Michael Wombat Week 198: You Will Burn

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Michael Wombat’s Picture Choice: 2

Title: You Will Burn

(Trigger warning: this one’s a bit violent. Please forgive any typos, as I wrote it in a two hour window between other necessary jobs)

“You will burn! You will burn!”

The voice woke me from my slumber. My dream of forests dissipated like smoke on a forest wind, leaving behind naught but wisps at the periphery of my mind.

“Let all be forgiven! Let none be denied!”

Who was making such a noise at this time? I fluttered open my eyes. Figures stood about my bed, holding lighted candles. Figures – men – from the village. I recognised their faces. There was Ailred the smith, Pentecost the baker, Father Ilbert and half a dozen others.

“Hold her!” the priest snapped. Pentecost flung aside my bedcover and strong hands gripped my wrists and ankles.

“Father Ilbert, what’s going on? Ailred?”

“Strip her,” Father Ilbert said. “Let her go naked before the Lord.”

My scream of denial went unheeded. Ailred’s meaty fists gripped the neck of my shift and tore it away. He stared at my naked body, licking his lips.

“Be not tempted by the witch!” Father Ilbert snapped at Ailred. “Before you know it she will turn you into an eel!”

“Witch? Wha... I am no witch! I am a cunning woman! Pentecost, tell them. I healed your rash last month. And Ailred, your daughter would have died but for my help. I delivered your grandson, tell them!” Both men stared silently away, their lips tight.

“There is a curse come upon this village. The crops fail, the beasts sicken—”

“The weather has—”

“It is well known that women are to blame for the world’s evil,” said the priest. “Eve, the first woman, proved that beyond the doubting. Admit to your guilt, witch, and die easily.”

“You’re all mad!” I writhed to free myself, but the hands that held me were too strong.

“We are here to save you, girl,” said the priest. “As you slept this night in your goose-feather bed we prayed for your soul in the sight of the Lord. Ailred! Break her shins.”

“What? What are you ... NO!” My protest was cut short by my screams as the smith brought his hammer down heavily on my legs with a mighty crack. The pain was immense.

“Confess!” Father Ilbert insisted, spittle spraying from his red lips.

“I am no witch!” I gasped desperately, sobbing, great racking sobs that shook my whole body.

“Bring her!”

They dragged me out of the toft, naked and bleeding. By the door little Pons lay on the ground in a heap.

“My child! What have you done?” My vision swam. Daggers of agony sliced my legs.

“The spawn of a witch must not be allowed to survive, lest they breed more.”

“You bastard! You evil turdsucker! You will rue this day—” Father Ilbert’s fist hit me full in the face. I felt my teeth shatter.

“You see?” he crowed, triumphantly, “She tried to curse me! Proof indeed of her guilt! Take her eyes. If she cannot see us, she cannot curse us.”

And they did. They put out my eyes, painfully, excruciatingly, with their eating knives. I knew then that I was as good as dead, and, inspired by the wisps of my dream, began my incantation, quietly, barely moving my bruised lips. Father Ilbert could not have heard my words, yet he cried “She confesses!”

The men dragged me out of the village to the forest. It was cold, and my whole being felt like it was being torn apart.

“Ralf!” called Father Ilbert, “Did you do as I asked?”

“Yes, Father, good sycamore and broom, just as you said.” I knew Ralf. I had made him a potion to repair his broken heart not a se’night ago. I continued to chant beneath my breath, calling on Cernunnos for help as they tied me to what felt like a stack of wood. The branches and twigs scratched at my back and buttocks. My shattered legs collapsed but the bindings around my arms kept me semi-upright. I felt intense heat around my feet, and knew that they had lit the fire.

“Cernunnos, please,” I wept.

“Know this, witch!” cried Father Ilbert. “Because you confessed your sins we forgive you, even as you twist in death like a dancing silhouette against the pure light of themoon. We purify your soul in the fire and your spirit will live forever, rising with the smoke from the ashes and the embers in your eyes!”

“Praise the Lord!” chorused the men watching.

“Another soul is saved!” cried Father Ilbert.

“Praise the Lord!”

I felt ... a tugging ... within me. Something inside shuddered, and suddenly I could see once more. No, not see – this was not seeing. Rather I sensed everything about me with a kind of misty awareness. I saw the men gathered around a blazing inferno, inside which a body – my body – twisted and charred. I felt no pain. I was detached from it all now. I was ... I had become ... the forest itself. Cernunnos had saved me, gathering me in to join her in the trees of the forest, rewarding me for my years of devotion. I was blessed.

And with my new awareness, I suddenly saw the emotions of the men who had killed me. I saw terror and anger and sadness and confusion and desperation. A better woman than I might have forgiven them then, knowing the despair that had driven them, but not I. I would never forgive. In their fear of a non-existent witch, they had, ironically, created one. They had created me. I pulled strands of their emotions through the earth, deep into me, up through my roots and into my branches, creating songs of hatred from their twisted feelings; songs that manifested in leaves of red fire. It was not yet autumn, and yet my leaves sang out and fell, raining fiery death upon those who had murdered me, the leaves singing my vengeance as the men screamed.

Through the long centuries since, other people have come to this clearing, drawn here by the remarkably red leaves of the large tree that shelter it. None of them ever left. And I see you now, woman, warming your feet against the paltry fire that you have made. I see your hopes and dreams, your lusts and your greed. You disgust me, as do all your kind. It is time for my leaves to sing again.

“You will burn, you will burn...”

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Michael Wombat Week 192: The Great Circle

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Michael Wombat’s Picture Choice: Both

Title: The Great Circle

The old Lakota people were wise. They knew that a man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; they knew that a lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans, too. So they kept their children close to nature’s softening influence.

Everything natural was possessed of personality, only differing from the people in form. Knowledge sat inherent in all things. The world was a library, its books the stones, leaves, grass, streams and the birds and animals that shared, along with them, the storms and blessings of earth. They learned to do what only students of nature can learn; to feel beauty as a sensation inside themselves. They never railed at the storms, the furious winds, and the biting frosts and snows. To do so intensified human futility, and so whatever came they adjusted, by more effort and energy if necessary, but without complaint.

They did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, the winding streams with tangled growth, as ‘wild’. Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was it ‘infested’ with ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’ people. To the Lakota it was tame. Earth was bountiful and they were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery.

Look at Mother Earth now. See what devastation the white man has wrought upon her, first by building ugly structures high upon her face, and then by raping her for fuel and resources. When she could give no more, they fought over the little that remained. They rained incandescent fire upon each other’s cities, towering mushroom clouds of devastation that rendered flesh and steel alike to ash, until nought but ruin remained. They poisoned the water. They poisoned the air. The clouds of their destruction covered the face of Anpetu Wi, the sun bison, for two years. The vegetation and animal life became sick, and died. Most humans died of the air-sickness, but a lonely few survive, frightened and deep underground. They do not have long to live.

Everything the Power of the World does works in a circle. The sky is round, the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for they too worship us. The sun spirit Anpetu Wi and his moonwife Hanhepi Wi come forth and go down again in a circle. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything. The tepees of the Lakota were round like the nests of birds, and were always set in a circle, the sacred hoop of the Sioux Nation.

Now is our time. We shall fall to Earth once more, we spirits, to teach the pitiful remnants of humankind the lost way; the way of the Great Mystery. Tate, the god of wind, will decontaminate the poisoned air. Untunktahe, the water god, will clean the tainted seas. Maka, earth goddess, will purify the seared land. And White Buffalo Calf Woman will re-educate the people in the Seven Sacred Rites. The Earth will become whole and beautiful and a paradise for humankind.

And then Iktomi, spider trickster spirit, will once again set his twin worms, Evil and Greed, to burrow into the hearts of men and the long, slow fall into destruction and despair will happen once more, as it has times uncountable since I first created time itself. For such is the way with circles. Everything repeats.

So speak I, Wakan Tanka, The Sacred, The Divine, The Great Spirit.

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Michael Wombat Week 190: Toffee Apple

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Michael Wombat's Picture Choice:

Title: Toffee Apple

It is dark, long past bedtime, and breath-steamingly cold. Away from the crackle and bark of the scorched-heat fire you can look up and see a million stars. Honest, I’m not kidding. I try counting but get interrupted after about twenty-three because Maureen From Number Fourteen runs up breathless and says “Come on, gormless, stop catching flies! Mr. End-house is going to set off a rocket. It’s ginormous, Billy! It’s way too big for a milk bottle. He’s stuck it in a bit of drainpipe.”

She is so excited that she has forgotten that she still has her skirt tucked in her knickers from doing cartwheels earlier. She wipes the snot from her top lip with her cardigan sleeve and skips away between the grown-ups, who are mostly standing around drinking hot grown-up drinks that make them giggle and touch each other. I follow Maureen From Number Fourteen’s floral knickers, stars forgotten. I desperately want to see a rocket big enough to require a drainpipe launch.

We round the crackling bonfire, the pile of blazing detritus that the villagers have been piling here for days ready for this Guy Fawkes Night – old chairs, bits of gate, felled trees, Number Thirteen’s door that they had replaced. It’s a grand inferno now, and the gusts of heat make my face tingle as I run round it to the field where they set the fireworks off. Sparks fly up to die in the dark above it.

“Ayup, Billy Ingleton!” shouts Mrs. Her-next-door from a trestle table nearby, “do you want a toffee apple, you little scamp? They’re nearly all gone!” Mrs. Her-next-door is a big woman with chests like pillows and vermillion lips that leave a mark on your cheek if she kisses it. I don’t like it when she does that, or when she ruffles my hair, but I do like her toffee apples. The ones you get at the funfair have a crisp shell, bright translucent red. Mrs. Her-next-door’s are more opaque and softer to the bite. You can nibble the toffee off the apple and roll it into a pliant ball in your mouth, to chew and suck until it melts away to nothing. I liked the bit where the toffee had pooled around the apple where it stood drying after being dipped. It was lovely and thick there. Mrs. Her-next-door’s toffee apples are the best toffee apples in the world, bar none.

I am torn. I don’t want to miss the ginormous rocket, but there are only two sticks left on the tray on the trestle table. I decide to risk it, and swerve towards the table. As I pick up one of the top-heavy, flat-peaked brown spheres Mrs. Her-next-door ruffles my hair, then bends and kisses my cheek. I can see down her blouse, her smooth cleavage like a folded quilt. She smells like new-mown grass on a sunny day.

“Thank you,” I say, politely, rubbing the back of my free hand against my moist cheek. Red comes off on it.

“A chip off the old block, that’s what you are. You’ll break some hearts in a few years.”

I have no idea what she means so I say thank you again. Manners are important, Mam says, because manners show respect and cost nowt.

I turn quickly, feet slipping a little on the grass, and scamper after Maureen From Number Fourteen. I reach her just as Mr. End-house lights the blue touch-paper at the bottom of the biggest firework I have ever seen. It is easily taller than me. A dull red glow appears, and the onlookers all stare at it, waiting breathlessly for the thrust of sparks.

“You’re showing your knickers,” I whisper to Maureen From Number Fourteen, and she extricates her skirt.

“Thank you,” she breathes. Manners show respect and cost nowt. I nibble the toffee from my toffee apple. It is smooth and rich. A few sparkles appear around the red glow.

“It’s going!” squeaks Maureen From Number Fourteen. She grabs my hand tightly. I don’t mind. I strip more toffee with my teeth, a good long piece, and roll it on my tongue. The tail of the rocket spurts gold fire, and before I can swallow my toffee to gasp it is amongst the stars, trailing silver-gold sparks and cracking the air with a fiery hiss. It curves like a phoenix before bursting into a blinding ball of green and silver points of brilliance.

“Ooooh!” goes the crowd.

“Ooooh!” goes Maureen From Number Fourteen.

“Ooooh!” goes a man’s voice from dark bushes nearby. It sounds like Dad, so I release Maureen From Number Fourteen’s sweaty, sticky fingers and go to investigate, like Dick Barton off the wireless. I lick the last of Mrs. Her-next-door’s toffee from the apple. When the person who invented toffee apples decided to put an apple in the middle instead of a big ball of chocolate, that’s where he was stupid. Apples are fruit, and fruit is boring. I use the heft of the apple on the stick to fling it directly into the bonfire, where it hisses and disappears, raising a brief flurry of sparks. Fruit - ugh.

“Ayup, Mr. Ingleton,” says a woman’s voice from the dark bushes, “Now THAT’s what I call a toffee apple. You don’t mind if I have a quick nibble, now do you?”

I think it’s ever so nice of Mrs. Her-next-door to go and find Dad in the bushes and give him her last toffee apple. Manners show respect and cost nowt. I can’t wait to tell Mam.

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Denise finds herself lost in a field of dandelions. With one blow, her dandelion dreams transform into the words on a page. Some of those dreams have found their way to her website: https://lostinafieldofdandelions.wordpress.com/

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Michael Wombat Week 188: The Madness of Love

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Michael Wombat’s Picture Choice: Both

Title: The Madness of Love

It was her smell that first attracted me. Not her flawless ebony skin. Not eyes the colour of the ocean depths. Not the tantalising curve of her hip like a wave about to break. These things I noticed later. Before all of these, first was her scent; a warm dark musky intoxication that somehow smelled of a La Jolla sunset. I wanted to breathe her in, take her entirely into my lungs and hold her there while my imagination wallowed in her essence and she made my senses reel, like the finest marijuana smoke.

We met at San Diego’s Birch Aquarium, at a private afternoon gathering that I had set up for a local business. I sat in semi-darkness, nursing a lukewarm glass of mundane fizz and gazing at the two-storey high kelp tank, spread large before me. It shone turquoise and teal, sapphire and emerald, lit by natural sunlight pouring from above. Black sea bass swam between the swaying columns of kelp. A pair of leopard sharks circled the chrysochlorous forest, while surfperch, bright orange garibaldi damselfish, eels and barracudas played hide and seek among the lush tangle of kelp. The sight was hypnotic, a slow circling kaleidoscope of life and light.

I was pulled from my reverie by the most intoxicating scent, and looked up to find a beautiful woman standing by me. When I say beautiful, please do not lightly pass over that word. Savour it properly, and take it quite literally – she was breath-taking; a delight for both eyes and soul, all elegant grace and curves like the bays and coves of the sinuous San Diego coastline. Her dark hair shifted like a meadow of seagrass in a slow current. She wore a short fringed dress that rode up firm thighs as she sat.

“It’s actually algae, you know,” she said, her voice as soft as distant whale-song.

“Which... what?” I mumbled, lost the unwavering gaze of ocean-pearled eyes.

“The kelp. It’s actually an algae. Did you know that?”

“Um, no, I did not. The only thing I know about kelp is how to make a whistle from the bladder.”

“To call for Norouas, the north-west wind?”

“I’m no sailor. To give a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.” She smiled, and my stomach flipped nervously. Had that sounded too pretentious?

“In other words, to make music,” she said. “So, you know Plato. You are interesting man, Robert Penny.”

“Um, hi, yes. I am. Him, I mean. Not that I’m interesting. I mean hello.” Her eyes flashed in the half-darkness. Water-light rippled across her profile. “Excuse me. I’m not very good at, you know, talking and stuff.”

“And yet you organise social events? An interesting career choice for an introvert.” I found it hard to concentrate with those deep eyes gazing into mine and her exhilarating scent fogging my mind.

“Yes,” I tried to sound like an adult, rather than a blushing teenager. “I’m Robert Penny.”

“I know,” she smiled, and reached out. She took the glass of wine from my hand and put it down beside her.

“How? Are you psychic? A mind reader?”

“Not yet.” She laughed, a liquid soft sound of sheer delight. Her fingertips brushed my lapel. “I read your name badge.” Her hand drifted down to my wrist, where they rested, the tips of her fingers to the inside of my wrist. My blood pulsed against her warm touch.

“Oh.” I looked for her own name badge, pinned to the neckline of her dress, but could not make out the tiny words in the gloom. My gaze strayed to the enticing swell of her breasts. Her skin smelled like the spray of saltwater against lichened rocks.

“My name is Polly,” she said. I quickly looked up from her cleavage, feeling like a schoolboy caught admiring his teacher’s backside. “Polly Char. I’m a marine biologist at Scripps.”

“Char? Like the fish? An appropriate name for a marine biologist. What field are you working in? I did some work in coastal geography once, a long time ago.”

“I’m researching deep ocean bio-DNA – from bathypelagic lophiiformes, mostly.” I could tell from her grin that she was testing me.

“Anglerfish?” I tried, scraping a guess from a remote corner of my brain. I decided to try riding my luck with the pretension. “Anglerfish, from the abysm in which nightmares crawl?”

Her slender fingers wound around mine and she drew me upright. I had clearly passed her test. She was much taller than me. She leaned close and I closed my eyes, drowning in the sensual smell of her. “Come with me,” she mouthed, lips brushing my ear, her whisper the susurration of a sighing sea.

She led me away from the crowd, past a ‘DO NOT ENTER’ sign, and down a barely-lit corridor to a darkened room, the only illumination a virescent light from two tanks set in one wall. Jellyfish pulsed rhythmically in one, their flowing, insistent rhythms reminding me of the cadences of sex. In the other tank, labelled ‘Sea Devil’, an angry-looking grey-brown fish hovered motionless. It had a huge head and an enormous crescent-shaped mouth filled with sharp, translucent teeth. It stared out at us with ugly eyes.

“What are we doing here?” I asked. She let go of my hand and turned to face me.

“When a ceratioid male goes looking for love,” she purred, her voice a caress, “He follows a particular pheremone exuded by the female. In fact, he cannot resist following it.”

I stood mute like an idiot, held by her fragrance and her perfect side-lit form. She unzipped her dress and let it fall. She continued to speak, clad only in French-cut underwear, her soft words like the swelling uprush of a flood tide, her naked thighs firm as wet sand sculpted by a downwelling current.

“He is driven headlong through the immense forbidding darkness by this impelling odour, and finds a mate much larger than he, who will often aid his search further by teasing reveals of her bioluminescent lure.”

She beckoned me to her, and I complied willingly. She embraced me, tightly, and I kissed her neck. Her fingers stroked my shoulders, then pushed me down onto my knees. I ran my lips across her naked belly. She tasted of salt.

“Bite me, little man,” she said. I could no more have resisted than flown in the air. I closed my teeth on the moist flesh just above her hip, gently, not breaking the skin. “Harder!” she commanded, and I bit down hard, tasting her blood.

“When the male mates with the female, he bites into her skin, wilfully eating into her soft flesh,” Polly’s voice continued from somewhere above me. Her blood flowed over my lips and washed my tongue. My mouth felt odd. It tingled and fizzed. Small particles of my tongue drifted in the tsunami of blood in my mouth, drifting down my throat as my face melded into her hip.

“He dissolves into her flesh,” she continued to speak normally as my eyesight darkened, “mouth and eyes melting away, slowly fusing into her body.” I sensed the gradually increasing transfusion of her blood into my own veins, her pulse now controlling my existence. I could no longer feel my limbs. I knew nothing but her, my lover, my life.

“Eventually he becomes nothing more than a glorified gonad, existing solely to pump sperm when needed in order to fertilise her eggs.” Everything that marked me as other than a worm was disappearing. I would soon become a brainless, senseless thing that was little more than an appendage.

“This, in a nutshell, my sweet, is what’s happening to you. You no longer have to trouble yourself with seeing, eating or thinking. Your body atrophies and withers away, though you will live on in order to provide me with semen when I’m ready to spawn. Be joyful, Robert. As Plato also said, the madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings.”

Polly is getting dressed now, taking care not to catch the tender new bump on her hip.

Help.

Please help.

H...

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Michael Wombat has published several books - search for him on Amazon, or go talk to him on Twitter where he is @wombat37.

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Michael Wombat Week 174: Bubblewrap and Chandeliers

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Michael Wombat’s Picture Choice: Both

Title: Bubblewrap and Chandeliers

t squatted on the dining room table, a giant spider of copper and glass. Its twin depended from the ceiling. The dining room floor swam with bubblewrap like a plastic pool, enough for a celebratory game of her favourite ‘Furry Fish’. There would be a popping frenzy the likes of which had not been seen in the house since, well, since Toby had been fired and they’d had to stop buying lovely new things.

All that had changed now, of course, after the unfortunate accident that had befallen Toby’s boss. Life had become hard after Eileen Bottomley, newly arrived as head of department, had forced Toby out of the company. They had struggled to get by on Llyzbet’s wage only. Saddled with a huge mortgage, they had pared outgoings to the bone; stopped eating out, shopped at Aldi, cancelled Netflix. They had turned off the heating, which in a draughty old house like theirs led to arctic draughts everywhere. Life had been hard, grey and miserable.

Naturally, they had tried to find out what his new boss had against Toby. Emails, meetings with HR and angry letters to Occupational Health had all come to nothing. The reason that Arseface, as they had come to call her, had given Toby the sack seemed to be no more than an irrational hatred of home-workers coupled with a personal dislike of Toby himself, and what Arseface called “his kind”, the whole rancid meld liberally sprinkled with a solipsistic conviction of her own infallibility. Without telling Toby, Llyzbet had even visited Arseface’s house in a desperate attempt to persuade her to see reason, woman to woman, but that hadn’t worked out at all well. Of course, once blessed fate had stepped in to deal Toby’s nemesis the literal and metaphorical blow that had led to her being hooked up to a life support machine, the company had had little option but to approach Toby and beg him to return. No one else knew the department like Toby. No one else would be able to rescue the plummeting sales figures. He simply had to come back.

Toby would have leaped like a puppy into their honeyed words with no thought other than working and feeling useful again, but Llyzbet had sensed opportunity and had restrained his enthusiasm. Once Arseface was out of the picture, she had gone to town and had made the company work to bring Toby back into the fold.

She had ensured that the company made concession after concession. If they wanted Toby, they had to give him Arseface’s position for starters. A company car had been her next request. Llyzbet had to admit that she felt a revengeful glee at the ease with which they capitulated. They had welcomed Toby back with open arms, a huge rise in salary, and even an unasked for, rather splendid Christmas hamper.

Llyzbet and Toby had turned the heating back on, visited M&S for a big Christmas shop, and re-subscribed to Netflix. A few early winter weeks without heating had shown that the house badly needed insulation and draught-proofing. It also needed new carpets, curtains, and upholstery, but Llyzbet had insisted that their first house purchase had been the copper and glass chandeliers for the dining room, one of which had been hung earlier.

“You’ll be wanting shitloads of carved mouldings next,” Toby had joked, “and stained glass shower curtains. Bells for the servants.”

“No point until we actually have servants, cariad,” she’d smirked. “No, it has to be the chandeliers first. It’s appropriate.”

“In what way?”

“It satisfies my sense of karmic balance,” she’d told him mysteriously, and left it at that. It was better that her husband didn’t know the details. Better that he remained blissfully unaware that his devoted wife had visited Arseface less than a month before. That she had perched on a hard chair in the plushly furnished lounge while Arseface sprawled languorously in a leather armchair, drinking sherry and pontificating on the importance of hard work and how people like Toby were incapable of it. Rainbows of light cast by her own enormous chandelier had danced about on her cashmere top as she had said “Frankly, my dear, you’d be far better off getting rid of him. Find yourself a decent white man instead. You’re not that unattractive, after all.”

Llyzbet had pushed to her feet, stepped calmly over to Arseface, and punched her full in her smug arse-nose. She heard the satisfying crack as the vomer bone shattered. The sherry glass fell, drenching the Persian carpet., but Arseface didn’t care about that. She didn’t care about the snotty blood pouring from her nose either, being deeply unconscious.

Llyzbet looked down at the mess she had made of Arseface’s nose. She did not regret her moment of fury; oh no - Arseface had deserved all that she got. Clearly, though, there would be hell to pay once she regained consciousness. Llyzbet’s troubles were about to get a whole lot worse. Unless…

Llyzbet scoured the room for ideas. Plenty presented themselves, but they all screamed ‘murder investigation’, and that would never do. What she needed was an accident. Finally she glanced up, and nodded, her lips curving into a grim smile.

The kitchen yielded nothing of use, but eventually she found a toolbox in the utility room that contained all that she needed. She took a Phillips screwdriver, an adjustable spanner, and a can of WD40 because you never knew, did you?

The bedroom above the lounge had been easy to find, and her luck was in as she paced the correct distance from the door and found herself in space in the middle of the room. It would have been impossible for her to move the four-poster bed on her own. She slid aside the rug, and unscrewed what she thought was the correct floorboard. Damn, not quite. Four more screws, a second floorboard lifted, and there sat the huge bolt held in place through a crossbeam by a large nut.

She fitted the spanner and put all her weight into pushing the handle. Nothing. A small squirt of WD40, then she tried again. It shifted slightly. Encouraged, she pushed harder. It turned reluctantly, squeaking a little. Llyzbet felt a frisson of excitement. She really had no idea what to expect, but sometimes you had to just trust in fate.

The nut turned more easily now, and Llyzbet held her breath. What would it sound like? Would the neighbours hear, despite the extensive grounds that surrounded the house? The nut came free and Llyzbet caught her breath, gritting her teeth.

Nothing happened. Why wasn’t it moving? She stood and, after a doubtful pause said “Fuck it” and stamped on the bolt with her heel. It slipped through the crossbeam, freeing itself from years of enclosure. From below a cacophonous thumping crash shook the house. A dog somewhere began to bark furiously.

Llyzbet knelt back down and placed the nut in what she guessed might be a believable place if it had not been secured properly. She replaced the floorboards and screwed them home, rubbing dirt into the screws so that they looked undisturbed. She replaced the rug, and carried the spanner, screwdriver and WD40 back down to the toolbox in the utility room. She wasn’t certain that she needed to, but she rubbed the handles anyway with a towel from a washing basket.

Back in the lounge she found devastation. Eileen Bottomley sprawled across her expensive bloodstained carpet, pinned there by the shattered skeleton of the fallen chandelier. Her skin was sliced by scores of livid cuts, and shattered glass covered the floor and furniture. Llyzbet could not cross to check the body for fear of disturbing the pattern of glass shards. She turned and left the house.

Although Arseface had not been killed outright by the falling chandelier, she hadn’t lasted long, and Toby’s life had been put to rights again. She smiled at him now, idly toying with the second chandelier on the table.

“Never mind that for now, cariad,” she said. “Take your clothes off and bring that bubblewrap. It’s time for Furry Fish.”

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Michael Wombat has published several books - search for him on Amazon, or go talk to him on Twitter where he is @wombat37.

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Michael Wombat Week 172: Mirela

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Michael Wombat’s Picture Choice: Both

Title: Mirela

The angel’s head was too big, and the wings too small. Those were the first things I noticed. I had said that we should use the stonemason from Brasov, but no, Grigore had insisted that we save money by employing the village blacksmith instead. I suspected that the blacksmith had simply crept into a graveyard in dead of night and severed the head of an existing statue and the wings from a second to add to the childishly carved body and hands. Our own little angel, Mirela, had been perfect. This mawkish grotesque was nothing but an insult to her memory.

The midnight breeze chilled my back as cold as the moonlight that cast across the bare winter trees and the book held in the angel’s hands. A book, for the love of sacred God! Mirela hadn’t even started learning to read when she was murdered, her innocent soul snuffed out by an evil monster.

De mormânt, how I had wept. I had roared, I had screamed into the black heavens for God to help us, but He wasn’t listening. I had ranted at Grigore, but he was not listening either. Grigore had not allowed me to attend to any preparations for the funeral, nor even the ceremony itself that morning. He had said it was for my own sanity, but I knew I needed to see Mirela’s grave with my own eyes in order to bring peace. What the Americans call closure. I could not be certain that she was truly gone unless I saw for myself.

I felt a slight tremor through the thin soles of my slippers. It was beginning. I took a pace back, shaking with trepidation, although the prospect of seeing my baby again filled me with an exquisite agony. The freshly-dug earth shook, then poured aside as a pair of small white hands broke through the surface. The fingers clawed at the soil, but were unable to push it aside.

I reached down and took the thin forearms in my hands, giving a gentle tug. With my help, my little daughter emerged from her grave, coughing out gobbets of dirt and spittle. She looked up at my face, her clear eyes seeking recognition.

“Mămică?” she whispered.

“Mirela, fiica mea prețioase,” I purred, reassuringly. The moonlight lit clearly the ugly scars on her neck, and the lengthened incisors when she smiled at me. “Te iubesc.”

I released her wrists and she reached for me. I stooped to pick up the wooden stake at my feet.

“Îmi pare rău, dragă. Fii la pace acum,” I said gently, and, tears rimming my eyes, plunged the sharpened point deep into her chest. She screamed, and a look of pure evil drenched her eyes. She clutched at her pierced chest and ran into the shadows beyond the gravestones, still impaled on the shaft of ash that I had sharpened that afternoon.

I must have missed the heart, because she still lives. My daughter creeps, hissing, just out of my sight, in the dark shadows cast by the ranks of bitter gravestones. She is hunting me, and I do not know whether I have the courage, or the heart to hurt my little girl again.

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Michael Wombat Week 170: All the Crepuscular Dudes

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Michael Wombat’s Picture Choice: 1, although I’m not sure you’ll immediately see why. It brought to mind a poem by our own KendallJaye Collard, which in turn inspired me to write this

Title: All the Crepuscular Dudes

I remember only shards these days. It's all fading away. Except for a few things, most of my time with Aoide has gone already, but the feel of her breath on my neck, the curl of her fingers interlaced with mine, the swirl of my mind when the side of her mouth curved in a half-smile – those things will stay with me forever.

We met at a party held in a large Georgian house. I had gate-crashed earlier that evening, looking for some mindless distraction to wrench my mind away from the latest job, and the desperate pleading in the target’s eyes just before I put a bullet between them. The Service pays its operatives well, but not well enough to completely erase the pang of shame that eats at our souls. I needed bright lights and noise to wipe away the patina of guilt, and the ever-growing thought that one day my Glock might just fire a bullet between my own eyes. This shindig promised lights, noise and more. It turned out that the celebration was for the eldest daughter of the house, who was about to get married to – God forgive her – a futures trader.

The family was hideously rich. A thirty-piece band played swing tunes, the champagne was Dom Perignon White Gold, and the food was magnificent. I had just made my selection from the menu for the first three courses, which oddly still sticks in my mind - miniature pastries filled with spiced cheese, a meat tile (pieces of veal, simmered, sautéed, served in a spiced sauce of pounded crayfish tails and almonds), to be followed by fig and ginger frumenty.

As it turned out I never even saw the dining room, for at that moment I saw her. Aoide; a pretty thing in a white dress, bobbed dark hair held in a circlet of silver, a graceful nose, and a full mouth with a delicious overbite. I’ll swear as she floated down the wide staircase at the other side of the room that she gazed at me directly with eyes large and ocean-pearled. I found it impossible to look away.

She half-smiled at me as she crossed to the stage, climbed up, and joined the band as they played “Serenade in Blue”, singing with a voice like liquid gold. As the final notes faded, no-one applauded, no-one took any notice of her song. She crossed to my side and took the glass of champagne out of my trembling fingers. I felt a tug in my chest as I gazed slack-jawed at the curve of her neck, the freckles spattering her bare shoulders.

She took my hand in cool fingers and led me outside into the warm twilight. Bats flitted and swooped, and an occasional travelling silence marked the flight of an owl overhead. Aoide spoke of the kinship she felt with the twilight creatures; the owls, bats, nightingales and moths – all the crepuscular dudes, as she called them, often heard, rarely seen. She felt the music in their sounds; the hoots, clicks and warbles all melding together into a magnificent vespertine symphony.

She led me to a walled garden, where the air caressed us with the scent of evening primrose, sweet rocket, phlox, honeysuckle, moonflower vine, angel's trumpet and night-scented stock. Her hand on my shoulder nudged me to a chaise lounge in a summer house, and there in the dark we talked like old friends. We laughed and lamented, spoke of our fantasies and our deep dark shames.

She confessed her envy of her two sisters; Mneme, who had almost total recall, and the cerebral, perceptive Melete. For my part, I opened up more to Aoide than I could ever have imagined doing with anyone. I did not go into details about the Service, but she could see the fury raging inside me, the eternal struggle against a yawning maw of empty despair. Her eyes offered understanding and hope, but no pity, and I loved her for that.

She laid her head on my shoulder, her warm breath on my neck setting my mind awhirl, then she was kissing me, undressing me, seducing me there among the scented night flowers, our soundtrack the music of all the crepuscular dudes. I asked if she’d stay with me. She said that she would be with me always. Afterwards, half dozing in her warm embrace, I wondered whether I should tell her what I did for a living, how many innocent lives I had ended, how many families destroyed. I questioned whether I would, after all, welcome the kiss of the Glock against my forehead. I decided that, unworthy though I was of the breath of life that Aoide had offered me, to turn my back on such sweet serendipity would be a disgrace greater than admitting to my iniquitous occupation as a destroyer of lives.

A bright future with Aoide flickered in my mind, but before it could grow into a warming flame I noticed that my back was cold. Aoide had gone. She hadn’t moved, or stood up – I would have noticed – she simply was no longer there. It was as if she had become a night-scent herself and drifted away on the soft breeze. As strangely as our union had begun, so too had it ended. I was devastated. A lifetime with her had slipped from my grasp almost before I had dared to dream it. An opportunity to turn my life to good things, missed.

I dressed myself and stumbled home, and though I visited the Georgian house time and time again, initially to enquire fruitlessly about Aoide, then later as a family friend and eventually as owner, I never saw her again. The agony of her abandonment swallowed my self-loathing whole, and suicide became less important than discovering what had happened to the girl who had seduced me in the twilight. I never did make that discovery.

I'm an old man now, and my memory plays tricks. If I did meet Aoide again, I'm not even sure that I would recognize her. Time can be a cruel tide to drift away on. However, the tide of time has helped me to recognise one thing - after a million what-ifs and a lifetime of lost sleep, I have realised that our brief encounter wasn't a missed opportunity at all.

In the half century since that night I have lived life as a good man. I left the Service behind and took a job as a gardener. I buried the Glock deep under my potato patch. I fell in love with a good woman – the daughter who had married, and then rapidly divorced, the futures trader. We raised two other good women, and we travelled the wide, mesmerising world. Yes, we lived in contentment rather than bliss, but who’s to say that’s not the better state? And, over time, I forgave myself. Aoide was the source of all of that. She breathed spirit and integrity into my lungs one twilit evening, and I’ll be forever grateful to her for that.

There have been difficult days, too. My wife died four years ago, my eldest daughter the year after. I cry sometimes. Occasionally, in the dark, I can still see the horror in a target’s face; smell the acrid pistol shot, the iron splash of blood. But then, every evening, I receive a remarkable gift. The moths appear, then the bats and owls – all the crepuscular dudes.

Then I remember her breath, her touch, a heartbeat, a tingle and a moment of dizziness. Aoide joins me every evening as the blanket of night settles about us. She is with me still and always, just as she promised that night long ago, and every evening at dusk I softly sing our song. When I hear that serenade in blue I'm somewhere in another world, alone with you.

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Michael Wombat Week 169: Fallen

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Michael Wombat’s Picture Choice: 1

Title: Fallen

The Gray School bell rang for the very last time, and opened its door to the late summer day the way Stacy had opened her heart to James the previous night. They had sat on the school bench out by the trees, shyly held hands, and he had fallen for her like the blue star that had fallen from the night sky above them. They had kissed; proper grown-up kissing, too. Stacy had tasted of strawberry. She had taken his hand and put it on her small breast, but he hadn’t known what to do next. Oh sure, Richie Chester had told him all about how men and women did it, but it all seemed a mite unlikely to James. Not to mention embarrassing, and not at all romantic.

Four sisters and three brothers had educated Stacy in the ways of the world far more extensively than he, but she had given him a stunningly beautiful smile, and told him not to worry. They were probably too young to do more than kiss, anyway. For now, at least. James was more than content, for kissing Stacy was the finest thing he could imagine in the whole wide universe.

As twilight deepened and fireflies commenced to doodle in light, Stacy had gone home as instructed by her father. Mr. Bennett kept a close eye on his daughter, as was only right, and he had told her to be home by nine. James had offered to walk her home, but she had reassured him that it was only a half mile through the trees, and James’ own father would begin to worry if his son stayed out too long after dark. He had watched her disappear into the trees, admiring the sway of her hips, then jumped on his bike and pedalled hard all the way home.

He had found it impossible to concentrate in class today. James had spent most of his time writing Stacy’s name all over his notebook, and thinking about her beguiling lopsided grin. Each minute had seemed like ten, each hour like a day, but now, finally, he was free. He would head over to Stacy’s house now, to see whether Mr. Bennett would allow him to take her out to Cheryl’s Shakes. His mind still spinning with the memory of Stacy’s hair sapphire-lit by the falling star, James stumbled outside with the rest of the students, squinting in the dazzling late-August sun. The hot air buzzed like a fat bee.

A colossal, gnarled hand grabbed his shoulder, the fingers digging painfully into his flesh through his thin checked shirt, and flung him hard against the old tree stump embedded in the school wall.

“What the hell did you do, boy?” Mr. Bennett thrust his furious face close to James’, flecks of spittle spraying from his twisted lips.

“Sir... sorry, sir, I don’t—”

“Shut the fuck up!” Mr. Bennett growled, thrusting the barrel of a shotgun up against James’ nose. “You’ll come with me. Now!”

“Yes, sir. I... of course. But what—” Mr. Bennett shot James a murderous look that stilled his voice, and pushed him towards the trees and the narrow dirt path that ran through the small wood to the Bennetts’ home. James’ stomach felt tight and flippy. He was baffled and terrified. Mr. Bennett was normally so calm, so in control. James had never heard him curse even mildly before, let alone say f... use that word. What could have happened to make him so angry? And what had it to do with James?

Oh God, Stacy. Maybe something had happened to Stacy. He turned to ask Mr. Bennett if she was OK, but the nearby tree trunks distracted him before he could speak. They were scorched, burned charcoal black, but only in a small section between about one and four feet off the ground. Further away from the path the trees were untouched, but those close by had all been subject to intense heat.

They emerged into sunlight once again by the Bennett house. Stacy was standing there, thank goodness, her back to him, her captivating hair lifting slightly in the breeze. James’ heart lifted. She was OK. Thank God she was OK. She turned as she heard them approach, and James’ mouth fell open as his world fell apart.

Stacy was pregnant – hugely pregnant – her distended belly pushing what was clearly one of her mother’s dresses far out in front of her. Her breasts seemed much larger than James remembered from, well, from last night. He gaped at her idiotically. When she saw him she ran to him and threw herself into his arms. He held her as close as he could, as she sobbed against his chest.

“Now boy,” barked Mr. Bennett, “Explain yourself. How’d you do this?”

“Papa, I’ve told you!” Stacy cried, “It wasn’t James! We’ve never... we’ve never...” She looked up into James’ eyes for help.

“We’ve never made love,” James said, trying to read her expression. All he saw was confusion and fear.

“Don’t give me that crap,” Mr. Bennett snarled. “I know boys like you. You’re only after one thing. You’re slaves to your dicks and your filthy thoughts. Now I don’t know how you managed to make this happen overnight – maybe it’s some modern thing you got out of those damned comic books or those god-awful movies you kids like about giant ants or Martian invasions. I don’t much care, frankly – but you will do right by my girl.”

“Papa, it wasn’t James. I left him last night at nine, like you’d said.”

“You got in at ten thirty,” her father told her. “Ninety minutes to walk half a mile? Then you went straight up without even coming through to apologise for your lateness! What’s this horny bastard been doing to you?”

“Papa, don’t. I told you, something crazy’s happening. I was walking home through the trees and then – Lord knows – then there was a bright blue light. The next thing I know I’m waking up in bed this morning like... like this.”

“Mr. Bennett, sir,” James faced the confused, angry man who was pointing a shotgun at him, and hoped that the honesty of his words would show in his face. “I’m sorry, but I have no idea what’s going on here. I’ve only ever treated Stacy with respect. Sir, please, I... I love her.” He looked Stacy in the eyes, those deep beautiful eyes. “I love you.”

She smiled and tears rimmed her eyes. Encouraged, he continued “and whatever this is – whatever is going on – I will stand with you and protect you and look after you and stuff.”

“Oh, James,” she sniffed. Her smile made his chest swell. His skin tingled where it touched hers, and his feet felt wet. Why were his feet wet?

“Oh James!” Stacy cried, “Lord, I think my waters broke!”

“Your what did what?” James squeaked, wide-eyed in panic.

“The baby’s coming! It’s coming now!”

“Nope! Stop that nonsense, girl. Babies never come that quick,” Mr. Bennett said firmly. “Well, except in bad movies and crap stories.”

“Then maybe this is a crap story, Papa, because I tell you it’s a-coming! It’s coming NOW! Aaaaaah!”

Stacy got down on the lawn on all fours, helped by James. Mr. Bennett flapped his hands, looking lost. He would be no help at all.

“What should I do?” he asked Stacy, though part of him was desperate to run and hide.

“James, you’re going to have to help the baby out,” Stacy gasped, trying to catch her breath.

“How? How does it happen?”

“Remember when your dog had puppies? Like that.”

“I closed my eyes! It was icky!”

“Well you’re going to have to keep them open now!” Stacy pulled up the dress, baring her backside and parted legs. Blue liquid ran down her thighs.

“Stacy Bennett!” roared her father.

“Papa, we ain’t got time for embarrassment. This baby’s a-coming fast. James, if you love me, keep your eyes open and DON’T DROP IT!”

“This can’t be happening,” wailed Mr. Bennett, dropping his shotgun on the ground.

James looked between Stacy’s legs, a thing he had never even dreamed have doing. From between her plump thighs a slippery round thing protruded. He put his hand gently under the head, and with the other prepared to catch the small body as it came out. The baby slid out of Stacy like eggs from a pan, then it was safe in James’ hands, covered in blue gunk, but breathing. He cradled it securely, supporting the ass and the head.

“James, you have to cut the cord,” Stacy panted.

“Um, there ain’t one,” he said. “Look.”

Stacy turned and sat on the grass. James sat beside her and laid her child in her arms. He put his own arm round her shoulders, protectively.

“Oh, look, Papa!” she laughed. “Isn’t it beautiful? Look at its tiny horns!” She stroked her new child’s wriggling tentacles and it gazed up at her with lidless red eyes. “I think we should call it Colin.”

Colin roared in approval, and reached up with his tail to stroke his mother’s hair.



Several Twitter chums all influenced this story. My thanks to @flcro, @rachaelkanute, @ekctafc, @landladycheryl, @captain_doodle, @SBennettwrites, @LEJamez and especially to my eternal muse @KJCollard.

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Michael Wombat has published several books - search for him on Amazon, or go talk to him on Twitter where he is @wombat37.

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Michael Wombat Week 166: The Road Warrior

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Michael Wombat’s Picture Choice: One

Title: The Road Warrior

Dennis. Yep, that’s my name. Dennis; beagle-hound extraordinaire and proud warrior of the road, at your service. That’s me, right up front with the wind tossing my ears, stalwartly leading the way as usual. Of course my hat and scarf are more a muddy grey-brown these days rather than their original vivid colours, but such are the signs of a true road warrior. My being lashed up here in all weathers is bound to have an effect. My job is vital, however. Without me cable-tied to the front of their dustcart the team’s morale would soon plummet, and they’d be constantly dropping rubbish all over the road. I’m the essential glue that holds them together, really. So essential that the bin lorry even has my name in huge silver letters across the front. Quite how the team coped before they found me I just can’t imagine. Of course, before they managed to free me and adopted me I wasn’t called Dennis. Back then I was called...

Please No Duvets. Yes, yes, I know. It was a ridiculous name. You see, I’ve always tried to conduct myself according to what Mr. Kaczmarek said all those years ago, and that sign stuck to the side of the recycling skip was the only thing nearby that had words on it. So ‘Please No Duvets’ I became. I wasn’t there long, luckily, for it was a place of endless tedium and discomfort. It stank, for one thing. Inside the skip flies and other unseen crawly things moved over my bottom, and outside my face gazed out over a tedious dirt car park. The worst part was when people said bad words at me for blocking the opening and they had to throw their unwanted detritus onto an ever-growing pile on the ground. Some folk tried to pull me out, but Gwynedd, as angry as a thunder sky, had jammed me in there as tightly as the stuffing in my paws. In her incandescent rage, she had lost any love that she once had for her cuddly...

Bythie. Apparently Gwynedd’s name for me was short for ‘bytheiad’, which she had told Huw meant ‘hound’. This had been the second time that a human had named me, and I rather liked it. Life with Gwynedd and Huw was joyful. They loved and laughed together constantly in their little house on the hill, or at least they had until that last day when Huw had loved and laughed with Mrs. Probert from the corner shop instead. When Gwynedd found them together in the narrow bed everything cracked apart. I was devastated. I had held such a special place in their now-shattered hearts, having been part of their first evening together when they met at the fair. Huw had won despite all of Mr. Llewellyn’s sneaky tricks, such as weighting the hoops differently, and when he asked a delighted Gwynedd which prize she wanted she said “Can I have the ci hyll, please?” She had kissed Huw and he had kissed her back. Their future together seemed so bright when I first saw them, back when my name was...

Hoopla. In those days I dangled by my ears from a string at the back of the gaudy, flashy stall. Fairground music played every night and coloured lights dazzled my glass eyes. I looked down on an endless stream of people happy to give Mr. Llewellyn a pound for the chance to fling his oddly-weighted hoops at stubby candy-striped wooden pegs. Very few people managed to get even one hoop over a peg, still fewer two. I was a three-hoop prize, there more for decoration than for winning. The occasional person who did somehow manage to ring three pegs never wanted the ugly dog in the bright hat, and would choose a fairy or amusing hat instead. It had been just the same before Mr. Llewellyn found me, too. No-one wanted me then either, and I was stuffed into a wicker basket, half-forgotten, until that fateful day when I heard Mr. Llewellyn say “Got any cheap stuffed toys?”

“In the basket, cariad,” the shop-woman said, and I felt large hands rummaging through and around me before lifting me out into the light.

“You’ll do, boyo,” Mr. Llewelyn nodded, paying twenty pence for me and fifty for a fairy that he also pulled from the bric-a-brac in the basket. That was the moment my name changed from...

Oxfam, I’m pleased to say. Oh, I loved my life in the odd little shop full of people’s cast-away treasures. There was plenty of time for people-watching from my high shelf above the books, and on the whole the customers were kind people. My name had to be ‘Oxfam’, of course, even though to my mind it was an ugly name with its spiky ‘X’. The word was written all around me, and had even been painted in enormous letters above the door when Emily’s mum had brought me here. I had been so nervous at what to expect as she had carried me through the door. Emily’s mum had told the shop-woman that Emily had gone away to learn how to be something called a lawyer, and so she was taking the chance to have a bit of a clear out. That day was a tremendous shock to my system, I can tell you, after years of being...

Cuggly. Years of being hugged, years of being loved, years of having the bobble on my hat sucked by Emily when she was very young and very tired. Oh my, we had such a wonderful life together. We had tea-parties on the carpet in the front room. When she went off to school I was always there to welcome her home. When she cried because Danny Potts had ignored her, I was there to comfort her. I sat on her desk during exams, bringing her the luck that helped her to get into university. So many long years of friendship and love since that long-ago day that she had pointed at me in the toy shop and said “Cuggly!”

“Are you sure?” her mum asked, “There are far prettier cuddlies.”

“Cuggly!” Emily had insisted, and so I became hers, leaving behind my life as...

Ten shillings. There were four or five of us sitting above the sign that said that. We were surrounded by bright notices and shiny cellophane-wrapped boxes of vivid colour that contained new toys. The laughter of happy smiling children rang around the shop, competing with the musical box tinklings of ‘Teddy Bear’s Picnic’ emerging from the display on the shelf below us. This gaudy, noisy world fascinated me. Its entertainment value had been apparent immediately I had arrived, and it helped me to get over the initial shock I had felt when I was taken out of the dark, stifling box after hours of being thrown around and jostled. The happy, lively toy shop lifted my spirits, easing my transition from my previous existence as...

Wyjście pożarowe. That was my name when I was born. Those words in white letters on a green sign were my first sight as my eyes were stitched into place. I was passed from hand to gnarled hand, having my head stuffed, my paws sewn on and my tail attached. Mr. Kaczmarek spread glue liberally around my head. Ever the poet, as he stuck the gaudy hat permanently to my scalp he said the words that have stuck with me through all of my eight lives.

“It is odd to think,” he mused, “how all of these identical fabrications of cloth and glass will eventually end up with different names depending each upon their circumstance. People, and I daresay even places themselves, will name them and give them character.” He looked straight into my glass eyes.

“I wonder what your name will be?”

NOTE: In the UK and across Europe, many/most dustcarts are made by Dennis Eagle, and have DENNIS writ large across the front. See here http://www.dennis-eagle.co.uk/

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Michael Wombat has published several books - search for him on Amazon, or go talk to him on Twitter where he is @wombat37.

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Michael Wombat Week 164: A Rescue

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Michael Wombat’s Picture Choice: Both

Title: A Rescue

I pushed aside some cow parsley and peered at the compound. The fence looked flimsy enough to cut through, but it was still broad daylight. This job would have been far easier under cover of darkness, but I didn’t have that luxury. I had been given a strict deadline. Five hours, they had said. It would take five hours for the Nazi’s chief interrogator, known ominously as Der Schmerzbringer, to reach the compound. Roads and rail had been bombed earlier, specifically to slow the torturer’s arrival, but he would certainly get here by sunset. After that, the Professor would be subjected to the most intensely painful agonies. He would soon break down, and he would hand the Germans a secret about British defence capabilities that would win the war for the Axis Powers. Even then the Professor’s suffering would not cease. Der Schmerzbringer took joy in his torture and would continue simply for the pleasure he took from it. Some said he saw it as an art form. Others that he was just a sadistic, sick bastard.

I could not concern myself with that. I also had no idea what the big secret was, and to be honest, I didn’t much care. I had my orders and I would follow them – get to the Professor before sunset and save him from the horrors that Der Schmerzbringer intended to inflict upon him.

I wriggled backwards further into the undergrowth at the sound of an engine approaching. The honeywagon, come to take away the barrels full of shit from the military latrines. No such hygienic arrangement existed for the prisoners, of course, who had to empty their own soil by hand, distributing it onto nearby fields.

The filthy grey lorry halted before the gates, engine idling, while the driver’s papers were checked. I rolled, swift as sixpence, into the deep shadow beneath the truck and pulled myself up. When the driver got the all clear, the truck bounced into the compound, taking me with it. It halted by a row of barrels that sat in a trench running behind the latrine block. Brimming with a week’s worth of shite from a score of Wehrmacht soldiers, they stank worse than a hundred rotting corpses.

I dropped and rolled into the noisome filth that had slopped out of the barrels into the bottom of the trench. The malodorous filth made it easy to worm on my back to the far end of the ditch. I slipped my fingers between the metal bars of a slimy grating in the ground. A simple pull revealed a hole just large enough for me to slide down. I fell perhaps three feet, turned quickly, and replaced the drain grid over the hole. The entire manoeuvre had taken no more than thirty seconds. The honeywagon driver had not yet climbed out of his cab.

I wiped my shit-stained hands down the back of my trousers, then drew a small torch from my waterproof pocket. The plans I had been shown were accurate. A low, rough passageway led to the south, towards the main detention cells. Letters scrawled on a rock proclaimed that I was not the first person to come down here. The inscription was old, however, perhaps scratched there by a foolish prisoner attempting to escape. I need not fear discovery.

Five minutes later I was beneath another grating. The stains beneath this one, however, were from a different bodily fluid to that which I had crawled through. These blotches were the darker brown-black left by blood. A faint sobbing emanated from the room above.

I pushed up on the grating. It did not move. I squirmed around and kicked it up into the air. It fell to the stone floor with a clatter. The voice above broke into a terrified, meaningless gibber. They had been right. The Professor would not last a minute in the hands of Der Schmerzbringer.

I clambered out of the hole. A grey-haired old man lay on a filthy campbed in a dark corner of the small cell, hands and feet tied to the frame. He stared at me, wild-eyed. I put my finger to my lips – sssh – and crossed to his side.

“Professor Cherry?” I asked. It would not do to save the wrong man from the torturer’s art.

“Yes, sir. Yes, I am. You’ve... you’ve come for me?” he gasped, the light of hope entering his weary, rheumy eyes as he gazed up at his saviour. I nodded.

“Indeed I have, Professor. We would never allow you to be tortured by the Nazi bastards.”

“You smell appallingly, young man,” he smiled, “yet I am overjoyed to see you.”

I took out my knife, and he looked up, pulling his scrawny right hand away from the metal framework so that I might easily cut his bonds. I placed the sharp edge of my blade against his neck just below the ear. With a swift movement, and a twist so that the neck muscles would not interfere, I sliced through his carotid artery. His blood splashed over my face. I twisted his head, ignoring the bewildered, pleading look in his eyes, and severed the artery on the other side. Blood fountained up the wall and drenched my hair. He gurgled, gasped, and fell into unconsciousness, his brain starved of oxygen. He would be dead within three minutes.

I turned to slide back down the hole in the floor. The precious British secret was safe.

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Michael Wombat Week 162: Alert

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Michael Wombat’s Picture Choice: Both

Title: Alert

Since I was seven years old, I have been able to see things that no one else can: the weeping shades in the graveyard; the dancing fires of the forest; and sometimes, looking down, I see ghoulish faces in the Earth, contorted in agony. These visions hold no fear for me, yet no prize in the universe would convince me to again glance upwards on a starry and cloudless night.

How long ago was that midnight when my eyes were drawn to the stars by an unnatural curl of movement? A flicker only, it was, but a motion so, well, wrong that it turned my stomach. Six months or so, was it? Maybe. It’s hard to keep track of time way up here, now that the signals have stopped.

No one believed me when I told them what I had seen that night. That was hardly surprising, since disbelief had been the one constant reaction every time I reported the strange things that I saw. Over the years I had learned to keep quiet about my visions, to avoid rocking the boat and frightening people away.

That night, however, what I saw was so terrifying, so horrific, that I had contacted the police, the army, politicians, priests and reporters. Even the National Enquirer laughed me away. I decided then that if I could not save humanity, I might at least save myself.

So I Googled ‘northernmost inhabited place in the world’, cashed in my life savings and took a train up to foggy Vancouver. From there my remaining money bought me a flight to Alert, Canada, way above Greenland and just 800 klicks from the North Pole. I harboured some hope that we might go unnoticed this far North.

I became Alert’s only permanent resident, tolerated by the rotating military and scientific personnel as long as I pitched in and helped. Or at least the personnel had rotated until a week ago, when the scheduled flight had failed to appear. All communications had ceased, suddenly, and the military signals intelligence radio receiving facility had fallen silent. Then we knew. Then the other personnel slowly began to take my warnings seriously, and they too stopped looking up at the night sky. Not that that stops them, you understand. All that it achieves is to slow down their inexorable advance, to force them into methods other than mind control. Methods more... visceral.

Two days ago the GAW atmosphere monitoring laboratory suddenly went haywire, giving impossible readings from the troposphere. So now we know. We know that it is not possible to escape this fate, no matter how far North we are. The invaders will infest the entire globe. They will find every single living creature and devour it from the inside out. The Earth will become a festering, noisome midden bubbling with countless bubo-covered pus-oozing maggot-rats, all scurrying to kill and maim their neighbours while fat fleas dig into their filthy flesh and drink their fetid blood.

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Michael Wombat Week 160: Pangaea

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Michael Wombat’s Picture Choice: 1

Title: Pangaea

Seventeen years. Seventeen claustrophobic, stifling, soul-sucking years stuck with two shit-for-brains bitches in this cramped box of a hypership with the fucking FTL drive stuck on max. The thinking behind having an all female crew had been to avoid tensions brought about by male posturing and testosterone-driven willy waving. Yeah, right. Fluctuating oestrogen and progesterone levels, added to three completely different personality types, do not make for a happy band of travellers.

We’d tried everything to fix that bastard drive. Heidi had even taken to belabouring the casing for hours on end with a big fuck off steel hammer. Arms like a docker, that one, but all of her sweaty effort could not shift the needle out of the red. Daft twat, she kept trying though.

Heather, ever the thinker, the planner, had spent endless months trying to work out the effects of travelling away from Earth for seventeen years at 3.73 times the speed of light. Stupid cow, as if it mattered. She’d tried to tell us that if we ever got back to Earth, say seventeen years from now assuming that we could just turn the fucking ship, which we couldn’t given that at this speed it handled like the Titanic after it had been hit by the iceberg, that far more than thirty-four years would have passed back at home. Or fewer, I forget which. She’s a right spunktrumpet.

Me? I’ve spent the last seventeen years thinking about men – well, cocks – and fapping, given that my speciality, Sub-Light Manoeuvring, had become completely irrelevant the moment the entanglement drive array had been pierced by a pea-sized piece of space shit just three days into the mission.

Fucksake, here’s that wrinkled whore, Heather, sticking her head through my hatch as if she owned it. About five years ago I’d been briefly tempted to try feeling her up, maybe release some frustration with a bit of lesbian lust, but then she’d laughed that irritating snake-hiss laugh of hers, and all thoughts of girl-on-girl action had disappeared forever. What the fuck does she want now?

“Hey, Maggie, take your headphones out.”

“I can’t hear you. I’ve got my headphones in. I’ll take them out.”

“Stupid bitch. Yes, I’m smiling but you can’t hear me, you c—aah, can you hear me now?”

“I can, yes. Not that I give a donkey’s bollock, but what do you want, Heather?”

“What’s that racket from the speakers? Sort of wanka wanka wanka?”

“Fuck!”

“What?”

“Sweet Baby G and all his little unicorns!”

“WHAT?”

“FUUUUCK!!”

“So help me, I’ll kick you in the fanny!”

“It’s, erm, it’s the Proximity Alarm. We’ve come so close to an object – a planet, asteroid, sun, I don’t fucking know – that the override circuits have only gone and SHUT DOWN THE FTL DRIVE!”

“Really? So we can...?”

“Maggie! Heather! Stop fingering each other down there and get your skanky arses up to the pointy end! NOW!”

“You mean walk along the ten feet of decking to you, like this? Hello, cunt-face.”

“Look. Look out there, ahead of us.”

“Bugger me sideways. It’s Earth.”

“It is, isn’t it? I mean, I’m not seeing things.”

“No, Heidi, you’re not seeing things. That, my pretty pudenda, is Earth. We’re home.”

“Eeeeeerrrrrmmmm....”

“Crack a smile, Heather! We’re home!”

“Maybe, but...”

“But what? Come on, spit it out. You never were a swallower, I’ll bet.”

“OK. You see the land-masses? The continents?”

“Yes! I even remember that one’s Africa!”

“Yes, well done, but – they shouldn’t all be touching each other like that. There should be oceans in between.”

“So what you’re saying is... I don’t know what the fuck you’re saying.”

“Pangaea.”

“Gesundheit. Come on, out with it. Your face looks like a slapped arse.”

“Pangaea was a supercontinent that existed during the late Palaeozoic and early Mesozoic eras. It was formed roughly three hundred million years ago, and it began to break apart about a hundred and seventy five million years ago. Much of Pangaea was in the southern hemisphere and surrounded by a super ocean, Panthalassa. Exactly like what we’re looking at now.”

“Oh fuck.”

“Oh fuck.”

“Yes, ladies, we are indeed home. And now I finally know what happens if you travel for seventeen years at 3.73 times the speed of light. Apparently you go around in fucking circles and also travel two hundred fucking million fucking years into the fucking past.”

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Michael Wombat Week 158: A Place in Time

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Michael Wombat’s Picture Choice: Two

Title: A Place in Time

The iguanodon heaves its three tonne bulk into the torpid air and balances on its hind legs, stretching its bony beak to the topmost branches of the conifer. It reaches with its thumb spike to pull the branches closer, the effort pushing its foot deeper into the ground. It rips away a branch and moves on, chewing, leaving a three-toed footprint in the cretaceous earth.

***

Squealing its alarm, the red-eyed boar skitters on a rock, then takes the hunter's spear in its side, screaming agony as it crashes to the ground. A flint knife soon ends the screams, and thick arterial blood fills the three-toed depression in the nascent rock.

***

“Forma – ad signa!” The Legionnaires push to their calloused feet, ready to march on. A young recruit stumbles, his toes catching in the middle hollow of the fossilised iguanodon footprint, and his comrades burst into laughter.

“Silentium!” Blood trickles from a cut on the young recruit’s knee as he joins his fellow soldiers in an unwaveringly straight rank.

*** />
The small black and white dog sniffs at the footprint and barks.

“What is it, Tray?” the woman asks, lifting her full-length skirt to allow her to kneel beside the depression. She gasps as the hard rock meets her bare knees.

“What have you found, Mary?” her companion asks, standing over her.

“Such a fine example of a preserved footprint!” she exclaims, eyes a-twinkle. She takes out her sketchbook.

“Of which creature, think you?”

“Perhaps... well, from the three toes, perhaps one of Mr. Mantell’s iguanodon?”

“So close to the river?”

“In geological terms, my dear Joseph, the river is newly come.”

***

“The town looks quite pretty from here,” the buxom girl says, shielding her eyes against the summer sun that reflects blindingly from the wide river.

“It is not the only pretty thing, Elizabeth,” her beau twines his arms around her. “Let us sit a while.” The couple fold their legs and sit demurely on the rocky river bank. The young man leans forward for a kiss, but the girl raises a hand to stop him.

“You do know that my squadron leaves for France in the morning?” the man pleads. In response, the girl lowers her eyes modestly, fully intent upon allowing him to kiss her after a long enough interval has passed so that she might not be considered ‘easy’.

“I say, look at that,” she says, pointing in the direction of her gaze. “That hollow looks just like a footprint.”

“That must have been an enormous dog!”

“With three toes? Surely not, I—” she falls silent as her young man kisses her.

***

The old fisherman sits on the gunwale of his small boat, mending his baskets. He peers across the water and spits his disgust at modern civilisation. His gnarled, worn fingers scoop liquid soap from a rusty old can, which he sets down. Distracted by the smog-haze breathed by the ugly city that has grown across the river, he misses the old dinosaur footprint that usually holds his can upright, and it topples.

***

On the horizon the city burns, incandescent through the steam-billows of the evaporating river. Glitter beams arc from vast, dark spacecraft that blacken the sky. Exquisitely beautiful rays of light disintegrate the last of humanity, liquefying people from the inside out. A half-naked, terrified man, possibly the last man alive, desperately sucks stagnant water from the three-toed footprint in the rock.

***

J'shwang of the Kyrrak, warrior-surveyor, removes his tail armour and breathes a rattle of relief. His eye swivels down. He examines the curious depression in the rock, and then puts his leathery foot inside it, intrigued. The footprint is exactly the same shape as his own, though considerably larger.

***

A pair of mindglows, entwining lights of cerulean and emerald, spark their love in the eternal night, and cast moving shadows on the primeval footprint that lies ignored beneath their dance of joining.

***

The rock along the ancient river bed cracks and melts. The footprint loses form and vaporises, swallowed by the red giant sun as the planet dies.

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Michael Wombat Week 156: Echoes

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Michael Wombat’s Picture Choice: 2

Title: Echoes

..the sleepers are spaced perfectly for my natural stride, almost as if each one magically appears in exactly the right place just before my foot meets the ground. My bare soles delight in the feel of rough wood, warm on this spring afternoon. Long weeds caress my ankles. The flowery nightdress excites my thighs as I follow the curve of the rusted, corroded track ahead.

I am looking forward to surprising Percy, working all alone in the tiny signal box ahead. I shall climb the steps silently, creep up behind him and slide my hand down his trousers. He will kiss me, lift off my nightdress, and make love to me in the pauses between the passing of trains. This time, this time, I will reach him and we will make love.

The sleepers vibrate against my feet, and I look down, puzzled. The rails sing. The 15:10 to Windmill End, twenty minutes late as it is every day, hits me full in the back. The wheels slice through my neck and my thighs, quartering me and splashing crimson over the willow-herb, dandelion and dock leaves that grow between the rails. My last sight is of the endless arc of the old, abandoned railway track. The rails are rusted after decades of disuse, and the sleepers are spaced perfectly for my natural stride, almost as if each one magically appears…

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Michael Wombat has published several books - search for him on Amazon, or go talk to him on Twitter where he is @wombat37.

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