On a giant waterless world, a monstrously huge vessel pushed its way through a pole-to-pole sea. It was heading away from a small, insignificant northern hemisphere island, somewhat ironically named Landfall, the one and only land mass to rise above the surface of the fluid on the whole planet. The strange vessel only ever plied between the same two sea- surface features, ‘Landfall’ in the far north and ‘The Spout’ located precisely on the world’s equator...

The wall felt sticky beneath my palms. That excited me. “Toby! This is the wall, man. This is the right place.” “You sure?” he muttered as he rolled his second herbal cigarette of the morning. “Prob’ly just goats’ piss or Red Kite dribble.” I licked my hand. This was definitely it. “No, Toby; try this.” I stuck my hand in front of his face. He looked up at me, his wide forehead creased with a frown. I nodded enthusiastically. He tentatively poked out his tongue and touched the sticky...

“Nothing changes, does it?” The young man driving the VW Golf settled deeper in his seat, resigned to the rush-hour delay. It was 8.35am on the ring-road. The daily conflict here was a four-way battle between those late for work, parents trying to get children to school on time, contractors attempting to get to jobs and truckers with loads to deliver. It was saloon versus four-by-four versus rusting van versus articulated truck, each one on a quest more important than...

So why should I be sitting in the driving seat of a bright red ’69 Ford Mustang convertible, parked just off Highway 434 in Cook County, Tennessee, with an old photograph of a beautiful girl propped up on the shining metal dash; and with a smile on my face? Why? Because I always wanted to drive a classic Mustang and because while some people in England do own one, they wouldn’t let anyone else drive the “love of their life” and in the USA, you can rent...

Hannah dried the last of the heavy iron cooking pots and hefted it up onto the shelf. She pushed her hair back from her perspiring forehead and sighed. She was tired. Tired as hell. She leant back against the heavily chipped deep porcelain sink and wiped her hands on her distinctly off-white apron. “Ahh.” Her sigh was not due to tiredness but about the colour of the apron. It used to be white. Crisp and bright white. The well water out here was sweet to drink...

Bars of sunlight streamed through half-drawn shutters into a cluttered room. Outside, beyond the paint-peeled window frame, the vines hanging off the walls were heavy, thick with full summer leaf. They swayed in the warm breeze, their gentle movements dappling the room with their shadows, shifting and stirring across the carpet and desk. The doctor, pince-nez gripped firmly upon the bridge of his nose, sat at his desk and methodically wrote up his...

“Say, Maven! Can I ask you a question?” Maven looked up at the huge bulk of Paxon eclipsing the glittering starlight in the cave entrance. “Whose stupid idea was it to drag the corpse along with us?” “Why you asking, Paxon? Surely it ain’t bothering you, is it?” “Yes it is, Maven, but that’s not the point. I just want to know why we’re hauling a dead body on a pilgrimage? Why are we wasting precious energy and time on a dead man, uh?”

Hubert followed the chambermaid along the narrow, windowless corridor. His flaring torch scarcely illuminated the cold, sweating stone walls. His breath billowed before him in the harshly cold air. The maid, clad in dun, homespun skirts, was barely discernible in front of him, her meagre candle-lantern, serving more for comfort than light, bobbed on its chain beneath her outstretched arm...

Steep-sided mountain flanks dropped either side of the little town nestling below a shroud of grey and listless mist. The fast-flowing river that had cut this distinct and narrow valley eons ago flowed in a tumbling swirling brown mass along its ancient bed. The river moved quickly through the town as though not wanting to stop at this dreary, damp-soaked collection of tiles and thatches, no clean white-water here just smudgy ochre-coloured thrashings of the...

“Dunno what all the fuss is about. I only had a few jars of Hadrak The Witch’s Seven Star Magic Blend Real Ale with Old Ma Tonkin before I flew home.”
“Fuss? Fuss! They could throw the book at you, my girl,” said Margaret the senior witch. “Flying a broom whilst under the influence of drink, drugs or Post Magic Spell Syndrome; drunk in charge of a besom whether airborne or not; flying below legal altitude in a built-up area, assaulting an high officer..."

“It’s a bloody simple question, Jack, but I will repeat it for you in case you’ve forgotten how to understand English. Whose shoes are you wearing?” Perplexed at the question Jack drew the tablecloth aside and stared down at his feet. “C’mon Jack, they are things found on your feet, you know - at the ends of your legs!” Jack smiled and glanced across at her. “Yeah, I sort of figured that out all by myself.” He looked down again, studied the brown slip-on...

She had no need of a name. There was no chance she would ever meet another member of her own kind. Neither would she encounter another living creature in her entire lifetime because her world was as devoid of life as deep space itself. Many centuries ago, her mother had spawned her one and only ovum on the slippery rocks at the bottom of a deep, still pool of liquid methane and there it had lain, on a hard, refrigerated crib for decades. From her...

In a quiet, reflective mood he sat and stared out to sea. Across the gentle grey-green swell a flock of huge, silky-black creatures swooped and plunged after prey into the water, their raucous screeches reaching out to him on the shore. As the lazy ocean swell barely broke a wave on the level sand before him, he idly mused how long it would be before this flat and uninspiring coastline of heaped dunes and brackish water meadows would eventually heave up and...

He was sitting in his seat, already scanning through the newspaper that he had picked up at the station kiosk. A movement in his peripheral vision made him glance up involuntarily then look down at the paper again. When his brain caught up, he realised that the movement had been a person walking down the carriage and sitting across the aisle from him. He looked up again, and across to where the person was sitting. She, too, held a copy...

He waited patiently at the bus stop in the pouring rain. He had been catching the same bus for eleven years. As a creature of excruciatingly implacable habits, for eleven years he had always turned up exactly five minutes early. And in all those years the bus had never once shown up on time. He had complained, of course, as was his nature...

He hated this town with all his heart and soul, everything and everything about the place, its sheer tackiness and complete absence of any sort of sophistication. Tom stared glassy-eyed without any interest across the narrow promenade walkway. Through peeling iron railings, the great sweep of white sand curved away into the distance...

By slow degrees he became aware of the pain. It was insistent, it was pounding, it was clamorous, it was totally unforgiving He struggled through the heavy layers of an unnatural sleep until he finally surfaced, only to float on a shifting sea of pain and nausea. He attempted to raise his head but the cacophony exploded more violently across his sweat-glazed forehead...

It was towards the end of setting out his plans to murder his wife when he discovered something rather important and it put a rapid halt to them. A couple of days ago Steve discovered his wife, Ruby, was rich. Seriously rich, in fact. She was sitting on a huge pile of dosh he knew absolutely nothing about. It was a sort of chance discovery...

"It was summer. Me and my four band member mates decided to take a few weeks off from playing gigs to enjoy a well-earned rest. And after that, we would get back to writing new material for recording rather than continue busting our guts with the rigours of touring; after all, we were “getting on a bit”. I decided that I had not seen my daughter for, what, a few years now and a stay at her lovely house just outside Canterbury, Kent, right on the boundary of the...

"Be gone, vile Aviator! Don’t land, you filthy putridness! Your very presence defiles this place. This is a place of supreme importance and your reek is obnoxious to all land-dwellers here come to see the Godobject. Be gone back to your home place, go back to where your cloying malodorous stench is wholesome to your decrepit kinfolk in their eyries high above the world-ground. Go, I say, you debased defiler of all ground-dwellers, unhealthy despoiler of nest and grave...

Dan saw her the very instant he stepped off the train.

There, over there, the pretty, stylishly-dressed girl leaning against a vending machine, engrossed in a magazine, tall and slim, with a luxurious main of midnight-black hair and a long camel trench coat that reached down below her knees.

The desalination plant had been working assiduously and flawless for just over 12,500 years; it prided itself, because in all those long and tedious millennia it had never recorded a single moment of downtime. Every day it drew in billions of litres of salt-tinged ocean and every day pure, drinkable water poured back into the sea. It did so unfailingly and consistently because that was the reason for which it existed. Detailed reports of its activities through every second of every...

He leaned out and craned his neck past the green-anodised aluminium shutters that were flat against the wall either side of the window. He looked left and right. The street was barely three metres wide. Directly ahead, a similar view; another narrow street, straight and true. Belying the ancient medieval brickwork, a few sagging power and phone cables traversed the confined canyons...

I have had a result. And it was somewhat unexpected. The ghost has begun to talk to me. She’s been around for a little while now. By that I mean I first noticed her a couple of weeks ago when I came in late one night from the pub...

Sam was a soldier. He knew about good days and bad days - this wasn’t going to be a good day. He knew that from the very moment he dropped eight feet and landed ungainly into a field of gently undulating tall grasses when he was expecting to step an inch or two over the fastway portal threshold and onto desiccated desert sand. The fall momentarily winded him, the crash landing was exacerbated by his heavy armour, weapons peripherals and powerpack...