Irregular Scribblings

Fright Night

Based on the Victorian tradition of the communal sharing of ghost stories, Fright Night is a Hallowe'en event where we celebrate the macabre, the ghoulish and the downright spine-tingling. Poetry, prose and even interesting non-fiction are all welcome, and there is much fun to be had in the telling, the listening, the dressing up (optional) and the enjoying of mort cake (compulsory).

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Included here are a couple of the stories shared that night...

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Heretics Park - Sophie Kersey

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They’d landed on their feet, thought Seb, turning down the alleyway into Heretics Park. It wasn’t just the excellent schools: the little town they’d moved to had real history. He had enthused about it to Clapham friends who joked about yokels with extra thumbs. Parkrun here had been great for getting to know people, but Seb was also determined to improve his time, hence his arrival for interval training with sunrise a hopeful glimmer at the end of their road. The dimly lit alleyway disgorged him into the park itself. Dawn didn’t seem to have penetrated here. You didn’t realise in the city what real darkness was like. Seb slowed down to let his eyes adjust. It was great, really – no light pollution! He clicked on his head-torch. He set off along the path towards the football pitch where he planned to run. Over there on his left was the duckpond with that stand of trees beside it: ‘the burnt oaks,’ according to the run brief on Saturday. He’d asked why and someone had told him about the five women burnt as heretics there in Bloody Mary’s reign. They had been accused of turning milk sour, harbouring Protestants and talking to the Devil in the form of a crow....Click here for the full story

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And Then They Came - Zin Murphy

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Oliver Youngblood steps off the bus that has brought the group of foreign writers and scholars to the edge of the Cathedral Square in Pisa. Yet another visa check. He waves his blue passport at the man in uniform, who looks more like a soldier than an immigration official, and continues his conversation with his travelling companion, Walter Hextube, about the role of the supernatural in early Chaucer. The man in uniform snatches his passport and flips its pages back and forth until he finds the visa. Then he scrutinises Oliver to see whether he is indeed as described – white, male and of working age – before shoving the passport back into Oliver's hand and gesturing for Walter to submit his. The disembarked group is flanked by a corridor of stony-faced officials as it proceeds toward the Tower, hired for the annual international meeting of the Royal Ivory Tower Association of Scriveners (motto Fabula longa, vita brevis), reputedly at great expense, by Lady Hunnipotte. Only a few know how much she paid for the privilege, and for the visas for the dodgy intellectuals coming from far and wide, but no-one doubts that she paid an enormous sum to use the Tower on the evening before its demolition.... Click here for the full story