Thirteen Supernatural Tales

Thirteen Supernatural Tales

Keith Coleman

Published by Keith Coleman at Smashwords

Copyright 2015 Keith Coleman

CONTENTS

A Lovely Shade of Nasty Green

Bourtree and Broom

FAQ

Imagine Here, At Night

Man of Clay

The Plettie

The Was Wolf

Those Who Cut the Holly Tree

Rubble

Fleg

The Pictures on the Wall

On the Pier

Learning Curve

About The Author

‘Fleg’ first appeared on the McStorytellers website: McStorytellers

‘The Pictures On The Wall’ first appeared in the June 1997 edition of All Hallows magazine.

‘FAQ’ first appeared in Deadman’s Tome E-zine, 2013: Deadman's Tome

A Lovely Shade of Nasty Green

It was typical that Henry refused to accept a vintage racing car in British Racing Green that had been left to him in our uncle’s will. News about his obstinacy over the car was passed around the family well before we knew he would receive the bulk of the estate. Not that there was ever any doubt about the scale of his inheritance. He had been ingratiating himself with the old man for years in a stealthy way. But it was just like him to graciously accept a fortune and turn his nose up at one item he took a dislike to. It was out of the question that uncle would leave the car to any of the rest of us because we were all women. Females and motor vehicles did not equate in his mind.

I suppose the women in the family (we were called ‘the witches’ by Henry) could have been accused of jealousy at being relegated to relatively smaller amounts in the bequest stakes. But I think the business was more of a convenient excuse for lambasting Henry, who had been the family whipping boy for years. He had bumbled his way into a fortune and undeservedly kept a hold of it after marrying and divorcing three inappropriate gold-diggers. Through all his obvious mistakes he remained a pompous fool unable to admit that any way was right except his own.

In the fall out over the will the vultures had a good cackle about him trying to refuse the car (after they had moaned and bitched for weeks about the money). It transpired, entertainingly, that the uncle’s solicitors and executors were cussed sorts who dug their heels in and insisted that Henry must take the car, whether or not he actually wanted it. He was responsible for disposing of it himself afterwards.

‘Why won’t he just accept the car with good grace?’ cousin Jane asked. ‘You don’t hear me moaning about getting next to nothing.’

‘Well, you did get that cottage in Dorset,’ I told her.

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Jane. ‘I forgot that detail.’

I repeated that I was not surprised that Henry had dug his heels in, but I was intrigued by the reason he refused. Apparently he refused to take the car because green was unlucky on account of being the colour of the Fairies and the Otherworld.

‘Outrageous attention seeking. Or he’s doolally,’ Jane said.

‘Well, he’s laughing all the way to the madhouse. He got the villa in Spain and a condominium in Florida,’ I countered. ‘Anyway, he was never weird or superstitious or whimsical or whatever. You expect travelling salesmen to have all these little odd superstitions, not a bona fide businessman.’

Her husband was an ex-salesman (amongst other things), so that comment shut her up for a short time. Then she came back with:

‘If it was me, and I believed what he did, I would just re-spray the bloody motor.’

‘It would still be green underneath.’

‘Yes, but who cares? Appearances are what counts in this world.’

‘What about other worlds?’

‘Mmmn.’ Jane usually insisted on claiming the final word, but in this instance she was beyond the limits of her imaginative comfort zone.

Two things happened close together several weeks later. The first was that I received a phone call from uncle’s solicitor. There had been an unfortunate discrepancy in my legacy. I was too preoccupied with my divorce and moving house to give the whole matter any further consideration; in fact I had forgotten I had been left anything at all.

‘Don’t tell me,’ I said to Mr Rodgers. ‘There was an administrative cock-up and I shouldn’t have received anything?’

‘Not at all,’ he said, bless him.

‘Or I actually owe the estate something?’

No, it wasn’t that, because there had been an inconsistency with the figures and the amount I was due to receive was not in copper money but several thousands of pounds. Through the dizziness I was aware of asking Mr Rodgers to marry me. Thankfully for both of us he announced that he was already attached.

One of my first thoughts, when I had digested the news, was whether this turnaround in fortunes would seep into the tribal consciousness. Jane had a sensitive nose for rumour and was instantly aware of every development in each branch and crevice of the family. So I decided to tell her myself before she spread around a fantastically inflated version that I was now worth millions. But I could tell from her voice there was something wrong from her voice when I called her a few hours later. She did not seem the least bit interested in my reversal of fortune.

‘I’ve been conned,’ she whispered to me.

‘How so?’ I asked.

‘I don’t really understand what’s happened. Bloody Henry – the little shit – has persuaded me to keep that horrible inherited sports car at my place. He said he didn’t have space at his own house, which is an absolute lie, come to think of it. There’s about five outbuildings behind his house. They came and delivered the car and put it in the double garage when I was out. But they changed the garage locks without asking me.’

‘That’s a bit odd,’ I said.

‘I tried to get in touch with Henry, but he’s gone off to the States with his latest bimbo.’

I made sympathetic noises in between mouthfuls of doughnut.

‘And there’s worse,’ she went on. ‘I wish I hadn’t said anything spiteful about Henry being superstitious and believing weird things. There’s something in the garage with the car.’

There are times when you are thankful for your own forbearance, and this was one of them. Eight times out of ten I might have responded with some witty, sarcastic comment, such as saying there was a plague of madness infecting the family and I hoped it would not reach me. But I held my tongue and muttered a platitude and tried to tease out of her just what she thought was inside the garage with the beastly car. Was it a nest of rats? A stereo system pumping out rap music? A big boxful of juicy twenty pound notes that she could smell through the garage walls? I put various serious and facetious suggestions to her, but she didn’t rise to the bait. She was uncharacteristically quiet.

‘It’s noise,’ she said lowly. ‘There’s sound inside, in there, with the car. I don’t want to say any more on the phone. Can you come over?’

I went over that afternoon and found her, very pale, hardly herself at all, sitting just inside her open front door, with a brush in her hand. She looked like an insane sentry guard.

‘Come with me.’

The garage was a separate block, enough for two or three cars, adjacent to the house. The steel door was firmly bolted. It was slightly concave in the section where someone had bashed out the old lock and inserted a new one. There was an oblong aperture, letterbox sized, where you could look in, just above the lock and handle. I looked in and immediately wished I hadn’t.

The car was visible in the half light. I want to say that it was facing me, because that’s the impression of it I got. It was a low, open topped vintage model – 1940s or 1950s perhaps. Not that I know too much about these things. British Racing Green, as I said, with a roundel on the bonnet with a white background and the number zero painted in black. Facing me, I thought, because it seemed like the car moved position infinitesimally towards, as if it was organic. And a trick of the light made the paintwork seem to move in a slimy fashion.

I withdrew rapidly and almost bowled Jane over. She scuttled me back into the house, away from the presence, and locked the door. I was trying to process what it could possibly mean in my mind, but all I got was a lot of broken detritus flashing along on a conveyor belt. I recalled something about Brooklands, the old abandoned racing circuit, and wondered if the car had come from there. I had a vague memory that the place was supposed to be haunted. Then there were a lot of half remembered images about the bad luck of the colour green.

‘The Battle of Arbroath,’ I said suddenly, and Jane jumped. ‘1446. The Lindsay family put down their defeat in the battle to the fact their tartan contained a bit of green, the fairy colour.’

‘Hardly helpful at all,’ Jane moaned, head in her hands.

It took us the rest of the afternoon to decide what to do. During that time Jane gave me a brief sketch of what she thought she had encountered. Although it was a bit weird, but I don’t think it was enough to justify her state of near hysteria. The first strangeness was sounds coming from the locked garage. Not the sound of car engines as she thought at first when she went down to investigate. When she pressed her ear against the door (being too scared at first to look through the aperture) she heard a low, rhythmic sound that was definitely human.

‘It was moaning,’ she said.

‘What kind of moaning?’

‘The unnatural kind,’ Jane said irritably. ‘You know, like someone enjoying themselves too much, in a certain kind of way. Or someone really not enjoying themselves at all.’

‘That narrows it down nicely.’

She ignored me. ‘Then I looked through that letterbox thingy.’

‘You never! Not by yourself, all alone?’

‘Don’t say it so sarky. I did, and you’ll never guess what I saw.’

‘Demystify me immediately.’

She had looked through the door and saw some shadows scuttle away into the deeper darkness as she peered in. Then she thought she heard a challenging sort of laugh. The darkness inside flickered, then there was a bit more light and the big zero had changed into this ghastly grinning skull head that was looking right at her.

There was an awkward silence where Jane sat, lip trembling, trying to assess whether I believed her or not. I got embarrassed and shrugged, then I asked her what she thought we could do about it. It was a mistake to say ‘we’ instead of ‘you’, as I was immediately enlisted as a co-conspirator. The immediate question was not the supernatural provenance of the car: Jane stopped me wondering out loud about that with a burst of hysterics. Nor was it important how much Henry knew about it, and what he had witnessed. We needed to urgently get the car back to him, or at least somewhere else.

‘You could break in and drive it over to his place,’ I suggested.

It was not a serious suggestion; more of a reaction to Jane flapping about and not coming up with anything constructive herself. She responded with a flood of abusive rhetoric, but no solutions unfortunately.

‘I shall have to move house,’ she said dramatically. ‘I can’t go on living with that just outside the door.’

I stayed with her that night, to keep her company, though it did neither of us much good in terms of providing peace of mind.

Uneasy spirits can be locked away as well as family skeletons. Half the battle, I think, is not driving yourself mental trying to puzzle out how or why something strange is happening, or where it began, or what it means. Most of life, like most of the afterlife maybe, means nothing at all. The next day I became frighteningly practical with my cousin. It was no good wringing our hands, or going through the yellow pages for exorcists, or whatever. The only thing we could do was refer the whole thing back – physically – to Henry.

Jane had a wide range of objections, but I was in no mood for any of them. The matter had taken up too much of my time already and I just wanted to go off on holiday somewhere and spend uncle’s money. Somehow we had to put the ball, or rather the car, back in Henry’s court. Apart from Jane’s hysteria, I was having trouble with my divorce settlement, a matter which she had no reciprocal sympathy for. She had never liked my husband, and he blamed her spite for initiating the bad blood between us.

‘Who ever heard of a builder called Jeremy?’ she used to say slyly about him. ‘Builders should be called Fred or Pete or Mike.’ The way she shuddered as she said it made me want to hit her. Behind my back she used to make snide jokes about the fact that he came from a well-to-do background and had demeaned himself, and therefore me, by entering into a manual trade. Her favourite dig was that he had run away from his family’s accountancy company to become a bricklayer. But, for a good few