Free The Kimota Anthology by Steve Lockley, Stephen Gallagher, Neal Asher, Stephen Laws, Mark Chadbourn, Mark Morris, Paul Finch, William Meikle, Peter Crowther, Graeme Hurry Page A

were hot.
    “He seems better now,” the WPC said. “When I arrived he was blue. I thought...well, you know...”
    Gill stared blankly at the wall, her mind racing. Somehow, deep in her gut, she felt the source of the evil was the house. Its reach might extend beyond the four walls, but the black heart of it was there, soaked into the bricks and the mortar where the sick bastard had inulged his awful perversions. Through the window, she saw the ambulance pull up to take Christopher in for a check. He looked fine now, pink and healthy, his eyes roving all over her face.
    Gill handed him to the WPC. “Can you take him out to the ambulance? I’ll be out in a minute. There’s something I’ve got to do.”
    When they had left her alone, she went into the kitchen and rifled under the sink for the candles they kept in case of power cuts. She put one on the kitchen table and lit it with trembling fingers. Then she returned to the lounge and left another one there, and another one in the dining room in the centre of the large table they had bought for all the dinner parties she had never got round to arranging.
    Briefly, she stood in the hall and looked around their first home, the place which should have carried them into the future, but which had been tainted from the start. Then she turned on all the gas rings on the cooker, and the fire in the lounge, and the one in the dining room, and with the smell of the gas in her nose she left the house without looking back.
    [Originally published in Kimota 5, Winter 1996]

WEE ROBBIE
    by William Meikle
    We knew it was a bad idea to isolate ourselves so much when it was so near her time but it had been years since our last holiday and besides, her doctors assured us that we were at least three weeks away from the birth.
    It wasn’t planned - not at all. We’d settled for a couple of weeks rest and I’d booked a three month sabbatical from the office, hoping to get some work done on the house. Then we won the competition. One week anywhere in Britain of our choosing as long as we took the holiday in the next month. One day we were in our flat in London, surrounded by half finished building work, noise, dust and general aggravation, the next we were all alone on the west coast of Scotland, in a cottage by the shore on Jura - just us, the seals and the view over the sea to Argyll.
    I wasn’t sure at first. I wanted to be near a hospital, just in case of emergencies, but she insisted. It would be our last holiday alone for a while, she was fit and healthy and she wanted to do it.
    The nearest house was five miles south - the nearest doctor twice that distance. To the north and west there was only the rugged hills and the deer. We didn’t even have a boat. At least there was a road - a single track lane with passing places. But it had recently been resurfaced and we had been provided with a new Range Rover for the duration. I was confident that we could reach the doctors’ house in less than twenty minutes in event of an emergency. That was quicker than I could have managed it in London. And we had warned the doctor we were coming. I had talked myself round to the idea and I wasn’t worried. I should have been.
    We arrived late - Jura is not the easiest place to get to. It involved a flight to Glasgow and a short hop over to Islay. The Range Rover was waiting at Islay airport, which is more a glorified field than an airstrip. After that it is a fifteen mile trip to the Port Askaig ferry, a small ramshackle affair which can take four cars on a calm day across the half mile of treacherous waters towards the stunning mountains of Jura.
    Once on the island it was a single track road all the way. There is only one road twenty miles of it with Craighouse, the only town, half way along but we were going right to the far end.
    We stopped in the one and only hotel for a meal but we were too late to pick up any other provisions - that would have to wait till the morning.
    It was dark when we