TREATMENTS...

I used to HATE treatments.

Never used to write them unless I had to. And even then it was usually after the fact, having written a full script, or at least some kind of longer document, but discovering someone else really wanted one.

I still find them problematic. Conveying the exitement of an idea in such a way as to grab the readers imagination, but not giving them every last beat of the script.

Recently I've had a turnaround. I've got so many ideas on the go, that it just seemed practical (and quicker) to write treatments for them all, so that there was something concrete to give to people if they were interested/wanted to read.

My thinking being that - since I still work full time - I don't have the time to just sit down and blast the scripts out, so why not work them up to being ready to go, and let fate/interested parties decide which one goes to script first. And if no one makes that decision, well I'll slowly work my way through them anyway. No harm, no fowl. Everyone's a winner...

In the process, I've had a bit of a breakthrough.

When I first sit down to write a treatment, it isn't just a 'treatment'. It's the first draft of the script.

I write a very detailed, often undisciplined treatment, knowing that I'll cut it back. But that first moment of throwing paint at the canvas, is like an info dump. I write it fast. As fast as I can, pouring everything I think I know about the script/story out onto the page.

That's not to say I don't pay any attention to how it's going to read.

I'd be a very poor writer I think, if I did that. But I don't let it get in the way.

I write to be read. I write to excite - myself as much as anything. And as ever the process of writing, of pouring the stew of ideas out onto the page, seems to act like a sieve, cutting out the fat. Details leap out at me, flag themselves as key. Images and core points crystalise, and push you in more definate, honed directions. The story starts to find itself, define itself. Well, that's writing...

And I guess that's where I was going wrong before. I thought of the treatment as a condensation. Now it's part of the process. A first step to finding what the story/script really wants to be.

The treatment isn't just the 'treatment'. It's the first draft of the script...

Thinking of it that way makes it more integral. More useful. Less like something that's getting in the way. Less like something that seemed like it was just for lazy financers who couldn't be bothered to read a script (come on you know you've often thought it when you're trying to boil a big idea down without killing it dead).

It's an important step in the creative process now. A really helpful step.

It helps to order all my thoughts BEFORE I'm knee deep in the finer details of how one scene cuts to the next, or the implications of a single word of dialogue.

And it's fun. It feels a lot like telling myself the story for the first time again, seeing what works. Why the idea was exiting when I had it. And if I can tell the whole thing (even allowing for some narrative gaps filled in with notes) and make it work, find the shape in the treatment. It's pretty certain I can make it work as a script. Writing the treatment first gives you confidence. By the end of it, you're already partway there.

THREE HAIRS OF THE DEVIL (Screenplay)

Work in progress. An original screenplay by Neil Snowdon


Pete Gleadall and his dad are new in town.

The local kids tell Pete that the Devil lives in the house at the end of his street. That the old woman living there is a witch, who once had sex with a demon and nine months later gave birth to the Devil.

Pete doesn't believe a word of it. But that night sees the hulking man who lives there going out...

He comes back first thing in the morning. Just as Pete is getting up for school.

Pete sneaks over there to get a better look. Hiding in the bushes in the back garden, Pete see's the man - The Devil - take a couple of raw, wet hearts from out his bag and push them down into the earth, covering them carefully.

But why? Pete becomes obsessed. Night after night, he sees the man go out into the dark, into the town, and every morning he returns and buries hearts in his back garden.

Pete's dad tells him a fairytale about the Devil - how if you can pluck three hairs from his back while he is sleeping, he will grant you a wish.

Pete's mum is dead. That's why they moved house.

Now he has a reason to find out more. So he breaks into the Devil's house one night.

He finds the Devil sleeping -

He reaches out to pluck a hair -

And wakes him up... and then all hell breaks loose. In a manner of speaking.


Who is the 'Devil'? Why does he live with his mother? And what does she want with Pete?

You'll have to wait and see...

(TO BE UPDATED!)

MOONDANCE (Screenplay)

Work in progress. Screenplay for a short film - probably animation - based on my short story.

A tale about how wolves learned to walk on two legs instead of four, and disguise themselves as men.

They walk among us still. They're out there on the streets today...


You can read the original short story HERE...

SWEET DREAMS...

The character in this story has been in my head for years.

For a while I thought I had a story for her, and another muse like character that's been floating round for even longer. But it's long since evaporated. I suspect because it wasn't very good.

So the little girl from this script, just kept on walking. Until I thought I'd at least tell this.

Because I knew what the begining for her character was. I've always known. That's how she appeared inside my head: a little girl with a backpack, sleeping in graveyards because she couldn't hurt anybody there. So I just had someone find her. And try to help/interfere...

It's a short script. I wrote it thinking it might be practical enough that maybe I could make it myself for no money. I'm still hopeful. But as ever, if you're interested, talk to me. Click HERE.

THE STAIN...

A man takes a room above a pub to write his novel in. A last ditch attempt to 'make it' before his wife gives birth to their first child and he has to buckle down to a REAL job, like he promised to.

It's a bare room. And damp. The paper is peeling and there are stains on the walls.

One stain in particular looks almost foetus like.

The man leaves the room untouched. Settles down to work. after a slow start, he finds he can't type fast enough. The novel starts to flow. He starts ignoring home. The book is taking off in new directions. Sometimes he forgets to eat, he's pouring all his energy into the story...

And as he does so, the stain starts getting bigger. Seems to grow. Become more formed. More defined. More human.

Until, one night, it reaches out to him. Crawls, mewling, out of the wall. A blind wet thing with skin the colour of mould, skin that is soft, and moist, almost fluid, like wallpaper paste, or the underbelly of a slug. And it needs feeding. It needs care. It needs our man.

It needs his story...



A short script. 30-45 mins. Work in progress.

TROLLBOY

A feature film script in progress.

What's it about?

It's about the statue of a Bronze Lion come to life and stalking through a Council Estate by night.

It's about the boy who thinks that his imagination gave it life.

And it's about what happens when it kills someone...

THE CAT WHO SAID WONG (Screenplay)

I'd never thought about this as a short film until Josh Gaunt suggested it.

But he had kind of an idea for the ending - which isn't quite what ended up in here - that made me think that it could work. And from the word go I pretty much knew how to do it.

It hasn't changed that much since the first draft. Though I did experiment with a very different angle based on feedback from South West Screen, in an effort to get their backing. Josh had some ideas. I ran with them. A little too far. The cat became a figment of the girls imagination rather than an actual cat. I also had one imaginary friend being consumed by another. I liked it, but I don't think it worked as well.

Mind you South West Screen didn't go for it at all. They wanted it about 3 minutes long. Which to my mind could only happen with a very explanatory voiceover telling the tale, and the images being little more than illustrations. That's not my idea of cinema.

Early on Josh had always thought there would infact be some voiceover - to preserve more of the story; he liked the prose and the tone of the voice I used to tell the story on the page. First thing I did in adapting it was drop that idea. It just seemed entirely superfluous. I believe that voiceover can work - it certainly worked for Orson Welles and Billy Wilder, but if you can make it work without, I think there's a pretty compelling arguement to do so.

I like the way this story flows now. I can see the images shot for shot, cut for cut in my head. I think it's neat, and fun and a little touching. At least I hope so.

I can't help but always see this as utterly real, live action when I read it - it's certainly what I imagined when I wrote it. In practical terms though that means a lot of very well trained cats, a lot of patience, or very expensive CG. These days I wonder if it might not be best as animation. If you're an animator, get in touch, maybe we can talk about it.

Click HERE to take a look at it. Just remember the Copyright Caveat up there in the introduction...

MOONDANCE

I've always liked this piece of writing. It was another story that came out in a single rush. It just appeared to me, fully formed.

A few years earlier I'd read Jack Zipes' book THE TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD, and I'd worked on a kind of updating, that - after a good weird opening - got stymied and died on the page (I hope I can resurrect it someday, because that opening was really good; really weird; more than a little disturbing). Anyway, I'm pretty sure Jack Zipes' book, as well as Angela Carter, fed into this. I seem to remember that I read Jonathan Carroll's outstanding novel SLEEPING IN FLAME (wonderfully infuriating ending and all) around that time, so was possibly inspired by that as well - a little.

This was certainly one of the first things I wrote so concisely. I like it for that a great deal. I'm working on a screenplay adaptation at the moment (probably for animation) that I hope can keep the conciseness, and the loose ambiguity, suggesting more than it shows or tells. I'm hoping for a little poetry in the images.

I think it's working...



MOONDANCE by Neil Snowdon


I remember, in days long before these, when my kind were hunted all across Europe.

Out of the dark forests of Germany and Romania, the Eldest and the Wisest learned how to walk on two legs instead of four. Learned to blend in with our hunters and survive in their cities.

But still, in time, we were hunted again. Our hiding place discovered; inside the bodies of men, and put to death with silver… the earth bound tears of our mother the Moon. Her sad face looks upon us still, once a month, turning to look on us, her children… and we, uncontrollable in her sight, must come to her, bay and howl to her… and sacrifice for her love.

She is our mother, and she loves us.

We are her children, but she cannot protect us. We live alone and in fear… but our fear is lessening. The world of Man, the world of Sun, is without mystery and darkness. Its peoples are visible and constant, its magic electrical and controlled, its dreams are pixels… and its myths are caged.

I fear little as I walk in the world of Man.

But it fears me.

My face is not constant, nor my nature controlled.

Sister Night shelters me, holds me in her dark embrace.

Mother is turning once more to look on me with love…

My teeth feel sharp and my belly is cold and empty…

Watch as I eat this little girls heart…

LAMASHTU'S CHILD (SCREENPLAY)

Adaptation of the short story - which you can read HERE - but relocated to a Greek island in the middle of World War 2...

A Young Woman holds a dead baby in her arms and her mother is telling her to burn it...

It's coming along nicely. Should be finished soon. Keep your eyes peeled.

LAMASHTU'S CHILD...

This story came from reading Diana Purkiss's rather good book 'Troublesome Things' about fairys and fairytales, and their lineage/links to classical myth.

This came in pretty much one splurge. It was just there. The voice and the story and where it was going. Except for a tweak at the end about a year later. I still keep wanting to make little changes. I'm never quite sure if it works. Or is firing on all cylinders. But re-reading it, I like it. And it kickstarted me to get back to work on screenplays, not least a screenplay for this. Much as the story came in one go pretty much fully formed. So re-reading it, I could see completely how to make it work. What to change to make it work dramatically. I think it's really good. I'm excited for it...


LAMASHTU'S CHILD by Neil Snowdon


My baby lies dead… as blue as beaten lead. It seems only days since he was crimson with my blood, then pink with health.

He screamed until he died. And I screamed over him, bathed his corpse in my tears. But still he did not move, and he did not wake, and the blue of his flesh became darker still, cold and ashen grey.

He would not take my breast when offered. Clawed and wailed to be away from it. His skin then was scarlet and hot to the touch, a coal from out the fire, and I put him down in his cot, and I cooled him with damp cloth and ice… but nothing would soothe him and nothing would stop his burning and his cries.

My mother will not touch him, and wishes for me to burn or bury the child with haste. But I cannot throw him in the fire… I cannot put him in the earth. He is my child, though he has no name, and that, my mother says, was his curse.

She will not say the name to me, but I can read it in her eyes what she is thinking. She will not speak the name of the thing that took my baby… to name it is to give it power, to invoke it is to invite its curse upon you… but its curse is here, in the tainted flesh of my child, my baby, by tiny little boy…

My mother is old, and the people of the island laugh at her as she speaks in riddle and rhyme, of ancient evils and ancient cure… but still I know her truth, and I will not take it light. The cobwebs she applied to my childhood knees healed every scrape and cut, and the herbs and words that nightly she said and wrote, burned in fires or hung by window and threshold, have long kept our home safe and free from fear and harm. The bowls of milk and food left for creatures and peoples that no-one now believes in, still are empty and dry come morning, and our crops and flowers blossom and bloom, unblighted by insect or disease.

I know the name of the thing that took my baby, the name that my mother dare not speak… for she told me the tales in my youth, as a child, as I shivered and shook and pulled the blankets higher in the cold and the quiet of night, when every sound awoke suspicion and terror in me. I hear her as she tells me now, of what it is that I must do… but still the grey blue thing in the cot by my bed is mine, of me… and I cannot bury myself. He is my child, a piece of me, grown of my body and expelled in to life. And he was stolen… by another, who inhabits the dark, and whose lust for my child seduced it from my love.

I want him back. Within me, where he was, in my darkness, inside me, protected… a part of me again. I did not mean to expel him. It was too early, and he did not know… and in confusion, and in his pain, She offered him comfort, and She offered him silence, and She gave him peace.


Mother is sleeping, and the house is very quiet. The weight of night has settled and I can feel the darkness pressing on the house; its silent scream fills my ears, rings inside my bones, tightens my flesh all over. I am staring at my baby… he looks so beautiful still. Though his skin is the colour of a fading bruise, he looks beautiful… but so silent and so sad.

There is but a whisper of hair to his head: a dark, dark brown that looks almost black. It is so soft to the touch that I wonder if I am dreaming. Or if I cannot feel anymore… but I can feel his chill, and the shape of his skull, the soft orbs beneath his eyelids…

‘Lamashtu…’

In the dark, in the quiet, I dare to whisper Her name: She who stole my child from me, and who fed upon his life. She whose name my mother fears, and whose touch is still so common, but so rarely given blame. So few now know her, yet she eats so well. I can see her now, in the corner of my room, in the shadows, watching me, beckoning me… her breasts are full and leaking something viscous and dark. I cannot see her face, but her body is lithe, and at her taloned feet there is an animal… a dog or a pig, in the moonlight I cannot tell which, but it is pawing at her and licking at the fluid that runs from her breasts and down her legs…

I look to my baby, and I whisper again…

‘Lamashtu…’

And he wakes…

He opens his eyes and he looks at me with such longing… such longing…

She is gone now… the room is empty, but for me and my child… my baby… but She beckons from behind his eyes… and I bend to hold him close and kiss his cold flesh with my warm lips. And then I bite deeply and I feast, tearing his flesh and swallowing it down. I can taste Her in his cold meat, Her sweet taint amidst the sourness and the copper of his blood. It swirls in me, in my mouth, and in my guts, in my veins and in my mind, singing to me and soothing my pain, tending the wounds and the scars within me. From deep inside I can feel myself bleeding, feel the blood tickling down my legs… feel my life as was, washing away from me as my child is brought back to me, born again inside me, a part of me again… and She too is with us. She is with me… and in me, and together we love Our child and protect him and nourish him as he does Us… We are his mother now, and We shall never leave him.

I feel filled. My body feels alive. I feel like dancing…

Outside, the night is cold; it caresses me and raises goose-bumps on my skin. I am a cold fire, burning white in the darkness. My pale skin reflects the stars. I am dressed only in moonlight and in shadows as I walk, on the road and on the grass… I can feel the grit and the dirt beneath me, every blade of grass between my toes… the wind is in my hair and my eyes, chilling the blood that still trickles in crimson streams down my legs… and I can hear it talking. There are voices on that wind, blown from distant shores, from distant years and centuries… I can hear them, and they are getting louder.

Our village sits at the foot of a hill, and from the top I can see for miles. Over the twinkling lights of the village and the harbour, over the sea to the mainland, to the city… to the neon lights and the buildings, to the people who know little of me and my Sister and the child we are mother to… and the hunger that is beginning inside us. It is only an itch, distant and deep, but it is building. Strange, how soon We feel unsatisfied, how soon We begin to need once more…

But still, the wind is talking to me, and my eyes are wide and I can see for miles and miles and miles… across centuries of land and people and time… from this island, from atop this hill, I can see forever…

I can see the skeins of worlds, and feel the pulsing of the stars.

And I can hear the children calling; crying out and calling to me… and I will go to them. To each and every one. And I will comfort them, and I will hold them and I will kiss them with my love. My body is beauty, comfort and love. My milk tastes sweet, but is sour with age…

Come drink from me child, I will help you sleep...

Let me nourish you…

Feed me your love and you will live inside me forever…

I can hear the children calling me, crying across the centuries, through nights across Time for my love…

I will attend to you all in time. I will come and suckle you, and hold you in my arms. I will love you more than anyone ever could my child. And I will keep you with me always… your mother is no good for you, only I can sate your cries. Come to me, and dream forever…

WIDDERSHINS

This lurked in my note book for quite a while, loosely worked out, waiting...

Then I wrote it one day when I looked into the notebook, having forgotten about this idea, and grabbed it. And ran... well, had a short sprint.

I've a feeling that this is infact the prologue to somethign longer. At various times I've tried to expand it, but as yet haven't cracked the bigger plot. Though I've got some of it. Probably more than I'm willing to say right now. But it's bit. Bits and pieces that aren't quite linked. Not yet, but it's coming. It'll keep on percolating until it's ready.

Whether that longer version is prose, is another question. As I write this I'm working on a short script adapting the sotry as it stands. But the longer version could just as easily come out as a script as prose fiction/a novel.



WIDDERSHINS by Neil Snowdon


The little boy woke in darkness.

The house was sleeping, quietly, peacefully. He could feel its heavy, steady breathing, deep and constant pressing against him, rising and falling in the dark. He lay awhile, letting his eyes adjust to the night. A crack of orange split his curtains; the sodium glow of the world outside. He blinked, and breathed with the house. In the next room his parents slept heavily. He heard a groan, and the muffled applause of bedsprings: Dad from the sound of it. The groan was deep and his breath caught at the end as a snorting, snoring sound.

The boy lay very still, straining his ears against the dark. It made no noise. There was no sound from outside at this time of night, no movement in the streets that ran between the terraced houses and down either side like an elaborate ladder of bricks and tarmac. Quietly, the little boy pulled back his covers, swung his bare feet over the edge of the bed, and went to the window. He tugged the curtains wide and stared out at the empty streets below.

Nothing… no one, except a discarded turnip head, soft and smoke blackened, its carved eyes and jagged mouth half caved in by some careless footstep or wanton flinging. Little William Beech from across the road had had a Pumpkin. His mother had bought it at the supermarket in town, and his dad had carved it a Jack O’ Lantern face that seemed alarming happy for Halloween. They had all laughed at him.

They’d laughed when he said ‘Trick or Treat’ instead of ‘Penny for the lantern’. And they’d laughed every time he tried to lift his pumpkin-head lantern up for neighbours to see. His mother had bought the biggest and the best, bigger than her own sons head and far too heavy for little Billy to lift without straining both arms. He’d dropped it early on, and run home in tears when his pumpkin died as the candle went out.

Now it was time.

It had been a mildly productive evening. The little boy had made a few pounds from the neighbours… but then he had carved his turnip with care, and with passion. Its face had glowed eerily… its mouth a gash of what might have been broken teeth or jagged fangs. The eyes had frowned and glared mischievously. The scary lantern face, and the sweet cherubic smile of its carrier, had won the change from many a pocket…

Now the night was empty. The lanterns had been extinguished, coins exchanged or bribed, palms crossed; the safety of the adults paid in copper and silver…

The little boy stood at the window, and began to undress.

He wriggled out of his pyjama bottoms, let them slip off his bony hips and kicked them away with a flick of his foot. He fumbled with the buttons of his top, tossing it in the general direction of his bed, and stood naked at the window, his pale skin bathed in orange from the streetlights. He lifted a leg and placed one foot on the windowsill, hoisted himself up and balanced there, fingers clutching at the frame of the upper section, which was open just a crack. He lifted the catch and pushed it all the way, hooked his elbows over the edge of the window, pressed his bare feet against the glass, and eased himself through the thin gap. He hung for a second, his belly on the frame, half in half out, before slithering forward (there was no other word for it) out onto the ledge.

The boy crouched there, feeling the October chill raise goosebumps on his skin; feeling it tighten and prickle at the tickling touch of night’s cold breath. He smiled. And his smile spread to a grin. And with a sudden leap, he left the window ledge, stretched out through the night and the cold air, hanging, suspended, for an aching second, before grabbing the drainpipe and shinning up on to the roof.

The slates were like ice underfoot, slippery moist with moss and fungus. The boy scuttled across them, up their summit to the shelter of the chimney, where he perched, one leg either side the peak of the roof.

He stared about him now, breathing the night deep into his lungs… the time was closing in fast. He could feel excitement fluttering in his tummy. He could still smell candle wax and burned turnip on the air, and in the distance he could hear the whispered rush of cars on the main road.

The streets were still quiet. He hoped someone would be out… someone foolish enough to walk there, in the dark on such an eve as this. There was fun to be had with such people, such fools as would walk to streets so late on Halloween. Fun to be had with those foolish souls who refused to cross the children’s palms in penance…

The boy looked out over the terraced roofs. Children were crawling across them all over now. He liked to be early to see them come out… it had always impressed him so, to see so many come across their roofs at once, and perch in the dark and the lamp light, and wait…

Across the road, the boy could see little Billy Beech struggling up his drainpipe and clutching at the gutter, his legs kicking and swinging madly, searching for toehold and purchase. Next door, on his left, Selma Bannister gave a little wave as she walked, tightrope style, along the peak of her roof to the chimney, grabbing the TV aerial to steady herself. Like them all, she too was naked. Next door on the little boys right, Mungo Paye was climbing with ease out of the attic window his parents had put in earlier that year, when they’d made him a bedroom there and taken a lodger in to his old room.

All across town, children came out into the night and waited.
And waited…

The night was not perfect; the moon hid its face behind thick banks of cloud that had settled in mid October and since refused to move… but it would do.

Distantly, a bell began to toll. Softly, but carried on the wind. And on roofs across the town, children began to shiver. It was a delicious kind of shiver. It caught their breaths, then gave it back… shakily… fresher and colder. The little boy closed his eyes and felt his belly and his bladder clench. This was it. He could feel the waves of excitement rolling across the roofs of the town. Some of the children giggled. Over to his left he heard Selma give a little squeak that he knew was delight.

The boy hunched himself over, brought his knees to his chest and drew in his arms. He could feel the muscles in his back tighten and cramp. It hurt, but only a little, and still the excitement coursed through him.

And then the wings pushed out of his back… huge, black, leathery wings that sprouted from his shoulder blades. He felt the warmth inside him run cold. In his excitement his bladder let go, and he peed cold urine on the slates and on his legs and feet.
His wings unfurled themselves, huge and dark, and he stood and stretched, as if waking from some deep and dreamy sleep. He opened his eyes and felt them ice over, blue-white from their usual nut brown. He tried to cry out, to shout and whoop… but his voice caught in his throat and came out a high birdlike screech. His voice began a chorus of answering calls, and as he looked out over the roofs, in darkness that suddenly seemed blindingly white, he saw the other children, and together, screeching their joy, they took flight, soaring in to the arms of night…

THE CAT WHO SAID WONG

It's weird the legs that this story seems to have. It was just a bit of fun.

Inspired by Diana Wynne Jones and a friend, both of whom described cats who didn't meow but said 'Wong'. The story just appeared fully formed one day (the climax coming from a darker tale that I had started but abandoned a few years before), except for the epilogue, that little extra at the end, where the voice inside my head just ket on talking when I reached what I had thought would be the end... I liked it. It felt right. And interesting.

The story was published in THE CABINET PAPER when one of the editors/compilers asked if I'd like to contribute. It was coming up to christmas, and this story seemed to fit both the time of year and the handmade nature of THE CABINET PAPER itelf (that particular issue was a hand stitched bag like thing, made up of many different sized pockets to accomodate writing, tiny artworks, and a CD).

Josh Gaunt read the story in that collection and thought it might make a good short film. We worked on that together as Writer (me) and Director (him) and pitched it to South West Film... they didn't go for it (or maybe they did, they never really told us in the end, but that's another tale and I won't rant about it here). I'll put the script up soon, or at least a sample of it, so you can have a read. I still think that it can work. But it might need to be animation, unless someone has a pack of very well trained cats, or photoreal CGI suddenly gets very cheap. I hold out hope for it. If you're an animator, get in touch. This is something that I'd like to make.




THE CAT WHO SAID WONG by Neil Snowdon


“Wrong, wrong, wrong!”

The huge feet pounded up and down the hallway once again, as the cat watched the little girl and her mother. The little girl stood silent, toeing at the carpet with scuffed blue sandals that were a size too small.

“Wrong!”

The cat watched as Mother stopped and towered, and spat the word again, and the little girl flinched, and seemed to sink a little lower, shrink a little smaller.

It sometimes seemed to the cat that ‘Wrong’ was the only word that Mother knew, and that Father, perhaps, knew none. He made grumbling noises sometimes, and he snored in the night, but the cat had never heard words from him. At least, none she could decipher. She knew what words were, even if she didn’t know what they meant. She was certainly not a stupid cat. She simply did not seem to care. What use, after all, were words to a cat? She could not speak them…

But after many years of listening, she did begin to wonder.

This word: ‘Wrong’. It seemed a very powerful word to her. Certainly it had a very strong effect upon the child who looked after the cat so well, who’s feet the cat slept on at night, and who’s arms woke her every morning with a hug. And it was said to very often in the house to which she had been born… the cat really did have to wonder.

And wonder she did…

And watch, and listen, and worry, and think.

With every passing day, with every passing year the little girl got older and, it seemed to the cat, a little more dead. The ‘Wrongs’ kept coming. Day in, day out. And the child, it seemed , did shrink with every one.

Just a little mind you.

Just a teeny, tiny bit.

But the cat could see it… and, as the years went on, so could anyone who took the time to look. But the girl was such a small girl, and so quiet from the ‘Wrongs’, that no one really noticed, and no one really saw. And life for the poor little girl went on…

And on…

And on…

“Wrong! You’re wrong in what you think. You’re wrong in what you do, and you are wrong in what you are!”

Nothing the little girl could say, it seemed, would escape the vote of ‘Wrong’. And nothing that the little girl could do…

The A’s in school were always, inexplicably, wrong.

The Mothers day cards were always, somehow, wrong.

The state of her room was always, in some small detail, wrong.

The smile on her face was always… wrong.

Nothing the little girl could ever do was ever anything, except wrong…

And the cat continued to watch, and the cat continued to listen; to every uttered ‘Wrong’, and every shed tear that fell from the little girls swollen red eyes and wet blushing cheeks. Sometimes, the cat would lick at the salty little rivers, or wipe away the tears with her fur. And then the little girl would always laugh, and hug the cat harder than ever, until the cat had to wriggle to avoid being squished.

And so life went on…

And the years floated past, like huge nimbus clouds, heavy and slow, casting shadows and blocking out the sun and, all too often, pissing on the world as they passed.

Mothers voice never dimmed in all those years. It never faltered and it never failed, never grew croaky or quiet, or mellow with age. And all the while, the girl, it seemed, grew smaller, and quieter.

Not that she literally shrank you understand: the girl, though little, was no Tom Thumb, and nor did she become so. But some people we say are huge, when really they are not so big, it’s just that their presence in a room can make it seem small, make it seem filled. A living-room or a hall, or whatever you will. That person seems to fill it with their voice and their warmth and the energy that fizzes from them like lemonade that’s been shaken up too hard.

This girl was the opposite of that.

She seemed, to the cat, to be going rather flat. All the bubbles and the fizz were going out of her. And all because her Mother said the little girl was ‘Wrong’.

“You’re just… wrong,” she’d say. “Everything about you … is wrong!”

Wrong…

There was power it seemed, lurking in this word. The cat could see it, and feel it. Could see how it was killing the girl, little by little, inch by inch, millimetre by millimetre… it was crushing the life out of her, wringing her dry like a wet dish cloth. And so, in secret, the cat began to practice… began to teach itself to speak.

In the night, when all the house was sleeping, and in the garden, when no on else was there, the cat purred and growled and whined, and twisted its mouth and tongue, trying to form her single word of power. And slowly, slowly, she got better…

And better.

Closer…

And closer.

From ‘Meow’, she began to say ‘Ow’, and then ‘Wow’… and then ‘Ang’, and then ‘Waahhng’… until finally, one day - with much practice - she said ‘Wong’.

But try though she might - and she certainly did - she could never quite manage to make the sound of an R.

It irked her that she could not. But no matter how she tried, she simply could not make it come…

Perhaps a cats palate is not designed for such things. Perhaps her tongue was not made for such a shape. Or perhaps she simply had what humans call, a lisp… whatever the reason, and for no want of trying, the cat simply could not produce that R.

‘Wong’ was all she could muster.

‘Wong’ was all she could manage.

And so, even though it was, in its own right, wrong, she began teaching other cats how to say ‘Wong’.

She started with the cats that she knew in the neighbourhood; from the garden next door, and the one next to that, and the one next to that, and so on…

Her womanhood here was an advantage. And in that time of the month when boy-cats came from miles to see her, she used it. She held her nose aloft and cast her eyes to the sky. She would not let the boy-cats touch her, wouldn’t do so much as let them sniff, didn’t even look their way. A sharp scratch from a whiplash paw was the prize for any who so much as dared to even try. Only by her rules could the boy-cats come to play.

Soon every tomcat in the neighbourhood knew how to say ‘Wong’ - such motivation makes fast learners of the usually stubborn and dull - while the other females learned because, once it was known how, it seemed the proper thing to do. None could be seen to be left behind, and none could bear to be seen as anything but the very height of sophistication. And so, the neighbourhood cats all began to speak a single lisping word of English… and then, one night in winter, not long before Christmas, the cat who first learned it - the cat who had taught all the others to speak - took revenge for the little girl who loved her. The little girl who was told she was ‘Wrong’.

*

It was cold that night. There was frost on the windows. Father was snoring deeply, which meant that mother was not quite properly asleep when the first cat spoke its ‘Wong’.

It was a quiet ‘Wong’; a mutter if it had been a human voice, but, from a cat, it was a grumbling kind of purr. Mother turned in bed and stared in to the darkness.

At first it seemed she could see nothing. Perhaps, she thought, she had been dreaming; paddling in the shallows of her sleep. But then she caught the glint of glowing eyes…

And they were everywhere.

She stopped breathing for a second: the length of time it took for her to reach a hand out to the bedside lamp and turn it on. The gasp she gave was loud enough to wake her husband.

He came scrambling out of snores and dreams in a twist of blankets, propped himself on to his elbows, and slurred the first full words the cat had every heard escape his lips…

“What the fuck!?”

And then he saw what Mother saw.

The cats…

They filled the room and stared unblinking at Mother and Father, lying there in bed, voices frozen in their throats, both of them too scared to even breathe…

And then - as one - the cats began to speak…

“Wong. Wong. Wong. Wooooooonnnng. Woooooooonnnnnngggg. Woooooonnnnngggg.”

Just one word…

Over, and over…

Louder, and louder…

“Wooooooooooonng, wong, wooOONNNGGG, WONG, WONG, WOOOOOONNNNNNGGG!”

It began as a pulsing sound, rhythmic and steady, building and building, until soon it was a cacophony, every cat reaching fever pitch, the room humming and resonating like a tuning fork, so loud and so strong that Mother and Father could barely hear each other screaming over the noise the cats made; crying and wailing, accusing and judging, condemning them both with their single spoken word, over and over and over and over… again, and again, and again…

*

Christmas that year was good for everyone. The little girl lit up with joy as Mother and Father made up for every dismal Christmas past. By lunchtime the house was filled knee deep with shredded wrapping paper, and there were still yet presents to unwrap. Mother and Father paid much attention to cooking the grandest feast the girl had ever seen, and erecting a tree that was so large it had to bend where it met the ceiling. There was even a fairy perched on top, though its neck was quite certainly broken.

There were crackers so loud that they sounded like cannon, and bought in such numbers the house sounded like a battlefield. The cat, meanwhile, was discovered to be pregnant. And proud she looked as she padded regally about the house, while Mother and Father kept respectful distance and barely uttered a word.


And so our story might have ended… were it not that it featured a cat. For a cat is not a straightforward creature, like a dog. Cats are never simple, and rarely ever content… and a little knowledge can be such a dangerous thing…
T
he little girl lived happily to the end of her days, in a house with many cats, while her parents - out of fear - in the end became quite nice people: adults, much like dogs, can be trained with relative ease…

But cats are a different matter.

Cats are never contented.

And they know when they have the power.

The cat in question - the cat who learned to speak, who learned to say ‘Wong’ and passed her knowledge to every other cat she could - had kittens in the early part of the following year. They were a beautiful brood, a speckled litter of black and ginger and grey, and just as bright as their mother. She taught them well, passing on the power of her single word to them too…

‘Wong’.

The years passed and her kittens had kittens of their own, and those kitten had theirs, and so on, and so on… until, slowly, the cats across the country all began to speak. The knowledge passed from stray to stray, spread far and wide by hobo tomcats as they spread their seed. It was handed down from one generation to the next, muttered and whispered and purred… until kittens were practising it in their sleep, roaring it in their dreams, their one all powerful word.

Some were shy at first, of using their word in front of humans.

But not for long…

Those cats among the first, who were there that night, in the bedroom of Mother and Father, soon spoke to their owners and discovered the power of their single spoken word:

‘Wong’.

Those cats have now passed in to legend. The years have claimed their names, but still, they are remembered. The first owners to hear their speech, it is said, fell to their knees. Some in laughter. Some in fear… but all, it is told, were taken away in giggling madness soon thereafter.

It was not long, however, before the mad were hailed as prophets.

Soon, cats up an down the country were being heard to speak. And the country stopped to listen. My grandfather told me how he saw one of those first, paraded on the television for everyone to see. For everyone to hear…

‘Wong’.

The people watched in wonder. But soon they bowed in fealty.

The cats became our masters in a matter of years. Their berating word of ‘Wong’ was taken to heart by all: we knew, within our hearts, that the cats were right. That we were ‘Wong’ , and had been now for centuries.

Nature had found its voice. The Animal Kingdom spoke in clear and certain terms… and purred when scratched behind the ears.

But still, the wheel has turned, and now we live as slaves, and to live in fear is no good thing. The wisdom of the cats seems now long past, the wisdom of their ‘Wong’ forgot. The cats now have become our Mother…


Be careful dear reader and secret this story well. I heard it from my grandfather, who heard it from the lips of a dying stray, who - to hear my grandfather tell it - spoke to him in an eloquent, though lisping, form of English that my grandfather claimed made him think the cat had, at some time, been to university. The stray had seemed well educated, and had spoke with sadness over what had become of the Feline Revolution, how great ideals were twisted and abused… he died feeling guilty, hoping and praying that some day there would be equality between beasts and men.

I can’t help thinking that he was a dreamer.

I believe it is in the fundamental nature of a cat to feel superior. This will never change. Their current position makes them dangerous… deadly. They might kill me if they know I told this tale. So I write in secret, and I pass it on to you with fear, for I cannot keep this to myself.

Please dear reader, do not get caught with this in your hands, or your fate might be as mine: death at their claw if they find you…

But only if they find you…

And I intend to run.

I’m planning now, biding my time.

I must be patient. My time will come. My time to run and hide, dreaming of -and fighting for - a world in which humans are not just feeders, groomers, providers… a world in which humans are not simply slaves to feline masters…

But that time is not yet.

That time is not now.

By the clock on the wall, the time, right now, is Dinner…


I put down my pen and walk quietly to the kitchen, and bring my masters feast with fear.

I set the bowl of finest china before him and wait to hear his words. I slaved for hours to make this right, to make it nice, to make it just so…

I watch and I wait as the master takes his meal. A tiny lick to taste…

Is it alright?

I cross my fingers behind my back and bite my lip. He takes a mouthful, chews and swallows. I can feel my heart pounding in my chest, hear my pulse, loud in my ears…

He stops eating. A fresh mouthful of food, chewed, but not swallowed, drops back in to the bowl with a wet kissing sound. My master looks up at me. His yellow eyes are full of sad disdain.

‘Wong,’ he mewls at me, with a heavy catty sigh.

‘Wong…’

I take the china bowl in hand and turn my back with a scowl. Tomorrow I will run from my masters home. Tomorrow I will be a stray. Tomorrow I will be free… tomorrow…

HERE LIES LUCY: A Vampire Yarn

Ah for the days when I owned a DVD rental shop. If you're local to Exeter, you might remember it - BRAZIL. It lasted exactly one year before the credit crunch (and to honest a not so great location) drove a stake into its heart.

But while it was open, I used to let Josh Gaunt use the back room as an editing bay.

I have fond memories of the sounds that spilled out as he was working and I was serving customers. It helped kick me up the backside to get started on my own work too.

In the end, I did a little work on this. There were sections of the film that Josh had intentionally left open to improvisation and he didn't want to write the voice over until he saw what the actors came up with. In the end, I wrote the voice over. In part because I knew the project. In part because I know Stoker's DRACULA quite well. And this is something of a riff on that, and other vampire stories since.

So I wrote the Voice Over for Doctor Seward, based on what Josh was aiming for and what I took from the imagery - whcih is potent, and quite alive.

My only regret is that (sorry Josh) I don't like the way the actor said the words. He's too earnest. Too emotive. He's trying too hard.

It was written in a style that's a little archaic, a little academic, a little more flowery than the rest of the dialogue in the film, as befits an academic character, and one who in the film is a more overt link to the past as represented by the novel. But to counter-blance that - at least in my head - the words were written to be said in the manner of Martin Sheen's Voice Over in APOCALYPSE NOW... quiet, almost flat. The sound of a man thinking aloud to himself, under his breath. Remembering. In some ways it should be the sound of the voice he might hear at the back of his head when reading...

Still, it's a good little film. And got me my first official credit on IMDB: 'Additional Dialogue by...' and I'm happy about that. Enjoy the film.

Here Lies Lucy: A Vampire Yarn from Syndrome Pictures on Vimeo.

THE HOLLOW HILL

This is not the first story that I ever wrote. But it is the first one that I ever sent out for publication.

Before this I wrote a few short stories and most of a feature script and some articles for a self published fanzine. The stories that I wrote appeared in a writing group letter thing... I only ever did one. Never quite got the hang of it. But the feedback was enough to say 'Yes you can write.' And 'No, not everyone will like it.' But it seemed the criticism was largely based on taste. I wasn't very interested in explain where the weird things that appeared in my stories had come from, that wasn't the point. So some people responded and others did not. That was fine. More in that group seemed to like them than didn't. That was good enough for me and my ego.

THE HOLLOW HILL was probably the first longer form story that I wrote, and as I say it was the first one I sent out to try to get it published. It got rejected. Pretty much unanimously, except by INTERZONE. Dave Pringle sent me a hand written note (on form rejection paper) saying that he thought the story was good and worthy of being published, but that space considerations bumped it out (this was in the final days of his editorship. I wonder if he'd have hung onto the story for a future issue if he'd not been moving on?). He also told me he was sure that it would be published if I sent it elsewhere - he may have suggested some places that I try, I can't remember. I do remember that he seemd to suggest that needed the right home since it didn't sit comfortably into any obvious genre slots.

I promptly filed the story and the letter away and didn't send it anywhere.

Why? Probably hearing that affirmation from someone I valued as important was enough. Publication - since I wasn't expecting any money from it - was just a means of validation. A way of knowing that what I did was good enough, worth pursuing, that I wasn't wasting my time or deluding myself.

Foolish boy.

Looking back at the story now, I think it's okay. I still like the story, but I htink the prose is over done. I'm trying too hard. But it was an early work, so that's acceptable. I was finding myself, finding my voice. Now I use fewer elipses (thogugh I'm still guilty of using quite a few). And I'd be ruthless with the words. Probably I could go back and cut a lot, reshape it, polish the whole thing up. But I'm not the person that I was when it was written. And I sort of think it stands as what it is. An early work, something formative. I almost like it's slight awkwardness. Its sense of trying just a little bit too hard. I stand by it... although I slightly cringe at those first paragraphs.



THE HOLLOW HILL by Neil Snowdon.

‘Wake up…’

England was a different place then. I remember it well… all gleaming glass and plastic. It was like the industrial revolution all over again, but without the sympathetic cover of thick, black smog to hide the landscape of naked grey concrete that seemed to suck the colour from the land and the sky…

God, that sounds so ‘New Age’, I know. But I’m inclined to be these days… an adopted child of nature, as it were…

‘Wake up…’

I leaned down and kissed my son Kimberly on the forehead. Touched my lips to his wispy blond hair. He moaned slightly, but didn’t wake, and I watched him for a while, wondering what was being dreamed inside that tiny skull of his.

His mother had died two years ago when he was six, in a car crash that had put me in hospital for a week. Kim had stayed with his grandmother in that time. We were over the worst of it now, but we both still missed her. Sometimes I would see him drifting off in the midst of play, as if she were visiting him, or he her, in some other, more private playground.

While she was alive we had all lived together in an oversized caravan, on an acre of land we’d bought soon after our wedding day. After her death the place was too small and too full of her to live in. You couldn’t turn your head without seeing some tiny trace of her. A crack in the balsa ceiling where she’d bumped her head in a night of enthusiastic dancing. The crayon lines on the wall where we’d marked Kim’s height every six months… the marks way above those where we’d marked hers and mine.

It was too claustrophobic in there. Kim felt it as much as I did and, soon after, we sold it and moved in to a cottage down the road. Just far enough not to find Kathrins presence too cloying, still close enough to feel we hadn’t left home… not really.

In the days of the caravan we had moved it with the sun, so Kim always had its light in his window; it rose and it set in his bedroom. Less than a week after we moved in to the cottage, he asked me if I could turn the house so he could have the sun in his room again. It was a strange moment of growing up for both of us, when I explained to him I couldn’t.

I crouched by his bedside, and whispered in his ear.

“Kim… come on, wake up…” I shook his shoulder gently. “Wake up Kim, c’mon… it’s a full moon, we’re going out, remember?”

Kim rolled over towards me, cracking his eyes half open and wiping away sleep rocks with the backs of his hands.

“What time is it?”

“It’s after midnight. Nearly one in the morning.”

His eyes opened all the way at that, and I smiled at him. For ages now, ever since the time he’d spent with his grandmother, he’d been obsessed by faeries. She’d told him the same tales that she had told me when I was his age, and I’d told him more. Some I’d learned, some I’d made up or dreamed as a child… some I remembered that she had forgotten. Most of all, Kim was excited by the hill a mile or so down the road.

Grandma had said it was a faerie mound, and ever since he had begged to go to it. We had been there in the daytime, but it wasn’t really the same, though he said he could feel them watching us. No, we had to be there at night to see the faerie folk themselves… visit at full moon if we wanted to watch them, and by lore it was best on certain dates of faerie import. But as Kim had learned to watch the wax and wane of the moon, in the almost two years since he’d learned of the mound, no full moon had fallen on quite the right dates… until now. So that night, as promised, we were to visit by the light of the moon.

He climbed out of bed and padded off to the bathroom to get washed. In the kitchen, I made coffee, milky and sweet, and poured it in to a thermos for us. I placed it carefully in the haversack I usually used for work, packing in an old ice-cream tub filled with sandwiches for breakfast. On top, wrapped in a jumper, I packed my camera; part out of deference to Kim and our intended venture, and part out of a desire to capture whatever magic the morning might hold for us. As much as anything though, I packed it out of habit, something Kathrin had instilled in me almost from the moment Kim was conceived.

He came into the kitchen pulling on a thick woollen jumper, his hair still tousled from sleep, his fringe still wet from washing. I laughed at him and tried to smooth down the tufts that stood on his head like exclamation marks. Kim scrunched up his face and made disgust sounds at my fussing until I stopped and let him be.

“Maybe we should just shave your head like mine, eh?”

I’d shaved my head when I was twenty-eight, the very day I noticed it was thinning. Kim looked at me solemnly and shook his head, his eyebrows raised, the corners of his mouth tilted low.

“Okay, maybe not then.”

The toaster popped and I grabbed butter and jam from the fridge, spread butter on mine and jam on his, and we sat in the kitchen eating in silence.

It was dark outside, quiet and black. I could feel it pressing against the house, against the windows. It felt strange and exciting to be up at this time. Everyone else in the village was wrapped up in bed, dreaming, while we wandered roads and fields, unseen and unheard by anyone, walking in the dark while the world slept… Who knew what we might see or run in to, going about its business at such secret times, our eyes open when they were usually shut so tight.

It was cold as we turned out the light and stepped outside, closing and locking the door behind us. Kim shivered and shrugged inside his oversized parker (he’d grow in to it). He looked like a tortoise, trying to withdraw in to the warmth of his scarf and coat. November 11th was Hollantide according to Kim, a night when the faeries were abroad; the time Hogmen and Hillmen and other fairfolk chose to move their abode, traversing the countryside along a cats cradle of well worn trails that ran from hill to hill, and forest to forest. A good night then, to finally see a faerie…

Kim had left the house well prepared. On his back was his school bag, a backpack style affair, stuffed with books and pens, the fun-sized Polaroid I’d bought him for his birthday, and the tiny charms of his own indelible magic.

The air was crisp, not yet tainted by any breath but our own, and the moon was full. The torch I carried in my bag, in case it was too dark or Kim should begin to get scared, remained there… unused, unneeded. By day these roads, the fields and forests that bordered them, were the yellow brown of dead bracken, the rich dark green of mould, the orange fire of leaves that still clung against the seasons winds. Under the moon you could still see the trees, bare and black; brittle skeletons against the crushed blue velvet of night… their branches gilded silver-white. But all other colour was gone. Everything was blue and black, and silver.

We left the main road, clambering over a stile that seemed slick with moss, the wood feeling almost soft to the touch. The footpath was rough hewn, a worn brown track by day. Blades of grass and weeds still fresh to the world, seemed to crunch and snap under our feet as we trod onwards, Kim with his camera at the ready, eyes and ears keen to the slightest sound or movement. We walked on, further from the road, further from the village… away from the amber glow of the streetlights that seemed to hover in the air like an orange fog. I had a pocket full of pebbles and small stones, and whenever Kim wasn’t looking I’d toss one in to the bushes with a flick of my wrist…

“What was that!?”

“Something moving in the bushes…”

Kim grinned. I could see his wide smile; white teeth glowing in the dark, excited eyes glistening moonlight.

“Do you think they’re watching us?” I’d say to him…

“Of course they’re watching!” That was a given apparently. I could feel his incredulous eyes on me. His excitement was making him annoyed at my stupidity.

“Sorry… sorry…” I whispered, feeling guilty and scolded.

There was a moment’s silence while he seemed to look me up and down, as if sizing me up.

“Did you really ever see a faerie?”

“Of course I did,” I lied. “Why would I tell you I had, if I hadn’t?!”

I hoped I sounded convincing. I’d never seen a faerie really. But as a child my dreams had been filled with them both night and day, and I’d played at the mound as often as I could sneak off there. More than once I’d played there alone but for the creatures I conjured up to keep me company, to adventure and explore with. But puberty had wiped that slate clean…

Kim was still staring at me in the dark, in that intense way that he had that so unnerved me and made me feel transparent.

“Well, you’re a grown up…” He shrugged. “Mrs. Frith does it all the time.”

I’d met the battleaxe of a woman at Kim’s last parent-teacher evening. She was the entire cause of our depression in the lead up to the previous Christmas. She had told the class that Santa was coming to visit the children on the last day of term. Of course this was a cause of much excitement at home for Kim… naturally. But he’s a bright kid and observant. And frankly, the school caretaker in a bad wig and beard combo was never going to fool his discerning eye. He’d come home in a rage of tears and shattered dreams, shouting in his youthful idiom that grown-ups were all liars… and that meant me too.

It took me over an hour to finally get the story out of him, and another two to argue logically, that it really wasn’t feasible that the real Santa could possibly visit every school in the world on their last day, but that in order to still make things special for everyone, Saint Nick would train up an army of helpers to stand in for him, making appearances at schools and shopping centres, and checking in the eyes of all the children to see just which ones had been naughty and nice this year, and who would then get presents.

After long consideration, and a top to bottom search of the house to make sure I wasn’t hiding his Christmas presents anywhere (thank god I’d left them at his grandmothers that year), Kim eventually bought the logic of this thinking, with only one question…

“Does that mean that Mark Taylor’s parents buy all his presents for him then? ‘Cos he’s stolen sweets twice off me this year…”

“Of course.” I told him. “Parents still buy things for their children, even if they have been naughty, because they love them, and they don’t want them to be upset on Christmas morning…”

“So their presents aren’t as special then?”

“No.”

This he seemed to find agreeable. And though after a time, I think he began to doubt it again, he never said another word on the subject.

He was doubting me again now… and I hated it.

He gave me another few seconds under his heavy gaze…

“Okay then”.

The tension dissipated. Inside I heaved a sigh.

“Sorry,” he said. “But they have to trust us, or they won’t let us see them.”

Shit. When we didn’t see anything, would he blame me and say I must have lied? Would it shatter his trust in me forever? There was nothing I could do but let it play.

“It’s okay… c’mon. You got your camera ready?”

He nodded vigorously, and held it up for me to see.

“It’s here. I’ve got in my front pocket… it’s easier on the draw.”

I couldn’t help but smile. Just that week I’d taped a few old westerns from the TV and we’d watched them together. He’d preferred the Leone stuff to the John Wayne, and I’d wondered at how he seemed so much more sophisticated than when I was a kid. I couldn’t figure it, but he gained my respect and pride for his preference nonetheless.

Re-holstering the Polaroid, he moved stealthily onwards, and I followed right behind him, cracking jokes about it always being the man at the back who gets picked off first.

The footpath, hemmed in on both sides by bushes and woodland, opened out on to a small field. And in it, lay the hill… the mound, rising up before us, a darker blot against the dark of the night sky.

We stopped, together, without saying a word, and stared at it. In all my years, and through my childhood obsessions, I’d never once been here at night. Never had the guts to sneak out of bed and creep out of the house to come here… in the night… in the dark. It was an unsettling presence that I fed on in daylight, when all that was evil was banished and had no shadow to lurk in. But at night, the woods, and the mound were a dangerous place… something inside just told me, warned me; it was not a wise thing to do. Perhaps something in me was in fact afraid to confirm or defiantly shatter my own dream life obsession, the imagination with which I populated this place and other quiet spots of woodland, secret places of draped cobweb and hiding… my places, where I would come to read and draw and dream my childhood days away. Perhaps I sensed their fragile magic, and did not want nor dared to break it…

The grass looked silver grey in the moonlight. It was mottled with patches of clover that showed like stains under nights gentle shading. I remembered the hours I’d spent searching those patches for a four leafed clover and never finding one. But the time I’d spent looking, and hoping… and wishing…

We stood at the base of the mound and stared. I could see nothing unusual about it. Could neither hear nor feel anything in the air. It was dead. Quiet but for the sound of our breathing, and the pulse that was beating in my ears. My scalp tightened. I could feel Kim tensing up.

“You alright?”

“Mm hmm.”

His voice was quiet, reverent, the way one might sound in a church or library.

“So what now?” I asked.

“Um, I’m not sure…”

“Do you think they’re here?”

“Yeeees… but, um… I don’t know…”

“Maybe they won’t come out if they know we’re watching…”

“Um… maybe.”

“Okay…”

I made a big show of grabbing Kim’s hand and turning us around, and proclaiming loudly that there obviously weren’t any faerie folk here, and it was all just a silly story, so now we’d best be off home to bed and forget such nonsense. We tromped off loudly and clumsily a few yards down the road, and then doubled back, looping in a wide arc, to the cover of the bushes on one side of the mound. We settled down to watch, sitting cross-legged side by side, ours eyes focussed intently before us.

I unscrewed the cup-lid on the thermos and poured coffee to warm us, to keep us awake and alert, fine-tuned to every frequency. And there we sat…

Occasionally something moved in the distance… a bird, a fox, perhaps a rabbit. It was strange there in the dark. But much as I twitched at every noise, and cursed my romantic imagination for convincing me to take my son on such an adventure as was never given to me, I never once really believed the sounds were anything other than animal. And yet, much as I knew there was nothing dangerous in these woods, I have to admit I was more than a little scared. Darkness does that to a person… I think it’s in the blood somewhere. Something in the make-up of man knows that he does not belong in the dark… nor outside, in the night. He is vulnerable, and fearful, not least of his own imagination. The night is a rich canvas to paint on, and the imagination a limitless palette. I think deep down we fear what is there, fear what we might see come out of us in that dark mirror. The shadows are an unknown territory to us, somewhere deep inside we know we are trespassing there… at least, that is how I felt that night at the foot of the mound, sitting in the dark with my son, watching and waiting for faeries…

We sat there a long time us two… passing the thermos flask of coffee and eating all the food I had brought with us… and growing colder.

I cupped my hands and blew in to them, feeling the moist warmth of my breath loosen the joints in my fingers. Whilst there was still a tingling edge to my senses, I was getting bored. I looked to Kim.

He had his back-pack unzipped in front of him, and was staring at the pages of a book with a penlight torch, studying them intently. I marvelled at how quiet and stealthy he could be… I hadn’t noticed him taking the pack off his back, let alone unzipping it and taking out a book and a torch to read by. I wondered if he was bored too and had given up. I wondered if perhaps I’d nodded off, slept while sitting upright. I’d heard it was possible…

I leaned close and whispered in his ear.

“What are you doing?”

“Reading my notes.”

“You’re notes?”

I looked closer and noticed that the book was a spiral bound exercise book, the kind you might expect to get in school. I wondered for a second if he might have stolen it… but quickly forgot to ask as he flicked through, showing me what was inside.

It was a kind of scrapbook, the pages covered in cut and paste snippets from books and magazines… and other sections carefully, lovingly copied in Kim’s own shaky handwriting. And everything in it was about Faerie. Stories, myths, legends, pictures… the places and peoples, lore and superstition… everything he could lay his hands on, Kim had done. I had to admit he’d done the old man proud. If he was doing it for school, it was a guaranteed A+ for sure. If not, then it sure as hell beat the shit out of sticker collecting.

“I’m looking for my notes on faerie dwell-ings.” He pronounced every syllable carefully. “I think I read something about how to make them open up”.

“Like, ‘Open Sesame’ ?”

He didn’t even look up.

“No dad, that’s just a stooooreee”.

“Sorry…”

I remember mumbling it more to myself than anything else…and I remember how dumb and stupid and utterly out of my depth I suddenly felt in his presence.

“Here…”

He pointed to a page in his notebook, and I took it from him to look more closely. I could have been wrong but it looked as if it had been secretly torn from a library book… we’d have words when we got home: item number one being on the concept of photocopiers.

The page looked to have come from a more scholarly text than the typical sort of thing found in the children’s section of the local library, or what they had at school. For one, there were only a few illustrations and they were of an almost anatomical nature. No cutesy cartoon figures, but rather serious studies of figure and appearance in context to supposed lifestyle. I read the page quickly, concentrating on the paragraphs that Kim had carefully underlined in red biro.

Handing the book back to him, I nodded. I was getting eager to be done with all this and go home. The novelty and the excitement had worn off for me… the prospect of making a slight fool of myself seemed a small price to pay for hurrying things along.

So we broke cover, and with Kim leading, we walked around the mound nine times under the light of the full moon.

There was no chanting involved, no strange dancing. We just did what the torn page said. We walked calmly… somewhat dejectedly, around the base of the mound nine times. The book didn’t say in which direction, so for dramatic purposes, and in deference to the feeling that Faerie most likely runs counter to the ‘mortal’ world, we walked anti-clockwise.

Nine times…

Around the base of the mound…

It was marshy in places and I almost lost a shoe. Regardless, it was getting close to dawn now, and the dew forming on the grass soaked through our shoes and socks so that we squelched with every step.

One…

Two…

Three…

Four…

Five…

Six…

Seven…

Eight…

Nine…

And we stopped.

And we stared at the mound.

And nothing…

I yawned.

And then I heard the music.

It was distant… dull, like loud music in a car when it passes you by. I could hear voices too, shouting and singing, and laughter… and I could feel it. I could feel it coming through the soles of my feet…

I looked at Kim. He glanced at me then bolted to the mound, sprinting part way up its slope, dropping to his hands and knees and putting his ear to the grass.

“You can hear it! It’s coming from inside! Come on, listen!”

My heart was caroming off the inside walls of my chest as I walked over and put my ear to the ground. The grass was wet and tickled inside my ear. But he was right. The music, the voices, were coming from inside the mound. You could feel it more strongly from here, like putting your hand to the wall of a nightclub and feeling it vibrate from the intensity of the sound. A drum was beating, strings were being plucked and stroked, and other sounds I did not recognise were oozing from the ground beneath us like worms in a rainstorm.

Kim was lying flat on the ground now, giggling as he let the gentle vibrations in the ground tickle through him.

My mouth was dry. I got shakily back to my feet, stumbled back a step or two, and then froze, rooted to the spot.

And that’s when I felt it.

A rumbling and a tearing sound… it was the kind of sound you’d expect to hear as someone’s scalp is pulled away from their skull. It’s the sound you hear if you take a handful of turf and pull at it… blades of grass breaking, roots tearing from the soil… Dig your fingers under; pull harder… you hear it? That’s the sound. But imagine it bigger, filling you and the air around you… imagine that you’re standing on the piece of turf that you’re pulling and can feel the shifting in your feet, vibrating up your legs, through knees that feel like water… that was the sound of the hill that night…

I felt the blood screaming in my veins. My lips felt numb, thick and heavy… my face felt cold, the blood rushing to my heart as it cried out to keep beating… And as I watched, the whole top of the mound began to lift, to rise on pillars of mouldy rock, blackened with soil and time, its cap of grass and weeds trailing a fringe of torn roots… and in the hollow under the cap, inside the hill, I could see the glimmer and twinkle of firelight… candles… growing brighter. Figures began to appear, and then spill forth in a cavalcade of strange and grotesque beauty, all dancing and writhing, lithe and playful, as the music found clarity and sang on the air while the voices that accompanied rode upon it.

A young boy danced before me then stopped. Perfectly still. Then slowly, gracefully, he leaned to one side and cocked his head at me in curiosity. He was naked, his ears pointed high and long, his hair growing in wild clumps and tufts on his head… he stood staring, with eyes shaped like almonds but made entirely of pupil, wet and black, their only colour the glinting light of the moon. His body was hairless and smooth, thin to the point of emaciated, but beneath the skin I could see contours of taught muscle and sinew… not the atrophied flesh of my own kind; raised in concrete battery farms… his only clothing was the dirt and soil on his skin, the black green powder of tree bark you’d come home covered in as a child, after a long hard day in the trees… in a twisting skip, he was gone…

Others were spilling forth, dressed in moss and leaves… in fine silken threads that might have been cobweb, their skins pale white or tinted green… one or two with a rocky kind of slate to their features, others with the reddish veinery of granite… There was a feral cast to their eyes, all of them… and still they poured forth… some now dressed in finery, but of styles and shades no person had ever worn in my world, not on sidewalk or catwalk…

They were dancing around Kim now… around and around, as he laughed in delight and clicked madly with his Polaroid… leaping, writhing figures caught frozen in the strobe of the flash.

Peoples of plant and wood as much as flesh and bone, people as much bird and animal, lizard and insect as blood and teeth and skin, kith and kin to every species that had ever walked in every realm of the earth…

Some held torches and large candles in their hands, with flames of orange and violet and green… others carried an incandescent light entirely of their own, as they fluttered and flitted and danced in the air. A tiny boy and girl both dressed in rags and weeds took Kim by the hands and began to lift him off the ground. He laughed and gasped, as they twisted and swooped and dived and twirled above me. I reached out a hand and got a bare fingertip to the tail of his coat, but closed my fingers on nothing. My mind raced with fearful desperate thoughts of Peter Pan… and as Kim flew, I promised deep inside my soul that I would always leave his bedroom window open, just a chink, no matter what.

“Kim…? Kim, come down… Pleeaase Kim, come back down to me…”

I was wailing. My voice sounded cracked and desperate… tiny and pathetic in a way that it hadn’t since primary school, when I’d cried in the face of bigger boys tortures and derision at my dreams.

If Kim heard me he didn’t acknowledge it. He was above me… around me… swooping and dancing in the dark, hand in hand with the tiny faerie boy and girl, laughing and giggling together and crying out defiantly to the earth below them.

All around me now, the faerie revellers had ceased moving and were lined from the open mouth of the mound, to its base just a few yards ahead of me, all eyes in my direction. I could feel hot tears on my cheeks, panic and dread alive and beating in my chest. My breath was coming in shivering, sobbing gasps. All about me were still and silent. The only sounds the crackling of the flaming torches, the wet sobbing of my breath, and the distant cries of my child in the sky.

From the throngs before me, in their infinite variety, their rapturous shapes and colours, a figure stepped forward. A girl, a woman… about my age in the face, but her body was slimmer, lithe… her hips and breasts underdeveloped, more like a child, her groin was an androgyne smoothness, bereft of hair, cleft and organ. Her long hair was a deep dark red. Her huge round eyes, black as coal, glistened wetly. Her cheeks were high and sharp. Her skin was mottled blue and purple, in a way that suggested less the healing flesh of a bruise, and more the markings of flower petals, the staining of berries and fruit. Her legs were speckled to the thighs with mud, dried and cracking. I felt my guts shift, fearful in the face of a childhood dream born real.

“Twas no dream fair boy… we met indeed, in times when you were wiser.”

Finally my feet uprooted themselves, and I took a careful step away from her. Instantly she stopped moving, and stared at me, indignant.

“Are you so feared of me Alan Barton? There was a time when we played together, you and I…”

Blood was screaming in my veins, pounding in my ears… a fist of adrenalin was squeezing my heart and brain…

“How-do-you-know-my-name?” The words came out in a half garbled rush, butting up against each other in their haste to leave my throat before they choked me.

“You saved me once Alan, when both of us were young.

An elder mortal's animal gone savage had cornered me near here. You fought it off and hid me. We promised never to forget each other…

Yet here you are, and you remember me not. And you treat our memory as if to shit upon it.”

Her voice was strange; I could not place it… at once melodious and banal… unknown yet familiar… I recognised not a single word she spoke, but understood everything she said.

“No. No… that never happened.”

She raised her eyebrows at me and cocked her head to one side, much like Kim would do when he didn’t believe a word I was telling him…

“No?”

I began to doubt my sanity. Had the grief been delayed? Had my mind snapped long ago? Was it only now was I seeing it? Seeing just how far up the yellow brick road my mind had travelled?

“No. I remember you… but… you were never real. You were a person I made up… I was a lonely child, and I played here alone… I played here alone, and I’d imagine faeries, and adventures and friends who were not like me, and that I wasn’t really me, that I wasn’t really from here, and that you would come to claim me back to where I belonged… but it was never real. None of it… I made it all up… you, you’re a figment of my imagination. You’re the friend I played with and shared my first kiss with because I didn’t have anyone to really share that with… but it never really happened, and I grew up and I got a grip, and I got on with my fucking life…”

I ran out of whining breaths and half-truths that I only believed in a quarter … my mouth was still working, soundlessly trying to find and form words.

The woman watched me a while longer… watched me flailing for words and stamping up and down on the muddy ground of my sanity, checking that it was solid.

Her furrowed brow smoothed itself, and she stepped closer to me. She reached out a hand, stroked dirt-encrusted fingernails across my cheek, before sliding them to the back of my neck, drawing me close and whispering in my ear.

I felt her naked body pressing gently against me, felt the warmth of her breath on my skin, the light brush of her lips against my ear as she spoke, in words of a tongue that I thought perhaps I’d heard once in a dream; the language of the voice inside my skull…

Then she stepped back over. Her coal black eyes still glistened, with something that might have been pity… might have been anger… and I felt my insides begin to harden…

My heart clutched, and became still… but I lived… I could feel it happen…

Then my guts, solidifying from the slippery casserole inside me to some carved wooden relief… I felt the blood in my veins and arteries slow and thicken, felt my toes burst through the fabric of my shoes and begin to burrow in to the ground, worming their way through the topsoil and then down, down… deeper and deeper… I stared at my hands and arms as my skin began to darken, harden, go brittle and brown, rough and fibrous, then began to thicken and bend, the joints snapping and dislocating as my arms stretched back over and upwards, my fingers outwards … my nipples hardened to knots… my lips, my tongue, my mouth… stiffening, twisting to a hideous bark cartoon that would perhaps frighten children in time to come… ‘Look Daddy, that tree has got a face…’

My eyelashes thickened to twigs, the stubble of my hair to branches that began sprouting with new found vigour after my arms, out of my shoulders and neck and face. I felt my eyes begin to shrink and close as skin begat bark and shut them forever, and I remember the last thing I saw…

The faeries all stood there, from the top of the mound to the bottom, Kim at the front, watching from the crowd with a curious frown, and snapping with his tiny Polaroid camera…

That was four months ago…

Or five.

Time seems stranger now… slower… heavier… I can feel it more now.

Yesterday the girl with the hair of a deep dark red pissed on me; squatted at my base and then danced about me, singing all the while. Her faerie water tasted good to my roots, and already I can feel a tingling at the outmost tips of my branches as buds begin to blossom… so I suppose it must be spring…

For a while I was alone here… guardian, in all my twisted foreboding. But not for long…

I see others come the way I came with Kim. Parents and children. Secretive lovers walking hand in hand... I try to warn them sometimes, shake my branches and creak at them eerily…but they take no heed. They gather themselves closer, clutch hands tighter, sensing magic in the air; the smiles on their faces say it all. They know nothing…they fear nothing…

There is a forest growing here now, spreading out from the base of the hollow hill… I hear the faeries talking in their strangely lilting voices, and I hear their plans, for they tell them to me often, and discuss them in my shelter. And I hear the whispering, the groaning voices of the other trees that once were mothers and fathers just like me… in our roots, we know it is our own fault really, but no-one wants to admit that here…

Forests are springing up all over England. With our young the Faerie are injecting fresh blood in their dwindling race… with our bodies they are reclaiming their land…

Our children play in our branches, and as we cradle them in our giant hands of wood, we hope that perhaps somehow they still love us, and remember. We don’t doubt that we serve purpose, or that our fate is merely punishment. The Oaks are home to many here, the Hazels wise and the Rowan, like I, are protectors and guardian against any evils that should approach the hill at the centre of this forest.

But still I can feel the singing of the birds in my branches, the warm acid of their shit on my bark. I can feel the thoughts of the bats that live in the crevice of wood where once I had a mouth. I can feel worms writhing and burrowing between my deepest roots… those roots that anchor me ever more solidly to the earth, while my branches reach ever more steadily for the sky…

Kim is here… sitting in my uppermost branches with a faerie girl of about his age. They are watching the spiders that spin their webs there, and talking to them in that melodic faerie tongue which I hear him speaking all the time now, though he tends to still swear in English…

They sit there and I can hear them talking, feel their voices resonating through my trunk and down in to my roots. They are giggling and I can feel love seeping in to me with the warmth from their bodies. And then they are silent a moment…but I can hear the birds and the spiders whispering to each other…

They are kissing.

Holding hands tightly, and kissing each other…

My bark groans gently as I smile inside…and then I can feel them cutting me…cutting and gouging with a tiny blade, carving their names, high in my body, where the marks will remain and grow forever upwards and someday, perhaps, to the stars…

And then they are gone…

Their laughter still lingering in the air…

Their warmth still lingering in my branches…

My sap weeping gently from the heart between their names…