The Ghastling - Nathaniel Winter-Hebert

This issue is full of women. Women lost, disappeared, heroic, misguided, spurned, haunted, wicked, put-upon, neglected, misunderstood, bedraggled, ghostly and preoccupied. In Bryan Marshall’s ‘the Grin Thief’, grief plants a black seed into the mind of a woman who loses her family to a terrible accident and so begins a ‘frightful scheme’… Callum McAllister’s story ‘the Smog Geist’, a young girl loses her way home from school amidst a thick yellow fog, beware the stranger approaching… Parineeta Singh’s ‘Crocuses in Spring, 1958’ tells of a nanny employed to take care of a troubled little boy whose imaginings become unnerving… Enter the heady, strange Fairy Glen of Claire Savage’s story ‘the Flame Keepers’ where ghostly apparitions float in the woods at certain times of the year and people are spirited away, or are they taken? In Joao Morais ‘Corpse Candle’, a young girl is sent to fetch the doctor for her gravely ill father, but her mother has filled her head with tales and warnings of a witch that may obstruct her route through the woods, ‘whatever you do, don’t look back and don’t stop walking. Get out of the woods as fast as you can.’… Enter a Conjurer’s tupenny show where promises of raising the dead before the audience’s very eyes are made in Kristy Kerruish’s story, ‘the Conjurer’. In Mark Blayney’s peculiar tale, ‘Sexistential’: ever wondered what it is like to actually be a ghost, to live eternally as you died? This story explores the complex relationships of ghosts who, ‘cannot get physically ill – but problems of the mind are frequent…’ Renee Anderson’s ‘Medium Black’ tells the story of a tragic death of a Victorian Medium. Ectoplasm, conjurer of spirits, or mistress of invention? But what killed her? In Melanie Marshall’s sad story, ‘His Garden’, an academic mourns the end of a relationship, finds herself wandering the gardens of a large stately home, she meets an old woman and follows her along a dark path. A strange exile from her empty flat, her abandoned life, she wonders, is she ‘fated to be always out in the garden’… Jennie Owen’s ‘Alternative Therapy’ brings a new meaning to ‘carrying your demons’… Catrin Kean’s terrifying ghost story, ‘Blue’, a single mother, despairing, is offered a fresh start, a new home by the sea, when one day a stranger arrives, soaking wet, at her door…