I’d known Martin for over thirty years, since I was a boy, in fact. He has always been like an uncle to me. There is no blood relation between us; he just kind of took me under his wing, so to speak. Perhaps I should explain. I live in a small village, Altham, in the county of Kent, England. Having moved here with my mother shortly after my father died. I was ten at the time. My father worked for the financial sector in L...
Playing truant was always appealing. Always. Two nine-year-olds deep into their school days would always know better than what adults told them. Your years in school were not the best days of your life, and you don’t need to attend classes to get clever to get good jobs. They knew it all, so didn’t need to bother attending, and why do maths lessons and cross-country runs when it was much more appealing to play on railways...
Eldon Woods was dark and quiet as I walked the path from Riordan Crescent to the park. I rarely entered those woods after dark. There were reports of coyotes and, more likely, the risk of human predators. But on this night, I took my daily walk after sunset. The day had been busy and I needed fresh air and natural surroundings. I was about fifty meters in when something moved to my right. It was large and white, slipping...
The office was empty when Jack came back from the archives. He could not hear any sounds or see anyone around. Jack frowned, then went into his private office and dropped the pile of files he had pulled on his desk. The clock on Jack’s desk phone showed eight-thirty. He found it odd that no one seemed to be in yet. Then again, most of his co-workers arrived between eight-thirty and nine so maybe that would change soon. Ja...
It was much more isolated than he'd imagined. He'd pictured the cemetery by a church. Near a town. Near something. Not this - just a cemetery, in a forest, with nothing - and no-one - around. The darkness didn't help, or the creeping fog. Despite this, and despite the pervasive atmosphere on impeding doom he felt, he quickly found the grave. A shiver ran through him as he read the epitaph. So young.Though it felt quite ma...
I only did a short run last night. The day had been hot, and I had already run almost every day this week. Also, I was on call for work. Technically I'm not supposed to be more than 15 minutes from being able to get online in response to some technical issue with Nordstrom's credit card application system. Normally, this isn't a big deal. In the absence of some new software being pushed out, we don't get many issues, and...
THE ALMSHOUSE Chapter 1I remember my last day at St. Margaret’s. It had been snowing, as it did every winter in Ashford, Pennsylvania. The roads disappeared under blankets of white, and businesses closed, slowed by the weather and the Great Depression. From my window, I watched people hurry home to their families, breathing on their hands to keep warm. Everyone had somewhere to go, everyone except the twelve of us strande...
