ADULT STORIES


The Ticket Collector (8,300 words) is unashamedly an old-fashioned ghost story.  It describes how, if you sit in a certain seat, in a certain carriage, on a certain train out of Glasgow on its way down to Ayr, you stand a very good chance of seeing the ghost of a passenger who died in a train accident many years before.  The thrust of the story is that someone does see the ghost, and after some hit-and-miss investigation which includes the interpretation of a weird dream, discovers why the ghost keeps coming back.

The descriptions of Glasgow Central Station, and the somnambulant trip down to Ayr, and the old blocks of flats opposite Ayr station, are all accurate.  I made some copies of this story one Christmas and left them in the ticket office at Ayr Station for passengers to read on the train.  I wonder if they did, and if so, what they thought of it?

I submitted The Ticket Collector to the magazine Supernatural Tales, and am glad to say it was accepted, and should come out in spring of 2011.  So you can't read the story here!  You have to wait until 2011 and buy a copy of the magazine!

Future is a supernatural story with a strong twist of mystery.  It portrays Dee Dee, a woman who tells fortunes in her third floor flat.  She tries to divine the secrets of her latest client by her usual deductive means, but is baffled by his heavily disguised appearance and his blank, unreadable manner.  But the reader is introduced early on to the fact that Dee Dee possesses genuine psychic gifts, though she dislikes and fears them.  And it is these unpredictable skills which come to the fore and put her into terrible danger from her latest client.