© The Sirens Call
Underneath the Arches, a short horror story I wrote a long time ago, is among the 167 pieces of fiction and poetry that appear in the newly-published Winter 2023 / 2024 edition of the magazine The Sirens Call. The story was inspired by the arched cavities along the western side of the graveyard behind the Church of St John the Evangelist, which stands at the junction of Princes Street and Lothian Road in central Edinburgh. In August each year – Edinburgh Festival time – the church’s grounds become the home of an art, crafts and design fair. Stalls set up shop in the area between the church and its graves of illustrious, well-heeled Edinburgh citizens of times past. According to its Facebook account, this is now known as the West End Fair.
What caught my fancy when I first encountered the St John’s craft fair in the late 20th century was how those western arches, underneath Lothian Road, had been drafted into use too. During August, they became mini-shops, out of which vendors sold their wares to the market’s customers. Thus inspired, I wrote a macabre story about a young man who buys something from one of the arches and, inevitably, lives to regret it. (Hint: the market is sited in a graveyard… A place of the dead!)
When I was looking for something to submit to the latest edition of The Sirens Call, I stumbled across Underneath the Arches on my computer’s hard drive. Talk about a blast from the past. It’d obviously been written by a much younger version of myself, angsty, pretentious, and in thrall to Edgar Allan Poe (and, indeed, Franz Kafka). Predictably, the story itself was pompous and overwrought, ridden with adjectives, adverbs, metaphors and similes. I ended up cutting about 2000 words – 45 percent of its original length – out of it before I submitted it.
Reading it now, I have to say I wish I’d been even more stringent in my editing of it. There’s a sentence at the end where the word ‘ridge’ is used twice, and I manage to use ‘seemed to’ three times in the opening paragraphs. (Coincidentally, the editor of a different publication recently told me: “Mark Twain famously said; ‘Anytime you have the urge to write the word ‘just’, use ‘damn’ instead, that way your editor will remove it for you.’ The same is true of the phrase ‘seemed to’.”)
Anyway, no matter. As usual with my horror stories, Underneath the Arches appears under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield. And available for free, with all sorts of ghoulish goodies loaded into its 253 pages, the new issue of The Sirens Call is a rare bargain these days. You can download it here.