Murder Of Crows
By: Thomas Kleaton
A Short Excerpt From The New Horror Story Collection, The Bacchanal
An Excerpt from Paul Sherman's Novella,
Satan's Grip
It was Esther’s eighth birthday.
Charlotte Caplin, her mother, had lived in
utter dread of this day for eight years. Ever since she had given birth to the child.
No, before that. Nine months before that. Ever since the child was conceived, Charlotte had feared the coming of her daughter’s eighth birthday.
Now that day was here and she was gripped by real icy terror. Today, Charlotte believed, somebody was going to try to snatch her daugh- ter away from her.
She tried to push the thoughts aside. They were foolish. Unfounded.
In her life as a respectable parent, she had managed to put her awful wild adolescence behind her. She bravely endured the scathing looks of the other mothers at the school gate when they stared at her tattoos and piercings, a legacy of her misspent youth.
She always managed to smile and take Esther’s hand lovingly, in a motherly fashion,
just as a good mother should. She was a good mother. She was.
It was early afternoon, and the sun streamed in through the front room window of their tiny terraced house.
“So you liked your presents then?” Charlotte asked. Esther was sitting surrounded by her birthday gifts and pink pretty wrapping paper, everything that Charlotte could afford. She got up and flew like an angel into her arms.
“Oh Mummy, of course I did; they’re lovely. How could you even ask?”
Charlotte’s heart fluttered at the feel of the warm wonderful little thing in her arms. She couldn’t bear even the thought of losing her little girl. But again, the reminder that it was Esther’s eighth birthday brought a shudder that cut through her whole body like a wire.
“Mummy, what’s wrong?”
Charlotte looked into her daughter’s blue eyes and lied. “Nothing, baby; absolutely nothing.”
“Then can we go to the playground? Please...” she pleaded, obviously catching the look of doubt in her mother’s eyes.
“No darling, not today,” was Charlotte’s defini- tive response.
“Why not, Mummy?”
The question was reasonable, innocent, polite. “Well...” So many reasons flooded into
Charlotte’s mind, the chief one being “... because today baby, I have a horrific fear that someone will take you away from me.”
Of course, she would never, could never ever
say that, but the fear was there, gnawing like a cancer at the back of her mind.
“It is my birthday.”
“I know, darling, and I’ve tried to give you a good birthday, haven’t I? You said you liked your presents. Mummy made you a nice cake. Now, do you really need to go to the playground?”
“Yes. I haven’t seen any of my friends today.”
This was true. It was August, the middle of the summer holidays. Charlotte had deliberately not arranged a birthday party. Yes, okay, it was fanciful; it was a completely irrational fear, but today of all days, she wanted to keep her daugh- ter at home and she wanted to keep her away from other people.
“Mother!”
Charlotte looked up, startled. Esther had never called her that. It had always been ‘Mummy’.
“I want to go to the playground. And I want to go now.”
Esther was standing with her feet apart, her hands on her hips. Her daughter was adopting an attitude. An attitude. She had never done that before.
“Esther...”
“You can’t stop me on my birthday. I’m eight years old now.”
I can, thought Charlotte, and I will. But there was something about Esther’s attitude that stopped her from saying anything. There was a fire in the child’s eyes and Esther found herself weakening...
Was this the little girl who had played Mary in the Infant School nativity play three years running? Was this the child who, looking angelic in her white pinafore dress, had led the Sunday School choir singing What a friend we have in Jesus? Esther (deliberately given a biblical name by Charlotte as a form of protection), her perfect child, her angel, was now — on her eighth birth- day — standing there in open defiance. It’s time to stand firm, Charlotte told herself, and yet...
Esther ran to her and took her arm. “Mummy, please can we go to the playground?”
Esther seemed to have sensed a chink in Charlotte’s armour, suddenly reverting from anger and defiance to gentle pleading.
The child was stroking her arm, circling her fingers on one of her tattoos. Her daughter was stroking the tattoo that Charlotte regretted and loathed most of all. She had planned to have it removed but never did. She pulled away from Esther. “Don’t do that!” she shouted.
“What’s the matter Mummy?” The child’s innocent round eyes looked up at her, the rebel- lion gone. But there was something else there. Was Charlotte mistaken, or was there a look of smug triumph as if Esther knew she had won?
Charlotte stood defensively, her hand over the one tattoo she reviled so much, the one she’d had done when she was sixteen and not old enough to know any better. She was briefly part of a Satanist cult, because at the time it seemed ‘cool’ and ‘big’. The result was a tattoo on the inside of her arm, between her wrist elbow with the
words ‘I Promise’ intertwined with the number 6,6,6 and two deadly black mambas, represent- ing her greatest fear: snakes.
“Shall I lock the back door, Mummy?” Charlotte seemed to have lost the power of speech; she had certainly lost the power of com- mand. Esther had won. They were going to the
playground.
“Just for a little while,” she wanted to say,
but the words wouldn’t come.
Esther skipped back into the room with her
cardigan and hat.
“You must stay where I can see you.” The
words were on Charlotte’s tongue but again, she couldn’t utter them.
Esther, her little white cardigan on, held out her hand. Charlotte took it, meekly.
“And don’t wander too far away from me.”
Why can’t I speak? Charlotte puzzled, I am in so much fear of losing this beautiful child I love. I desperately want to keep her at home, today of all days, and yet I am powerless to speak.
Charlotte could not deny Esther anything; that was it, that was surely it.
“Don’t worry, Mummy,” Esther said solemnly. “We’ll only go out for a little while. I’ll stay where you can see me and I won’t wander too far away from you.”
Charlotte stared at her in amazement. Had the child read her thoughts?
***
The playground was only a five minute walk from home. Esther, skipping and chattering incessantly, gripped Charlotte’s hand as they walked. It was as if the argument had never happened.
As they approached the playground gate, Esther began to recite a rhyme. It chilled Charlotte to the bone. She was chanting an old verse:
“The horny-goloch is an awesome beast—” “Esther, who taught you that?”
“You did, Mummy.”
“I did?”
“Yes, ages ago. Don’t you remember? You said it was by a nonny mouse.”
Charlotte chuckled in spite of herself. “A nonny mouse?”
“Yes. When nobody knows who wrote a poem, you said it was always written by a nonny mouse. I know how the poem goes on, by the way.”
So did Charlotte. She didn’t really want Esther to go on saying it, but she had no rational reason for stopping the child, except that...
“The horny-goloch is an awesome beast, all soople and scaly...” Esther recited.
Charlotte joined in. “It has twa horns and a hantle of feet...”
...Except that she had first heard it during her devil-worshipping days.
“And a forky tailie.”
Devil-worshipping days? Childish games, when she was sixteen. Stupid kids’ stuff. Ouija boards and wine glasses, reciting the Lord’s
Prayer backwards, and just to show how silly it all was, saying that stupid little rhyme and reading passages aloud from Denis Wheatley’s ‘The Devil Rides Out’. It didn’t even seem scary at the time. It was just cool. Most of the others were older than she was; it made her feel sophis- ticated to join in with their ridiculous games.
Esther was still saying the rhyme as they entered the playground. The place was crowded with kids and their parents. The sun was high overhead and the air resonated with the happy laughter and cries of children having a good time.
“Hey, Esther!” Two girls, school friends of Esther’s age, were waving and shouting from the row of swings.
“Lucy! Amy!” Esther shouted and ran over to them.
Charlotte watched them hug each other. “Not too far. Stay where I can see you,” she managed to call out, but her voice, normally strident, was lost amongst the joyful cacophony of playground noise.
She watched as the three girls took turns to push each other on the swing. The sun was so warm that Charlotte dearly wanted to close her eyes, but she avoided the temptation. To take her eyes off Esther would be tantamount to a criminal offence. Especially today.
“I promise...”
That ridiculous vow she had taken all those years ago.
She came to herself with a start. The swing that Esther had been playing on was empty,
swinging back and forth mockingly, but the girls had gone.
Then relief flooded through her as she espied them on the far side of the playground, negotiat- ing a seesaw. They were a little farther away than Charlotte would have liked, so she looked for a free seat over on the other side. No luck. They were all occupied by mums, with and without push chairs; normal mums out with their kids on a summers’ afternoon. It was as it should be. Yet Charlotte still felt that ominous twinge of menace.
In spite of her fears, she got up and moved around the perimeter of the playground to- wards the seesaw. Esther was so immersed in the act of balancing her two friends in appro- priate positions either side of the seesaw that she seemed unaware of her mother’s move and totally happy. Charlotte relaxed a little... but only a little.
One of the mothers, seated near her, called out sharply, “Cecile,” and a young girl in a yel- low dress moved towards her.
“Time to go home.”
Cecile and her mother moved off and there was suddenly room on the end of the bench immediately facing the seesaw. Charlotte sank on to it thankfully.
The sun moved behind a cloud. There was a sudden cool breeze and Charlotte shivered. Words came into her head from nowhere.
“I don’t want you to feel cold, Mummy...when the time comes.”
Those words were in Esther’s voice, but Esther hadn’t spoken them. Esther was bob- bing up and down on the seesaw.
Charlotte put her arms around herself. It was really cold now. Cold... and dark. The sky seemed to be completely obliterated by a black cloud.
The world seemed to be moving in slow motion. A crow fluttered out of nowhere and perched on a branch that overhung the play- ground fence. It seemed to be watching her, its black beady eyes unwavering.
She stared back as if it had thrown down a challenge. “You can’t stare me out!” she thought, eyeing the bird defiantly.
The bird stared back impassively.
A second crow alighted on the branch beside the first, and then a third. They seemed to move, to stare, in unison. Now six black beady eyes were trained on her; boring into her. Their gaze was hypnotic. Charlotte could not take her eyes off them and their steely gaze.
So she was only vaguely aware of the shape of the man who had entered the playground and was edging his way around the circumference of the ground towards where Esther was having a great time at the seesaw.
Had she been watching him more carefully, she would have been considerably more anxious of him than she was of the crows. Something frightened the crows and they flapped off beyond the trees. The man was now standing directly by the seesaw, and Charlotte saw him properly for the first time. What was he doing there?
He was dressed plainly but not shabbily in a brown suit, and his greying hair was long enough to be over his shirt collar. As Charlotte stared at him, trying to take him in, trying to gauge why he was there, one thing above all struck her about him. There was so much fear in his face. His eyes were ringed in white, and his mouth was incessantly moving as he wrung his hands, as if totally undecided what he should do next.
There were words emanating from his mouth and Charlotte strained to hear what he was say- ing. And then, through the still air, his words came to her:
“The horny-goloch is an awesome beast...”
Ice-cold fear gripped Charlotte’s chest. She knew this man; she recognised the look of him, his voice, even the smell of him — naphthalene, like moth balls. Older now, greyer; but it was unmistakably one of that crowd, the so called followers of the left hand path, Satan’s disciples. And Charlotte knew why he was there.
She opened her mouth to scream Esther’s name but as before, nothing came out. Her heart was beating, she was hyperventilating, and the tattoo on her arm was burning. She looked down. The snakes were intertwining, moving, slithering, and the three sixes were throbbing with red heat radiating out from her arm. She badly wanted to rub the tattoo with the fingers of her other hand, but was unable to move.
The crows were back again, or maybe they had never gone away. They were controlling her,
hypnotising her, keeping her silent and unmov- ing. She wanted to get up and smash them, smash their heads with rocks.
The man now had his hand out, extended towards Esther, but he didn’t seem to be a will- ing abductor. Far from it, he was terrified of something. Charlotte could see the sweat bead- ing his forehead and the hand that he held out to Esther was shaking.
Esther had seen him now and had got off the seesaw and moved slightly away from it. Her friends and the other parents seemed to be oblivious to the whole proceedings.
Esther was now standing halfway between Charlotte and the man, whose shaking hand was still outstretched.
Charlotte wanted to leap up, grab her daugh- ter in her arms and protect her from this mon- ster, but the steady gaze of the crows held her motionless.
“All soople and scaly...” she heard Esther say.
“He has twa horns and a hantle of feet...” said the man.
“Esther!” Charlotte screamed inwardly.
“... and a forky tailie!” Esther and the man shouted it out together; it was almost a cry of
triumph.
And their hands enclosed on each other, and
he was leading her away.
Esther did not so much as glance back. She
seemed to be going quite willingly. It was the man who was the more uncomfortable of the two. He looked back at Charlotte, with what she could
only describe as an apologetic look. But mostly, terrified remorse registered in his face.
Charlotte, frozen to the seat, watched panic- stricken as they disappeared through the gate and out of sight.
The crows held their position and their gaze for what seemed like an interminable period of time. Then they flapped off, cawing mockingly and disappeared.
Charlotte stood up and screamed her daughter’s name so loud everybody in the playground stopped what they were doing to look at her.
About the Author:
Paul Sherman is a teacher, author and director of Youth Theatre. He has had stories published in various hard copy magazines, but most recently, he has had three fantasy-hor- ror stories (The Jokers of Sarzuz, Daemon Page and Missed!) published by TWB Press which are available on Amazon, OmniLit, etc. He has also written poetry and plays which have been performed at various locations in the UK, includ- ing the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh. His play ‘Kilmainham Kids’ about the children imprisoned in the gaol in Dublin in the 1850’s is shortly to be published. He is currently work- ing on a collection of short stories ‘Tales out of Herm’ all set at different locations on Herm Island, one of the smaller Channel Islands, but steeped in history and mythology and ripe for short story settings.
Satan's Grip
It was Esther’s eighth birthday.
Charlotte Caplin, her mother, had lived in
utter dread of this day for eight years. Ever since she had given birth to the child.
No, before that. Nine months before that. Ever since the child was conceived, Charlotte had feared the coming of her daughter’s eighth birthday.
Now that day was here and she was gripped by real icy terror. Today, Charlotte believed, somebody was going to try to snatch her daugh- ter away from her.
She tried to push the thoughts aside. They were foolish. Unfounded.
In her life as a respectable parent, she had managed to put her awful wild adolescence behind her. She bravely endured the scathing looks of the other mothers at the school gate when they stared at her tattoos and piercings, a legacy of her misspent youth.
She always managed to smile and take Esther’s hand lovingly, in a motherly fashion,
just as a good mother should. She was a good mother. She was.
It was early afternoon, and the sun streamed in through the front room window of their tiny terraced house.
“So you liked your presents then?” Charlotte asked. Esther was sitting surrounded by her birthday gifts and pink pretty wrapping paper, everything that Charlotte could afford. She got up and flew like an angel into her arms.
“Oh Mummy, of course I did; they’re lovely. How could you even ask?”
Charlotte’s heart fluttered at the feel of the warm wonderful little thing in her arms. She couldn’t bear even the thought of losing her little girl. But again, the reminder that it was Esther’s eighth birthday brought a shudder that cut through her whole body like a wire.
“Mummy, what’s wrong?”
Charlotte looked into her daughter’s blue eyes and lied. “Nothing, baby; absolutely nothing.”
“Then can we go to the playground? Please...” she pleaded, obviously catching the look of doubt in her mother’s eyes.
“No darling, not today,” was Charlotte’s defini- tive response.
“Why not, Mummy?”
The question was reasonable, innocent, polite. “Well...” So many reasons flooded into
Charlotte’s mind, the chief one being “... because today baby, I have a horrific fear that someone will take you away from me.”
Of course, she would never, could never ever
say that, but the fear was there, gnawing like a cancer at the back of her mind.
“It is my birthday.”
“I know, darling, and I’ve tried to give you a good birthday, haven’t I? You said you liked your presents. Mummy made you a nice cake. Now, do you really need to go to the playground?”
“Yes. I haven’t seen any of my friends today.”
This was true. It was August, the middle of the summer holidays. Charlotte had deliberately not arranged a birthday party. Yes, okay, it was fanciful; it was a completely irrational fear, but today of all days, she wanted to keep her daugh- ter at home and she wanted to keep her away from other people.
“Mother!”
Charlotte looked up, startled. Esther had never called her that. It had always been ‘Mummy’.
“I want to go to the playground. And I want to go now.”
Esther was standing with her feet apart, her hands on her hips. Her daughter was adopting an attitude. An attitude. She had never done that before.
“Esther...”
“You can’t stop me on my birthday. I’m eight years old now.”
I can, thought Charlotte, and I will. But there was something about Esther’s attitude that stopped her from saying anything. There was a fire in the child’s eyes and Esther found herself weakening...
Was this the little girl who had played Mary in the Infant School nativity play three years running? Was this the child who, looking angelic in her white pinafore dress, had led the Sunday School choir singing What a friend we have in Jesus? Esther (deliberately given a biblical name by Charlotte as a form of protection), her perfect child, her angel, was now — on her eighth birth- day — standing there in open defiance. It’s time to stand firm, Charlotte told herself, and yet...
Esther ran to her and took her arm. “Mummy, please can we go to the playground?”
Esther seemed to have sensed a chink in Charlotte’s armour, suddenly reverting from anger and defiance to gentle pleading.
The child was stroking her arm, circling her fingers on one of her tattoos. Her daughter was stroking the tattoo that Charlotte regretted and loathed most of all. She had planned to have it removed but never did. She pulled away from Esther. “Don’t do that!” she shouted.
“What’s the matter Mummy?” The child’s innocent round eyes looked up at her, the rebel- lion gone. But there was something else there. Was Charlotte mistaken, or was there a look of smug triumph as if Esther knew she had won?
Charlotte stood defensively, her hand over the one tattoo she reviled so much, the one she’d had done when she was sixteen and not old enough to know any better. She was briefly part of a Satanist cult, because at the time it seemed ‘cool’ and ‘big’. The result was a tattoo on the inside of her arm, between her wrist elbow with the
words ‘I Promise’ intertwined with the number 6,6,6 and two deadly black mambas, represent- ing her greatest fear: snakes.
“Shall I lock the back door, Mummy?” Charlotte seemed to have lost the power of speech; she had certainly lost the power of com- mand. Esther had won. They were going to the
playground.
“Just for a little while,” she wanted to say,
but the words wouldn’t come.
Esther skipped back into the room with her
cardigan and hat.
“You must stay where I can see you.” The
words were on Charlotte’s tongue but again, she couldn’t utter them.
Esther, her little white cardigan on, held out her hand. Charlotte took it, meekly.
“And don’t wander too far away from me.”
Why can’t I speak? Charlotte puzzled, I am in so much fear of losing this beautiful child I love. I desperately want to keep her at home, today of all days, and yet I am powerless to speak.
Charlotte could not deny Esther anything; that was it, that was surely it.
“Don’t worry, Mummy,” Esther said solemnly. “We’ll only go out for a little while. I’ll stay where you can see me and I won’t wander too far away from you.”
Charlotte stared at her in amazement. Had the child read her thoughts?
***
The playground was only a five minute walk from home. Esther, skipping and chattering incessantly, gripped Charlotte’s hand as they walked. It was as if the argument had never happened.
As they approached the playground gate, Esther began to recite a rhyme. It chilled Charlotte to the bone. She was chanting an old verse:
“The horny-goloch is an awesome beast—” “Esther, who taught you that?”
“You did, Mummy.”
“I did?”
“Yes, ages ago. Don’t you remember? You said it was by a nonny mouse.”
Charlotte chuckled in spite of herself. “A nonny mouse?”
“Yes. When nobody knows who wrote a poem, you said it was always written by a nonny mouse. I know how the poem goes on, by the way.”
So did Charlotte. She didn’t really want Esther to go on saying it, but she had no rational reason for stopping the child, except that...
“The horny-goloch is an awesome beast, all soople and scaly...” Esther recited.
Charlotte joined in. “It has twa horns and a hantle of feet...”
...Except that she had first heard it during her devil-worshipping days.
“And a forky tailie.”
Devil-worshipping days? Childish games, when she was sixteen. Stupid kids’ stuff. Ouija boards and wine glasses, reciting the Lord’s
Prayer backwards, and just to show how silly it all was, saying that stupid little rhyme and reading passages aloud from Denis Wheatley’s ‘The Devil Rides Out’. It didn’t even seem scary at the time. It was just cool. Most of the others were older than she was; it made her feel sophis- ticated to join in with their ridiculous games.
Esther was still saying the rhyme as they entered the playground. The place was crowded with kids and their parents. The sun was high overhead and the air resonated with the happy laughter and cries of children having a good time.
“Hey, Esther!” Two girls, school friends of Esther’s age, were waving and shouting from the row of swings.
“Lucy! Amy!” Esther shouted and ran over to them.
Charlotte watched them hug each other. “Not too far. Stay where I can see you,” she managed to call out, but her voice, normally strident, was lost amongst the joyful cacophony of playground noise.
She watched as the three girls took turns to push each other on the swing. The sun was so warm that Charlotte dearly wanted to close her eyes, but she avoided the temptation. To take her eyes off Esther would be tantamount to a criminal offence. Especially today.
“I promise...”
That ridiculous vow she had taken all those years ago.
She came to herself with a start. The swing that Esther had been playing on was empty,
swinging back and forth mockingly, but the girls had gone.
Then relief flooded through her as she espied them on the far side of the playground, negotiat- ing a seesaw. They were a little farther away than Charlotte would have liked, so she looked for a free seat over on the other side. No luck. They were all occupied by mums, with and without push chairs; normal mums out with their kids on a summers’ afternoon. It was as it should be. Yet Charlotte still felt that ominous twinge of menace.
In spite of her fears, she got up and moved around the perimeter of the playground to- wards the seesaw. Esther was so immersed in the act of balancing her two friends in appro- priate positions either side of the seesaw that she seemed unaware of her mother’s move and totally happy. Charlotte relaxed a little... but only a little.
One of the mothers, seated near her, called out sharply, “Cecile,” and a young girl in a yel- low dress moved towards her.
“Time to go home.”
Cecile and her mother moved off and there was suddenly room on the end of the bench immediately facing the seesaw. Charlotte sank on to it thankfully.
The sun moved behind a cloud. There was a sudden cool breeze and Charlotte shivered. Words came into her head from nowhere.
“I don’t want you to feel cold, Mummy...when the time comes.”
Those words were in Esther’s voice, but Esther hadn’t spoken them. Esther was bob- bing up and down on the seesaw.
Charlotte put her arms around herself. It was really cold now. Cold... and dark. The sky seemed to be completely obliterated by a black cloud.
The world seemed to be moving in slow motion. A crow fluttered out of nowhere and perched on a branch that overhung the play- ground fence. It seemed to be watching her, its black beady eyes unwavering.
She stared back as if it had thrown down a challenge. “You can’t stare me out!” she thought, eyeing the bird defiantly.
The bird stared back impassively.
A second crow alighted on the branch beside the first, and then a third. They seemed to move, to stare, in unison. Now six black beady eyes were trained on her; boring into her. Their gaze was hypnotic. Charlotte could not take her eyes off them and their steely gaze.
So she was only vaguely aware of the shape of the man who had entered the playground and was edging his way around the circumference of the ground towards where Esther was having a great time at the seesaw.
Had she been watching him more carefully, she would have been considerably more anxious of him than she was of the crows. Something frightened the crows and they flapped off beyond the trees. The man was now standing directly by the seesaw, and Charlotte saw him properly for the first time. What was he doing there?
He was dressed plainly but not shabbily in a brown suit, and his greying hair was long enough to be over his shirt collar. As Charlotte stared at him, trying to take him in, trying to gauge why he was there, one thing above all struck her about him. There was so much fear in his face. His eyes were ringed in white, and his mouth was incessantly moving as he wrung his hands, as if totally undecided what he should do next.
There were words emanating from his mouth and Charlotte strained to hear what he was say- ing. And then, through the still air, his words came to her:
“The horny-goloch is an awesome beast...”
Ice-cold fear gripped Charlotte’s chest. She knew this man; she recognised the look of him, his voice, even the smell of him — naphthalene, like moth balls. Older now, greyer; but it was unmistakably one of that crowd, the so called followers of the left hand path, Satan’s disciples. And Charlotte knew why he was there.
She opened her mouth to scream Esther’s name but as before, nothing came out. Her heart was beating, she was hyperventilating, and the tattoo on her arm was burning. She looked down. The snakes were intertwining, moving, slithering, and the three sixes were throbbing with red heat radiating out from her arm. She badly wanted to rub the tattoo with the fingers of her other hand, but was unable to move.
The crows were back again, or maybe they had never gone away. They were controlling her,
hypnotising her, keeping her silent and unmov- ing. She wanted to get up and smash them, smash their heads with rocks.
The man now had his hand out, extended towards Esther, but he didn’t seem to be a will- ing abductor. Far from it, he was terrified of something. Charlotte could see the sweat bead- ing his forehead and the hand that he held out to Esther was shaking.
Esther had seen him now and had got off the seesaw and moved slightly away from it. Her friends and the other parents seemed to be oblivious to the whole proceedings.
Esther was now standing halfway between Charlotte and the man, whose shaking hand was still outstretched.
Charlotte wanted to leap up, grab her daugh- ter in her arms and protect her from this mon- ster, but the steady gaze of the crows held her motionless.
“All soople and scaly...” she heard Esther say.
“He has twa horns and a hantle of feet...” said the man.
“Esther!” Charlotte screamed inwardly.
“... and a forky tailie!” Esther and the man shouted it out together; it was almost a cry of
triumph.
And their hands enclosed on each other, and
he was leading her away.
Esther did not so much as glance back. She
seemed to be going quite willingly. It was the man who was the more uncomfortable of the two. He looked back at Charlotte, with what she could
only describe as an apologetic look. But mostly, terrified remorse registered in his face.
Charlotte, frozen to the seat, watched panic- stricken as they disappeared through the gate and out of sight.
The crows held their position and their gaze for what seemed like an interminable period of time. Then they flapped off, cawing mockingly and disappeared.
Charlotte stood up and screamed her daughter’s name so loud everybody in the playground stopped what they were doing to look at her.
About the Author:
Paul Sherman is a teacher, author and director of Youth Theatre. He has had stories published in various hard copy magazines, but most recently, he has had three fantasy-hor- ror stories (The Jokers of Sarzuz, Daemon Page and Missed!) published by TWB Press which are available on Amazon, OmniLit, etc. He has also written poetry and plays which have been performed at various locations in the UK, includ- ing the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh. His play ‘Kilmainham Kids’ about the children imprisoned in the gaol in Dublin in the 1850’s is shortly to be published. He is currently work- ing on a collection of short stories ‘Tales out of Herm’ all set at different locations on Herm Island, one of the smaller Channel Islands, but steeped in history and mythology and ripe for short story settings.
