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For December, the Creative Writing team at Brighton uni ran a “Frightening Writing” competition, alongside talks about ghost stories, and showings of ghost stories (including The Muppet Christmas Carol, possibly the best adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic!).

There were about a dozen entries, including some submissions from PhD students and others. I’m very pleased to say that I won!

For a different take on the same story, you might also like the re-write by my dearest nemesis Fen over at Winter’s Tales, who very kindly looked at the first draft for me at literally the 11th hour.

The short story I wrote (at 10pm on the day it was due by), is below. Enjoy!

Angel

Entrance. Oyster card. Headphones in.

“Gah!”

Morgan flinched as his fingers brushed the stainless-steel gulf between the opposing handrail straps. The audible click caused passers-by – a family somehow pushing six clacking luggage cases between two beleaguered adults and two recalcitrant children – to glance at him, while he shook his fingers to relieve the numbness from the shock.

Thinking nothing more of it, he continued his descent. 90 feet, down into the depths. He’d often wondered why some tube stations Hampstead, Angel, Covent Garden, others?  were so deep. Something about avoiding infrastructure, according to the internet, but who can believe that these days?

Whoosh. Beep-beep-beep. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Home.

Weeks later in the Viaduct, Morgan’s friend Gary was holding court as the resident (and self-appointed) ghost expert and folklorist:

“’course, they bloody had to make Highgate that deep, because of the cemet’ry! Who knows what kind of creepie crawlers might emerge looking for a train otherwise! Hurr hurr…”

“That’s bollocks, Gary,” Susan–a fairly respected author of spooky tales–interjected. “The cemetery’s a good mile away from the station, that doesn’t make any sense at all!”

Rallying, Gary unsheathed his sharpest weapon (insofar as they related to tube station depths) and made his riposte.

“Ah, well, Susie,” (Susan bristled at that), “What about Angel, eh? Eh? I heard when they was digging it, they found a stone coffin, lined with lead, all fancy-work done on the outside of it an’ all!” The story was punctuated by swigs from his handled glass of London Pride. “Now, when some bods from the university came to have a poke around in it, they cracked it open, if you follow me, and do you know what happened next?”

“They found a body?” one of the resident ghost-hunters offered,

“No they bloody didn’t! What ‘appened was, they cracked the lid open a little bit, and old mate student, his crowbar touches the lead, and he gets the shock of his life! So-called, because it killed him dead!” He underlined the drama of this revelation with a long draught of his ale. “Now, I know a bloke who worked down the tube, and he told me, the other one was so distraught that he ended up in the loony bin, but guess what? He said he had a ringing in his ears the rest of his life, loud as the bloody London philharmonic! Anyway, that’s why they dug Angel so deep.” Satisfied that he’d convinced the masses, Gary plunked his empty pint pot onto the bar, and in the same raconteur’s tone said: “Landlord! Another of your finest, please!”

The landlord didn’t seem impressed. Neither did Susan, but Morgan tucked this factoid away in his head, as something to wheel out at parties, or awkwardly mention on dates with the right kind of boy.

Months passed. Morgan didn’t keep a tally of how many shocks that fucking escalator gave him, but he did notice that it happened literally every single time he touched the rail, now. Thanks, Baader-Meinhof. He wondered if it happened to everyone, or if he should just buy some different shoes.

One particularly furnace-like June night, the kind of weather where each breath feels like a fight against strangely gritty air, and curly-haired people can be heard swearing softly to themselves, Morgan was out later than planned. An evening at the Townhouse in Islington had gone on till the witching hour, and a postscript with his mate Charli outside the pub had gone down enough tangents, rabbit-holes, and sidebars, that now he was having to actually run to the station.

Skirting past the benches, and skidding to a halt in the entrance, Morgan tapped his Oyster card, glanced at the ribbon-like metal sculpture in the foyer, and approached the escalator. As expected, there was the familiar jolt that seemed to jar his elbow, and he descended into the depths. There were only a handful of people around: other midnight revellers, a few worried-looking office workers who’d been trying to impress their bosses, but quiet, for London.

The lights flickered. Once. Twice.

Darkness.

The emergency lighting begrudgingly swelled to something that passed for illumination. In the smudge-light of the backup LEDs, he could make out some of the other grumbling travellers.

In fact, now his eyes were adjusting, he saw that the escalator was absolutely packed.

Outnumbering the muttering and complaining Londoners was a horde of moaning, wailing, gurgling apparitions, all in states of bodily injury and dismemberment that would make George R.R. Martin and Stephen King blanch. A woman a few steps ahead, that he’d seen slip through the gates a few moments ahead of him, stood passively by as a headless figure turned, wrenched a veil-covered woman in white by the shoulders, and threw her down the stairs to a cacophonous response of jeering from the damned.

After that, all hell broke loose. Shrieking spirits holding their own severed arms as bludgeons battered at lanky, ghoulish fiends who clawed back with yellow dirt-caked fingernails. Impossibly wide-eyed apparitions of children sobbed as wild-haired figures holding curved knives took turns ineffectually but repeatedly stabbing each other.

Glancing behind in fright, Morgan’s eyes were drawn to the top of the stairs. There, the sculpture from the foyer stood, crackling with amber lightning, sparks of coruscating power leaping from each twist and turn of the ribbons of steel. Even as he peered past the maddening monsters, Morgan saw the outline of the iron angel become limned with sinister radiance, and he turned away.

Be not afraid. The thought overrode his own panicked processing and pressed into his mind with an irrefutable force. You will be judged. Morgan trembled, then, his body convulsing with a fear far outweighing his horror at the writhing mass of discordant souls.

As he neared the end of the escalator – long, long after it should have reached the bottom – the blood-curdling screams and shouts of anguish were drowned out by a slowly rising tone, strident but discordant against the wailing, not unlike a train’s horn extended and amplified sevenfold. Morgan fell to his knees, hands pressed over his ears.

It was the last sound he ever heard.

The other day I learned, from my dear friend Bianca, of the passing of a horse called Whisper, who had the reputation of being a gentle king amongst the other horses. I wrote a few short lines in tribute, and thought they ought to be somewhere other than on Facebook.

Whisper

On a wind-whipped and wide open plain,

Where seven thousand hard hoofbeats had rung,

Was a story of a King and his reign,

Whose name will never be whispered, but sung.

This piece was a response to several poems about the Long Man of Wilmington, on the South Downs. I grew up in another place, far from there, but also on chalk, so I imagined a conversation between the Long Man and the Cerne Abbas giant, talking about their longevity, and their forgotten cousins.

Giants

Cousin!
Are you well?
I have here walked,
Long-legged leagues from chalk to chalk,
And bear thee greeting.

Staff-bearer, weapon-dancer,
Underneath the roiling rainclouds prancer,
Shall we fight?
Can your staff, or spear
(Or frame from within whose door you peer?)
Match my knurled and knobbly cudgel’s might?

Guardian!
In your deeping dell.
I have here walked,
Fleet-footed, flying over farm and fell,
And bear thee warning.

Gate-keeper, hill-sleeper,
Astride your dun-side portal-keeper,

What have you seen?
Did you see the men of bone,
Who dug with the horns of beasts for glassy stones,
When they made you?
Or did you peer with twinkling eye,
(Under rainclouds that go ever racing by),
A man in black with book clutched nigh,
Who re-laid you?

Wanderer!
Chalk-rider, dream-strider,
Lost in time and thought and memory-rider.
Shall we leave?

There are horses enough to bear us yonder,
So that in ages hence some folk will ponder,
Where did they go?
Those gods of Cerne, and Down, and Plymouth Hoe,
On steeds from Westbury, Cherhill, and red Tysoe,
Leaving hill, and hump, and bluff all bare,

And when they ask,
“Were they ever truly there?”,
The hills will rumble and give voice to answer,
That if they miss Heilith and Woden Weapon-Dancer,
Seeing nothing where their bones were laid,
And wished they lingered on their banks of earth,
The next god they make should instead be made,
Of something more stern than mossy, chalky, turf.

Most blacksmiths have Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith” quoted at them at least once in their lives, and fragments of it are lodged in my brain. So, when we were asked to re-write a classic piece of literature through a queer lens, I thought I would draw on my experience of the trials and tribulations of being a transgender, neurodivergent, blacksmith – if I weren’t imitating his style, I wouldn’t use so many “bossy rhymes”…!

The Modern Blacksmith

Under the groaning white gum-tree,
Close to the flowing Dart;
The smith rubs both her aching hands,
And tends her wounded heart;
And the muscles of her pudgy arms,
Are as nothing to her art.

Her hair is short, and cropped, and shorn,
Her face is pale and wan;
Her brow is wet with hated sweat,
She earns what little she can,
And scrapes along in mounting debt,
That she owes to him – the man.

Occasionally, from noon till night,
You can hear her forge-fan race;
You can hear her hammer’s frantic knell,
At reckless speed and pace,
Like a demon ringing the devil’s bell,
Lacking style, or charm, or grace.

Nosy wankers from nearby,
Look in at the open door;
They love to interrupt the smith,
Deaf from the fire’s roar,
Scaring the startled shit right out of her,
Sending her hammer to the floor.

Anxious, manic, or ‘out of spoons’,
She groans at each commission;
Like a soldier unprepared to die,
Abandoning each mission,
Six thousand rusting projects lie,
Each night a new addition.

No thanks for thee, you sweaty cow,
For the things that you have wrought!
They say by bearing woe and and weal,
Our fortunes must be sought;
But not by forging iron or steel,
Just as your teachers taught.

This poem is inspired by the idea of an “introspective bildungsroman”, a sort of autobiographical snippet of my personal history. I wanted to suggest a link between habits and learning from our mistakes, and how a change of discipline and daily experience can provoke a sense of dissonance.

Pitted

I am as familiar with the flaking olive drab of an anti-aircraft gun,
(Or the crumbling straps under a cannon’s rotting carriage),
As I am incapable of keeping my nail polish unchipped.
Pale, sullen, scars, from countless blistering battles lost and won,
(With hot iron, or cold unyielding steel),
Leap out from the blank page of my skin.
They linger, each crescent describing poor decisions,
Lessons learned from slippery apprentice fingers,
Criss-crossed and struck through like an editor’s note.
They fade, but never wane completely,
Serving as reference, remembrance, retrospective,
Pocked and pitted footnotes on my body’s painful history.

Another weekly writing task. This one asked us to reflect on our first experiences (last year) of receiving peer feedback in seminars/workshops, and how we’ve developed as writers since then.

I’ve long held that art – whether that’s writing, a forged bit of ironwork, a song performance, or a painting etc. – is often a snapshot of a point in time, a capturing of what’s going on with the artist at that moment. This poem is a reluctant acceptance that sometimes it’s worth going back and refining something, rather than moving on to the next exciting dopamine hit.

Wright

The patient page, stark and staring,

Awaits scribe, and script, and scribble,

(Of love, and loss, or desperate daring),

Resolved to be scratched and scraped,

Whittled or wrought,

As words are wrenched, wrangled, and wrestled,

From draft to doomed or destined draft.

Today was… a lot! Another productive and engaging day at university, but one that ended in me hitting a bit of a wall as my momentum came to an abrupt end. I fell asleep, exhausted and upset, as soon as I got home, and on waking found I was even more sensitive than usual to exterior sounds.
As I lay there frowning, I wrote this poem, which attempts to sum up my reaction to those noises.

Still

In the chaos and clatter
As a thousand thousand
Unsummoned sounds
Peeked around the edges of her perception
She found that if she lay
Very
Very
VERY
still
The stillness was almost
(But not quite)
A substitute for silence.

3am. I couldn’t sleep – I don’t think in my entire life I’ve ever fallen asleep intentionally at the moment I chose to – so I let my mind wander through rhymes and verses, some very silly, some very sweet. In the grand tradition of writing poems or songs about other poems or songs, here is a short poem about those fleeing stanzas.

Drifting

If I wrote down all the poetry,
That I wrought before I stumbled,
Into restless sleep and reverie,
Each stanza soft and mumbled.

In gilded parchment’s secret folds,
I’d keep those poems bound,
By a pen of burnished beaten gold,
To capture every whispered sound.

Yesterday, as I was travelling home from university, I was caught in a sudden downpour without my umbrella. As I took shelter at the train station, I wrote a short poem inspired by that blissful smell of rain on a warm autumn day.

Petrichor

Blood from a stone.

Crystalline.
Divine.
A smell as old as mould and stale sunshine.

Perfumed.
Pungent.
Against the cloying warmth a salving unguent.

Loamy.
It lingers.
Tickles the nostrils with mist-moistened fingers.