Pariah and Other Stories

The first collection by Sam Dawson. Stories of the strange and disturbing, ghostly tales of obsolete British tanks and haunted graveyards, accounts of houses best left unvisited and people destined for terrible fates. Something for everyone, in fact, who likes tales of horror, the supernatural, and the mysterious. Among the dark pleasures on offer here are: 'And Where Will She Go and What Shall She Do?' So, we like to go to graveyards at night and get drunk, do a bit of drugs, play with a Ouija board on a grave, party a little, try to summon ghosts, talk about death and think about dying, discuss demonic possession and generally flaunt our youth, vitality and desirability to the resident dead. The more isolated and darker and haunted the place the better. 'Identity Crisis' Dale Toombes, Waffen SS sturmgrenadier, Iron Cross, first class. Saturdays and Sundays only. Dale Toombes. Member of Gruppe Totenkopf, Southern England-based battle re-enactment group. One of twelve like-minded males who enjoy dressing up as warriors of the master race every weekend. Dale is five foot eight inches tall. Dale is, shall we say, not hugely blessed in the pants department. 'Sally’s In the Well' The unmistakeable scent of elderflower. Unmissable too, even here, where the fields are bordered by a dry streambed peppered with reeking wild garlic – just as it is to the eye, normally lost in the jumble of nettles, brambles, cow parsley and hawthorn, but suddenly leaping out, its shiningly white heads of blossom everywhere lighting the hedgerows like a thousand vivid splashes of paint. 'Pariah' 1944 Inches from his head shrapnel lashed the metal like storm-swept rain stinging the rattling windows of childhood memory, but inside the tank all was warmth, cigarette smoke and the muggy condensation of hours of exhaled breath. The five of them had been sitting there, locked down, for half a day: cooking, eating, smoking, sweating, sleeping, peeing in an empty shellcase when they needed to, and throwing it out in lulls between bombardments. 'Self-isolation' “That one says ‘Go back where you came from!’ Are you sure we ought to stay on this road? Mark steered around the clumsily-painted sign set in the middle of the lane. It wasn’t the first they had passed. “It’s probably old,” he told her, “Left over from lockdown. It’s nothing.”