A local journalist is sent to write an article on a supposedly haunted hotel, but is everything as it first seems?

A young boy discovers something mysterious at an abandoned quarry.

In medieval Lancashire, just out from a small fishing village, two fishermen are caught in a peculiar storm.

A young girl struggles with the loss of her brother, as grief deals her a dark hand.

A courier must deliver a priceless package, but others too have designs on the contents.

All these and many more stories await... 

"Genuinely creepy... will have you sleeping with the lights on!"

- Other Magazine 

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Excerpt from 'Last Of The Rosaceae'

  The first thing that Detective Gillian Lands noticed as she entered the bedsit, was the stench of decay, rotting flesh, invading her nostrils and clawing at the back of her throat.

  She cupped a hand over her nose and mouth, fearful of vomiting and contaminating the scene.

  “Where’s the body?” Lands asked the officer, stood at the far side of the living room.

  “In the wardrobe,” came the reply. Just how the officer wasn’t being sick himself was unfathomable to her.

  She walked slowly over to the old oak wardrobe at the back of the room, rounding the open doors before noting the corpse propped against the inside of the wardrobe.

  “Jesus,” she said, unable to look away from the dead man.

  Gaping black pits stared back at her, the eyes having been removed at some point and the flesh that remained was starting to heavily decompose. The mouth was tilted awkwardly open, as if the jaw had been broken and there was blackening to the skin around the throat and jaw to the left side of the face, indicating some sort of trauma there.

  She noted the colour and condition of the skin. Combined with the stench of decay, she surmised that the person had been dead around a week.

  “Holy shit!” exclaimed Detective Harry Kirkwood, entering the bedsit now. “I’m glad I wasn’t on the sauce last night. What have we got?”

  “This one’s earlier,” Lands said, turning away from the cadaver to meet the eyes of her partner.

  “Earlier?” Kirkwood asked.

  “This one must have been dead more than a week. Seven to ten days at a guess.”

  Neither of them had expected that.

  “Okay,” he deliberated for a moment, scanning the room. “So, this one is actually murder number two then?”

  She nodded, also looking around the bedsit for anything that might stand out to her.

  “Does it look the same?” he asked, walking over to take a look for himself.

  “Yeah,” she replied. “Eyes removed.”

  He screwed his nose up upon seeing the body in the wardrobe, but leaned in to take a closer look at the wrists. Sure enough, there was the tattoo. A small black rose with a single red thorn.

  “The ink’s there,” he confirmed, though he needn’t have. She was sure it would have been.

  This was the third body in ten days that they had found, each of them with a strange black wound to the throat, each of them with their eyes removed and each of them with a small black rose tattoo on their wrist.

  She looked around at the bedsit; a very unspectacular place, nothing on the walls, aside from a small mirror and not a great deal of furniture either.

  There was a small white cupboard with a sink and tiny drainer on top of it, an old cooker in the corner, by the window with the curtains drawn, a single bed and a chest of drawers.

  “Edward Tannen, fifty-two, according to the landlord,” she said. “Single, no family, at least not that the landlord knows of, quiet guy, kept himself to himself and never missed a payment.”

  “Do we know what he did?” Kirkwood asked.

  “He was a porter at the hospital.”

  “I don’t get the link,” he looked at his partner. “The first body, murder number one… a twenty-seven-year-old woman, solicitor, newly qualified. The second body, murder number three, as it turns out… a forty-two-year-old man, clothes store manager. From what we know, those two didn’t run in the same social circles and by the sound of it, neither did this guy. So, on the face of it, it appears that the murderer is choosing the victims at random…”

  “Apart from the tattoos,” Lands said.

  “Apart from the tattoos,” he repeated. “The first two both having a rose tattoo, that’s maybe a coincidence…” he started.

  “Although I never believed that,” she interrupted. “The rose tattoos were identical… black rose with a single red thorn. That seemed a little too on the nose for me.”

  “Well, it looks like you were right,” he gave her a congratulatory pat on the shoulder.

  She walked over to the chest of drawers, putting on her disposable gloves as she went and then opened the top drawer. She rifled through the bunched-up socks and underwear, before closing it and moving on to the next drawer.

  It was all clothing, until the bottom drawer, where she also found a small black notebook tucked under a pair of jeans. She opened it up and perused the scribblings as Kirkwood checked the cupboard under the sink.

  “Can’t be easy living with one cupboard,” he said. “Bleach next to the cornflakes. Sacrilege.”

  “Got something here,” she said, holding up the notebook. “Rosaceae. 28 St Peter’s Road.”

  She took out her phone and snapped a photo of the page.

  “What’s that… Rosaceae?” Kirkwood asked.

  She typed it into her search engine.

  “The rose family,” she said. “I think we need to get to St Peter’s Road.”

  Last Of The Rosaceae and many other dark tales make up the contents of 'A Mass Of Shadows', available on Amazon and from numerous retail stockists.