The room was stuffy with embalmed trophies, causing the already close air to stick insects to Artie’s skin. He imagined that larger insects or stranger things scratched behind the skirting-boards but, of course, by so imagining he had put them beyond the realm of possibility. It was more efficacious to imagine that an unwanted reality existed than to disbelieve it, because a true disbelief came primarily from the direction of belief.

And he imagined that there were things in the house that couldn’t climb down the stairs and other things in the house that couldn’t climb up the stairs. Not make-belief. But a true honest heartfelt, if imagined, faith in their existence. A faith that would diminish their potentiality for existence the stronger its underpinning of imagination became.

Not that he imagined these things to be ghosts. He explained it to his niece Rose when she came to visit him in her Sunday best tunic of red and black:

“They’re cross-breeds, maybe with ghostly parts, but basically either vampires or werewolves or suchlike, with bits missing...”

“What bits, Uncle Artie?”

Rose seemed too young to hear such explanations from an Uncle who should have known better.

“Bits that make the differences between them, dear Rose.”

She nodded, as if she understood. In fact, she possibly understood far more than was good for her. That werewolves were only nasty monsters owing to the man in them, wolves themselves being fundamentally good at heart. Vampires likewise, because of the corpse in them - their souls being fine. And that Uncle Artie knew more than he let on. About himself as well as the others that were either trapped upstairs or down.



One night, Rose had a dream that seemed so real, she knew it wasn’t really happening. Uncle Artie, she recalled, had told her that the realler something seemed, the more one should suspect its credentials. In the event, she gave the dream as much rope as possible...

Led by the hand of someone who didn’t look like anyone she knew by being more nondescript than average, she was taken beyond the skirting-boards of a house that was indistinguishable from every house - to be shown the scratching things which turned out to possess nothing with which to scratch, being limbless creatures: infant vampires and toddler werewolves with their means to wield claws or to grow their fingernails into claws removed. They wriggled on their rumps towards Rose and her mentor, as if they had seen the light of day for the first time. Their mouths had teeth, however, which might have gone a long way to explaining the scratching or gnawing or gnashing in the night.

Rose’s mentor stamped them underfoot with bone-crackling squelches, as if he believed them to be insects, albeit some were pink and flabby and others all scrawn and fur. They were all the same to him. She guessed he was Uncle Artie in disguise, for who else would have the knowledge to people her dream?

Meanwhile, she looked around for the Fruit-Stoners. Having read a book recently which treated of the old nursery characters (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor &c.), narrating their imagined existence behind walls that had no doors nor outside to them nor, even, secret rooms. She wanted to marry one of these characters, the handsomest one, as long as that was not the Beggarman or Thief. She may have persuaded herself to a bravery that the squirming things couldn’t diminish, but she was worried about marrying beneath her. She was a sweet girl who deserved the best.



Artie woke in the stuffed dead of night. He had dreamed of that Rose again, but she didn’t deserve such a dreamer as Artie. He raised his hands together, as if in open-palmed prayer, and through them horned a howl that even the real baying of a hundred hounds couldn’t have matched.

Only the human in the wolf made it want to ride the waves of blood and badness. A small human with a pinky red hood and a heart of stone.


(published ‘The Vampire’s Crypt’ 1994)