Casting Shadows

for something that might be able to help her. A wedge of metal lay behind her head and she dragged it over her, little by little, and jammed it under the other piece, then rolled onto her side to push down on it with the weight of her body. She felt the pressure on her legs give way a little and once again reached for them with her hands, pulling them out. This time, she managed.

  Which way? She wondered as she glanced around her. She wasn't even certain anymore which direction the light had been in; the darkness was disorienting. She lay back down, her legs on top of the sheet of metal now rather than beneath it, to get her bearings. She started to crawl in the direction of the light, dragging her legs.

  She was definitely in a tunnel, she thought as she made her way along a solid wall. It suddenly gave way, prodding with her hands she realised she'd reached a flight of stairs. She hauled herself up a couple, found it excruciatingly difficult. Her legs were a dead weight behind her.

  A few at a time she made some progress. There was still no sign of anyone else, dead or alive. Just the dust.

  She reached a plateau. A floor that was smooth beneath the coating of ashes, it was easier to move along. She wasn't really thinking about anything but moving when the word iodine popped into her head. Iodine? She wondered. What's that about?

  It was still dark, though not as dark, but she still couldn't see anything. The only difference was that now it was grey rather than black. A sickly kind of grey. She could just about see her hands, they were covered with sores, blood oozed out of her.

  Suddenly she stopped; she heard something. Something scuttling, moving quickly toward her. She screamed as it passed over her hand. A huge beetle, maybe a cockroach. Just one. "Calm down, Lisa," she said aloud suddenly. "Lisa! My name! I'm Lisa!" A wave of elation hit her. "It's all coming back," she thought.

  "Calm down, Lisa," she muttered again. Someone had said that to her. A man, older, her father perhaps? What had she been doing? She saw a newspaper article. Nuclear hostilities a possibility. She felt her panic on that day.

  "Scaremongering," her father had said. "They said that all during the cold war, we're still here." She took the iodine tablets anyway, the ones they sent out. Bought more on the internet, dosed herself with them.

  Conspiracy theories. Ten, ten, ten. Today's date. The end of the world. It was all over the internet. She looked at her hands again. The sores were getting worse, she thought. Even iodine couldn't put off the inevitable forever. She'd run for the tunnels, not to catch a train. To hide from the blast. None of her friends had believed her.

  She looked around again. Knew where she was. London, St. Pancras. Except there was nothing there. Just dust. She heard another cockroach scuttling around nearby. More of them, behind her now. They were coming for her. She pulled herself further along, but they came nearer. She winced as a piece of skin peeled off the palm of her hand. Heard the roaches eating it as she moved onward.

  Monsters

  by E.J. Tett

  She prowled through the house in the darkness,

  relishing the power that the night gave her.

  She was a cat burglar and a super spy

  and a vampire.

  A sudden crash of thunder made her jump and gasp,

  lightening flashed and illuminated the room.

  She was hiding behind the sofa, a frightened little girl.

  She was fifteen and vampires aren't real!

  The lightening stopped, the thunder growled

  and rumbled in the distance like a monster.

  Monsters are real. She knew that.

  She was a werewolf, a demon, a witch.

  Nothing to hurt her,

  not in the darkness.

  She owned the night.

  Now was her time.

  She crept up the stairs,

  avoiding the fourth one

  - that one creaked. She was an Amazon,

  a Valkyrie, afraid of nothing.

  She was here to kill a monster. At the top of the stairs

  her confidence waned. Thunder boomed, loud enough

  to wake the dead. She held her breath and waited.

  Pleaded in her head.

  Lightening flickered behind the curtains

  of the hall window. On, off, on. Gone.

  She moved on.

  Nobody can see who you really are in the dark.

  She opened the bedroom door,

  winced at the creak,

  though if the thunder hadn't woken him?

  She was a superhero, a Goddess and justice for all.

  He slept in his bed while a storm raged outside.

  His skin was wrinkled and covered in age spots;

  his head was covered in grey.

  He was an old man, a monster, and deserved to be dead.

  She sang a lullaby to him as she crept closer.

  Softly, sweetly, for him and herself.

  "It's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring.

  Bumped his head and he went to bed, and couldn't get up in the morning?"

  She hit him with a bedside lamp. Hard.

  Thunder crashed, rain hammered at the window

  and the lightening lit up the room.

  She was fifteen and scared and monsters are real.

  Roses

  by Jo Robertson

  Roses. That's what it was.

  She'd been smelling it for days now in the old house and it was making her stomach turn more and more. She pulled the sleeves of the cardigan around her as she walked about the place. Dust danced in the shafts of cold sunlight through the broken windows and the smell of age that permeated the place made her wrinkle her nose.

  But it was the roses that bothered her. Sweet, cloying and insistent, as if someone was standing directly behind her with a bunch of them. The thought made her turn around quickly and she flushed at her own stupidity when she saw nothing but the empty hallway behind her.

  She moved through to the kitchen where she had left the plywood. There was so much to do at the old house before James got there at the weekend; standing around imagining things wasn't going to help. She gathered up the hammer, nails and wood and marched back to the hallway to board up the broken windows.

  The house had only belonged to her a month, only a month since she had signed the documents at the solicitors dealing with her Uncle's will. She hadn't known him well and his death hadn't affected her very much until she had heard she would inherit his property. This old place had belonged to her maternal grandparents and had stood empty since their deaths eight years ago. Her uncle's work meant he didn't have the time or the inclination to spend his weekends out here patching up windows and re-hanging doors.

  Up the ladder again, nails held in her mouth, wood and hammer under her arm she worked for most of the afternoon, until the fading sun forced her down for the evening. She was halfway down the ladder when the smell drifted across her face in a sickly cloud. Roses again. She stood in the dusty silence watching the specks spiral to the ground in the dim sunlight. Roses, strong and so very sweet? she held her breath until she was out of the dining room and back into the kitchen .

  She woke the next morning with a pounding headache, the airbed she was sleeping on had half-deflated and her hip-bone ground against the bare floorboard painfully. She groaned and sat up. Why had she decided to stay here when there was a perfectly good hotel five miles down the road? she asked herself as she pulled herself to her feet. Money, it was always money. James had argued that they should just sell the place, make a tidy profit and buy their own little place in the city - something they'd never dreamt of affording. But one visit to the house had changed her mind; there was something gloriously homely about the place, vast as it was. From the porch that ran around the house to the sweeping, beautiful staircase that dominated the hallway, to the overgrown but rangy gardens, she had fallen in love with the whole place. She couldn't explain that to James, he loved minimalism and contemporary lines and it had taken
a lot of persuasion to convince him that to renovate the place would be the ultimate plan. She still expected another fight this weekend. Although she'd spent the whole week boarding up the cracks and painting over the intimidating old flock wallpaper she knew that this was no more James's house than the little apartment in the suburbs they'd shared had been hers.

  The thought of another painful discussion about their marriage made her headache increase its assault. There were things that needed to be said that neither of them wanted to say, but she feared that this house would be the issue that would force those words to the surface.

  She walked down the stairs and the smell of roses hit her straight away. She waved her hands in front of her face to try and disperse it and carried on towards the large dining room. She stopped in the doorway suddenly, a small cry forcing itself out and echoing around the high ceilings.

  Rose petals trailed across the floor to the centre of the room. Where there would be a table in future lay a pile of petals, bright orange ones. She ran to the middle of the room and kicked the pile of petals, scattering them across the wood floor and sending them dancing through the air on the light breeze.

  "James?" she shouted "Are you here?" ?Silence answered her. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and punched in his number, as it rung she listened out for the telltale noise of his ring tone echoing through the empty house and betraying his location.

  "Hello?" he answered. She could hear typing in the background; he was