Don't go Home Tonight and other tales of Mystery and the Supernatural

By Ian George

Seven edgy short stories that take you on a journey that will never end, to meet a woman who hides behind a mask and a ghost hunter who fears the dark.Read a familiar tale that is stranger than it seems and face a spirit that has murder in its heart.

1.Don’t go Home Tonight

‘You damn bitch,’ he spat the words. She recoiled from his raised hand as he slipped his fingers through his attractively tousled hair. The smile on his handsome face was a humourless triumphant snarl. He enjoyed controlling her without touching, he was a puppet master and she was his marionette.

2.The Avatar

He had not tried to hold her. Perhaps that was why he had lost her in the first place, because he did not try hard enough.

He remembered watching her retreating back. The door had slammed with such finality behind her, he knew it was over. He had not seen her since.
But there she was, staring in monochromatic blankness out of the front page of the newspaper, every bit as beautiful, even in newsprint.

3.The Inn on Primrose Hill

The Gibbet, he had read, was an Inn that had once occupied a prime location, but had found itself isolated by the arrival of the motor car. In particular, the arrival of a motorway that cut directly through, over, or under, obstacles instead of snaking around them. Thus in one sweep of a planner’s pencil, the oxygen of passing trade had been cut off. It had extinguished the life of the inn as abruptly as the blade of a guillotine steals away a life.

4.The Woodcutter’s Son

The old woman was sitting on a tree stump, her needles clicking industriously and with such amazing speed they were no more than a blur. Even as they stared in disbelief, the pink knitted scarf, it looked like a scarf, grew visibly longer. Now it hung down to the tree stump, now to the ground, now folding in a pile under her dangling feet.

As she worked, she gazed at them with eyes like deep water, surface sparkling as from the light of a sinking sun. Green eyes they were, a green that shifted green as grass, green as emeralds, green as moss. They were drawn into the cool refreshing water, away from fire beams and fear, away from the memory of sudden death.

5.The Letter Opener

‘Oh come on, which of you is pushing it!’ protested the pretty young woman, her brown eyes wide with excitement as they followed the orbit of the upturned sherry glass. At just nineteen, she was the youngest of the five whose forefingers spread from the bottom of the glass like the spokes of a peculiar wheel.

‘I don’t think any one person is, Ira,’ asserted Dylan, a handsome young man sporting a deliberately cultivated unshaven look. She felt his piercing blue eyes would turn her to jelly if she did not focus on the glass...

Two bonus short stories...

6. When her lift home fails to arrive, cold, dripping wet and uncomfortable, she forgets her mothers warnings and accepts a lift with a stranger.

7. Some jobs seem to last an eternity...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ian George
• Release date: May 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301848652

Ian George

Ian George was born in England in April 1959. His family moved from England to live in North Wales when he was eight years old. Married to a Welsh girl, it lasted only six years and there were no children. Ian was divorced from his first wife and moved back to England in 1988, marrying for a second time in 1989. He still lives in Kent with his wife and their two daughters. Only recently completing his first short story, Ian plans to write a collection in several genres. His ultimate intention is to write a tribute to his Father-in-Law, a German Prisoner of War who married his Land Army girl friend...a story that has to be told! He prefers to write supernatural, horror and fantasy stories, but an occasional crime story is likely to pop out unexpectedly.

Book preview

Don’t Go Home Tonight

And other tales of mystery and the supernatural

Ian George

Copyright 2013 by Ian George

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Table of Contents

Don’t go Home Tonight

The Avatar

The Inn on Primrose Hill

The Woodcutter’s Son

The Letter Opener

Stalker

The Door Page 63

Don’t go Home Tonight

Her eyes followed the raindrops as they hurried down the misted glass. She selected one to be hers, knowing it was a fruitless race which would always end in formless oblivion.

Occasionally the dash toward their inevitable fate was interrupted by a gust of wind that splattered the participants across the dirty glass. It was a momentary interruption. She quickly selected another champion and the race began again.

The same pointless competition was repeated, with or without an audience, across all of the other windows of the carriage. This carriage and five others were referred to officially as the 23:00 fast train, unofficially as the night train. Of course fast was a misnomer which always put a wry smile on her generous Chanel Rouge coated lips. The train would crawl painfully slowly through the suburbs of the City. Its wheels would fail to rattle out anything like a decent rhythm until it reached what remained of the surrounding green belt countryside. Of course, she knew fast meant non-stop, so why don’t they just say that, she thought.

But it was too fast for her at any speed.

She had deliberately delayed leaving the office this evening, tired though she was, but the relentless march of time brought her here again. Her nose and forehead were refreshingly cooled, pressed against the window. They were the only parts of her that could be referred to as refreshed, mind or body, in the stuffy overcrowded carriage. As she had dressed that morning, her bathroom mirror had reflected angry new wheals which joined the black, purple and fading brown blemishes that marked previous domestic retribution. They were hidden now like guilty secrets. She fought down a surge of anger, why do I think like that, why are they MY guilty secrets?

For a moment she struggled to break through the protection of denial, but it had taken months to lay down her emotional shield, like a geological process. It would take a seismic shift to break through it; she did not have the strength.

Having successfully stifled the fury, she repeated her mantra, it’s not his fault, he is right, I’m stupid and I bring it on myself. She repeated it to strengthen her conviction, reinforcing with soundlessly moving lips, I’m stupid and I bring it on myself, I bring it on myself...

Then another mantra came to her…one day ... one day...

Suddenly the reflected eye that gazed into her own was dead, dry, shrunken, the white stained with a painfully vivid network of angry red capillaries.

Startled, she pulled her head back, the abrupt movement rewarded with a sharp pain at the back of her neck. She rubbed the muscle with the tips of her fingers, glancing furtively around the faces in the carriage. Nobody seemed to have noticed.

She cautiously rested her head back on the glass, her own eye gazed back at her, alive, moist, the iris deep brown flecked with green. The trick of the light had passed.

Beyond the reflected image she could see the digits of the platform clock, bold black numbers on a white background. Though blurred by the rain, they were stark enough to remind her of the inexorable descent toward the moment she would slide her key into the lock of the front door. She imagined it in her fingers, carefully inserting it into the lock, turning it as silently as she possibly could. She watched the teeth of the mechanism slip with positive and almost imperceptible clicks into the unique shape of the notches in the key. She knew that to his oversensitive hearing they would be clattering and crashing into their allotted places, he would recognise the sounds. He would come.

A businessman in a crumpled grey suit threw an equally crumpled raincoat onto the luggage rack overhead, throwing an unexpected but welcome spray of cold recycled raindrops on her face. He crushed himself between her and the student who shared the seat. The student continued to bob his head in time with the hissing beat from invisible ear buds. He was unaware of the new arrival. His attention was divided between his music and ‘A Text book of Criminal Psychology’. He remained oblivious to his immediate surroundings. She had been shaken out of her reverie by the unexpected spray. Unlike the student, she had little to distract her from her present reality.

A wave of nausea engulfed her. It had been a mistake to finish the bottle of Merlot, delicious though it had been at the time, but she had welcomed the opportunity to delay leaving the restaurant.

Although she had visited the lavatory several times and once again immediately before leaving, she felt an uncomfortable pressure on her bladder. She was uncertain where the toilet on the train was, or even if there was one. She knew for certain that it was past the outstretched legs of her fellow seated passengers and beyond the crowded aisle.

She imagined the action of rising, of pushing herself up and stepping over the legs that formed a barrier like entangled tree roots stretching across a woodland path. Then on through the forest of standing passengers, into the corridor and the door of a toilet she imagined would be positioned conveniently between the carriages.

But she remained seated, unable to overcome her inertia. The carriage lurched and she fought down the nausea from her roiling stomach. The motors whined as the carriage rolled forward, its wheels complaining with discordant voices that faded quickly as their resistance was overcome.

The train slipped out of the light of the station platform, into the darkness of the night.

She slept, although she did not know it. Death was sleeping and was nothing to fear, it was the waking that would bring the pain and anguish. Before the waking came the dreams.

‘You damn bitch,’ he spat the words. She recoiled from his raised hand as he slipped his fingers through his attractively tousled hair. The smile on his handsome face was a humourless triumphant snarl. He enjoyed controlling her without touching, he was a puppet master and she was his marionette. He preferred physical contact, to inflict pain. For her the