When their habitats shrink, the Wild find new homes.

I thought I’d try something new for this blog by posting a complete short story which you can read for free. I’d love it if you’d check it out and let me know what you think. The Red Spot Murders is a horror tale that first appeared in the anthology Ghosts, Spirits, Specters Vol 1, edited by Xtina Marie, published by HellBound Books (2019). It plays with superstition and the power of belief.

Content warnings for the following story can be found here using the password: red

Copyright notice: ‘The Red Spot Murders’ published below is the sole work of the author Eric Nash and protected under copyright law. The work, in part or in its entirety, must not be reproduced in any form without prior written permission from the author himself.

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The Red Spot Murders

© Eric Nash

The line of tower blocks resembled huge groyne posts stained and encrusted by the urban ebb and flow. Josh stood in their shadow, next to a weary-looking playground that had been intimidated into redundancy. Around him a gallery of tags and graffiti formed a barrage of outrage on a filthy concrete canvas. This was Sunnyside. Josh knew its reputation – thanks to his students at Meadowdown Comp – but during yesterday’s call Maeve’s voice had transformed the run-down estate into a tingling promise.

Mayyy … Mayyy … vvv … ah. He thought her name was the sound of longing.

“Flowers! Fuck!” Maeve’s profile had stated that she wanted someone with ‘hero status’. He reckoned teacher made the grade; flowers sealed the deal.

Beyond a playground swing throttled by its own chain emanated the inviting warmth of a fluorescent light. The yellow and black sign below read, Brahma’s News. It was not Interflora or Texaco, it was his last hope.

Inside the musty interior, nine scrawny bunches of daffodils were dying in a bucket near the entrance. He took four of them and waited for the pursed-lipped cashier to finish serving.

“They should string the bastards up.”

“Mmm.”

“I mean, what her parents must be going through.”

“Awful.”

Josh had heard about the disappearance. It was early, there was still hope for Kaci. There were no bastards ready for the noose.

“That sort of thing just wasn’t heard of when I were a kid.”

“Mmm. That’s sixteen fifty then please.”

“Oh, and a packet of Rothmans, please, love.”

He fidgeted. Lateness was instant death for a first date.

“Let’s hope they find her soon, eh?”

“Oh, I do hope so. Poor little mite. Anyhow, must get the tea on. My lot will be starving.”

The cashier turned to Josh. He beamed.

“Who’s the lucky lady, then?” she said.

“My mum. Any chance you could wrap them in some nice paper?”

“Of course I can.”

As twilight turned to dusk, he found the tower block where Maeve lived, discovered the elevator out of use, and dodged overflowing bin bags in the stairwell. His shoes struck the concrete steps as he climbed, the sharp sound echoed through the crumbling spine of the building, a liminal space haunted by the smell of chip fat and urine: the odour of surrender.

“Oi!”

His heart missed a beat. He hurried on. Further up, a baby’s wearisome cry, its sorrow whispered through the hairs of his neck. A melancholy lingered next to him as he continued. As he stepped out onto the fifth-floor balcony that wrapped itself around the block like the limb of a desperate soul, the city lights stretched out below attempted to warm him. Maeve. His mouth was dry; his heart beat a little faster.

Flat 511. A siren sounded somewhere.

512. The invasive noise gained urgency. Were they headed here?

513. The hot and sweaty paper clinging to the daffodil stems threatened to tear.

514. Through the kitchen window, a wizened face. A grinning mouthful of rot startled him. A quick check of his phone: Flat 514. This was the one.

“It’s open, Joshua.” The voice was as gnarled as the features.

Before the dinner invite, they’d discussed his line of work and circumstances, but little about Maeve; certainly no mention of an elderly relative. Perhaps she’d been invited as a chaperone. Some grim god-fearing aunt or grandmother there to smother any hope of impropriety or even a smile.

He squinted, his eyes recalibrating to the glare of the overhead bulb. A chemical whiff of paint tickled his nostrils disguising a rich smell of caramelised meat that ignited his hunger.

“Hi, I’m Josh. Good to meet you.”

She remained by the window. Her hair, patchy and lank, dangled like string from her liver-spotted scalp. Josh wrinkled his nose: he didn’t want to get as old as this hag. The baggy sleeves of her vintage nightdress rolled high up her thin, furry arms were elbow-deep in a sink full of pink-tinged water. A wet roller and paint tray had been barged onto a cluttered counter, their vivid red colour matched the walls. Half-filled mugs and crusted plates, dirty cutlery and chipped glassware and opened food tins had all found a second-life as Petri dishes alive with dusty greens and blues. He told himself not to judge. There had to be a reason. And they’d hit it off famously on the phone, which hadn’t happened to him for a very long time.

“Thanks. I’m Josh.”

The hag continued wringing out a shirt in the sink. She glanced at his feet and trailed her gaze upward, water from the rinsed cotton dripped onto the lino counting the seconds that she continued to stare. “Yep, you’ll do. No more needed, now.”

“Um… is Maeve about?”

“Won’t be long. Washing machine’s buggered,” she said. “Saw you coming, sweetheart, so I made you coffee. Black, one sugar?”

“Good guess.”

Poking out from an overfilled swing bin tucked away behind the hag, bright flowers bloomed in pretty cellophane.

“I can tell what a man likes. Don’t mind the decorating. Just moved in.”

 She slapped the wet shirt over her shoulder then dried her hands in a teacloth. A red stain leeched into the material. She fetched his coffee from a foldable table and handed it to him. There was an odour about her. He smiled, held his breath, and checked the mug for stains.

A recent move would explain a little neglect, but not this filth. Was Maeve not even a little embarrassed to suggest this place for date night? The whiff of paint, even the aroma from the oven, could not mask the stink of squalor and decay. The only sign of a life beyond that was a small corkboard pinned with five party Polaroids that hung on the remaining bare wall, but even this object was tainted with an eerie sadness.

“How long is she going to be?” He’d give his date five minutes max, then he was gone.

“Like I said already, sweetheart, I won’t be long.”.

“Sorry, I meant Maeve.”

“Get that coffee down ya and you’ll see her soon enough.” The hag turned to exit the room and stumbled over the skirts of her nightgown. Her steps were awkward, like one leg was longer than the other, except that didn’t explain the odd clacking noise. A frailty aid, maybe. Truth is, she may have been hiding anything under that Victorian garb. Josh’s old man used to swear that a lover’s mother was the yardstick to the quality of a romance. Every rule had an exception, right? At least she made decent coffee. Complex, but strong: the buzz hit him after two gulps.

Four minutes thirty seconds and counting.

He headed over to the corkboard and the small foldable table underneath. A shlick-shlick sound of his soles on the sticky linoleum announced his approach. Agitated by a sudden bout of tinnitus, he placed the daffodils alongside two dinner plates and a wooden-handled carving knife, a teaspoon and an old Instamatic camera filled the remaining space. The five Polaroids weren’t party photos as he had first thought, but headshots. Three men and a woman grouped in a square. Each appeared to be asleep, very pale, and all wore a red vertical smear the width of a finger in the middle of their lips. The fifth and crowning headshot was of a little girl. Very much awake. And terrified. They all resembled crime scene photographs, which was a peculiar thing for a person to display, but everyone has a little weird inside them. Perhaps it was an art project. After all, he didn’t know if Maeve was an art student or an accountant, or even an astronaut. He’d ask her if she ever showed.

Eager to keep some distance from the creepy photos, he took a step back and almost lost his footing on the numerous dark, glistening splashes surrounding his feet. There were more at the edge of the table next to the teaspoon that the hag must have used to stir his coffee. He dipped a finger in the surface gloop. Too gelatinous to be coffee, plus coffee wasn’t the colour of rubies and this lacked paint’s invasive VOC odour. He’d had enough. Time was up.

The ringing in his ears had stopped.

“Joshua?”

In the hallway, the hag grinned, her bony fingers twirling sparse hair in a coy flirtation.

 Sod this! Josh shlick-shlicked toward the front door.

“There you are!” A new voice. Rich, a little husky, a voice that forced his head to turn.

Maeve stood where the hag had been moments before. Armed with a wicked smile, she dropped her gaze from him to the burgundy dress that rolled down her curves and splashed her bare feet.

“Maeve?” His own feet were already guiding him nearer the woman in the doorway.

“I see you’ve finished the brew, Joshua.”

There was no way this gorgeous woman would ever end up like the hag. He was onto a winner.

“She makes good coffee, your…?”

“It’s very effective. Are those lovely flowers for moi?”

“Yes. Yes, they are.” He retrieved the simple bouquet from the table. Maeve closed in and a faint sound echoed in the small space, repetitive, rhythmic, hard. As she took the wilted daffodils, her fingers brushing his, he caught an unpleasant whiff before the richness of the meat roasting in the oven filled his nostrils. His belly rumbled.

“What do you think of the photos?” She stretched to retrieve a pint glass from a cupboard.

“Um… I used to have lots of party ones on my wall at Uni. What’s the story behind yours?”

“It’s a project,” she said, filling the glass with water.

“It reminds me of an exhibition at the Metropolitan a while back.”

Maeve tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear with paint-stained fingers, then faced the window and unwrapped the flowers.

“Something and foul play, I think it was called. Attracted massive crowds. Suitably gruesome, I guess.”

Her hair fell in waves down her back to the pinch of her waist, the fullness below. He checked himself. He had been adamant on leaving, his hand inches from the door, and now his head struggled to have anything other than lovesick thoughts. He just hoped the creepy old hag would leave them alone.

“Vegetarian?” She eyed him in the window’s reflection.

Josh could feel his cheeks flush. “No, I’m not.”

“I admit I haven’t yet met a hero who was,” she replied, facing him, daffodils now in the makeshift vase.

“Do you exclusively date heroes?”

“Wouldn’t you? They keep my house safe,” she said. “Now, sit down so I can check on dinner. Here put these on the table.”

He inched the camera over to make room for the flowers, their fading blooms drooped over the rim of the dirty pint glass. Maeve opened the oven, bending over, her dress taut. The air thickened with succulent meat. Oil spat from the roasting tray as she slid it onto the hob forcing aside the clutter. Two joints were lifted from the roasting tray onto a large plate to rest.

“It smells delicious. I’m not used to being treated like this on a date.” The words hung in a silence betraying his loneliness and he told himself to stop filling the gaps in conversation.

“Are you a serial dater, Josh?” Maeve asked, wrapping her hair into a loose knot.

“No… well, I’ve been on a few, I guess. What about you?”

 “Lovers are easy to find, heroes not so. I need new ones whenever I relocate.”

“Do you relocate often?”

“When the magic wears off.”

Pragmatic and honest, both qualities could become tedious over time. A thought he re-examined when she reached the fridge, hitched the dress over her thighs and squat to take something from the interior. He realised his mouth was open. The fridge shut with a flick of her hips, and Maeve stood holding a Perspex jug filled with red wine. She broke the surface of the liquid with her nail, then sucked on it.

“Too cold. Bugger, I should have taken it out sooner.”

“Do you normally put red wine in the fridge?” Room temperature had risen a lot in two hundred years, so it was not such a crazy idea.

“Wine? This is blood.”

Artist or not, confident and drop-dead gorgeous aside, this woman had issues. And her mother was a hag. He’d quite liked the Kerry with the big boobs from last week. “Did you drain a chicken?”

“It’ll thicken the gravy. Take some thyme from the windowsill, sweetheart, and chop it into little pieces for me. Knife’s by your elbow.”

Side-by-side they stood. She mixed the blood with the fat pooled in the base of the tray; he chopped the thyme, barely missing his fingertips. The hairs on his arms stiffened from the static between them, the rapid beating of his heart drowned out thoughts of last week’s girl.

“Dinner’s ready. Sit down. I don’t want the stock to catch.”

He took his place while she reached over the sink and pulled down the blind.

“Here you are, sweetheart.”

She set both plates heavy with two blackened shanks on the foldable table, making it rock back and forth. Water lapped at the rim of the pint glass vase.

“What a treat. Are we having vegetables?”

“You aren’t vegetarian.” She poured thick, bloody gravy over his shank. “Eat.”

Josh looked for cutlery while Maeve raised the dripping roast to her mouth. She had this careless way about her, a crude and uncultivated manner that didn’t seem to be an affectation or an edge, but more an embodiment. Josh liked nice things, liked neat and orderly, he preferred to conform. She was his opposite. What he wanted to do was fetch a knife and fork but he feared judgement. Instead, he remained seated, feeling uncomfortable, and brimming with a desire to have just a drop of her brashness, to feel her almost overpowering confidence within him.

Fuck it. He picked up the slippery joint and took a bite trying not to fumble or to appear awkward throughout the act. Her eyes widened with glee as pink juices trickled down his fingers. It felt disgusting. He felt ashamed. Underneath the table, her leg brushed his, slowly eroding his discomfort.

“This is so good,” he said. It wasn’t a lie.

“Ssh. Eat.”

And the more he did, the more it appeared she liked it, her approval acting as fuel. Fired up, they both tore into the bloody flesh time again. Rotating their shanks spit-like, each turn exposed more creamy-white bone, their eyelids lowered like dogs licking out marrow. He couldn’t help himself. His pulse frantic, his body on fire, as he witnessed the last of his dignity drop into the grease-riddled gravy. He didn’t care for decency, just ached to be naked with her, to feel the bloody juices baste his skin, to smear her flesh with clutched and pressed patterns, greasy streaks on inner thighs.

Tender chunks fell from the bone to their plates with a splash only to be picked up and fed back between their teeth with a greed so voracious they nipped their own fingertips. As gnawed bones clattered on their plates, he was left both disgusted and hard.

“It’s time,” Maeve announced, her chin and neck pink and glistening. A sudden tinnitus raised a mental alarm. Her hand circled his wrist and clamped down tight. The increasing pressure affected his perception: her stained and blood-spattered clothes were no longer an alluring depravity, but sordid and grotesque.

He tried to pull away. She jerked him back hard, angry, and hitched up her dress. His hips struck the table knocking it over sending glass and crockery crashing to the floor. Maeve’s features glitched: skin warped to wrinkled bark split ragged by a grin of rot then back to an idealised vision of beauty. She yanked him closer, shoved his hand under her raised skirt into viscous heat enveloping his greasy fingers. It was so sudden. Wrong. Like the filth cluttering the counters, and the creepy hagmother, the macabre photos and everything else that had been lost in his periphery, that now screamed at him.

“Stop it!” he yelled.

Her grip remained as she withdrew his bloody hand from between her legs and forced it toward his face, jabbing the wet knuckles against his lips. He tasted her blood. The camera flared.

In the resulting blindness, he felt his neck sliced open.

Josh was dead in three minutes.

After a further twenty-nine seconds he blinked.

Below him sodden petals clung to pieces of plate, ceramic flotsam adrift in a pink-tinged puddle. He refused to look beyond, content to have the body that lay motionless on the lino stay in his blurred periphery. Above him someone sniffed.

“Maeve?” he asked.

“Once upon… What did I taste like?” The voice was brittle, tiny.

“Oh, God, what’s happening?” Josh cried out. “Wake up, wake up!”

“Hi Josh, I’m Sandra.” A new voice, calm and firm, the kind that reassured, and probably delivered bad news. “Sorry to be the one to tell you but waking up isn’t an option anymore. You’re dead, like us. But hey, at least you’re not alone, eh?”

“Who the fuck are you? What the fuck is going on? Why can’t I move?”

“It’ll help if you take a peek at your corpse over there. Helps things along a little.”

This was just a dream. A dream in which he does what the voice asks of him and he’ll wake up. Josh searched beyond the daffodils to his where his body lay face-down in a puddle of blood.

“Nonononono. No! No! No!” That wasn’t him: it couldn’t be. He retched. Or rather he felt the nausea rise, the muscles contract; vivid, desperate memories.

“I would have jumped in and saved you, being a paramedic and all, but you can understand why I couldn’t,” Sandra said. “Guess you didn’t hear me shouting?”

“What?” Josh remembered tinnitus. “Shut up.”

“Don’t worry, your handling things better than the other two.”

“I can’t be dead. I’m talking to you.”

“And keep doing so, buddy, else you’ll end up like the others here who seemed to have lost their tongues, metaphorically speaking I hope, within hours of joining me. Where are you from, Josh?”

“Eh?”

“Once upon… What did I taste like?”

“Kaci? Kaci? It’s okay, love.”

Josh didn’t want to know about Kaci; he wanted her to go away.

“Once upon… What did I ta—”

The hag tripped back into the room, sloshing emulsion over the lip of the tin that she carried.

“Fucking nightdress gets on my tits!”

She put the paint down near the puddle and raised the garment exposing a set of sparsely-furred hind legs complete with a pair of black cloven hooves – the probable source of the clacking sound that accompanied her gait. In Josh’s mind this monster must have done something terrible to the gorgeous woman he had been having the time of his life with just moments ago. The hag levered her way out of the nightdress, hauling the tangled material over her head. Beneath, the hag was a patchwork of reddish fur and tanned skin stitched together with scars; ropey muscles rippled along the bones of her wiry frame. She resembled a vicious weasel, all sinew and spite. Naked, she shifted and squat next to Josh’s corpse, grunted and sighed while stripping his shirt and pants from cold flesh.

Josh screamed for the nightmare to end. When it didn’t, he said, “Where’s Maeve?”

“That is Maeve, you pleb.”

“No, it’s not.”

“She used her menstrual blood to do the hoodoo on you, Josh. It’s an ancient practice, apparently. Works a treat, doesn’t it? Who knew? Made you think she was your wettest dream, didn’t she?” There was a smile in Sandra’s voice.

“You’re sick.”

“Listen, she did it with all of us except Kaci. We all fell head over heels for her!”

The coffee’s complicated flavour, the blood on the table near the spoon, the fact that Maeve only appeared after he’d finished the drink. It all made sense.

“Now you get it?”

Josh didn’t want to ‘get it’. Perhaps Maeve had drugged him. Perhaps Maeve, with her hooves click-clacking like a billy-goat’s, dragged his heavy bone sack across the lino and into the other room. It didn’t mean he had to accept it.

“What the fuck is that?” Josh demanded.

“Who cares?”

“I fucking care!”

“Watch your language in front of Kaci.”

“Oh, like THAT’S fucking important! Can that thing hear us?”

“Don’t think so. I’ve been trying to talk to it for days and it’s not given the slightest indication that it can hear me.” Sandra sounded less upbeat now.

Josh shut his eyes tight. “I need to get out of here. I need to get back to work.”

“Once upon … What did I taste like?”

“Shut up!”

The hag returned with a pair of aluminium steps and a thin, paint-stained stick. She squat and picked up Josh’s blood-clogged shirt, squeezed every last drop of blood into the paint tin.

“Where’s my brush? I need to get on.” Maeve rummaged through the detritus on the worktops until she found it. Mere inches from Josh and the others pinned to the corkboard, she scooped out the mixture of emulsion and blood and slapped it onto the bare wall. She pulled the ladder closer, its rubber feet skated silently. Half goat half hag climbed the steps like it was a rock face, her hooves clattered against each metal rung. Every flick of the swollen brush peppered the clutter on the counters with gore. Thick, clotted splodges splashed onto the floor. When she raised the corkboard to paint beneath, Josh’s view slid upward to the ceiling, then fell again as the board lowered back into place. In front of them all, the hag admired her handiwork.

Josh shouted out when he heard the sound of voices on the balcony.

The hag chucked the brush and tin into the sink and pulled the spattered blind away from the window and peered outside. “Time for the test.”

She opened the front door then grabbed the corkboard, lifting it from the wall. This time Sandra and Josh both cried out as they spun in the air, then struck the hag’s hairy leg. Josh’s stomach flipped. The recently consumed contents threatened to fill his throat as he repeatedly slapped against the hag’s hard thigh. The heroes were hurried into another newly-decorated room  where they came to rest on the back of an open cupboard door, swaying gently against a bag-tidy while Maeve took her place in the centre of the room.

“Shit!” Behind the hag, Five naked bodies had been jammed together on a sofa, an intimate press of dead flesh, a mockery. Josh’s blood-stained corpse had been chucked across their laps, his head rested on grey thighs in a grotesque pose.

“Jesus,” he whispered, tasting the bile on his tongue.

“Who are the other two?” Sandra asked.

“Possibly, the previous occupa—”

A knock at the open door.

“Help!” Josh shouted. “HELP!”

“Hello?” The visitor had the whining twang of a Birmingham accent. In the spotlight, Maeve cupped the flaccid flesh of her empty breast and winked at the heroes. Behind the sofa the curtains shivered in the draught from the open door.

“Hello? Police.”

“YES!” The two other souls burst their wall of silence and joined Josh and Sandra in a torrent of desperate pleas. Pleas that rose and swelled into demands, demands that surged and twisted into threats, each rising above the last, each racing toward a crescendo. “WE’RE IN HERE! HELP!!!”

The two officers didn’t respond: both deaf to the shrieks of the dead whose voices were as redundant as their defiled bodies. Josh wept ghost tears.

“Anyone home? We’re conducting a door-to-door enquiry concerning a missing child.” Their voices neared.

“Look at the state of the place.”

“Is that paint?”

“It’s all over the fucking floor.”

Their footsteps schlicked louder.

Josh had to do something. He shouted at them, calling them into the living room, telling the others to do the same. They had to have hope.

“Dinner’s warm,” one officer said. “Mmm, tastes like pork.”

“Jesus, don’t do that.”

The two policemen appeared at the doorway.

The dead howled. A cacophony that filled their minds, but not the throats of the bodies lined up on the sofa. The heroes were nothing, but a raucous audience for Maeve, centre stage, who stood on cloven hoof with her hand buried between her scrawny, caprine legs.

“Fuck!”

“Call it in. Call it in!”

Their eyes were on the sofa, their brains processing the heap of violated corpses while Maeve continued pleasuring herself in front of them.

“Oh God, there’s loads of ’em.” Fumbling with the radio attached to his lapel, one of them turned toward the cupboard and stared straight at Josh.

“Help me!” Josh screamed.

The officer peered at the grim line-up on the corkboard, a crusty rock of rheum still glued to the corner of his eye.

“Help us. Help us get out of here!”

He looked above Josh’s head as the hag’s rapturous moans filled the room. “I… I think Kaci Withers is in this photo.”

“Can you hear that?” The other officer hadn’t moved from the doorway, but his attention had shifted from the sofa to the hag who had dropped to her knees in front of him, a spatter of blood on her thighs, her hand still busy.  

“I can’t hear anything.”

“Sounds like an animal?”

“Why can’t you fucking hear us!”

“We need to get out. There’s something here.”

The hag convulsed. Throwing her head back, she unleashed a growl that rippled throughout the space.

The officer grabbed his partner as he retreated out of the room.

“No! Don’t fuckin’ go! Come back! Come back. Take us with you!” Josh screamed. The policemen had disappeared. Breathless, the hag clambered onto her hooves, took a moment to steady herself, then followed them. Schlick, schlick, schlick, went the officers’ feet until the front door slammed shut. Clack, clack, clack, went the hooves of the hag until the heroes heard the click of a lock.