See How They Run: A Deathless Gods Story

By Christopher Joyce

Little Lillian Grange is eight years old. She has a mother, a dog, and deep black holes where her eyes should have been. Strange, then, that she can see so clearly...

 

This novella tells the tragic and terrifying tales of young Lillian, and explores her possible connection to the fabled Deathless Gods.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christopher Joyce
• Release date: Sep 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223165057

Christopher Joyce

Christopher is a Middlesbrough-born Horror/Fantasy author, and freelance content creator. When not busy crafting tales of weirdness and wonder, Christopher's main passions are retro video gaming, superhero comics, and tabletop strategy games.

Book preview

The sound of laughter mingled with the friendly barking of the family dog as a young girl and a labrador chased each other around the large garden. The sprinklers were on, and both the girl and the dog delighted in the feel of the cool water on the hot summer’s day.

The girl, eight, wore a red dress with a repeated print of ladybirds upon it, and she was barefoot as she ran around the damp grass. She was missing a tooth on the left side of her bottom set, and she liked to poke her tongue out of it as a party trick for her friends and family. Her skin was pale, but not unhealthily so, and her hair was raven black. Beneath her straight-cut fringe which sat just above her eyebrows, empty eye sockets flanked her button nose. An unfortunate quirk of nature, no more; a cruel birth defect - the girl had deep black maws where her eyes should have been.

Strange, then, that she could see so clearly.

But that was then.

Things are very different now for Lillian Grainge.

The house was a stain on the community; a blight; a dark smudge on an otherwise pristine lens. The locals avoided it, giving it as wide a berth as their routes and busy schedules would allow. The kids, though, seemed to flit between the extreme ends of an equally extreme scale. Half of the neighbourhood kids would not go within a hundred metres of the place, brought up as they had been on ghost stories, and cautionary tales of the little blind girl who would steal your soul and send you to hell with just a stare. The other half - usually older, and almost always boys - would dare each other to go inside the blackened and derelict structure, pushing, shoving, and cajoling each other into feats of bravery which did not go much deeper than surface-level bravado. The truth was that even the parents were frightened of that place.

Number 30, Charnel Street was a bad, bad place.

To this day, stories, gossip, tales, and legends could be heard, whispered, in every dark corner of every cafe, pub, or diner in the small town of Thistlemore. The elderly whispered curses and crossed themselves; the young sang songs and rhymes about the little blind girl, and everyone else just grudgingly gave voice to the things they had tried for the last thirty years to forget.

The worst of it? Well, the worst of it was that some of those things, delivered knowingly in hushed tones in dark, smokey corners under the gaze of heavy, watchful eyes, some of these things were true.

P lease, Mommy; I don’t want to go, sobbed little Lillian as she sat slumped up against her bedroom door. Her mother, Cara, who could have opened the door without much difficulty had she really wanted to, so slight was her daughter, sat on the carpeted floor on the outside of Lillian’s room.

I know sweet girl, she said softly, allowing her emotion to enrich each spoken word, but you have to go, you know that.

But... but they laugh at me, Mommy. They’re frightened of me. Lillian could not hold back the tears which ran openly from the tear ducts which still worked perfectly well despite... well, despite her condition.

"I’ve spoken to Mrs Jenkins, sweet girl; they won’t be mean to you anymore, I promise you. Besides, I have a gift for you if you would just open the door for me, just a