If you’d like to be included in this slot, please get in touch: estherchilton@gmail.com. Poems can be up to 60 lines and prose 2000 words. If you’d like to add a short bio and photo, then great. All I ask is that there’s nothing offensive.
This week’s guest is one of my Writers Bureau students who is appearing in this slot for the first time. Please give a warm welcome to Mark Wright. I hope you enjoy his atmospheric story.
A Reckoning
As the wind sighed and murmured through the old trees outside her bedroom window, Gina woke with a start. The cottage bedroom was in explicably colder. She saw her breaths coming out in plumes of steam. Not again she thought.
How had the duvet worked itself free again, pooling at the bottom of the lumpy four-poster bed? And why was it always exactly 1:35 a.m. when her bladder, without fail, announced its demands?
Groping in the dim light, she pulled the duvet back to her chin and stared at the frost spreading across the small windowpanes. Thin white lines like spider silk, stretching left to right in uneven patterns—suggestive of a mesh, or a maze she couldn’t quite interpret.
The cottage was over a hundred years old, the man from the agency had told her with rehearsed enthusiasm when she booked it a month earlier. A break, a retreat from the pressures of the London publishing world—her friends had insisted she needed it, eager for her to rediscover her spark. It wasn’t “like Gina” to go away alone for a week. But since the accident… well, all bets were off. She had nothing left to lose.
Those friends—and a few admirers who still thought her something of a catch—would have said Gina had her life neatly arranged, even after turning forty the month before.
She had a quickness to her: a sharp humour, an easy laugh, and a job in magazine publishing that required both instinct and steel. On the surface, she was exactly the sort of woman people assumed was entirely fine.
But there was always, just at the edges, something else. A faint shadow, a warning glimmer, that sometimes passed over her expression without warning, as though a thought had brushed against her and not quite left.
She came from comfort, from a life that had never required much struggle on the surface—educated, supported, well provided for—but that was not what she found herself thinking about now, here, alone in the dark.
As she settled back into bed, unbidden and unwelcome images of Ian drifted through her mind. More like an unwanted guest who wouldn’t take the hint to leave than a lover.
Had it really only been three years since they had met, fallen in love, and made all their friends quietly envious? The perfect couple—warm, generous, funny, and popular—until…
That late June day when he came in to discuss his new book. A thriller with spy elements, though to her it felt slightly uneven, more commercial than she would have liked. They had ended up sitting side by side on the small two-seater in her office, close enough that their shoulders touched. It should have felt awkward but didn’t.
Gina had argued the book could be more cerebral—more Le Carré—while he was drawn towards something looser, more in the vein of Mick Herron, all grit and swagger. They had laughed about it. Agreed to disagree. There was no romance then. Just an easy, sparring kind of connection—half banter, half challenge, edging always towards laughter. Nearing the end of the meeting, a simple gesture. He noticed a stray blond hair near the end of her purple woollen sweater – he delicately picked it off and put it in the bin. How typical of him: intimate, unpredictable, gentle.
Floating in the hinterland between consciousness and sleep, a single tear rolled down her cheek. Outside, the wind strengthened, rattling the old windowpanes as if something unseen were testing them, searching for weakness.
And then the memory came again—unavoidable, unkind. That day on the yacht.
A perfect summer afternoon, the kind that feels almost staged for happiness. The Greek sun bright but softened by a steady sea breeze, the engine idling, lunch carefully prepared and half-forgotten.
Ian laughing. Relaxed. Turning towards her. And then her movement—small, wrong, irreversible. A slip. A stumble. A release.
The boom dropping, white and heavy, swinging down in a cruel arc.
The dull impact. A crack. Silence that lasted only a second too long. Then blood, too quick to be real, spreading the colour of jam on a new white tablecloth. No one to blame, they said. Yet…
Gina opened her eyes.
In the pale 3 a.m. light, she could just about make out the tall walnut dresser, the wardrobe, and the mirror—faint shapes in the dark, standing around her like silent mourners at a funeral.
The wind outside rose and fell in sudden, angry bursts. And in between those bursts—something else.
A sound. Unlike any before…a signal, a sign, a warning from hell itself.
Not quite a cry. Not quite a human voice. An injured cat? A screaming child? Something thinner, stretched, breaking at the edges.
The wind. Then the cry.
The wind. Then the cry.
Unforgiving. Inescapable. Real, or imagined—it no longer felt like a question that mattered. The temperature in the room had dropped. A thin mist seemed to cling to the air, blurring the edges of things.
And without quite knowing why, Gina found herself moving towards the window. She didn’t want to look.
In the clearing, beside the glade, she stood. Yellow, straggling hair fell over a flowing grey cloak.
A pointing,bony hand—scarred, insistent—lifted slowly toward the window. The sound changed.
What had been a screech softened into something lower now. Closer. Almost human. A murmuring that seemed to press itself into the air, searching for her.
It had seen Gina. The face turned slightly.
And then, a whisper—dry, broken, unceasing—slipped from the cracked mouth as it formed a word…
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Bio
Hi , my name is Mark and I am a freelance writer just starting out on my creative journey. I have been involved in education for over 30 years yet always felt something was missing – then I took the WB course with the lovely Esther and it really sparked me off. Yes the story is a bit dark but there is a wider range of reviews, travel pieces etc on wordsbywright.com so please go read, enjoy & comment.
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Image credit: Pinterest
Esther Chilton 
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