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Then enter the Secret Attic Short Story Competition!

Each month you can submit an entry that will be passed onto our judges who will pick the best and award a winner. During some months the subject matter will be a 'free for all', where you can write anything you like, other months will have a specific theme.

Previous Competition Winners

February 2005 David Willshaw

April 2005 Christine Sutton

May 2005 George L Darley

July 2005 Robyn O'Hara

August 2005 Richard Adamski

September 2005 Hannah Southgate

October 2005 Heather Parker

December 2005 Feathers by Bob Lakin

January 2006 RD Larson

February 2006 Debra Spiller

March 2006 Nethi Sette

April 2006 Joe Louis

May 2006 Kim Montgomery

Love of Literature by Raymond Hopkins, Kronoby, Finland

Missing by Debra Spiller, Kent, UK

Diary of a Ghost by Suzanne Ralphson, Leicester, UK

Shreds of Love by Irene Edwards, Angus, UK

Lip Service by Will Orr-Ewing, London, UK

Red by Gary Campbell, Mount Gambier, Australia

Leaving The City In Ruins. by Trevor Nicholl, Manchester, UK

The Freaks mostly come out after dark - to feed. The morning streets used to be lined with the disregarded carcasses of what little there was left of anything living. But there is less of that these days. Living things in general are now few in the city, and humans even less.
We even leave the dead to lie where they fall now. No-one can now risk recovering them, or taking them with you. They’ll track you down, the beasts. That is if they don’t get you right there on the spot. They used to lay in wait for us to take the dead back, before attacking while our heads were down, toying with our sense of decency. But we’ve gotten wiser to their tricks, and more cunning, as they have. Now when it seems our race is as close to the end as it’s ever been, most of our humanity has disappeared already. One way or another we are becoming them.
We’re just below sea-level in this part of the country, and here they make the Freaks lean and strong. Only their aged and infirm slink off to the mountains to die. As if realizing the horror of all they had become, and wishing lonely penance for their last days. They claw their way into the earth, a tomb of their own making, and protection from those cannibals who stalk their own. They say that once a Freak gives into cannibalism, they can never turn back. But I’ve never seen it happen. I’ve never seen them attack each other, even when there’s no food about. It seems as though they understand that there’s nothing left inside their brethren worth fighting for.
I wish it was true. I’d say let them feed on each other. Catch and tie the beasts down here, and present a banquet of their own. Drag the rogue creatures back to the cities snarling and slashing. Let them have their fill, let them finish each other.
But my opinion would hold no sway with the group, and anyway we no longer have the numbers to do anything but hide and flee – so that’s what we do. We usually hold up alone or paired at night. It makes it harder for them to track us. Big groups draw attention as we found out years before when they started their cull. We meet through the day at designated sites, not everyday, not even most. It is survival now, and we all forage alone, splitting the city. For the last two years at any of the gatherings it has always been less people, never more. I’ve not seen another soul in my area for a long time.
I look over the balcony of my top floor flat this early and wet morning. This is my latest makeshift compound. My last one is probably overrun by now, but I’ll never know, I won't be back. You can never wait around that long to find out if you’ve been discovered. To stay alive, you move when they start sniffing around. As soon as you see one on your tracks, you know there’ll be more around soon enough.
You can just about see the street now in the morning gloom. The last of the straggling Freaks are skulking around, seeking unclaimed resting grounds within the rubble that was once a city, then a battleground, and now a cemetery. They are solitary creatures, except when food is scarce, and these days, for all of us, that is usually the case. Only on occasions of severe hunger will they tolerate each other, and pack-wise they round up those who fall in their sweeping path. Luckily for us this amnesty is only a temporary measure till their hunger is sedated. If there comes a day when they organize themselves properly, if an alpha-freak rises up from the mass of beasts, then that will truly be our end. We already feel the terror of that here, but there’s been no outside communication in years now, we’ve no knowledge of how things are outside our small segments. People have left to find out, but none have ever returned, or at least no one that we ever knew. Again, everything is only hearsay and rumor, one counteracting the next. It could be contained, or it could be chaos.
I’ve thought many times of heading north while I still can. Like a lot of others, honing in on the stories that some parts of Scotland are now free from them. Running headlong into the maw of the beast it could be. At least I know these streets, and not chancing the gauntlet of a country I could hardly have negotiated when things were supposedly normal.
But what is there to do here? Wait for the beasts to come for me again and again, as they surely will. I’ve been through it so many times before. That's why you're always looking for the next place.
In a way I feel I understand them now, living barely above their level for so long. And why shouldn't I understand I suppose. They were us once, but now rabid and zombified, a distorted shadow of their former selves. Grotesque creatures of bone and endless hunger, twisted and ravaged by… by what.
You heard all sorts of things at the time. Government experiments, chemical weapons, dirty bombs. It was a new virus, an old virus, escaped genetic research, alien life, the plague, the devil, judgment day. But what does it matter? Now we’ll never know the truth anyway. All we know is that it spread fast, and if you get cut by one - you’re dead.
The Freak downstairs has now disappeared, and either wandered off to find a place with less sleeping kindred, or has secured itself somewhere for the next few hours. Time for me to go now as well, it’s safer in the day when most of them sleep, but certainly no time for being casual. The freaks only need a few hours rest, but then hopefully that’s all I’ll need to get a few jobs done - food, water, and whatever else I can dredge up that may be useful.
The daylight deters them for pretty much one reason only - we’re easier prey at night. That’s why the wise will be locked away when the light starts to dim. Locked away, buried in basements or high on rooftops. Always quiet, still, heart pumping in your ears. Listening, always listening, never truly safe. Only those with a death wish or the true Hunter's go out at night, and I'm neither. I'm a survivor, of sorts, like the majority of whatever is left of people, around here at least. Two generations the group says, two generations and we'll know if we're going to make it. Either we'll all be gone and it’ll no longer matter, or we'll have found a way to rid ourselves of these things. I think it’s only something they try to make themselves feel better with. A fable, that maybe if you get up enough mornings they’ll be gone.
Little matter though, for me at least. Two generations may as well be two eons, I'll survive neither, and I've no offspring to continue in my stead, and no hope of any in our reduced group of seven men, three already spoken for women, and a straggling few who you don't know their condition from one month to the next.
Maybe it is now time to go. The only thing this place promises is a bad end. One thing I can promise though, I’m never going to end like them, like most of those I’ve ever known. Robbed of the little life we had, and turned into something that never should have been.
But maybe it is better out there. Get to the highlands where a future is still a possibility, if even it still turns out to be an empty fantasy. Still, think of it. A wife, a safe home, hope. To stop looking over your shoulder for only a moment. To chance a dream, instead of holding only nightmares at bay.
First things first though – I’ll need to find dinner before I set to join the world. Bloody hope, it only gets in the way of the facts of life.