We waited in silence, protected by the trembling arms of my mother as we huddled together on the edge of the bed. There was no noise from outside, the silence was palpable. The room had become dark, the flames fully extinguished and the only light was the silver touch of the moon, creeping through the clouds above and spilling through the curtains.
Suddenly there came a noise, the slow, methodical crunch of footsteps through the snow. They appeared distant but with certainty they were approaching the door. Perhaps my father was returning, perhaps there was nothing to fear and the woods had been as empty as I had always observed them to be. The footsteps stopped for a moment outside of the door. Slowly, the wooden panel opened.
What stood before us was not my father. The sight of it caused all three of us to scream in unison. The creature was tall and thin. Its pale white flesh hung loosely from the bony form underneath. Its fingers were long, ending in vicious claws, but the most terrible, most terrifying aspect were its eyes. Huge and white, they gazed upon us soullessly above its gaping, grinning maw of stained teeth. As it approached, the air in the room became colder than anything I had felt before. My mother fought to protect us but her defence only lasted seconds. As darkness embraced me through violence and pain, I came to understand why William watched the flames die. Light would always succumb to the darkness.
the end 
About the author
Joseph Wheeldon was born in an uninspiring, typical working-class town just north of Nottingham. There he spent a happy childhood with a loving family. From a young age he enjoyed pouring out his imagination on to paper, writing short works of fiction to amuse himself, even if he never did quite finish anything. Now living in Cambridgeshire, he works as a registered veterinary nurse, but the lure of the written word hounds him to this day. His works now revolve around much darker, macabre themes but with the same intention to amuse himself and any others who may find the twisted texts inspiring. You can find updates on Joseph’s current work on his Instagram @JDWheeldon
JUSTICE IN THE ’POOL
Jonathan Edwards
Once it had been a beautiful metropolis. A zero-carbon city of the angels, if only for the rich. Schoolchildren had been taught how the city hosted, ‘The First Ever Air Olympics’. But it had been a very long time since the Olympics had been held, and schools were part of history now. Firstly, the rest of the population had eaten at the city’s edges. And the domes could only keep out so much foul air and dirty water. Man had attacked nature for hundreds of years, and the prize was disease, despair and filth. The pristine municipality had slowly been transformed into a squalid rats’ nest. Life expectancy had halved, but in this fetid hell, nobody complained.
Perhaps because of the downgrading in society, or possibly because of it, the population surged even higher. The push-button wars with other countries had given way to individual battles for space. As huge community towers blocked out the sun, funding and power were cut for the elderly and vulnerable. The government channel showed prisoners laughing about it. That led to punishment, which led to jail riots, which led to staff walking out for almost a year in a pay dispute. The prisoners didn’t get a meal during that time. All they found when they went back in was death.
With no space or money, justice had to evolve to cope with the spiralling crime levels. The new Case Handlers and Judges originally sounded like bureaucrats and lawyers. But the days of paperwork had given way to something grimy, chilling and fatal. Even in the air-starved, vermin-infested city, with legions of families sleeping in stairways and old cars, when people said they had nightmares, it was always of the Handlers and Judges.
Crib never had those nightmares, because he lived them.
Handlers Hutton and Tresling put their blackened boots against the windshield of their vehicle. They sat back and sucked the multi-coloured noodles out of the tin. They were meant to be green, but after fourteen hours on shift, anything warm worked.
Outside, people scuttled away from the Handlers’ machine. Some crossed themselves, all hugged themselves or their children, as if they could feel the cold from inside.
A red light flashed on the driving console, and Tresling hit it unnecessarily hard. The windscreen filled with a visual.
‘Murder one…’ said an aged man from the screen.
‘Go!’ shouted Hutton, and they were already moving before they even knew where they were going.
The cragged face carried on, ‘At Highland Boulevard Block 9. All squads within three blocks to attend urgently!’
Another Handler’s voice, unseen but probably on patrol like them, incredulously asked, ‘All squads within three blocks for a single murder one?!’
The old man looked angry. ‘Just do it!’
Tresling smiled at Hutton. Who the hell had been clicked?
‘Visual online, update as per.’ The old man’s face was replaced with several images from the location of the murder. All citizens were required to be implanted with tracking devices, and one image mapped scared people starbursting to save themselves.
The Handlers heard a crunch as they hit something, or probably someone. They laughed. The department had The Brain putting their speed as a priority way before their lives, let alone a pedestrian.
They looked at the screen. Usually, the area would have been almost blocked out with tracking signals. But now there was only one. It wasn’t the deceased. And whoever it was, they weren’t moving.
Hutton checked his icer. The icer was originally designed to record evidence, something which it did with its audio, visual, scanner and black box. But it also froze. It could freeze a fingerprint, a DNA sample, a suspect… Tresling had iced one suspect as he chased him over rooftops. The guy had been turning blue before he jumped for the other side. He fell 84 storeys. Splintered into a billion pieces.
Hutton told him in the old days the cops used to shout, ‘Freeze!’ to suspects. Tresling said Hutton was full of it, but Hutton kept saying it. He said back then it meant to ‘keep still’, as opposed to the current meaning: ‘Have a class 4 icer hit you with enough LDS to get your own body to use its energy to turn you into a giant popsicle, that will be kept in storage until the case gets processed’.
Neither of the Handlers had ever had someone intentionally wait at the scene for them before. They checked their icers again.
The reading said he was Crib L. Jones-7. He’d gotten in trouble as a juvenile, protesting at the zoo. He’d worn a T-shirt saying, ‘This is not a Zoo!’ and had been agitating people. According to him, a room with moving visuals of elephants, hippos, and the like (the ones that existed just a hundred years before) was not a zoo. There had been a cat and a white rat as well, but someone had stolen the first and eaten the latter, leaving just the room and the visuals. Crib got half-rations, curfew and limitation.
It was the other entry that was more interesting. Violent disorder. Three thousand had died after a queue riot. Hutton struggled to remember the case. He called it up.
Ah, it was from a good twenty years before. After fourteen investigations, an automatic appeal and finally, reviewing the video and tracking footage, it had shown Crib wasn’t involved. Of course, due process had to be followed. That’s why the Handlers had frozen Crib at the scene. And when, eighteen years later, the justice system had considered the case, Crib was immediately scheduled for de-icing. And the Handlers, the ‘Ice Squad’ as they were often called in the media, had Crib thawed out by the very next year. No harm done, on to the next case please!