The Soul Bazaar

By Anthony Morgan-Clark

Eight short tales of horror.

Is death the end? What does death mean for us anyway? In each of these stories, the author takes you on an exploration of death and rebirth.

In The Soul Bazaar, we meet Bryn: a man forced to confront his demons in a struggle to redeem his soul.

After The Disease: The Cure introduces us to Lucas, and his battle to find out who is the enemy in his post-apocalyptic world.

Bes. A troubled mind struggling with two personalities.

In The Cauldron Martina struggles with her identity and sexuality. Can she survive the mystery of The Cauldron?

In The Hollow we find DI Winchcombe mourning the lives she couldn’t save. How can she stop more people from being brutally murdered?

Wake. An old man looks forward to the new lease of life his transplant will give him. But at what cost?

After The Disease: Last of My Kind. Lucas wanders into the path of The Hunters, but can he share what he’s learned of the cure before it’s too late?

In The Book, Saul wanders into the world of The Tor and the red man. Why is his soul of such value to them?  Is he a pawn, or something more important?

These tales will have you questioning all you believe about that final step into the long shadow.

Includes the competition-winning Wake, and an introduction by the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Smokescreen Publications
• Release date: Nov 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386688495

Anthony Morgan-Clark

Anthony is an independent author of novels, novellas and short stories. He writes across all styles of horror, as well as sci-fi, thrillers and non-genre fiction. His horror has been compared to that of early James Herbert, and to Graham Masterton. Anthony currently lives in the Forest of Dean, in the UK.

Book preview

Author’s note

W elcome to the Soul Bazaar!

I had the line long before I had a story to go with it. As with many stories, The Soul Bazaar came to me in a fractured fashion, piecemeal, over a matter of weeks. I knew I wanted to write another short story with the red man from The Tor (the world in which The Cauldron is also set). I wanted to find out more about him, who he was, and what his role was in the oblique world of the white tower. I pegged him first as some sort of administrator, which would have made for an extremely dry story. I decided to have him as a trader was much more interesting. Since the white tower exists in a sort of nexus at the junction of life and consciousness, dreams and death, the idea of the soul trader was born. And where else could he trade but the Soul Bazaar?

So what souls could he trade? It would need to be a small number else he would be a glorified administrator again. The story also needed to focus on an individual to give the reader someone to connect with, a way in to the story. I can't tell you where Bryn's character came from. The story needed someone with a tarnished soul. But other than that Bryn, his life, and his actions came to me when I put the first draft together. Such elements are the yeast, flour, and water of any story, mixed and baked through draft and edit.

The beauty of the short story format is that one can flit between projects and themes in ways prohibited by working on a large novel. And so Saul, a character I had been keeping in mind for several months, found a story. Between drafts of The Soul Bazaar, he found Symeon and the book, and had his own encounter with the tall red man.

Such flitting is also the reason why After The Disease consists of two stories. They were written concurrently. ATD was originally conceived as a post-zombie-apocalypse story featuring no zombies. The story took a different turn when I set to work on it, but it's again a character driven horror that I feel is an effective short tale - though a little voice on my shoulder insists there is potential for a novel. We’ll see.

Both Bes and The Hollow are character studies rather than straight-ahead stories, short enough to be classed as flash fiction. The Hollow is the story of a Detective Inspector frustrated with the ineffectiveness of her work. Bes is a look inside the psyche of a man convinced he shares his mind with another.

Bes was the hardest of these stories to write. As ever it existed in mental dribs and drabs until I put arse to seat. I never write anything in the order in which you read it. I always have certain parts written before I go through what's on the page and 'fill in the gaps', as it were. But of all the stories collected here, Bes was by far the most fractured when I started to write it. Fitting, considering the mind it describes. The sequence of events went through numerous drafts before I was happy with it. I reordered the sentences in each paragraph almost as many times. I even resequenced the words in each sentence over and over before I was satisfied.

Wake came to me in a moment of idleness in my then day job. Data entry is one of those things the Geneva Convention ought to have banned. Indeed, a lifetime spent doing that is a fate worthy of any victim in a horror story. Wake wasn’t inspired by anything in particular. The idea for the twist at the end came to me out of the ether. Once I had that I thought of the deliberately ambiguous title. From that premise I thought about the character - who he could be, why he would be in that situation. I built the story up detail by detail, in a fashion far more methodical than my usual approach to writing. Once I had the premise and the ending, everything else came from thinking about the character. I submitted it to a short horror compilation, and it was selected for publication - my first ever competition entry! It was originally published in ‘Collective Ramblings Vol 1’. The book is from a small American press called Rambunctious Ramblings.

Whenever I assemble a collection like this, it is inevitable some stories won’t make it. I cut a few because the idea for the story was better than the story itself. Some didn't make it because the horror element was not strong enough. A lot of my stories lean more towards sci-fi or speculative fiction. Others, good stories, I dropped because they did not fit the collection thematically.

The theme. The weave binding these tales together. Death would be the most obvious one. But death would be too simple, too vague a concept to have running through these stories. I certainly was thinking a lot about death when I wrote these. But without intending to, I have written a lot about rebirth too.

But that's enough about the stories. By now you must be keen to read them. So we'll let this diversion die, only for the lives that follow to take its place.

Happy reading.

Anthony.

The Soul Bazaar

Anoise. Quiet, muffled . Guilty. A noise of stealth gone awry, a pause hidden in the surrounding silence.

Bryn stirred in the darkness of his attic bedroom. The foggy stillness drifted along the landing and into his room. He awoke, and his hand shot across to the far side of the double bed. The empty far side, as it had been for several months now. He always kept his mobile under the adjacent pillow. His fingers grasped for the phone’s smooth edges. He shivered. Was the window open? His room was never this cold. Not even in winter, when the mournful sea winds blew in from the bay.

Another noise, clear and distinct. He raised his head. From outside he heard tins rattle to the tarmac, chased by the clink of a bottle. Cats, or a fox. For a second he hoped it was what had roused him from his dreams. He laid his head on the pillow and pulled the duvet over him. He listened, every sinew a violin string of tension. He’d been dreaming when the noise awoke him, but couldn’t remember the dream in any detail. As ever he was grasping at fragments. His mind drifted back towards sleep.

There it was again, the muffled sound. A chill gripped him. There was someone in his house. His fingers wormed around beneath the pillow. No phone. He reached for the bedside cabinet, praying for the mattress not to creak. The door was ajar. He hoped whoever was downstairs wouldn’t hear him whisper into the phone when he called the police.

Shit. He’d left his mobile downstairs. It was probably still on the coffee table in front of the TV. The large, expensive OLED above the Blu-ray player, next to the Bang and Olufsen, across the hall from his office where he kept his Macbook. Somewhere near where he thought the noise was coming from.

A burglar.

He shuffled to the edge of the bed, hoping the soft glink of mattress springs wouldn’t give him away. He strained to hear over the sound of his hammering heart.  The heavy thumpthumpthump, the blood coursing through his ears... he was a fox listening for prey through passing traffic. He tried to calm himself, tried to concentrate on picking up anything from outside the room. Anything that might give him a clue as to who was in his house, what they might be after. How big was this person? Which room were they in?

His mind was troubled, his body sympathetic. Taught.  He listened some more, heard nothing. Couldn’t rest. He couldn’t be certain whether the noises had pulled him into wakefulness or pushed him from a dream. Nothing felt real anymore, not without her. Still the house was silent.

An old friend of his, an actor, once told him a technique she used to calm and focus before going on stage. Start with the head and work your way down, relaxing every muscle as you go. Scalp... face... shoulders... the tension sluiced from him as he focused on each part in turn. Arms, fingers, back... with each loosened muscle he was more ready to confront whatever awaited.

Until he heard it again. A subtle rustling of the shadows, as if they were forming into substance. It taunted him, daring him to get up and look. He could have sworn the noise was closer than before. The tension took a few sly steps back into the ground it had lost. He didn’t bother fighting back, just concentrated on keeping his breathing as quiet and steady as possible.

What to do? Should he wait here for the intruder to enter his room, hoping to attack first? Was that what they wanted, for him to remain hidden while they snuck in and trapped him in this room?

No. He had to get out of here. Ensure he met this intruder on his feet, not in his bed.

He inched back the duvet. His feet drifted to the deep pile of the carpet. He reached for the bedroom door, then hesitated. He fished his slipper from under the bed. If whoever was there knew what they were doing, they’d likely strike at the doorway the second the door opened. He crept to the far side of the door and lowered himself to one knee. He hooked his slipper over the handle and steeled himself to strike upwards at whatever entered. Hard and fast from this position, one forearm protecting his head, he could drive his fist into a groin, solar plexus, jaw, nose... all sensitive targets that would soften any attacker for a second and third blow.

He waited, listened to the soft padding footsteps make their way closer and closer. Nerves? His body was a cocked revolver as his pores squeezed out marbles of sweat. One more step, just one. He pulled the door open and threw his punch in a single trigger-and-hammer movement. Only shadows entered, and his blow flew through the air unhindered.

Something moved in the darkness at the end of the hall. It darted away from him, footsteps clattering down the stairs. The sound bounced back at him from the walls. The figure moved too quickly for him to see whether he was chasing a man or a woman. Whoever it was looked to be his size. He darted after the figure, rounding the landing and taking the stairs two at a time. He raced down the first flight of stairs, clearing the bottom before he could hope to get close. When he set foot on the second flight he saw he was gaining ground.

He stopped after six steps. The figure had halted at the foot, enshrouded in the deeper shadows of the hallway. Even in the gloom it looked relaxed. As if it belonged here and he was the intruder. It watched him, its face a melange of greys and blacks. Features were impossible to make out. All he could see with clarity was a set of too-big, too-sharp teeth glinting before him. A grin both malicious and inviting.

Six steps to the bottom. Without thinking, Bryn leapt towards the shadowy figure. The impact would take the intruder off balance. Two or three blows would finish the job. Once he’d subdued the burglar he could bind those limbs and call the police. He might have to break a jaw or some ribs, but he’d do it. Bryn roared as he launched from the stair.

The figure remained static. If anything, the grin broadened. In the short second he was in the air Bryn realised something was very, very wrong. This was no burglar. It had no interest in laptops and valuables. It remained in shadow as Bryn arced towards it. His stomach tried to claw its way back to the stairs. The shadows surrounding them darkened to nothing.

Bryn steadied himself for impact. His feet pointed at the intruder’s