The Reader

The following terrifying tale is by Marcel Krueger, a good friend of The Reader Berlin. I first read THERE IS NO HOPE AND THE NIGHTS ARE COLD some time ago in one of my workshops and I thought its harrowing nature would suit our purposes well. Marcel not only joined us a mere week or so after his wedding (we hope his bride forgives us for borrowing him so soon), he also kindly contributed an introduction which gives a little background to our erstwhile weekend home.

To appreciate it fully, you may want to imagine yourself deep amongst Gorgast’s dark tunnels, at the foot of a lightless broken staircase. You turn to your left and there, in the gloom, you make out the shadowy silhouette of a figure smoking a pipe…

As the founder of The Reader Berlin, it isn’t often I get to share my writing. Sometimes, I feel bad that after all the butchering I do with my editor’s pen, I don’t offer participants a chance to return the ‘favour’. So it seemed only fair that I contributed something over the course of our Fort Gorgast festival. This little piece is actually adapted from a novel I wrote that never saw the light of day and I confess it felt absolutely wonderful to let it slip out of its dark drawer and float loose amongst you.

V.G.

YOUR HEART’S DESIRE

Welcome to Fort Gorgast and the first of our terrifying tales. It is wonderful that you could all join us. This is the first event at which we have all got together, albeit it in a cold and shadowy tunnel, and while it might be a touch hippy-ish of me, I would like you to do something you may be familiar with from yoga class. I would like you each to set an intention, that is, to make a little wish. Eyes closed everyone. Out goes the torch…wishes done…? And we’re ready.

As one of the organisers of this weekend’s festivities, I had planned to write my own scary story but I am afraid things got a little busy, so this one is from a decaying book I found in a pile in a decrepit second hand bookshop in Berlin. You are, no doubt, familiar with the kind.

This story begins with a group of friends sitting around playing cards late into an autumn night in an ancestral home in one of the English shires, shortly before the beginning of the First World War

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When they took away Peter’s father he was raving. The end of the world was coming, it was coming soon, and we were all going to die. They knew, but they didn’t want the truth to get out. That’s why he was being silenced, and so on. In response to Mrs Hunter’s emergency call the operator had sent two burly paramedics, but they had not been enough and it had taken an additional four policemen to restrain him.

My mother delivered the news erratically, waving one arm as though she too was caught up in apocalyptic fervour. Then, on her way to the couch, she sank down to the hall rug and lay there, her face all concertinaed on one side, as though it had been the weight of Peter’s father’s revelation, and not a quart of vodka, that had been too much for her. June 23^rd, she said and passed out.

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