Here's a short story i wrote a while ago for a Spike student publication. I want to get back into story writing, see whatcha think...

Eye Eye Eye, Ear Ear Ear

The bespectacled girl trailed a lazy ‘S’ on her beat –up skateboard along a dirt track. With awkward grace, she trailed her cheaply died split hair behind her into the tunnel beyond. Idly, David watched from the family Volvo, only half interested in the display. Having been stuck in a car for the past four hours of the first day of the summer holidays, he felt a longing for any contact with youth. A kind of affinity with others’ sufferings, envy at others’ mercies, and a general longing for interaction with girls. Silently he rated her a generous 6 out of 10.

With a faint sense of desperation, he had felt the miles between himself and his radio, computer and games console lengthen at an alarming rate, plunging him into the envious green of the countryside , and further into the suffocating woods. And now that it appeared that the journey was coming to an end, he knew he would miss the prone muteness which was afforded him during travel, at least by his mother ( but not in the company of his temperamental father; ‘tempera-mental’, he thought sullenly).

They pulled up in front of a menacing white dilapidated building, ‘quaint’, his mother called it, and David was bundled out of the car by his sister Rose. Recently his sister had become a teacher, and now insisted on seeing David raise his hand before he could speak. They had left early that morning, but three toilet stops and his mother stopping to look at a hedge had delayed proceedings. Now the sky was turning shit pink as they trudged with heavy bags towards the building, meeting the legend which read ‘The I Ho el’, it’s namesake’s leaves clambering up the side like skin disease.

After much unnecessary faffing, the trio made their way through weighty doors into the chequered foyer. Nobody stood behind the predictable front desk with it’s predictable bell which his mother began repeatedly pressing in a predictable way. Wearily, David wandered off down the corridor sighing dejectedly, and easing into a sulky sprawl when his sister laughed at his well developed sense of bathos.


Around the corner David found a kitchen which was similarly deserted, but food was laid out on the table. Fruit, glazed ham, and Tracker bars. He absent-mindedly stole a cereal bar and popped it into his mouth. ‘ What kind of lame hotel is this anyway? There aren’t even any fucking people in it.’ He thought vehemently. He enjoyed swearing immensely, especially in his head.

The rooms he explored contained faded furniture and old cabinets to keep things of little interest. He circled the whole of the first floor with a kind of obsessive futile doggedness until he found he was lost. Instead of following a circular route, the corridors seemed to have led him to a dead-end. Behind him, darkness seemed to wind on endlessly, taking on an ominous quality as night fell. David faced a little door under a set of stairs and suddenly felt like Alice on a journey into her own mind. The door creaked open a little, and he stood there captivated as the moonlight affixed itself to it’s edges like fairy dust, highlighting the black gaping hollow of what lay inside. A hand fell on his shoulder. He quickly span ran with a yelp and was embarrassed to be confronted with the similar forms of his mother and sister. It seemed as though change had come over them, and he met pale visages. From past experience he knew that he was too young-they wouldn’t tell him what was wrong, only ‘ We have to leave’.


With a solemn urgency which surprised David, they all three scurried out of the Ivy and into the car which took three goes to start. Then, catching sight of a momentary flash of purple streak past the windscreen, he was thrown forward with a jolt, whipped back by his seatbelt. His heart measured the seconds of stillness, 1,.. 2,...3,…
Then slowly the family roused itself out of shock. His mother complained of various injuries. They would have to go back inside.

‘Just like in the films’ thought David, none of the phones worked back in the hotel ( mobile reception had died as soon as they had left the city). The two women looked grave and David exhausted as they prepared for the night. ‘David, if you get worried in the night you can come sleep in our room’. David raised a forlorn eyebrow, a trick he had learnt only recently.

That night, a woman invaded David’s sleep. He knew somehow, that she had owned the hotel. That the purple-haired girl was her daughter, and that bad things had happened to them both. One night. A man had come for a stay and he hadn’t been right upstairs.

She floated into David’s vision, pure white nightie, dark curling hair. Despite his paralysing terror he absently thought ‘8 out of 10’. She smiled faintly, stretching out her hands towards him, and in an attempt to induce pity he looked into her eyes and met two gaping holes. ‘You givin’ us the eye darlin’?’ she whispered softly.