Dark City

By Anne Phillips

Dark City is a collectionof various unsettling tales of a distopian future. There is a tragic discovery in an abandoned grotto in a garden. others, feature a haunted vacuum cleaner, the strange death of a young girl on a London train and a bag snatcher who has a nasty shock in store.
Care has been taken to make each one as surprising as possible. If you enjoy the unusual and macarbly different, then you will enjoy these stories.
One word of caution, if you read them at night or even in broad daylight, please make sure that you have all the lights on and back door securely locked.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anne Phillips
• Release date: Mar 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370360925

Anne Phillips

I was born in Swansea in March 1942, and apart from 5 years spent in Australia in my twenties, I have lived all my life in Wales. I have been married over 50 years, and I have one daughter. I have been a writer ever since I could hold a pen and mastered the alphabet. I belong to the Tuesday Afternoon Writers of Port Talbot. My hobbies are reading,reading, reading, and anything creative ie gardening, sewing and drawing. IAlso Iove to travel, and have done so extensively - and hope to do much more. Anne Phillips

Book preview

Dark City

And other stories

By

Anne Phillips

Copyright 2009 © Anne Phillips

Anne Phillips has asserted her right, under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise,

be lent, resold, hired out or 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 purchaser.

DARK CITY

and other stories

Contents

Dark City

Purple

Catacomb

Out of the Night

Memento Mori

Home Help

Servant of Bastet

Doll

Come Back to Me

Pretty Polly

Clockwatching

Bed and Breakfast

Keeper Of The Keys

All Fall Down

Changeling

Lost Child

The Light

Roundy house

Sara’s House

A Kind of Retribution

The Snow Globe

Hellibore

Forever

The Chair

Generation

Cousin Florien

DARK CITY

The small child stood in the darkest corner of the desolate street. Callie thought she was seeing things. Was it a real child of a wraith of her own imagining? Small, thin, the child had that pinched-faced, old/young look, which was the face of hunger and deprivation.

The dirty rags it wore for clothes seemed to be part of the gathering dusk. It was impossible to tell what colour its hair was, for it was tangled and filthy. It did not surprise Callie to see that it had no shoes on, for any kind of footwear was impossible to come by now. Unusually Callie felt drawn to this creature. She was usually ultra-wary about people and would not go near another human being if she could help it – especially at night and away from the safety of her shelter. The city was now a wilderness where only the fittest and most ruthless survived and did not care what it took to do so.

She could not tell what sex the child was, it could have been either. As Callie cautiously drew nearer, the child raised its head and the eyes were haunting and desperate.

Candles for sale, the child said tiredly and held out a tall, creamy wax candle, like the kind that used to be seen in churches.

Candles! Callie gasped, Where on earth did you get those? I haven`t seen a whole unused candle since the power went out.

The dead, haunted eyes stared at her. Candles for sale...candles for sale.

What do you want for them? Callie asked impatiently. There were several candles at the waif`s feet, filling Callie with a strange excitement. Wonderful candles, bringers of light and warmth to the nightmare cold and darkness that was their world now.

The child whispered hoarsely, Candles for sale...

Yes, but what do you want for them? Callie persisted.

But the child just stared. Eat...I want to eat, the child whispered again, in a voice so weak it was almost not there.

We are all hungry...she replied. Look, I will give you this for them, she unwound the the thick woollen scarf from about her neck and held it out to the child. The scarf was a relic from the past. It had once been bright and clean – cashmere – expensive. Now it was filthy and full of holes. The child stared mournfully and said again, I`m hungry.

For the first time in years, Callie felt compassion for a fellow human. She had understood very early when things started to fail, that to endure she had to look after herself first and last. She would have nothing to spare for anyone else. Everyone had to look out for themselves, for there was nobody to do it for them.

Callie could still remember clearly when the gas ran out. The oil had gone some time before, and cars and trucks stood rusting in overgrown driveways or abandoned on roads and waste ground where their last tank of petrol had run out. Filling stations lay derelict. Some of them boarded up, but a lot of them had been looted and set on fire by angry and frustrated motorists when they found out that the fuel was gone.

The stores and shops stayed open for a while, lit by candles. At first it seemed like a novelty; romantic, exciting, then the candles ran out. Now they were scarcer than gold, and much, much more valuable. Black markets had sprung up like loathsome scabs on the face of the diseased world, and those who controlled them ran them like monopolies; exorbitant prices only available to the very few.

Life had slowly ground to a halt. The supermarket shelves empties fast by the looters. Fresh food vanished in a matter of days, then the tinned and the dried foods.

Frozen food had rotted in their cold cabinets when the power went. There was no way of replenishing the stocks of course, as the great articulated trucks no longer delivered supplies the length and breadth of the country, and the factories that processed the food, starved of electricity and fell silent.

What they did get, usually came in a tin, and was eaten cold, for what basic fuel there was, people had hoarded for when the weather was cold. Water treatment works no long existed. All water was unsafe, and like others Callie collected rainwater in bowls and buckets on the veranda of her high-rise flat. She knew that life was now held cheaper than a battered can of soapy-tasting carrots, and people were killed for a tin of rancid meat.

All cats and dogs vanished from the city streets; even the city songbirds and pigeons disappeared. The only animals that were not slaughtered for food were the horses. They were a precious commodity, for they were the only means of transport. They were guarded, and cosseted, those who had them trekked far into the countryside in search of fodder and grain to feed them. They grazed them on any piece of empty ground they could find that grew grass. Horse owners became the new elite who lorded it over everyone else. In a world where transport of any kind meant power, peopled had been murdered for their horses, and this had revived an old law; stealing a horse was now once more a hanging offence. But justice was not meted out by courts of law and juries, but by the horse owners themselves, and the stanchions on the now defunct street lighting served as gallows, and the executed were left to dangle until they rotted.

Callie often thought with anguish and longing of the life she had lived before. It had been a good, comfortable life, though she realised now that it had also been self-indulgent, with no thought of the future. She`d had a well-paid job and was able to afford a smart car in which she went everywhere. She had never used public transport, and jetted off on exotic holidays without a thought that one day the fuel that fed the jets would be gone.

Callie didn`t really know how she had survived this long. Perhaps it was luck, or was it a fine-tuned survival instinct. She had an apartment at the top of what once had been exclusive luxury development. It had become her prison. With limited food she sometimes didn`t have the energy to descent and then re-ascend the twenty-five flights of steps. The elevators were, of course, extinct. In a matter of a few years civilisation in the city had collapsed. Yet somehow she still survived, eking out her remaining food, always scavenging for more, and managing to keep from freezing in the winter.

Today she had been forced to go into the hostile, dark city, for she had run out of medication. For years frequent excruciating migraines that sometimes lasted for days had tortured her. Over six months ago she had run out of her considerable stock of Migraleve, and she had gone in search of a pharmacy that might not be wrecked or looted completely. She had foraged nearly all day, and managed to find just a few packet of the drug, in a pile of rubbish in the remains of a chemist shop. She had grasped them to her like gold. Callie had slunk back to her sanctuary by way of narrow back lanes and dark alleyways, like the thief she had become. She had prayed every step of the way that she would not encounter anyone, especially the gangs, who had made the desolate streets their own.

But the constant nagging hunger, thirst and fear had exacerbated the migraines and they attached in increasing ferocity. Her precious stock of the magic medicine that brought her respite, and prevented her from towing herself off the balcony of the apartment in despair had dribbled swiftly away. Her practical common sense asserted itself and she made the grim decision that the next time she was struck by the paralysing agony and had no means of relief she would take that long fall down twenty-five floors to the street.

Suddenly the child started to cough; it was a dry, hacking sound that dragged Callie out of her self-absorption.

Where do you live? she asked the child.

I live here, it whispered.

Here, on the street corner? Then why haven`t I seen you here before?

The child`s pallor became almost translucent.

Callie sighed. Here, you can have the scarf, she said and held it out to the child. But the waif didn`t move to take it from her, but continued to stare with blank eyes. She turned away; there was nothing she could do for this pathetic creature. There were so many of them. Sooner or later it would fall victim to the gangs, who would kill it for its precious candles and matches. There was nothing she could do about it, and it wasn`t her responsibility anyway. Her only duty was to herself.

Callie walked to the entrance of the building, but she could not help looking back at the child. It just stood there, seeming even more insubstantial than ever. She pushed open the door, which was hanging drunkenly on one hinge, but found she could not enter and leave the child outside.

Then she heard them coming, faint at first but getting louder and sounding more savage with each second. Their shouts and cries of intimidation echoed in the deathly silence of the city streets. Her first instinct was to dive inside and drag herself up the endless stairs as fast as she could.

The gangs were always drunk or high on drugs. But how much longer could they go on looting pub cellars, pharmacies, surgeries and abandoned hospitals? How would they feed their addictions then? And there was a much more terrifying element about the gangs. They were stronger and healthier than the rest of the dwindling population. Somehow from somewhere they had access to protein, and plenty of it. Insidious rumours were beginning to reach the survivors. She heard them with a kind of shuddering denial and refused to even let herself acknowledge the obvious answer.

She called the child to her, Come with me! The child suddenly stooped with a strange agility and caught up the candles and matches, clutching them against its scrawny chest, then, together they darted into the building.

Callie did not look back as she half-carried half-dragged the child, who seemed weightless, and the coldness of its body burned into hers. She reached the stairs and began the mountainous climb upwards.

After the first four or five flights she slowed to a dragging pace, gasping as she went. Beside her the child seemed to float up effortlessly. Callie forced herself to climb steadily. By the time they were on the fifteenth landing, she heard them behind her for the first time and she strained harder to reach the top floor before they caught them up. If she got to the top and into her apartment then they would not know exactly which floor she was on. At least that was what she hoped. The animalistic howls and yells of their pursuers got louder, as if they were already in the building. The child was so small, so vulnerable; she must protect it from the cannibalistic hoard that was coming fast behind them.

She and the child dragged themselves up the last few flights of concrete stairs then out onto the dark, filthy landing. She knew where her door was in the dark by sheer instinct. She grabbed at the key that hung around her neck on a piece of string and opened the door to fling herself and the child into the apartment. Callie slammed the door and shot the bolts, then collapsed against it her breath harsh in her throat.

There was a sick pounding in her temples, answered by the sick churning of her stomach. Oh no... She moaned to herself, not now, not now... Not when she needed all her strength and wits about her. The first lightening flashed in the corner of her left eye. That was how it always began – the migraine. She dropped her head into her hands and rocked to and fro as the pounding in her head increased and waves of nausea rose in her throat. For a few seconds she completely forgot about the child. Callie forced her eyes to focus on the small figure in the dark room.

The child had seated itself on the bed of frowsy quilts and had arranged her candles in a semi-circle in front of her; Callie watched unmoving as slowly it struck a match and began to light them, one by one. The candles guttered into life, releasing thick, black greasy smoke from the flame and a smell, a dreadful smell which reminded her of the stinking armpits of a fat unwashed man. A terrible suspicion shook her that these candles were not beeswax, or tallow. They were made from from the rendered down- human corpses, of those the gangs preyed upon.

Callie stared at the child numbly for a second then in an explosion of pain she lunged across the floor.

NO! she cried out. They will see the light from the street. They will know where we are.

Again the child said nothing merely sat back on its heels and stared at her with those hungry cadaverous eyes as she swiftly snuffed out the candles.

I`m hungry, said the child.

Yes, I know you are so am I, Callie answered. Stay here, do not move, and do not go out onto the veranda. I`ll will get you something to eat.

She went to her small store of food in a cardboard box hidden in the flue of the fireplace. She hadn`t had a fire for months, for she had nothing left to burn. Callie took a tin out of the box, unable in the darkness to see what it contained. It could have been some kind of meat, peaches, rice pudding or peas. She opened it cautiously with her precious can opener – It was peas. She passed it to the child with the only spoon she still possessed. The child snatched it from her not even looking to see what it was, and began to literally shovel it down.

Callie felt the nausea rise in her throat again and the monster that had taken residence in her brain grew bigger and more powerful until it filled her whole skull. All she wanted to do was to throw herself onto her bed of quilts and bury her head in them. She longed for the Migraleve and despairing realised that she had dropped them in the street outside, or on the mad rush up the stairs. She moaned loudly, and the child paused in draining the last of the green liquid from the tin, to stare at her again.

A..are you tired...? Callie managed to mutter barely able to see through the almost tangible veil of pain that was blinding her.

I am cold, the child replied expressionlessly.

Y-you can snuggle up with me and keep warm, Callie joined the child on the makeshift bed. The child`s blank eyes watched her while she tucked a corner of a quilt around its skeletal body. Then she collapsed beside the waif and was swept away by the tsunami of pain that she was slowing drowning in...

Awaking from a merciful