Jimmy Allen looked up from his stall to see a grizzled male police officer and churlish-looking woman. It was a cold December evening, and bitter darkness had fallen upon Glasgow by the chime of four o’clock. The woman’s face was a smirking mask, and her whole demeanour cried gotcha. But Jimmy had been a trader at the Barras Market over long and weary years, and this was not his first rodeo. He had a few tricks up his sleeve, and winning form for dealing with inexperienced officers of the law. His eyes twinkled, and he felt his shoulders broaden. This was sport.


“Mr Allen?”


“Aye missus. And who might you be?”


“Liz Kirk, council enforcement.”


The smirking woman raised an ID badge like it was the Jules Rimet trophy, holding it flat out at Jimmy’s eyeline, leaving it hanging for longer than necessary to underline to the stragglers bombing about the final minutes of the market, those hardy few turning their collars up and tightening their scarves, just how important she was.


The old police officer, somewhat haggard and scratching at his salt-and-pepper beard, stepped forward. He was carrying a roll of evidence bags, and started examining the jewellery. Ms Kirk had to check her clipboard to remind herself of the trader’s name; she cared not. Her focus was on making his life as miserable as possible, and in doing so draw her mind away from her own emptiness.


“Mr Allen. In this authority you need a second-hand dealer licence to buy these items from the public.”


“Well … aye … but the people sellin’ their goods are no’ selling them tae me, Ms Kirk.”


Ms Kirk swallowed, her initial strut and swagger now off-kilter. She had come here to shut Jimmy down, and in doing so relish his annoyance. She had little joy in her own life; so why should others? Flustered, she took her glasses off to clean them. The rain had finally started to fall, first in spits, but soon enough, a torrent. It had been only minutes, but she no longer had an audience of other traders. All else had fled. 


“Mr Allen, are you trying to make fun of me? If these customers have not been selling their wares to you, who have they been selling them to, the Ghost of Christmas past?”


Jimmy dropped his arms to his side in modest recoil. Her flippancy betrayed a clouded judgement. He glanced at the big police officer, who clearly did not want to be here. Jimmy sensed he had his off-ramp.


“Officer, I think we both ken Ms Kirk has nae power tae charge me. That’s up tae you, big man. And I’m tellin’ ye I’m here acting as an agent on behalf of a licensed trader. It’s his money buyin’ these goods, no’ mine. I huv the records.”


The police officer had a sudden memory of a scene from a Pink Panther film. Something about a monkey needing a music licence. He did not fancy being the monkey in this little tete-a-tete, a drenched monkey at that. 


“I think discretion is the better part of valour for today, and I think we can all agree we dinnae want to be out in this bloody rain. Mr Allen, can I suggest you get a lawyer’s letter to back up what you are saying, and we can have this conversation again.”


“You mean you want a ‘To Whom it May Concern’ letter?”


“Aye, Mr Allen, ‘To Whom it May Concern’.”


The officer doffed his cap, and a little stream of rainwater dropped down. Ms Kirk, fumbling with a small red-and-black spotty brolly she had fished from her bag, could barely look at him. The brolly up and with the rain now battering against it, she shook with anger. “To be continued,” she huffed. Jimmy, chuckling, waved them off.


The interlopers now gone, Jimmy packed the last of his wares into his lockbox and he could at last (at last!) snatch a moment to examine his best find of the day. 


A beautiful, most beautiful gold brooch. 


It was a mesmerising piece, an antique he somehow oddly knew would be used to fasten a great-cloak below one’s neck, designed for someone who would travel foreboding nights by horse or carriage. The piece had a weight to it which indicated it was most likely twenty-four carats. But the piece also had some other sort of weight, something much deeper and obscure; an uncanny yet compelling presence. He had bought it for two-hundred quid from some batty old dear, who had no idea what she had. In fact, he reflected, she had seemed utterly relieved to be parted with it.


The brooch had a central, inset jewel which was a deep, blood red. Jimmy could not help but use his loupe to examine the jewel yet again; certainly, a ruby. As he wondered at the vintage of the piece, his mind conjured the curious image of a burly man on horseback with a huge black cloak wrapped around him, the brooch below his chin. 


Jimmy hadn’t noticed that the streets of the marketplace were now not only deserted, but desolate. Jimmy hadn’t noticed the creeping isolation which seemed to gather around him like a fog, clutching at him with wisping tendrils. He hadn’t seen that the grime of the city streets seemed to come alive and infest the pavement and roadside.


He was alone, finally alone, with his brooch.


There it nestled in his lockbox, his brooch, and for a moment he felt as if that ruby was staring right back at him, as if it had a pulse, a desire of its own. Jimmy reached out a slender finger, and caressed it. 


And he saw again an image in his mind, that of a huge, strapping man astride a horse, bedecked in finery and with a strongly-weaved great-cloak of the deepest black, flowing around his broad shoulders. And there, under the man’s ruddy neck, affixing that cloak, sat the ruby brooch. 


The image was so clear to Jimmy, he felt he could almost feel the barbed wind which swirled around the ominous man, that he could hear the jagged clops of the horse’s hooves, and as the image grew stronger in his mind’s eye he saw – he was forced to see – the face of the dark rider.


He screamed. 


It was a face no one should ever countenance, no one should ever have to see. It was the face of death, the face of pure evil, the face of greed and lasciviousness. It was a face hungry for all that the world could offer, and all that he might convince the world to give him in succour. It was the face of one whose hunger for all the fineries of the flesh could never be satiated. It was the face of one who has dwelled in darkness, and was now abroad the land.


Jimmy stumbled backwards, and realised he was crying. His tongue, as dry as arid bark, lolled from his gaping mouth, and his eyes popped from his skull. He scrambled to collect his senses, grab his lockbox, and escape. He careered down a dark lane, a shortcut where every cobble was known to his feet. Now, however, all around him was hostile, the world a gauntlet. There was a hot and acrid breath upon the nape of his neck, and shadows closed like the clutch of a great, black cape.


His breathing rasped in his chest like the claws of a bloodied beast. Panic filled his eyes and ears. Stumbling across the slick wet cobbles he fell, and his lockbox scattered across the ground. On his knees, he crawled, chittering, to reach his valuables. 


And then he knew dread, as the air itself vanished in fright.


Upon the cobbles was a monstrous rippling shadow, a shadow with a deep red glow which curled at the edges like the flowing ends of a winter cloak. His brain fought valiantly to convince his heart and stomach that this evilness simply could not be. The terrible shadow coalesced, and a great brute of man stepped from it (was it), and Jimmy figured then that he must be dead and on a cobbled path to hell. 


At least, he thought, if he was dead then this torment would cease. But then, the giant man spoke, and Jimmy knew that he was not yet dead, and that he had encountered the devil himself.


“You have something I desire,” the giant burred, his voice scraping across Jimmy like daggers on glass.


“Take it, take everything!” he shrieked, turning his head so as not to face the demon. 


The giant man stomped forward, and his black boots clopped upon the cobbles like nails being hammered into a wooden cross. He swept his cloak aside with one of his mighty arms, and held out a gloved hand, the size of a gravedigger’s shovel.


“Ah, now, James,” the creature growled, licking his teeth with a charcoal tongue. “A man such as you must realise that I am no thief. A man such as you must know that there is always a deal to be done.”


“Then name yer offer and I’ll accept, by Christ! I’ll accept ‘fore this madness takes me!”


The cloaked giant held his other hand out, and raised Jimmy to his feet, legs shaking like thin windchimes. The dark rider was easily two feet taller than the witless merchant, his burly chest like a whisky barrel, his garments giving him the outward appearance of a highwayman. 


Jimmy knew everlasting fear as he raised his shuddering, clammy neck to look the demon in the face. And there, within the eyes of the one who clutched him, he saw the black, unending void of eternal nothingness, the echoing screams of all fallen souls. There, he saw himself falling into that pitiful darkness, scratching and screaming, biting and wailing. 


But then, at the last, he also saw a glint; a flickering shadow, a lick of light, of golden light. It was the greed of the demon, the greed of the devil himself, and it was shaped like a brooch with a blood-red ruby within its terrible heart.


Jimmy clung to that glittering hope, realising that if there was a deal to be done perhaps there was a way out or through this terrible nightmare. “The brooch!” he cried out. “You want the brooch!”


The demon dropped Jimmy to the rain-lashed cobbles.


“And what, pray, what price would you ask of me? For I will not steal it. We must strike a bargain, James. And the bargain must be worthy.”


Jimmy’s mind flitted between despair and the opportunity which might appease this devil, appeal to his sense of contract.

And so, Jimmy spoke, and asked of the devil a most special item in exchange for the brooch. 


The giant man, wrapped in his cloaks and shadows, rolled back those blood red lips to reveal the smile of one whose hunger will always persist, the smile of anarchy, the rapture of chaos. 


Then the devil reached one of those great, powerful fists to his neck and found there, upon his chest, a beautiful golden brooch which affixed his great-cloak around his body. Feeling it there, for the first time in three hundred years, he found his desperation pricked, at least, for now. And so, he retreated back into his shadow, back to some other infernal place. 


And the rain fell on the cobbles, and the rain rattled on Jimmy’s lockbox, drumming like a funerial march.


Jimmy dragged himself along the lane, hand after hand, and foot after foot. He was sodden, exhausted. He opened the lockbox, and there, in place of the brooch, was a letter. A letter, if read by anyone, would somehow convince the reader of whatever Jimmy Allen should wish. He allowed himself a smirk, a greedy, dastardly smirk, and read the first line aloud.


“To whom it may concern …”

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JS Apsley is the pen name of an horror and noir author from Glasgow, Scotland. He won the Ringwood short story prize 2024 and has gone on to publish over fifty short stories around the world. You can find his work at www.jsapsley.com and on IG: @jsaspley_author.”

Listen to this story on the Kaidankai Podcast

When my family moved to Thornwick, I thought the sea would cleanse us from the noise of our old life, a vast expanse to soothe our city-worn souls. Greymist Manor crouched at the cliff’s edge like a sentinel, gray stone and ivy reaching toward a gray horizon. Its windows stared like hollow eyes watching us. The locals lowered their voices when they spoke of it and called it cursed, though never to our faces. My mother said such rumors came with every old house and my father laughed. Still, no one walked too close to our gates after dark.
   One night I stood by my window and stared at the moonlit tide. Something glittered on the shore below, catching the moonlight as if the sea itself were offering me a secret. I ran down barefoot, heart hammering, the air sharp with salt. The sand was cold and wet and the tide drew its breath back and forth like something alive. I waded through the water, cold and rough against my ankles, and found it: a silver chain threaded with black sea glass, smooth and pulsing faintly as if it kept a heartbeat inside. Without thinking I fastened it around my throat. The sea seemed to lean in closer and the waves whispered around me.
  That night sleep came heavy and strange.
I stood on the cliffs again as fog curled like smoke around jagged rock.That's when I saw it– a ship rising from the mist, lanterns glowing an eerie green, sails shredded but proud. A man stepped down from the prow, tall and broad, his coat dripping as though he had risen from the sea itself. His eyes were coals beneath a shadowed brow. He looked at me as if the world had narrowed to the shape of my face.
  “Alexa,” he said, low and rough, a sound like waves crashing against rocks.
  “That is not my name,” I whispered.
    He moved closer.  The fog wrapped us together. His boots made no sound. “You wear her heart,” he said.
  My throat tightened with something heavier than fear, as if his words reached into my blood. “I am Aveline,” I tried to insist.
  “Names are shells,” he murmured, voice low and almost tender. “Souls endure.” 
  He lifted a gloved hand toward me, and for a moment I felt as if he might touch the place where his fingers hovered.I woke up gasping with the pendant cold against my skin.
  After that the visions returned night after night. Sometimes he spoke, sometimes he watched, and always at the end his voice settled like a promise I could not keep. “When the tide swallows the moon, come to the cliffs,” he would whisper. “You will find me there.” I told myself I would not go. I told myself it was only a dream, but each morning salt crusted my lips and the pull in my chest tightened.
  One dawn I woke and found sand crunched in my sheets, gritty and cold against my skin. Strands of seaweed tangled in my hair as if the tide itself had visited my room. The smell of salt and damp earth lingered in the curtains. My mother scolded me for wandering the beach at night, but I had not left my bed. At least, I thought I had not. The house itself seemed to pulse with the rhythm of the waves and the floorboards creaked with phantom steps I could not trace. Every fiber of me whispered that something or someone had entered my room and brought the sea and him with it.
  As days passed his words grew sharper.
“They said I was damned. But you,” his eyes burned into me, “you swore to wait for me, Alexa. You promised by the sea.” 
  I tried to deny it. “I never—” he cut me off with a smile both cruel and aching. “Never loved me? Never longed for my return? Lies. Your blood knows mine.” Then his voice softened into something close to tenderness. “Meet me when the tide swallows the moon, come to the cliffs. You will find me there.”
  I did not go
  Not long after, while I walked the lanes of Thornwick, an old fisherman stopped me. He would not meet my eyes. He kept glancing at the pendant at my throat. “Best leave Thornwick, miss,” he muttered. “The sea remembers what it should not. Be careful.” He seemed to almost say more, then he shut his mouth and turned away. The way he looked at the pendant made my skin prickle. I asked him to explain, but he only repeated his warning and shuffled off.
  That night, for the first time since I had taken it, I slipped the necklace from my throat and tucked it into the bottom of my drawer beneath folded dresses. I whispered a shaky prayer that this would be the end of it. For two nights I slept dreamless, my head heavy with relief.
  On the third morning, my mother came into my room as I dressed. She was holding the necklace between her fingers, the black glass swaying on its chain.
  “You really should be more careful with this,” she said. “I found it on the floor in the parlor, near the hearth.”
  My blood turned cold, Impossible. I had locked it away, buried beneath fabric, the drawer pressed shut. Yet here it was, gleaming faintly in the gray morning light, as though it had crept back into the house on its own.
  That night, when the manor had fallen silent, I snatched the chain from my vanity, ran to the window, and flung it as far as I could. I watched it vanish into the waves far below, swallowed whole by the black sea. My breath came sharp with relief. Finally, it was gone.
  But the sea does not give up what it has claimed.
  At dawn, cries rose from the shore. A body had been found on the rocks, broken and pale as salt. Conrad, the fisherman who had warned me to leave, his eyes still wide with whatever he had seen last. He was lying at the exact place I had thrown the necklace. My father said accidents happen. My mother whispered a prayer. But I remembered Conrad’s face and the way he had stared at the pendant. I remembered how his words had stopped at the edge of something he would not name. When I saw the place where he lay, his fingers were clenched over a splinter of driftwood driven into the rocks. It was like a sentence hammered into him. I knew then, without a doubt, that whatever haunted my nights had reached into the day and taken him as a warning.
  When I returned to my room that day, my heart nearly stopped. The necklace lay waiting on my vanity, dry and gleaming, as though the sea itself had delivered it back.That was when I knew the death wasn’t random. It was a message.
  I could not breathe around that knowledge. So I put the pendant back on. The moment the cool glass touched my skin the fog came and his voice with it.
  “You tried to cast me away.” His eyes glinted, half-pain, half-possession.
  “You killed him.” was the first thing I said.
  He didn't even bother to hide it 

  “He would have taken you from me.” His smile was thin, desperate. “And I will not lose you again.”

  I could barely breathe. My stomach turned as hatred and devotion braided in his tone. “Do you see now, my bride?” he asked. “You are mine. No one will tear you from me. Not in this life, not in the next.”
  “I am not your bride,” I seethed.
  “Tell that to the sea, my love,” he said. “The pirate always gets what he wants and I have waited long enough.”
  It became more intimate and more terrible with each night. His obsession felt like a physical thing tightening around my throat. The memory of Conrad on the rocks thrummed in my ears. Someone who loved me from beneath the waves was cutting the world down until nothing remained between us until I couldn't endure it any longer. Desperate, I sought the witch who lived at the edge of the woods, the only person the town still avoided more than Greymist Manor. Her cottage smelled of salt and smoke. Dried herbs hung from every beam. She was smaller than I had expected and her hair was white as gull wings. Her eyes were the color of storm clouds.
  “You should not have taken what the sea gave back,” she said the instant she saw the pendant.
  I did not know,” I began.
  “Of course you did not,” she said with a slow bitterness. Her bony finger touched the glass and it pulsed like a vein under her touch. “This belonged to Alexa Grey, the last mistress of the Greymist Manor. She drowned a century ago, or so the story goes. Her pirate never stopped searching. His soul is chained to hers by this charm. You have woken him.”
  “But why me?” My voice shook.
  She pulled a sepia photograph from a chest and handed it to me. My heart nearly stopped. The woman in the picture was my mirror in another age. The same eyes, the same fall of hair. “You carry her likeness,” the witch said. “He believes you are returned.”
  “How do I stop him?” I asked.  
  “Break it,” she said, plain and terrible. “Shatter the glass and cast it into the sea. The stone is his anchor. Shatter it and he will be gone. He will not go without a fight. He will beg. He will promise anything. He will bleed his soul across your feet if you allow him, and you must not allow him.”
  I carried her words back to the manor like a weight in my bones, I tried to stay awake and put off the thing I feared most. It did not help. Exhaustion sank its teeth into me and in sleep he stood before me, wet and ravenous with longing.
  “You never came,” he said, sorrow raw as tidewater. “Tide after tide I waited as the moon waned and the sea swallowed light. You denied me.”
  “I cannot be yours,” I told him. “I am not Alexa!.”
  He smiled, a terrible thing and a beautiful one all at once. “You are hers. Her face, her soul, her promise. I would burn the heavens ,drown the earth, tear the stars down to have her back.”
  I woke up shaking. I knew then that I could not run. I had to end it. I had to stop him from twisting the world with his hunger.
  That night, for the first time, I answered him. For the first time I came where he said he would wait.
  when the tide swallows the moon. Come to the cliffs

  The fog thickened and the waves thudded against the rocks like a second heartbeat. He stood where the cliff jutted into the dark, coat soaked, face pale as carved stone, his eyes two coals in the gloom. When he saw me something raw tore across his features. Relief, hunger, devotion, all at once.
  “You came,” he whispered as he reached for me, fingers hovering near my face. “I’ve waited centuries to speak to you my love. To say all the things I never could. All the promises I carried to the depth–”
  “I came to end this,” I said, interrupting him.
  His smile broke and became wild. “No. No. You came to stay. You are mine, Alexa. Mine until the sea itself ends.”
  “I am not Alexa,” I told him, like I always do. “I am Aveline and I can't be yours.”
  His gaze darkened and for a long horrible silence he only looked at me. Then he stepped closer, breath cold as the grave.
  I took a step back.
  “Do you know what it is to drown a thousand times and rise only to emptiness? I’ve killed for you. I would kill the world for you. And you would cast me back into nothing?”
  With trembling hands I reached for the pendant. The chain slid cool against my fingers and the pendant felt like a heart beating in my palm. His eyes locked on it with a frantic hunger.
  “Don’t.” His voice cracked like a storm splitting the sky. “Don’t leave me again.”
  “I was never yours to leave.”
  
  His face twisted in agony as I raised the pendant. For the first time, he looked less like a monster and more like a man–broken, desperate, human in his torment. The pity that rose in me tasted like blood. But then I remembered the witch's words : 

  If you pity him, you will doom yourself.
He will beg and he will rage. You must still         
break it. 
  Break it.
  I carried her words as an anchor as the fog pressed in and the wind dragged my hair across my eyes. Finding the courage I raised the pendant and struck it hard against a stone until the black glass splintered into pieces . He tried to stop me but couldn't, like the sea had kept him from the land, columns of spray licking at his boots. I flung the pendant into the mouth of the sea. The waves rose as if they had been waiting. Light splintered up from the sea glass and then the ocean closed over it. He screamed, a sound of more loss than anger. Mist unpicked his coat and his outline blurred into steam that the wind could not quite scatter. His lips trembled as if he wanted to confess a hundred withheld things. The lines of his face tightened into sorrow and fury. Even as the salt wind took him, his eyes never left mine. They were pale fires, wet and molten, pleading and accusing and with a voice that held a last, terrible certainty, he said.

  “The sea takes me now, but it will bring you to me in the end.”


  And before I know it he dissolved into the night like smoke hauled by the wind. The waves closed and the storm eased until the sea went still. I fell to my knees on the cliff and the cold cut through my clothes and skin. My hands were slick with salt and the black glass. The manor behind me stood quiet for the first time since we had arrived. I wept until my cheeks were raw, for a thing that had been half terror and half devotion, for the lives that had been broken and for the man who had loved so fiercely he could not spare me.
  Sometimes, when the fog is thick and the waves pound the cliffs, I still feel the touch of that night. A shadow slides across my skin and the wind carries one word like a fossil in its mouth.
  Mine.
  I am Aveline. I am not Alexa. Yet I know some ties, once forged, do not fully die. They live like blind knots under the tide, waiting.

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Lara Shamas is a writer, Poet,  and literature enthusiast based in Lebanon. My work often explores the intersections of love, loss, and the supernatural.