ONE OVER
“How the Darkness makes children of us all!”
“…it’s reckoned round these parts that there ain’t no good comes of a low tide in Rushwold; no good at all, sir, no good at all.”
A honest-to-goodness tale told by one man to another over cosy comestibles and intoxicating drinks one New Year’s Eve atop a Cambridge bookshop of yore, about a dishonest-to-badness haunting of a would-be Suffolk Dunwich where tides at their bottom-ebb produce the direst ‘one over’ possible, the one leftover as a buried body not reburied in a land’s church but left to its own deep encroaching tides till such tides are intermittently but a ‘muddy estuary’. A pestilence or plague to those it gets near, young as well as old, this lug-worm.
Making the explicit tides of sleep less deep.
As from one man to another, like I said. No margins for cosy embroidery, this is just what happens, no more, no less, with words telling the barest truth of horror as stitched by instinctive expression by those who know — such as the affable soul who contextualises and narrates with words from outset, this being a freehold narration that is subsequently told by its leaseholder in deploying a truthful tenant’s diary about staying within the ironic hospitality of another ‘One Over’ of yore whereunder all us others usually have our varying intoxicants to mix.
Full review of the story collection here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/06/30/the-night-comes-steve-duffy/
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