three bright coconuts snagged his attention, lined up along the lowest of the nearby steps. “Oh my,” he murmured. “More gifts from the gardener . . . and maybe survival rations for the coming storm too.” Barefoot, he trod down the mossy shaded steps. Crouched in the sunlight, he clasped the head of one coconut and lifted it. It was dense, weighty. These will do nicely, he thought. Very nicely . . .
With the coconuts safe in the kitchen, Declan gathered his notebooks and belongings for the beach. In his bedroom, sprigs of rowan and boxwood crunched beneath his feet. He had picked them in Worcester and Malvern to conceal in Letitia, his capacious suitcase – flying them all the way from England. As did his forebears, he always travelled with protective and aromatic herbs.
Declan was vigilant in placing the twigs on the cool tiles at the base of the door. He bent double in the doorway to sprinkle black salt across their leaves. The salt was from Droitwich in Worcestershire, where the most saline water on earth spouts forth. Local folklore said the Romans originated the mines, but he had felt the residual presence of the native Druidic priests who long preceded them. Those who declare victory can never erase older truths, he had pondered in Droitwich on a brilliant spring day, as whispers came to him from miniature glades of daffodils, the flowers of Narcissus. The strengthening tropical sun flooded through his bedroom window as he sprinkled.
The eyes of a small nesting hummingbird only saw his silhouette in the doorway. The bird was weak from lack of nectar and had betrayed its natural fears, dancing back and forth through the wide french doors. It felt safe up in the rafters of the atrium, below the circular skylight. “Texas fairies,” or “the messengers of the gods” Declan called those enchanting diminutive darting birds of North America. Their utter absence in the Old World imbued a temporary melancholia each time he returned home, missing their magic.
04.45PM
Declan’s eyes weighed heavy as he looked up from the cluttered kitchen table. The ceiling fan turned lazily above his head, the old fridge whirred behind him. Steam rose from a coffee cup at his elbow, joining the comforting aroma of an audibly bubbling saucepan of sweet potato, corn and heart of palm chowder on the gas stove. Since mid-afternoon the kitchen’s atmosphere had also been infused with incense and candle smoke, from bowls and sticks clustered in a small altar near a slew of freshly folded origami cranes and the KitchenAid mixer.
Lines of cursive crowded the pages of Declan’s notebooks, their pages weighted with bright stones of amethyst, jade and carnelian. One blue glass Eye of Horus also punctuated the collection. On some pages his prose diminished in height from left to right. It’s a sure sign of insanity, he joked to himself. The handwritten lines of one notebook wound inwards, like a snail’s shell, in crude distorted circles. It was a style of note-keeping he’d first spontaneously and inexplicably started in Bloomsbury.
Declan wrote with a conscious laborious effort, glancing back and forth between his books. Several times he rubbed his eyes to pull his mind from stupor. Since New Year’s Eve, when Le Papillon was flooded with strangers – both invited and uninvited – he had increasingly had to fight to focus. Sometimes now during daylight hours too he was unable to “claim his mind”.
The notebooks on the kitchen table usually lived on Declan’s bed, behind the sweeping pyramidic shroud of his mosquito net. It was there that he documented the terrifying haunted visions, visions about what might have crept into the house, keeping mostly to its gloomier corners. Hidden among pillows and a duvet in the small hours, Declan was a ghostly apparition seen through the diaphanous net. He’d become a wraith from whom words and conceptions at first had begged and clamoured for release, and now demanded and compelled his service, manifesting on his computer screen. They fell silent, sometimes, in the act of typing . . . sometimes. Even when he was exhausted, and his fingertips raw, new words arose and ordered him on, mercilessly. His head was crowded with narratives and prose of an increasingly disturbing nature. They spanned the distant past to the present but whispered nothing of the future.
At first the disturbing tongues spoke in his own internal voice, which he had some success in suppressing. Then they spoke in voices he was sure were not him but were still somehow in his head – vague mutterings in dark corners, barely heard whispers. As time went on these whispers grew in confidence, more intelligible, more lucid and fluid. From previously unknown recesses of his mind, the words called to him with increasingly sharp tormented tongues. Some were even prideful, snarling their stories. Some nights they became a maddening cacophony, fighting to be heard, coming faster than his possessed fingers could type or scrawl with their furious demand that he act as scribe. He was only barely aware of what was happening. At times he would awaken catatonic, battling the shackles of a terrifying paralysis only to discover new chapters, written mysteriously, as if he were under the secret tutelage of the elves working for the famed Brothers Grimm cobbler. Time and again he would blame fatigue for his failing recollection, though those accusations fell hollow at his feet. He would barely blink before the next paragraph rushed into his mind, demanding.
In the past weeks he’d seen too many things for the events he had escaped in Bloomsbury to remain distant – the fear gnawed at his stomach and ached in his marrow. Too many revelations, too many omens. He was in trouble, he knew it, and leaving a record was his last defense.
THE SEETHING SHADOW RETURNS
05.50PM
The sun is setting, Declan thought. His face wrinkled as he peered through the worn kitchen window slats. He listened in vain for the gardener’s stereo, but all was quiet. And deathly still. The geckos aren’t even chirping. He snatched up his phone, squinting at the screen. I have about half an hour left. His lips quivered as he ticked off all the preparations required before he could retreat to his room. There would be no more swimming after dark. Something he couldn’t name lurked and, as he said in his diary – it freaked him out. The voices, the writing . . . he already felt a pressure building inside him, an itch in his fingers. It was becoming painful to resist. He flipped a switch next to him, the rectangular pool lighting up the twilight. In the late afternoon’s dying minutes stripes of light illuminated his sombre sunburned face. Angry coral scratches still marked his back, fingertips and toes, his skin freshly scented from the rub of crushed bay leaves. Water dripped from the draining saucepan into the wet sink, where ants already stalked the porcelain. Still no bats, he thought. He flipped the switch and gifted the garden back to the incoming night. His chest fell, his hoarse exhalation filling the silence. He sucked at the air, almost theatrically, attempting to fill his lungs to satisfaction. The atmosphere in the house’s interior was still stale, a toxic mash of sweet decay and sulphur.
07.00PM
Thin lines of royal purple faded in the sky as Declan belatedly retreated towards his bedroom, notebooks firmly clutched to his bare broad chest. His hand gripped a tall glass of water, while his pockets bulged more than usually with a cooked sweet potato and a banana. The last of the chowder fleshed out with sweetcorn, cream and another tin of heart of palm swelled his belly. Once again time had somehow slipped by and the night began to possess him. Betraying his caution, he flipped one room’s light switch off only when the next one was burning with illumination. The advancing circles of light were his protection. Shadows ever to my back and ahead, he thought as he traversed each successive aura.
As each light extinguished, the ancient thing in the guise of a shadow moved forward, proving Declan’s mind to be far from muddled. His instincts were unerringly correct. It haunted his path through the house, moving close to smell the coral scratches that beaded blood in the sweat of his back. A patient pleasure.
No last gasps of sun streaks nor rays of moonlight were visible through the wide circular skylight above. Almost there, Declan thought as he plodded up the open stairs to the bedroom landing. Every evening it seemed that, in spite of his intentions and attention to the time, he would inexplicably linger somewhere. I’ve got to get to the bedroom earlier, while it’s still light. No sooner had his foot met the bedroom landing than the house plunged into darkness. Terror gripped him. “Fuck, another power cut,” he whispered, hoping. Just like the night before he paused mid-step, waiting for the generators to start up. The seconds ticked by, in vain. Fear crested and panic began to rise.
The chances of a second power cut occurring as his feet trod over the exact same floor tiles seemed impossible, but random synchronicities littered Declan’s daily life, like bumping into the same stranger multiple times in a new city. In Bloomsbury he had kept checking his phone at the exact time of 11.11am for days in a row and, repeatedly, at exactly 04.45am he would be rudely awakened by the urgent sound of his name called by a sharp but saccharine voice. On the first occasion, he still feigned sleep, thinking, It’s pretending to be my mother. But it showed persistence. This is no mind lapse, he thought, in pitch black there on the landing, this force that somehow keeps me beyond my bedroom before the sun disappears. I’m being toyed with. Vaporous shadows multiplied in the air around him.
“Must be those bloody rats!” he exclaimed with false bravado, blaming Vanessa’s chosen miscreants. Who am I kidding? My bombastic tone fools no one, he thought. In his gut he suspected something was watching, assessing him. Blood thundered in his temples. He strained his ear to the dark, but his own pulse drowned all sound. He dared not look behind him into the dimness, for fear the figure was there. I wish the lights would come back on.
It was as well Declan did not look. The figure was there. Like the night before it stretched, unseen, to a great height, then bent unnaturally. After several seconds it dropped smoothly to its knees and elbows and crawled, reptilian-like, up the wall and across the roof of the atrium.
Creeeeeeak . . . Declan started. The sound was close by. It came from inside the cavernous maw at the centre of the house. He leaned forward and listened intently, biting his lip. He still dared not peer down into the impenetrable murk, though an unfamiliar and careless curiosity called him to do so in a voice that was not his own.
“Declaaaan . . . loooook . . . look here . . .”
It’s the same sinister sweet voice that woke me in the night, in Bloomsbury, he realised. His truncated breath burned in his lungs. It’s so cold. As the temperature dropped . . . he knew he was not alone.
There was a dull clink as he balanced his water glass on a low wall next to him. A bar of candlelight escaped under the bedroom door. The candles there had burned for hours. His blood was ice as his hands sought his pockets. He fumbled past his phone, the small rectangle burning a weak light through the fabric of his left pocket. With stealth his fingers sought the cold comfort of his keys. They delved past the banana and sweet potato, into a mass of his usual ballast – leaves, crystals, shells, driftwood and beach pebbles. There was comfort in the touch of the talismans. Even in Bloomsbury he walked the streets weighted down by such precious items, to be kept close to him when he wrote.
Declan directed the key into the lock. He gripped the door handle. The key ground unnaturally, sticking. Is that grit? And what’s that on the handle? He sniffed the slime on his fingers, his nose wrinkling in disgust. Sulphur! It was so strong. He wiped his hand on his cotton shorts and in fluid silent motion dug deeply in his pocket again, withdrawing his phone. The water glass beside him reflected the weak glow of its screen like some lonely fisherman’s lantern. He did not notice as fingerprints smudged across the brittle surface of the crystalline glass. More appeared in a flurry of besmirchment, large and from an invisible owner, imprinted in the same filth as the door handle. Declan’s nail rasped away dried mud around the keyhole. That must be what’s inside too, he thought, squinting through the phone screen’s illumination as he wriggled the key. He pushed and cranked the key harder, his fear rippling. Sweat poured from him. Finally it turned. Salvation!
He reached for the besmirched glass, which bounced from his fingertips. “Shit!” he hissed, grasping at thin air as it spiralled into the atrium’s deep inky sea. He cringed, braced for the fracture and crescendo of a thousand glass-shards across the marble floor. After an inordinately long drop, a muffled crunch!
He needed more light, fast. The phone’s lock screen demanded Declan’s password over the saved photograph of a short, handwritten poem – one of his own.
A Lost Romantic,
Forever gives chances to false lovers,
And shadow-eaters who feed on light.
Giving love like early-morning sunshine in spring,
But cursed by the gods from the first touch.
He knew the words by heart but had no time for their usual sting. He leaned over the wall, his eyes following the phone’s maximised beam. In its halo, the glass shards shone back at him from a large ceramic plant pot. An injured wet leaf still waved from impact. Damn, that was lucky. I’ll clean it up in the morning. Splashes of water sparkled like dew on the marble floor. He was not close enough to squint at fresh tracks that led from one puddle, in the shape of hooves.
Declan froze. Beyond, from below, came squeaks and scratches. Someone is moving the furniture. Or . . . something is. What is that?
With braced elbows and shaking fingers, Declan awkwardly directed the light from the broken glass towards the open-plan living room. He heard his own halting breath as, from the third floor, the beam barely penetrated the high-ceilinged space beyond the first ghostly outline of chairs and a coffee table. He squinted and blinked to focus past their forlorn shapes, deeper into the area where people had recently made inane small talk during the New Year party. Nothing. The space gave no more clues in its heavy impenetrable airs.
He guided the light around the edges of the circular atrium. The hanging silence of surrounding banana groves, infamous hives of the paranormal, had invaded the house. What was that? That shadow? It hugged one of the pillars. He gulped, training the light back on its amorphous shape. It melted to the dark side of the column . . . a little too reluctantly. The hairs on his neck stood straight. He bolted into his room, the dark pressing into his back like needles.
★★★★★
"What a debut novel! Hollywood this is your new dark historical fantasy and horror franchise!" -- Jedi Joeda
The Fitzmarbury Witches series unveils a web of predatory evil that spans eras and continents. Fans of Game of Thrones, The Pillars of the Earth, The Last Kingdom, The Witcher, and matured readers of Harry Potter and His Dark Materials will love BARATANAC.
For adult fans of Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Neil Gaimon, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Ken Follett, Alix E. Harrow, Diane Setterfield, Kate Mosse, Hillary Mantel, Philippa Gregory, Amy Harmon, Raymond E. Feist, Joe Abercrombie, Sabaa Tahir, Naomi Novik, Diana Gabaldon, Koji Suzuki, Bernard Cornwell, Clive Barker, Dean Koontz, Susanna Clark, Bridget Collins, V. E. Schwab, Charlie N. Holmberg, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Cassandra Clare, and Madeline Miller.
DISCOVER THE ENTHRALLING BOOKS OF AUTHOR D. J. SWALES:
Don't miss the thrilling history and occult horror of the FITZMARBURY WITCHES SERIES
Be terrified by the short story, PARIS: A CURSE COMES TO THE CITY OF THE CATACOMBS
Immerse yourself in the bestselling darkness of MIDNIGHT'S TWIN: DARK POEMS PENNED IN MIDNIGHT HOURS
Be charmed by the feel-good magical realism of PEOPLE OF BLOOMSBURY
★★★★★
"OK I’m shook, I think I just graduated from Harry Potter . . . Game of Thrones meets The Witcher . . . Totally amazing writing." --BookBabe760
★★★★
"Loved it! An impressively written and captivating first installment of supernatural historical fiction. . .the intricacy of the plot and detailed descriptions are truly praiseworthy." -- Mariah Pappas (Reedsy Literary Critic)
★★★★★
"An epic, epic book. So rich, so textured, so colourful." -- Charlie Green
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