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Want to get some practice?

Just need an excuse to put pen to paper?

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

He found himself in a warm, softly-lit space. He was standing on red sand.
The voices asked him to speak.
He opened his mouth. ‘What am I?’ The sound, which surprised him, for he had never heard it before, rolled out into the expanse.
You are human, the voices told him, in his mind.
Three little opaque balls appeared, in his line of sight, about two metres above him. They glowed softly. They encircled him at eye level. As they did, he felt subtle stimulation all over his body. They returned to their place. ‘You are human!’
Now he heard words- a triple chorus with joy, pride - elation in them. The little stars were pulsing. He was numb. The experiences of the last few weeks had stretched his senses. His first memory was one of waking in a tank of warm, blue liquid. He had gasped for air. Then, the voices came. They taught him how to move, and eat, and think. They taught him language and the basic processes of cognition and abstraction. He followed them- not because he trusted them, but because they were the only things he knew.
He did not know what human meant.
‘ Homo Sapiens,’ said one of the voices.
‘ The Cognitive Being,’ said another.
‘ Isn’t he wonderful?’ commented the third.
The three pulses hummed metallically in unison. ‘You must have a name,’ said one.
‘ Give yourself a name.’
‘ Yes!’ they sang.
He looked around himself, searching. ‘I call myself…Red.’
They hummed in admiration.
‘ Now tell me what you are,’ Red asked.
‘ We are…’ They paused. ‘like you.’
Red gasped. He was not sure what human meant, but they had told him that he was human. So they were humans as well?
The glows buzzed between themselves. Red felt them inside his mind, probing. They addressed Red again. ‘We are like you, are we not?’
Red did not answer.
‘ Do not be alarmed. We are as you are.’
‘ Are you?’ retorted Red, with as much fear as anger in his voice. ‘Why aren’t we the same? Where’s your arms? Your legs? Your faces?’
‘ We have these things,’ they replied, ‘but as genetic traces. Genetically, you are the same as us. Many thousands of years ago, we discovered that, in disembodying ourselves, we could free ourselves from the constraints of environment and circumstance.’
‘ H-how do you do that?’ The words meant little to Red.
The three glided through space and held themselves before Red’s eyes. ‘By reducing the body to a genetic print, sustained by an artificial apparatus on a molecular level. A microscopic body if you like. This body generates a field of energy around us. It can manipulate our environment. We can create whatever we want.’
He remained in numb silence.
‘ You have not asked us our name,’ they chimed together. They sounded particularly eager to be asked. Red felt his mind being probed again.
‘ Stop that!’ he cried.
They laughed. They laughed around him. They laughed in his head. There was something distant and nervous in their voices. ‘Ask us our name,’ they said softly.
Red had to force the air out of his lungs to ask the question. ‘Who are you?’ There was a silence, and they spoke almost soulfully.
‘ You are what we were.’
‘ Billions of years ago,’
‘ We are the same, are we not?’
‘So-so, I’m your ancestor?’ Red asked.
‘ No’, the voices replied. ‘You are an exact replica of the first of our species.’
‘ Created from our memory.’
‘ Created by our will.’
‘ Although your genetic make-up is the same as ours, there is no generational link between us.’
‘ What am I?’ Red asked softly.
Then there was silence, and the three spheres almost paled beyond Red’s senses. He saw the expanse of red, red sand, without horizon. He became aware, for the first time, of a warm zephyr and a gentle perfume. Then they were completely gone, and he stood by a brook. Around him were green things. Thick foliage. Running water. An assault of sight and smell. He saw a multi-coloured creature soar through the air, chattering as it went. Through trees he caught sight of a large brown creature, slowly moving. He instinctively backed up, stumbled and fell upon a muddy bank. He gazed into the sky. It was not like the sky he saw when he was speaking with the voices. It was softer, warmer, and he could feel the rays of the sun. He was exhausted, and he sank into a deep sleep.

It was not a savage place. It was warm. There was food; the trees were full of fruit. He discovered that some of the slower-moving creatures could be caught and roasted over a fire. They tasted good. He could make a shelter out of vegetation for when the darkness came and when the water fell from the sky. He began to give names to the things he dealt with, using the language he had been taught. But nothing seemed real to him. He did not feel the presence of the voices. No thoughts inside his head. Nothing.
Was this reality? He asked himself, through the many cycles of the sun rising and falling.
He survived, because something inside him told him that he had to, but he felt intolerably crippled in his mind, and lonely.
He travelled. Beyond the forest there were some hills, and beyond that, a vast expanse of water, seemingly without end. He began to prepare a vessel made out of wood and plant sinews. He wanted to go onto that water, to see where it ended. He was engaged in this when they appeared.
‘ What are you doing?’ they asked.
Red continued to bind branches with sinew, and did not look into at the pulsating globes.
‘ Going,’ he replied gruffly. ‘I want to see what’s on the other side.’
‘ Why?’ .
‘ I want to escape.’
‘ Why?’
‘ I-I don’t belong here. I want to see if there’s anything else.’
‘ There is not.’
‘ What?’ He stopped and looked at the spheres of light.
‘ We made this.’
‘ For you.’
‘ Why?’ Red asked.
‘ So you could know yourself, and be happy.’
‘ But I don’t know myself,’ Red protested. ‘Why did you make me?’
The voices seemed to be taken aback by this question. ‘So you might know yourself.’
‘ And live.’
‘ And be human.’
Red sensed something suddenly childlike in I Am. Why were they, the creators, wanting him to live? Surely, if they were the creators, it was they, not himself, who were living a human life. Whatever human meant. Whatever he was living, it was a half-life, a torturous existence. There was no point of reference, nothing to reflect to himself what he was or what he ought to be. But then, were they in the same agony? Alone (as far as he knew) with infinite power but no sense of identity and purpose? Why does anything create, except to fulfill itself? Why was he making a craft to cross the waters, except to find himself? And he understood. ‘You-you,’ he stuttered, ‘want me to tell you what it’s like to be human.’ He laughed. ‘You’ve forgotten after billions of years, So you re-create your ancestor, re-create his environment, leave him to his own devices, in the hope that he will learn what being human is!’
‘ We are human!’ the voices shouted like hurt boys.
‘ You’ve removed yourself from what I experience: warmth and light and sensation , and you want me to teach you how to live again!’
‘ No!’
Red felt power charge through his being, searing through, but not annihilating the pain. ‘But it’s all wrong. I am what you made me! I am you! I can’t teach you anything. You made me, but not the mirror with which I can see myself. You don’t know how to do it! If you can’t, how can I?’ He buried his head in his hands and fell to his knees. He sobbed.
‘ No!’ screamed the creator, in unison. ‘Tell us! Tell us!’ And the voices splintered into a myriad of identities- an explosion of consciousnesses buried for millennia. ‘You lie! Tell us! Tell us! We must be free! We must be free! If you don’t, we will keep you in our darkness forever!’
The voices reverberated around Red, to the point where the words and voices were indistinguishable from each other. Then they invaded his mind, as a poisoned man with one minute to live might rummage for the antidote in a cluttered room. Red looked at an obsidian knife on the ground with which he had been cutting sinews. He reached for it, and cut his wrists. As he escaped into slumber, the grief-stricken being shattered the numberless universes it had made, and all the corpses of all the Reds therein.