Claife Crier: Five Short Stories Of The Supernatural

By Ian K Pickup

Beyond the light lurks something more terrible than darkness...

Pull up a chair, turn down the light and prepare to be introduced first hand to fear and fiendish foes.

Here are five unique short reads guaranteed to send a chill down your spine. From deals with the devil to a cursed lake crossing, Ian Pickup harnesses the hell hounds that lurk closer than one might think and unleashes them upon the desperate. From the down and out to the downright greedy, nobody is safe from the evil that lurks closer than they ever feared.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Beaten Track Publishing
• Release date: Dec 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781910635223

Book preview

Claife Crier

Claife Crier

Five Short Stories

of the

Supernatural

by

Ian K Pickup

Beaten Track Logo

Beaten Track

www.beatentrackpublishing.com

Beaten Track

SMASHWORDS EDITION

First published 2014 by Beaten Track Publishing

Copyright © 2014, 2019 Ian K Pickup at Smashwords

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 910635 22 3

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

www.beatentrackpublishing.com

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the following:

My Mother, Pops and Kidda

Beaten Track Publishing

Special thanks to Tony at Formby Books

Iain Thomas [front cover artist]

The lads on the Windermere car ferry [early shift - June 2014]

All stories written by Ian K Pickup

Volume Two will be released in April 2015

This novel is a work of fiction and the characters and events in it exist only in its pages and in the author’s imagination.

Table of Contents

Crier of Claife [Part One]

Triptych 3

The Grave Digger

Meet at the Church [Kiss of Death]

Early Grave

Crier of Claife

[Part One]

The last ferry boat of the day was returning home. The welcoming sight of a fire on the eastern shore edge acted as a landing marker, casting an orange glow onto the cottages and ferry inn behind. This brought a wry smile to the old ferryman’s weather-beaten face as darkness fell quickly over Winander Mere lake. A sudden strong gust of wind fanned its way across the lake, pushing the boat the final few yards to shore; even this local man shivered as the temperature fell, but the thought of a few ales and standing by a roaring fire gave his weary body the extra strength to put the oars away and tie up the boat for the night.

Trudging his way to the inn door, another sudden gust of wind pushed against him, and above this sound and the shouts from inside the hostel, the old ferryman swore he heard someone calling out from somewhere over the lake; stopping dead in his tracks he listened hard, but nothing. Shaking his head, he carried on and disappeared inside. As it was a close-knit community, he shook hands and let on to nearly everyone inside and was soon enjoying his first ale of the evening.

Sometime later, a young boy, not familiar to the locals, opened the inn door and shouted at the top of his voice, Passenger waiting on the nab. Please send a ferry over, and left before anyone could respond.

The ferry service was mainly run by three families: one man and his two sons, another and his one son, and the oldest ferryman, who was last to moor up, also had two sons. All were inside the inn at the time of the request.

These ferrymen were not keen on collecting passengers after dark, the main reason being thieves, who knew there would be no one around to help on that side of the shore at night. But these were hard times, and an extra fare gained was always welcome, so the