Dim Stars is a new story published this month in Supernatural Tales 62, a great and venerable series, so I feel humbled to be included.
The story is more or less a standalone, but it is connected to some other, eerie terra incognita by means of forgotten canals and partially-collapsed alleyways (in English: it’s part of a sequence but you don’t need to read it in sequence).
The story concerns Miles and Bellamy, too hard-pressed south London clowns, urb-exers with a YouTube channel called Psychography Patrol, their content veering more towards the paranormal after they say they’ve filmed a ghost in a derelict mall and attract some clicks and attention.
Things take a darker turn when Miles insists they go looking for Little Winterthur, an abandoned high-end gated community that reputedly sits on cursed land. As the madman in any pub with tell you, places that don’t exist ought to be left alone.
Origin Story
Dim Stars is one of those stories that emerges from a glimpse-image cut-and-pasted from a day dream. I had an image in my mind’s eye of two guys egging each other on to cross a bridge into some sort of abandoned residential estate or incomplete business area. In this, I was reminded of a Brian Lumley story The Viaduct (Fruiting Bodies, 1983, though I read it in a Ramsey Campbell-edited anthology Superhorror that came out in 1976), The Viaduct had a powerful effect on me when I first read it in my early teens, maybe because it’s an explicitly horror story with no supernatural or otherworldly entities or concepts.
Although there is a brief homage to The Viaduct in the grafitti that appears in Dim Stars, my story is not influenced by it beyond there being a structure in both that you shouldn’t trespass upon.
I had originally intended the exploration of the ‘forbidden area’ to be the main thrust of the story as in something like The Nameless City by HP Lovecraft, but a lot happened during the planning stage and as I developed Miles and Bellamy. Here I used the character-building techniques I discuss in The Eyelash Tarot Experiment (it’s great that these are now written up for reference so I no longer need to rummage through past notebooks to see how I established a rapport with a character and cast last time). In the end, Dim Stars is one of those stories that changed so much during the development stage that I still have the original idea to play with if I ever want to write another bridge-threshold type story.
Subsequently, Dim Stars has become part of a new collection, Stories from our Disordered World.
Extract
Dead-black on the quiet side of midnight: the gap between the two warehouses had narrowed, and neither Miles nor Bellamy had any idea how far in they were. Both had turned their heads to the side, walked like Egyptians painted on the wall of a tomb. They edged along. Brickwork grazed their cheeks. It was humid, too, hot in the crack and a struggle to breathe. The passage tightened, converged, stretched onwards, a sweltering in-between hell without end, without exit.
Bellamy’s phone kept ringing. Stashed in the thigh-pocket of his combat trousers, he couldn’t reach it. He knew who it was, though, what she wanted.
‘Turn that fucking phone off,’ Miles hissed, ‘you want to get caught?’
Miles was still having the freakyfridays. The island he believed existed somewhere in the marshland beyond the warehouses was a grand slab of priceless real estate cunningly concealed from looters, intruders and YouTubers like them. There could be armed guards. There could be dogs or drones and custodial sentences if they were apprehended.
Bellamy was still unconvinced the island was real. It was a convenient tease and clickbait-story that Miles had broken a code hidden in obscure books and deciphered coordinates to a territory beyond the once-thriving industrial estate other urb-exers called the City of the Dead. Through this very crevice, the one that threatened to stick-fast both members of Psychography Patrol, Miles insisted they would find a forbidden zone obscure to all maps and GPS, what he called ‘a psychogeographical cold spot … a temporal and landscape anomaly’. It was hinted at in old texts written by unknown madmen. Miles had uncovered the clues, followed the breadcrumbs. Somewhere in this ‘anomaly’, what normal people would call inaccessible edgeland, or simply private property, existed the storied island of Little Winterthur.
Reviews
Patience!
Eeriepedia
There are a few nods at other stories here. The Paranormaliser and the r/eerie_england subreddit, who appear in lots of recent stories put in an appearance. The Anglian Book of Judgments, which appears in Under the Tower that Fell and others is dug out, as is Adam Pasmore’s The Ruins of England Handbook from The Crumbling Edifice. The deserted industrial estate here, that urb exers have named the City of the Dead will return in another story in Stories from Our Disordered World.
Stories from Our Disordered World
What in Cthulhu is Stories from Our Disordered World?
Seven stories of paranormal incursions, strands in a vibrating web of conspiracies centred on the long-cursed London Borough of Crobe are investigated by the mystery obsessives who meet on the subreddit r/eerie_england until it, too, suddenly and inexplicitly vanishes.
At the time I sat down to write this episode, however, eerie_england has received no new posts for over a year. It’s now a dead sub. It’s like they all suddenly lost interest. But the world has not reverted to its factory setting. Weirdness and savagery have been further unleashed. Everything is dark, everything deranged and disordered. So why stop now? What in the hell happened to r-slash-eerie_england? Eerie_England, why have you forsaken us?
Two files are discovered in a dead mobile phone hidden beneath an abandoned art cinema, one a secret police memo introducing an unencrypted file. The unencrypted file is the other, a script for a YouTube video, the first in an intended series of investigations into the strange death of the eerie_england subreddit. Its author – Mysterons – analyses seven heated debates that surround seven enigmatic stories from Crobe, an outer zone with a fearsome occult reputation and regarded as South London’s Area 51. These are stories of alien incursions, esoteric cults, vanishings, abductions, demons and napalm, many of them starring eerie_england’s lead investigators and doomed romantics, the Paranormaliser and the Believer.
‘Ashley Stokes is a writer who bends reality until it hums with a queasy vibration then hands the reader a lens that is both clarifying and distorting at once.’ Des Lewis, Gestalt Real-Time Reviews
Lovecraftian, Ballardian, with whispers of Burroughs and Lynch, Stories from our Disordered World reads like the script for a cult SF TV series about England’s darkest internet rabbit hole featuring near-future versions of Sapphire and Steel or Mulder and Scully.
Rights available. Contact either me directly or my agent John Baker at Peters Fraser and Dunlop.
Never forget that Dim Stars is in Supernatural Tales 62, along with top stories by Victoria Day, James Machin, Rex Borrows and more.
