Joshua is not his name. The face isn’t his either. Seventeen or thereabouts. Dirty-blond hair, piercings, sulky skater look. Billy cut it from a magazine and scanned it into an old computer. The voice belonged to a Californian student. The expressions were a short sequence of instructions, repeating whenever an ancient necromancer wanted to laugh,
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There’s a soul cake on the bar. Small thing. Flour, butter, spice, a few currants. A cross cut into the top deeply enough to survive the oven. You could mistake it for a biscuit. Soul cakes belonged to Hallowtide: All Hallows’ Eve on 31 October, All Saints’ Day on 1 November, then All Souls’ Day
Four pure demon families walk this world, rubbing shoulders with you in supermarkets and schools. Sharing a desk in the office or fixing your hot water heater. Lineage matters to all of them. But to Leeches, it matters most. There’s no nobility in an origin tale where a primordial swamp is your mother. They craved
Some objects hold things. This one holds a person. You know me by now. I don’t shock easily. Seen too much. But the first time I stood before Sowilo’s mirror, I found myself checking my own reflection like it was a stranger. It’s glass now. Full-length – tall enough to look a grown man in
I was in the village two miles east yesterday morning. Errands. Nothing worth reporting. On the way back I passed Paula the teacher from the primary school. I haven’t seen her since before her maternity leave — eight, nine months ago maybe. She looked the way new mothers look: held together by necessity and not
New Haven, Connecticut. 1866. A rifle comes off the line at the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Model 1866. Brass receiver, polished to a shine. Walnut stock. Smooth action for its era. Nobody marks the occasion. It’s one of a thousand or so. The workers go home. The foreman ticks a number in a ledger. The
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There’s a hill in Shropshire that a giant built by accident. That’s the story, anyway. He was carrying a load of earth — stolen from Wales, as tends to happen in these accounts — with the intention of burying a town he’d taken a dislike to. A shoemaker talked him out of it. He dropped
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I’ve known a few people who loved the wrong thing so completely that by the time they understood what it had cost them, there was nothing left. It’s a long, slow destruction. Until the person standing there at the end of it isn’t anything like the person who started. Jegudiel was one of those. I’m
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There was a man in a pub in Carlisle — this would have been the late nineties — who held a table for four hours without buying a round and left with three people’s phone numbers, one person’s car keys, and what I strongly suspect was a signed document of some kind. Nobody saw him
On a train. Headed south. The roads are impossible this time of year. Tourists and caravans and people who bought walking boots last Tuesday and think they know the hills. The train suits me better. Always has. You can think on a train. And there are the tunnels. At the first one, a boy pressed
