The Games Of The Children

Short psychological horror story

There was a sour wind that blew up the long grasses from the Morston isle and swum with the hollow sob of the gulls. It lingered there, bitterly cold on the warmest of days, haunting the reeds and the rushes before fading back with the withdrawing tides. The old folk called it the gulling wind, the dead wind, the ghosts of the drowned in the North Sea.

George had found the corpse there.

The soldier had been lying on the sandbank that September, face down with his hands spread wide like a bird, fingernails filled with sand. His yellow hair glittered with salt and the dark jellied blur of blood, the pallor of his neck as grey as his jacket. George had poked him with his stick, but he didn’t move. He was heavy, hard, as if he carried the weight of the sea within him. The grown-ups had gathered behind him, hushed, and told the boys to go play by the rock pools. Poor lad, the womenfolk had tutted. Must have gone down with The Glowworm.

Long way from home.

So was George. This was a long way from Bethnal Green, a wide flat open place with strange names and stranger people. They had an accent, out here, the Norfolk folks. A language, an old Norse tongue cut with Saxon, slow and wandering against his coarse guttural chatter. The school children of…