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    Gothic Reflections
    Gothic Reflections
    Gothic Reflections
    Ebook63 pages56 minutes

    Gothic Reflections

    By Alex Burrett

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    About this ebook

    Experience the pain and horror of phantasmagorical child abduction. Journey with two parents as they search castle, wood and ruined mill for clues to their children's whereabouts. And all the while wonder... is the parents' suffering deserved?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAlex Burrett
    Release dateJan 25, 2016
    ISBN9781311488367
    Gothic Reflections
    Author

    Alex Burrett

    Alex Burrett lives in London, where he works in advertising. This is his first collection of stories.

    Read more from Alex Burrett

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      Book preview

      Gothic Reflections - Alex Burrett

      Gothic Reflections

      by Alex Burrett

      Copyright Alex Burrett 2016

      Publisher Fedw

      Smashwords Edition

      Dedicated to Gorse, Scarlett, Morgan, Mitchell and Lauren.

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the endeavour of this author.

      Cover image original artwork owned by Alex Burrett.

      INDEX

      The Loss

      The Visit

      The Breakdown

      The Dovecot

      The Interpretation

      The Trip

      The Miller

      The Crows

      The Search

      About the Author

      The Loss

      Phantoms have no reflections, gurgled the foul mud. True faces do.

      The distraught parents were splattered with polluted, oily slime each time the fetid brown sludge uttered a spluttering word. Both almost retched at the acrid smell of the monstrous oracle’s stale-water breath. They wanted to walk away. But the stagnant puddle was their only source of advice – so they placed their ears close to its methane-bubbling mouth. And clung to every utterance.

      Find faces with reflections.

      After imparting its wisdom, it fell silent.

      We need more, bellowed the father, desperate for further information. None came.

      Tell us what to do, screamed the bereft mother. Tell us what to do!

      The mud was unmoved. It bubbled and babbled no more. It was once again a rancid mixture of still water and microbe-infested earth. Anyone watching would have imagined the agitated aristocratic couple no more than crazed lunatics screaming at a patch of wet soil.

      The father tried to drag the children’s mother away. But maternal bonds, stronger than the chains that raised their castle home’s drawbridge, held her uncomfortably close to the inanimate prophet’s visage. She was so intimately near, had her tongue flopped out, she would have licked the disgusting sludge’s hideous rippled cheeks.

      We must go. We must find them, urged her husband, tugging at her left arm like a small hound trying to drag a bull’s carcass across an abattoir yard.

      We’ve been looking for days, shrieked his sobbing wife.

      Her final word, higher in pitch and volume than the rest of her sentence, reached the castle wall on the far side of the moat. …days. It bounced back to the childless parents. Mocking them. That shrieked pitiful word also roused the devilish carrion crows from their rookery in the copse by the abandoned mill. They exploded into the air, flapping and cawing. Cawing. Cawing. Cawing. A mighty murder of crows.

      Caw’d you find them? Caw’se you can’t. Caw’d we care? Caw’se we can’t.

      The chorus of avian taunting broke the mother’s will. The force that drew her to the parents’ terrestrial sage was interrupted. Her husband felt the break in her attachment to the putrid puddle, raised her upright, placed his arm around her waist and led her back to the castle. The castle that was their home. The castle that had joyfully resounded with the noises of their longed-for children – from baby cries through giggles and laughter to screams of excitement and babbling chatter. And incessant questions. And learning the piano. And singing nursery rhymes. And counting out loud and coming ready or not and I’ve found you. The sounds of their delightful twins. Twins that had been taken. Noises, despite their disappearance, their parents still heard. Echoes of the vanished.

      It’s hard to say when the parents’ war with the birds began. Both could be held responsible. Both fell out with the avian world early in their lives.

      The twins’ mother grew up in the castle. She was the only child of two uninterested aristocratic parents. Many children dream of having a castle to play in. And hers was huge. Over twenty bedrooms. Five different dining rooms – depending on the occasion. A room for storing cured meats. And two for wine. But the castle was all she had. She wasn’t allowed to mix with common children – the servants had to leave theirs at home. Her parents’ guests never brought their offspring. It wasn’t the done thing. And her only cousins lived in France – a country her father avoided because of a long-standing legal dispute over a piece of land in Pas-de-Calais.

      She wasn’t allowed pets either. So the castle was pretty much all she had. Adults aside, the only living things she had for company were creatures small enough to evade eviction or those that could fly over the

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