Short Fiction

We were living in a rather spooky old house and there had been an undercurrent of things happening, stuff not quite right, but nothing specific, more a feeling of being watched or a general ambience of wrong.

Anyhow, an old relative turns up. A crotchety lady of advanced years, who is actually a relative of a woman I'd been previously engaged to (not in real life, in my dream persona) who happens to be called Carole (my wife in real life)

Somehow, I believe I can hoodwink this rather stern old lady, who is a cross between Miss Marple and Edna off Emmerdale, to accept that my current wife is the same Carole I had been previously engaged to. My rationale is that she is probably rich, and it would be a nice step on the ladder to inheritance if I could engineer a tenuous connection to her. Equally implausibly, I believe I can persuade Carole to accept her as a kosher relative too. I don't want her to think I'm just some cheap scammer in it for the dough, which my dream persona quite clearly is.

Anyway, I lead her into a sort of oak-panelled drawing room to meet my current wife. As the door closes, I am still outside the room they occupy, but from within I hear an immediate, utterly blood-curdling scream from Carole which chills me to the marrow. Rushing in, I wonder what the old lady has done or said to warrant such a reaction. As I quickly enter the room, Carole is ashen faced and pointing behind me. There, in an alcove that the closed door has revealed, observing us with a sort of sickening nonchalance, is this vividly-drawn creature. A cross between this



and this,



It has something to usurp even the combined unpleasantness of those images though. It is clothed in a tailored three-piece tweed suit, like some leprechaun gamekeeper of Hades, wearing a deerstalker with fishing flies. There is an emanation of unspeakable evil coming from it which we are all transfixed by, and I immediately pick up a cudgel from a nearby elephant's foot umbrella stand (a knobkerrie, if you will) and smash the malevolent hob to a bloody pulp.

We cut to breakfast the next morning. We are seated at a big oak table, and for some reason I have made the old lady comfortable on top of it, with masses of cushions. I am explaining to her the benefits of 'memory foam', but my underlying thoughts concern my eldest son, who is sat opposite. The sun is sloping in through a huge bay window, limning his hair and eyelashes with a fine, preternatural brilliance, like spun gold.

I'm trying to maintain a facade of normality, but there's a nasty worm of fear for him, deep down in the pit of my stomach. Its saying, with an awful, nagging certainty. "The demon's wife is still in the house, maybe its children too. They will want revenge."

I wake up in a sweat of scalp-tingling revulsion. Its 5am and the tv has been left on. There's a looping trailer on one of the satellite channels for the Comic Strip's "Five Go Mad in Dorset."

Brrr.