The Shorecliff Horror and Other Stories Read online



  The Shorecliff Horror and Other Stories

  Three weird tales by

  Rufus Woodward

  Olgada Press

  Chapbook no. 3

  2015

  www.shorecliffhorror.com

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2015 by The Olgada Press, Edinburgh, UK.

  All rights reserved

  Copyright Olgada 2015

  The right of Olgada to be identified as the authors of this book has been asserted by them under the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form, by any means, with prior permission of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  The Shorecliff Horror

  The Impossible City

  Philippe and the Silver Flute

  The Shorecliff Horror

  I first moved into Shorecliff House on a bright, warm morning in early April. When I moved out again in the November of that same year, there were clouds gathering on the horizon and an icy wind threatening to rise from the North. In between those two days, I emerged from one nightmare only to fall right into another one. I found a friend who came to me from nowhere and then lost him again in circumstances I still find difficult to explain. I can’t be sure how many of the things that happened to me there were real and how much I imagined. That whole period seems more dreamlike and unreal the more I think of it. I was like a ghost at that time, an insubstantial half man, and though I came out the other side more complete than before, I can’t help but wonder what the cost of that healing was, both to me and to my friend, Lovecraft, my protector, my rescuer.

  ***

  Lovecraft was never really my cat in the first place, not really. So individual and unusual a creature was he, in fact, that it was hard to imagine him ever having belonged to anyone. He padded through my door one day a week or so after I first moved into Shorecliff House and seemed to take a liking to the place. He sniffed at the carpets, peered under the furniture, crawled in and out of corners and small spaces I hardly even knew were there and, virtually ignoring me for the entire time, generally took his measure of the whole house. When all these investigations were complete he found himself a comfortable spot on the window ledge in the drawing room and sat there in the sun all afternoon while I worked at emptying boxes and cleaning floors and getting the place as close to habitable as was possible. I didn’t pay him much attention and he paid me even less. Later that day I wandered through the room again looking for something item or other I’d mislaid and noticed that he’d left his perch and disappeared from the house entirely. I never knew where he went to or where he came from in the first place. He made his own rules right from the start. He was never really my cat at all.

  After that first exploratory trip Lovecraft began a habit of coming back to Shorecliff House every few days or so. As the early weeks of my tenancy passed by so the gaps between these visits grew shorter and the length of his stays grew longer until eventually it became apparent that he had successfully insinuated himself as a permanent fixture in the fabric of the building as well as in my own daily routines and rituals. Just as I noticed every morning the loose catch on the bedroom window and would resolve to sometime do something about it, so each day I would trip over Lovecraft sitting on his favourite night time seat on the second from bottom step of the main staircase. Just as every day I would boil the kettle and warm my teapot carefully while making breakfast, so I would make sure to put a little something in Lovecraft’s dish before I sat down myself. In these small ways we turned that old house into a home together, circling around one another like two old bachelor men, too wrapped up in their own habits and peculiarities to properly manage a relationship with the world outside, but perfectly able to get along with another similarly afflicted soul.

  The way he settled into the house so quickly, finding just the right spot to catch the late afternoon sun, knowing just how to force the doorway into the scullery, you might have thought that he knew the place well before he arrived. You might have assumed, in fact, that he must have belonged to the previous owner and had somehow found his way back home. Except there were no previous owners to Shorecliff House. Before I came along the place, abandoned and neglected for years, had descended into a ramshackle half ruin, battered by a lifetime of winter storms and salty winds. Perhaps, then, you might have said, he belonged to a neighbour or some other visitor who dropped in on the house from time to time. Except there were no neighbours. Shorecliff stood on its own with no other houses or buildings of any sort as far as the eye could see, defended on one side by mile upon mile of heather clad moorland and on the other by steep cliffs facing east over the wild sea. To some, no doubt, it seemed a desolate sort of a place, and I suppose it was. To me, though, it was perfect, just exactly what I was looking for. To me it was place to escape to, to get away from cars and people, from noise and distractions and from all the trappings of a world I no longer felt equipped to deal with. I don’t want to dwell too much on my own personal history here, that’s not what this story is supposed to be about, but quiet isolation is what I was looking for at that time in my life, and Shorecliff provided it more perfectly than anywhere else I could imagine.