“The storm rumbled on throughout the night until it was directly over the farm, coughing and bellowing and sending vibrations through the furniture. It had pelted with rain hard enough to sound like lead pellets being shot at a tin roof and hail fell in the early hours. All the family were heavy-eyed and irritable, which meant Iain did not notice the conspiracy happening underneath his nose.
“Make sure you don’t lose it,” George murmured in the hallway, giving Warren a look laced with meaning. “And don’t read it, either.”
“I’m not a busybody, you know,” Warren said, then went to feed Carlton.
A small tree had blown over in one of the fields. Leaves, branches, and debris lay about in the lane on his way to school. He wondered how his father was going to find driving the tractor around the tree. Difficult, probably.
The weather of the night was no excuse for morning P.E. to be cancelled although the sports field was sodden through. Warren changed his clothes with dread, his head pounding and his mouth like sandpaper. Team games were one of the things he hated. He was fast and quite agile but not as strong as he would have liked to be, and his concentration tended to wander.
They were doing football. The sky was white and dull, the air damp. The hairs on his arms rose and already his nose was running. Mr. Peters gave him the task of dragging the sack of footballs from the cupboard next to the cheesy changing-rooms and lugging it to the field. It was muddy. He slipped and almost fell over a couple of times. A few members of the class saw this and sniggered, which heightened his sense of dread.
They practised dribbling around cones for a few minutes, then Mr. Peters cleared the cones away and told them to get into their positions. Warren’s heart raced harder. Try as he might, no matter how much he didn’t want to be the focus of attention, he was always relegated to goalkeeper. This time was no different. Everybody scrambled every which way, anything not to be in goal, and Mr. Peters gestured.
“Dyfed, you’re in goal.”
“Crap,” Warren muttered under his breath, positioning himself in goal.
“Dyfed, are you trying to be funny? The other goal, man. The other one!”
A walk of shame. More sniggering. His shoulders felt too thin inside the bibs they had to wear with the initials of their positions on. It was so cold, it cut through his frame and he felt transparent. Maybe if he stayed still, nobody would notice him.
The game dragged on, people kicking the ball and hunks of turf everywhere, people being tackled into the mud. It had been half an hour and nobody had managed to score a goal. Warren was starting to relax and allow himself a bit of relief. It was going to be all right. Just another half an hour to go. If he stayed still and waited patiently, maybe his luck would last–
Mr. Peters blew his whistle… and the field changed, the whistle dragging into a high-pitched scream in his ears. Someone screaming in pain. All around him, dust-kicking and swords thrashing, men in chain-mail fighting on foot, on horseback, blood, sweat, mud, shouting, swearing, someone was even laughing…
IN OTHER NEWS:
“And The Stars Do Dream” a cosmic horror tale by yours scribblingly, has been published in Hellbound Books’ “Science Fiction Anthology Volume One.” It came out in February, which was a surprise to me as nobody notified me to let me know it was out (after contracts had been signed, of course).
A shorter version of the story was included in Eldritch Dream Realms from Alban Lake Publishing a couple of years ago, but they got their wires crossed and somehow published the wrong version! This longer version that’s just come out is the correct one, (or I suppose I could call it the Author’s Preferred Text?)
My poem “Green + Blue = Red” will also be appearing in Beautiful Tragedies 3.
Nightwalks 