Morgan Delaney

Dark, strange and fantastic fiction

Horror

Steady

by

A black and white photo of a mannequin looking out of the photo
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

For this week’s piece of horror flash fiction, I get behind the wheel of my car. Don’t think that’s horrifying? You haven’t seen me drive!

Because I got the angry driving examiner.

Just my filthy, bloody luck.

Frank, my driving instructor, had told me to cancel the test if Mrs Rathbone was assigned as my examiner for the practical. Her fail rate was through the roof, so I’d have little chance of passing anyway, and the drivers were trying to “boycott” her, until she either changed her approach or got fired.

As if I wasn’t nervous enough already

I didn’t mind so much about the waste of money (no refunds on booked tests!), but I’d just changed jobs, and promised my new boss I had a driver’s licence.

Frank took me on the “usual” routes that the examiners went, so we could practise them, but Mrs Rathbone made up her own routes on the spot. And one time, she didn’t leave the mall’s parking lot at all, just had the guy go around and around for an hour, backing in and out of parking spaces.

He failed because the parking lot has a speed limit of 10 mph. “You know how hard it is to stay under 10mph for an hour?” said Frank.

I said yes, because Frank is half-Italian and gets excited.

The test centre has four spots on the top of the mall, and when Mrs Rathbone pointed me down the ramp to get onto the street, I thought, well, at least I’ll fail the test properly.

And I knew about the first trap.

There’s an extra “do not cross” line before the stop sign at the bottom of the ramp. It’s faded, so it’s easy to overlook, and even when you see it, it’s natural to associate it with the stop sign. So, that’s a fail if you don’t stop twice at the bottom of the ramp. And the stop sign announces the pedestrian crossing, and then you have to stop again after that before driving onto the actual road. Three stops before you even make it to the road.

Frank had prepared me for it, however, and although I ground the gears at all three stops, the car shuddered instead of stalling. Mrs Rathbone groaned as if it pained her, but I couldn’t fail for that. She shook a finger towards King Street, instead of Marrickville, which was a surprise, but I practised on King Street, so things were going my way. It’s a lot of stop-and-go traffic, but otherwise easy.

She said nothing else, and I just kept going straight ahead.

Should have been easy.

The thing is, though, King Street is easy until the University. That’s where I normally turn left towards the hospital. Turn around in the parking lot there, and head back home.

Go any further and you’re suddenly on City Street, which takes you to Broadway, which leads you onto Pitt Street. Then you’re in the city centre and God help you.

I cracked.

As we came up to my usual turn, I put on the indicators and made my way to the hospital. Mrs Rathbone said nothing.

She was dead.

So, that, kids, is why I’m such a nervous driver.

I should have listened to Frank about not doing the test with Mrs Rathbone.

And I should have listened to his advice to use the test centre’s car.

I hadn’t wanted to spend the time learning the feel of an unfamiliar car, though, so I used my own.

And now I can’t get rid of Mrs Rathbone out of the passenger seat.

She never says anything, but she’s always watching.

Didn’t I say?

She hadn’t been scowling at the road.

When she’d died at the bottom of the ramp, she’d been scowling at me.

This one is for Frank, my actual driving instructor, who played Gary Numan on the way home, after I passed my test!

Rush

by

A snarling street cat with birds flying overhead
Made with photos by Vadim Sadovski and Anthony DELANOIX on Unsplash

It’s still -20 degrees in Kazakhstan, but we’re going out in the garden for this week’s flash fiction anyway. You can imagine it’s somewhere else.

I’m not really sure what genre this one is. Perhaps you can write in and tell me?

Sean brought me another dead bird this morning. Sean means “old” in Irish to remind him to enjoy life while he can. He’s my cat.

Sean likes to bite the heads off the birds, and I can’t decide if it means he doesn’t respect me (“Here, you can have the rest of this bird”), or that he pities me, like a patient mother chopping up already soft vegetables for a finicky sickly child.

Do children eat vegetables? That’s something I’ve forgotten over the course of a long life. I know my cat’s name is Sean. I named him after an old boyfriend. Or husband, or something. And I know that the little birdies in my garden are trying to tell me something important, which is why Sean kills them when they come too close.

He buries their heads in the flower beds with their secrets still inside.

I don’t remember buying a cat.

I don’t remember the last time I bought anything, or even went as far as the garden gate. If it weren’t for the dead birds’ bodies that Sean feeds me, then I might have starved years ago.

What kind of name is Sean for a cat? If I had a cat, I’d call him… Puss, perhaps. That’s not a good name, but I don’t have time to worry about that. I have to concentrate on digging up the birds.

Sean doesn’t like it when I go into the garden, but he won’t tell me what the doctors say either, so I have to ask the birds that a neighbourhood stray buries in my garden. Sometimes the head isn’t there yet, so I have to kill the bird myself. Sean will try to take it if he catches me, but I won’t let him. He can have the body if he wants. There’s nothing left worth having in a cold body, but I won’t give him the head for all that I pity him. He’s getting older and older, while I intend to go on forever.

As soon as I’ve put the bits of the birds’ secrets together, I’ll be flying right out of this prison, leaving the old man behind.

And here’s something a little birdie told me: the new album from psychedelic rockers Earthless is out tomorrow, January 28th. If we learned anything from this week’s story, it’s that life is too short to waste. Make the most of yours with Night Parade of One Hundred Demons!

Sun

by

A setting sun at a crossroads
Photo by Malcolm Lightbody on Unsplash

I don’t know why they call them “crossroads”, they always seem like a mighty peaceful place to me. Now that I’ve got that out of my system, it’s safe to read on for this week’s supernatural flash fiction.

As soon as the sun disappeared over the horizon, the devil stepped out from the crossroads’ shadow, as if he’d been there all the time.

“Take a walk with me?” His slow accent reminded me of an old headmaster. We headed back to town — according to the signpost — but I didn’t recognise the way.

“People often call me when they need help with something, and I can see you’re one of those people. If I can help, I surely will,” said the Devil.

“I want to know why my wife is with you,” I said.

We walked a piece in silence, followed by shadows that stretched like elastic without the sun to give them shape, pecked at by birds without heads that hopped down from the dark branches around us.

“I don’t get asked that very often,” said the Devil. “Sometimes I’ve been asked to make sure a wife stays there, but…”

“She wasn’t always easy to live with, but she wasn’t bad.”

The Devil sucked in a lungful of air while he thought. If we had really been going back to town, we’d have been there by now, but there was nothing around us, except for the road we were on, and the trees passing us by. The same ones, again and again, like cheap background in a cartoon. The birds hurried us forwards by stabbing at our shadows with their sharp claws.

“I dare say you’d like her back,” said the Devil.

“I dare say I couldn’t afford the price, if I did.”

“So you’re just curious?”

“Human nature.” I stopped. I wouldn’t walk any further with a man — you know what I mean — only pretending to be my friend.

“Hannah Scott, née Cassidy, born ‘54? She’s there,” he said. “Didn’t respect her parents when she was little.”

So she was there, and for such a stupid reason. I sliced the Devil in the throat with a sweaty-handled knife.

He didn’t make the rules, but it wouldn’t kill him either.

He was done up like a man, so I guessed it was the kind of thing a man gets sent to Hell for.

If you’d like to listen to some horror, instead of having to do the work of, you know, moving your eyeballs, >groan<, why not try The Hotel on BBC Sounds?

10 Pop Songs You Didn’t Know Praised Satan

by

The Devil sings into a microphone
Made with photos by Alessio Zaccaria and Keagan Henman on Unsplash

With the holidays approaching (far too) fast, there’s cheerful bloody music everywhere. This week, I attempted to find refuge with the Devil, who famously has all the best tunes, only to discover that he’s responsible for some absolute stinkers, too.

1. “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” by Frankie Valli. Wearing the blue cloak of the Devil’s emissary goat, Azazel, Frankie explains to his victim that the blood sacrifice is necessary so that Satan will continue to allow the sun to shine and the moon to rise. The song enjoyed greater success in the version recorded by The Walker Brothers.

2. “Blue Suede Shoes” by Carl Perkins. Now better known as an Elvis Presley track, this song was originally written and performed by Carl Perkins, who also invokes Azazel with his use of the word “blue,” but goes further, connecting it with “suede,” a common codeword for “human skin” among devil-worshippers. In this song, Perkins informs us that he is happy to suffer any persecution his religious beliefs might bring, as long as his sacrificial victims remain undefiled.

3. “Metal Mickey” by Suede. The band fronted by Brett Anderson put their predilection for slaughtering innocents in Satan’s name right into their moniker. “Metal Mickey” is, of course, the name the singer gave to his ritual knife. Brett is most famous in satanic circles for his cryptic quote: “I don’t care whether my victim is a man or woman, as long as it’s a woman.”

4. “Milkshake” by Kelis. The clue that there is more to this song than a first listen might reveal is the injunction to “warm it up.” Obviously, nobody would ever warm up a milkshake. This must therefore be a reference to the fires of Hell which burn ever brighter as worshippers make their way to “the yard”: the black mass.

5. “Easy Lover” by Philip Bailey. She’ll take your heart when you’re on your knees? Sounds like Satan to me. This 1984 hit, which Bailey sung with Phil Collins, has been praised for its progressive use of the pronouns “she/her” to refer to Satan.

6. “Like A Virgin” by Madonna. In this catchy how-to song for beginners, Madonna explains the Dark Lord’s preference regarding his (or her) victims.

7. “What Is Love” by Haddaway. Trinidadian–German philosopher – and singer – Haddaway uses interrogative, almost epiplectically rhetorical lyrics to force us into confrontation with our beliefs. What, demands Haddaway, has love brought us other than pain? The conclusion, which the song cleverly leaves unformulated in order for the listener to reach it for themselves, is that we might as well try hate for a change.

8. “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X, one of the Church of Cthulhu’s most famous adherents, the song describes how X found his way to the “Old Town” (where Lovecraft’s Old Ones live) through the use of “horse” (heroin).

9. “Hand In My Pocket” by Alanis Morissette. Alanis describes the superficially carefree life of a Satanist, hinting slyly at an undercurrent of simmering resentment as she is forced to perform everyday tasks one-handedly, in other words, unable to give the sign of the horns.

10. “Mull of Kintyre” by Wings. Sometimes referred to as the “fifth Beatle,” Wings only revealed that the song was dedicated to a “close friend,” when he originally released it. I can now confirm that the friend was the Devil. The song’s title is an anagram of “For Inky Mullet,” and Wings wrote it to poke gentle fun at his friend’s poor taste in haircuts and frugal ways, which extended to using cheap substitute for hair dye, when they were young men “on the pull” in Liverpool. Also, it’s got bagpipes in it. Evil.

In other news this week: tomorrow is the final Bandcamp Friday of 2021, with no news yet whether Bandcamp plans to extend the fee-waiving days into 2022. So get your devil-worshipping tunes tomorrow!

I’ll be pre-ordering Zeal & Ardor’s third album, Zeal & Ardor, which already sounds like a strong contender for 2022’s best suck-up-to-Satan music.

I’ll also be pre-ordering Thank’s, [sic, that’s not a typo] Thoughtless Cruelty, an unholy cacophony guaranteed to harrow the souls of any unshriven dead you might have lying around (or at least annoy the neighbours).

Top 10 Haunted Summer Camps

by

A "campsite" sign pointing to what looks like gravestaones.
Made with photos by DDP and Bailey Anselme on Unsplash

If you enjoyed Netflix’s Fear Street series, you might be interested in more summer camp stories. Bookings open now for next year! For every year! Forever…

1. Camp Ararat is the site of countless visions, but few deaths. The most common vision is that of a man who waits at the door of the camp’s outhouse all night. Passing through the ghost leaves a black residue on the person’s skin.

2. Camp Yeller no longer opens during leap years, after campers were found dead in their beds – drowned – on leap years.

3. Camp Bearclaw continues to open, but its visitors are now mostly ghost hunters hoping to catch a vision of the 1942 massacre when an alligator attacked, eating 28 campers and supervisors. The rumour that the giant alligator still lives and could return to Camp Bearclaw is an added attraction for thrill seekers.

4. Camp Pheasant, on the other hand, never recovered from the attack that happened there. The area continues to experience an abnormally high number of disappearances, leading to rumours that the perpetrator, the infamous Dean West, continues to return to the area for victims, despite having been shot to death while attempting to escape police. Electronic equipment does not work at Camp Pheasant.

5. Since being burned down, Camp Oldham allegedly returns for one day every year, with reports of lights, screams and the smell of smoke where the camp was located.

6. Camp Rock Edge is still open for business, run by the original religious group. It is strongly recommended that anyone intending to travel to Camp Rock Edge wait to receive confirmation that they are expected before going. Local feeling still runs high and the group will shoot first and ask questions later.

The exact details of what happened remain disputed. The group claims that the children who attended in 1984 volunteered to dedicate their lives to Jesus, renouncing the outside world and their parents. Families of the children say they picked up their children on the last day, only to have them disappear “like smoke” from their cars on the way home.

A comparison of photos shows the same cult members – barely aged – still running the camp today.

7. Camp Woodwish is the locus for numerous hauntings involving a boy calling for help, who lures hikers and dog walkers ever further into the treacherous woods. Locals presume this is Tim Eldon, who got lost in a game of Hide and Seek in 1911.

8. Camp Malcolm was Missouri’s first racially integrated summer camp. After their horrific attack on it, the membership of the regional Ku Klux Klan went into sharp decline. Sheer disgust at their actions made it difficult for them to recruit new members, while existing members mysteriously disappeared. Even today, bloody handprints appear on the houses of Ku Klux Klan family members.

9. The bus which crashed on the way to camp in Wichita returns throughout the summer months each year. Motorists report following a bus of happy children, who often make faces or otherwise tease them through the bus’s rear window, before it abruptly vanishes at the hairpin turn, which was the site of the original crash.

10. The drowned bodies of the campers from Camp Aloha rise from the lake every year during the August full moon. The figures stand in the waist high water all night, before sinking back into the mud by morning. An attempt to free them by draining the lake revealed the lake bed had been seeded with several hundred bear traps. The perpetrator is still at large.

I’ve heard back from readers praising/complaining that the short story in last weekend’s newsletter was very creepy. You’ve missed it unfortunately, but it’s not too late to get signed up for the next one. Signing up also gets you two EXCLUSIVE ebooks. Click here to kumbaya-nd* join us round the newsletter campfire!

* “come by and”. Sorry.

10 Ways To Die At Work.

by

A blood spattered desk with note book, coffee cup and laptop
Made with Photo by Oli Dale on Unsplash and Photo by Alexandre Boucey on Unsplash

Here are ten things they won’t tell you about on your first day…

1. Getting trapped for a week in the supply room with Andrew from Marketing. He’s a tool, but he’s also bigger than you, and you don’t like the way he stares at your legs and belly even before the paper and ink supplies run out.

2. The stress of an upcoming deadline makes you drink more and more of the awful cheap coffee from the office’s machine, which makes you more stressed, which in turn sends you more frequently back to the coffee machine, until your heart hurts so much that you are sure you are suffering a massive coronary and die from psychosomatic heart failure.

3. You stay late after work to meet a client, not realising your boss has also stayed back to keep an eye on you. When you close thea deal with the client, your boss congratulates you as you wait for the lift. Not knowing he was there, you get a fright, stumble and fall, catching your skull on the corner of a hideous flower pot with a fake plant. Your boss is forced to make an emergency late night call to Andrew to “swallow the evidence.”

4. You take the office elevator to a meeting on the top floor: you aren’t wearing your sports tracker, so it would be a “waste” to take the stairs. The lift gets stuck between floors. After 24 hours of being assured that help is on its way, you climb through the lift’s emergency hatch in the ceiling. From there you can easily reach the floor above you. The doors aren’t even fully closed! As you move towards them, you hear movement behind you: Andrew’s face, his lips still blue from the pen ink he drank, grins at you.

5. You buy a cake to share with your colleagues as it’s your birthday. The cake looks nice, and really big, covered in a thick layer of creamy gunk. A bee fell into the gunk while the baker was making it, and has been struggling to swim out of the hideously sweet “creme” for hours. She makes it to the surface just as you bite into a slice and you die of anaphylactic shock.

6. As a practical joke, Andrew (he’s a tool, remember?) has piled up all the photocopy machines into an “office Jenga” tower. When Marie from Health and Safety bends over to check they are unplugged, she bumps into you, knockig you into the tower. The tower falls on you, crushing your skull.

7. Poor customer service sends a man who was already desperate for some attention to go on a shooting spree at your office.

8. The barman where you are celebrating the office Christmas party has been eating nuts. When you order a beer, he pours it, without having washed his hands, holding the glass by the rim. Your body goes into anaphylactic shock because of your nut allergy.

9. A brief, violent gust of wind sends paper flying everywhere as you pass the stationery cupboard. You die of blood loss caused by a ridiculous number of paper cuts.

10. Andrew always reads your diary when you go on lunch break. Having read this list, he decides that – like him – you never recovered from being rescued from the supply room. He calls aournd after work with a bottle of wine, an axe, and a large appetite.

This week I finished the second book in the Withes of Woodville series by Mark Stay, Babes in the Wood. If you’re jonesing for some feel-good fantasy (while I finish off the next Alumière Sisters adventure, for example…), then check it out here!