I remember the games. Back when the distinction between dreams and waking was so thin...when so much was possible.

The games we'd play...little dreams, little theatres; pockets of ephemeral reality, so vivid we could taste the blood and snow, feel the rain on our faces, the swords and fire in our hands. Most forget, or convince themselves that they do, remembering too painful, the world having shamed them into certainty.

I...I still play; I've never forgotten, when back gardens stretched into fairy tale woodlands, when a patch of dirt could be a desert or the desolation of an alien world...when stones were mountains, trees lunatic sorcerer's towers.

But now, I play alone. None of them remember, none of them want to; would likely not admit it, even if they did. No matter how deeply they want it.

Children's games; pretending to be what we aren't, what the world insists we are. Look! I am not here, in the same back garden where the dead child played, where it still does; a ghost in the grass, amongst the connifers, the plant plots...behind sheds, absconding through the secret gaps between fences into other realms; other gardens, wholly other states of being.

Still here. The other...the one the world wants me to be...he isn't; has always felt hollow, more ghost-like; the shirts and smart trousers he wears to the electronics store where he works...a costume, more a game than anything he remembers.

I never asked for him; never wanted to be him. Time I put him to bed; a life for a life, a sacrifice to the ghosts of yesterday.

These games...in the sun, in the rain; sitting upon the grass, feeling the damp soil beneath my fingers, smelling it. Something skittering over my hand...feathery and many-legged, something I close my eyes against, not wanting to see.

I sit, in the same space, another time; body protesting, too big, too cumbersome, the perspective changed so much, this might as well be an alien world; one that the ghost child certainly wouldn't recognise.

Things have changed, since then; the playground altered; mud-pits dug out to become fish ponds, plant-plots replaced by ornamental rockeries, stretches of lawn by pits of stone and gravel and coloured not-quite glass. Some sort of gazebo, a table and chairs beneath, where nobody sat, even when the ones who made it this way were alive.

But I still remember. The games and ghosts...still here, no matter how much they try to bury them, to smother them beneath empty, unasked for difference.

That child, who they murdered; that I let them. So much since has been an attempt to resurrect him; to remember him; a casual necromancy, digging through the toys he used to play with, the dog-eared, ripped and weathered comics in the loft. I want him back...more than these misty rememberings; I want to feel it again; reality so thin and flimsy, fear or want could rip it wide open, monsters behind every twilight tree, every shadow a nursery of demons, waiting for night and for his dread to call them. I want to be in that world of anything again, always have.

Child, they call me; the few, who I never truly wanted; the women that the world gave to me, that it insisted I chase. They've always been better at infanticide; at murdering the children, burning them, scattering their ashes. Always relief, after the tears, when they've gone, when even the scent of them has been exorcised.

Not one wanted, not one loved.

I try, contacting the boy I betrayed, when the loss of the child inside almost drove me mad; made me bizarre and bitter; the games turned to lies and cunning and cruelty. A man, now; his ghost here, too, the most beloved; the one who knew, who likely still remembers, at least a little.

My texts and e-mails go unanswered, many of them; the ones that mean something, unsent. I can't. Even if he does remember, what would it mean to him?; Just the games we used to play as children, how silly, how nostalgic... how strange and magical we were, compared to the rest, denied, for sanity's sake.

I remember. I remember making the wind blow with a gesture, a thought. I remember causing cloud to coalesce over the sun, for rain to fall. I remember the snow storm we once called down, laughing as the rest fled, as the teachers attempted to herd us inside.

Old, old magic; forgotten, that I can't do anymore, no matter how much I try, how hard I try to recall the means of it.

Even if he did come, if the ghosts sang to him, as they do to me, he wouldn't stay; wouldn't help me remember the magic. The first taste, the first tingle of it at his fingertips...he'd be gone, back to his wife and children, back to his home and job and television.

Because betrayal works both ways.

Only the children, the ghosts, can show me. Nothing that calls itself living, nothing that wants to be more.
I follow, I call to them, every day, in every way I know how; sometimes through the night, whispering the silly songs, the nursery rhymes and playground-limericks...

They see; eyes in the windows, in the evil, orange light; idiot eyes, pretending that they don't understand, that they don't want it, too. They don't come to me; don't speak to me or say hello in the street. That's all right; none of us ever have anything to say, anyway.

                                                                                        *

At work, Gary's office. They way he moves...as though there's machinery somewhere beneath the rumpled, salmon shirt, the mismatched tie. Clearing his throat, smiling...apologising before he's said a word.

"This isn't, like, a telling off or anything, Giles...we're not allowed to do that anymore. I'd just like to...talk to you about a few things, ask how you're getting on, you know?"

I can't help it; my eyes drooping, my shoulders sagging, the sigh leaving me before I can murder it.

He draws up, at that. Fat, pig-eyed, empty. Why am I here? Why do I even listen?

"...am I boring you?"

Time was, the lightning in my belly at this encounter would have made me sick. Nothing, now; only the ashes, swilling and swirling.

"Yes. Yes. You're so boring, Gary; so fucking boring..."

Blinking, those pig-eyes, those tiny, baby's ears...never having known this, before.

"...what do you think..?"

I rise, staggering out of my chair, slouching against his desk, holding myself upright, so tired, so fucking bored.

"You know, just like the rest of them. You know. That's why I'm here, isn't it?; You don't like to remember. I remind you, just by being here..."

"I...think you'd better leave, Giles. I don't know..."

"Stop it. Stop fucking lying. It doesn't work on me. I can hear them, I can smell them, even though you won't admit it..."

"Get...get out now..." Jowls trembling, chins and tits aflutter. Piggy eyes dark and glassy. "...I'm calling security."

Pens. Paper weights. Chairs. Staplers. So many ways; I might as well gouge his eyes out, for all the use they are to him. Perhaps that will help him see more clearly.

No. I'd lose the garden, then; the parks, the streets, where the ghosts play. I can't. I leave, laughing.

                                                                                      *

They call. I don't answer. They knock, they send letters. I ignore them. People come to the door; barking, deaf-blind, shadow-things; I barely hear, even when they hammer so hard, they shake the door on its hinges. Angry, angry letters. Soon, the phone and water, the TV and lights...all stop.

It's...fine. I don't want them.

I want this; the quiet, the soil, the grass; the rain on warm stone, on rampant weeds...the scents and textures of them, the ones that play here knowing them all so well...all around me, now; little girls, little boys; not merely smears on the air, but almost solid, almost enough for me to reach out and pull through...

Pangs in my belly, dust in my throat. It doesn't matter...none of it. Some dreams have to die to make way for waking...that's just the way it is.

It doesn't hurt, not really. Too far away, like it's always been; a bag of bones and itches. I won't miss it.

They come through the rain, dancing, laughing, screaming...shimmering things, silver skinned, as though made from moonlight. I remember them...remember them all; every stuttering, uncertain face; every smiling, weeping one of them...and they know me.

Black eyes, gaping, their scrutiny scalpels, lancing and paring, scraping bone. Why? Why do they hate me so much?

A new game and old. I fall, back in the grass, the soil, seeping away in the rain. They laugh, the old and young ghosts; the ancient children, whose stretching, splitting, broken masks are all mine. They laugh, as teeth and tongues take place of knives, as they take what I don't want; matter, meaning, life.

A new game, the stars so bright tonight, the rain luminous with their sacrificial light. The children rise as I do, though I rise further, away, away, from memory, from disappointment; from all possibility.

From the things I have called and made flesh, theirs still steaming and flowing, not quite solid. No longer ghosts, no longer mere memory; more, as they've always ached to be, caged inside; the bone asylum that they break and shatter, whose shards they stomp and dance on until it is ground into the dirt.

They scatter, laughing into the night, new games to play, new play-mates to call.

Tomorrow, the world will be a new playground, one that I will never know, whose games I'll never see. Only the stars, the darkness between, the relief of being adrift amongst them, and the silence of dreamless sleep.

Born in Blood began somewhere in the early days of promotion for Strange Playgrounds. Nicky Hardy, whose work you will find strewn throughout this website, and who is responsible for establishing it, produced a number of promotional photographs based on the project, which, in the way of art, transcended their original intention to the point that they became the inspirations for their own stories.

From the outset, it was clear that Born in Blood was going to be a different sort of project (for one thing, the stories of Strange Playgrounds weren't so considered or intended to be part of a whole; they were compiled after the fact, from at least a decade's worth of writing); the images Nick had created were so stark, so aggressively nihilistic, the entire tone of the project was set by them; this was always going to be a far more sombre work, without the abstruse hope that often occurs at the conclusion of Strange Playground's tales.  Here, blood and pain and despair would become their own Edens; states of extremity that humanity cannot endure, but cannot escape. That sense of the ineluctable; the sheer impossibility of denying despair, became the foundation; the running thread throughout every tale. What transcendences occur here do so only in the most abominable ways, and always, always through a descent into pain and disgrace beyond easy comprehension.

The first tales were largely minor scraps and scribblings; bleakly poetic little notes and nothings that will appear in the final collection amongst the larger tales, as well as featuring in some form or another in the visual volume that Nick himself is compiling (another departure from Strange Playgrounds, in that this project is split across multiple volumes and in various mediums: alongside the short story collection, which will contain the tales in their entirety, a series of visual volumes, including Nick's work alongside select extracts of the stories they inspired). All that was asked, to start with; something inspired by the truly distressing visual work Nick had created (kudos to his models, by the way, who have all proven themselves incredibly game for the experience), but, as is the nature of such beasties, it soon took on a shape and vitality of its own, what were supposed to be little more than sentences and paragraphs swelling to whole short stories, short stories swelling into what might be considered small novellas. Ultimately, the project has proven so fruitful that, not only does Nick have a back catalogue of over a thousand images, I have several folders full of my scribblings; more than enough for several volumes or collections.

Not only that, but, as was the case with Strange Playgrounds, Born in Blood has accrued its own back-mythology and consistent symbolism as the stories have progressed; almost all of its stories involving some form of dissolution; of the self, of the mind; of the body...of entire worlds and states of being, despair and insanity becoming means by which reality can be undermined, terminally ruptured; the notion that not even death can provide release becoming a central one; that there is an "after life," of a sorts, but one not promised or imagined in any of the mythologies of humanity: A condition inspired partially by Lovecraftian nihilism, but also by mythologies such as those underpinning the Shadow Man and Legacy of Kain video game franchises, the state that awaits all souls, no matter the pain, no matter the despair, they have suffered in their waking life, is a wasteland of confusions and encroaching insanity; of inevitable decay, devolution and a descent into mindlessness; a cosmic sewer and insane asylum, a dumping ground that may be one that God left unfinished when He departed this sphere of existence or that He never had a mind to finish; the by-product of some hallucinogenic or fever dream; perhaps little more than a splash of the vomit that follows.

From this condition arises Abarise, a state that comparatively few souls find their way to; a kind of sanctuary against impotence; a place where those born to be the run-off or by-product of whatever diseased engine we call "being" may find some semblance of bleak respite, not to mention the meaning, though it may not be in the manner that they imagine...

This in turn informed the shape and consistency of the stories; not to mention the lay out of the project (though still somewhat tentative, one of the ideas we are currently playing with is having the short stories "cut up" and scattered throughout the collection in the manner of a dismembered body, obliging the reader to piece them together as they go). References to Abarise occur throughout, sometimes tangentially, sometimes overtly; one or two of the stories feed the concept directly, whereas others derive from back-mythologies that run concurrently; far, far older than Abarise itself, deriving from stories that were written years before the project even began:

Elias Kirchner, Nathaniel Roseblade; characters that readers of Strange Playgrounds might recognise; consistent characters that crop up now and again in my work. Here, they have a fair few stories dedicated to them, exploring the bizarre, love/hate, cat and mouse game they play with one another across a string of states and realities, not to mention the effects that their play tends to have upon those they encounter.

It has been one of the most interesting creative experiences of my life, thus far; occassionally so intense, I've been forced to take a break from it; to ensure that I have other projects occurring concurrently that I can skip to when I need a change of tone (the nihilism of Born in Blood is infectious and pervasive), the work itself consuming entire days, my body protesting wildly when I realise it exists and probably requires moving, feeding etc.

I sincerely hope that the finished products prove similarly affecting on their audience, that they feel every black mote of despair, taste every scarlet drop Nick and I have poured into it.