© Spiral Tower Press
Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write horror stories, has been on a roll this month – which, appropriately enough, is October, the month of Halloween. Already in October 2023 he’s had short stories appear in the online publication Schlock! Webzine and in the collection Nightmare Fuel: Mind Terrors 2023. Now he’s just had a third story, entitled The Shelterbelt, published in Issue 3 of the magazine Witch House.
As its title implies, The Shelterbelt concerns a plantation of trees grown next to a property to shield it against the elements. In the story, the property is a farm in a remote part of southern Scotland. I didn’t have to look far for inspiration for The Shelterbelt. In 1977, my parents sold our farm in Northern Ireland and purchased and moved to a new farm in southern Scotland, near the town of Peebles. But the steading we found ourselves living in was hardly ‘new’ – it was a dilapidated and bleak-looking place at the time, with scarcely a tree anywhere, which was unfortunate because the steading was in a north-south-running valley and in the pathway of any bad weather borne by the north wind. Several times during our first few winters there, we had to dig our way out from our front door, so heavily had snow been piled against it. How long ago that seems now in these globally-warmed times…
My Dad immediately decided to create a shelterbelt on the northern side of the steading. I still remember the day when he, my Mum and a good friend from Northern Ireland, Hugh Buchanon, planted the saplings. Maybe I remember it because I discovered then how seriously my Dad – who was normally relaxed and easy-going – took his work. He was very exacting. He was very particular about how far apart those saplings were placed – not too close, not too distant. After an hour of listening to him, my Mum and Hugh looked ready to plant him along with the trees.
Meanwhile, a literary influence for The Shelterbelt is the 1914 short story Ancient Lights by the author, broadcaster and occultist Algernon Blackwood. And I’d be lying if I said a certain 1973 movie, about an uptight, virginal, Free Presbyterian policeman investigating a possible case of human sacrifice on a remote Scottish island, didn’t provide a little inspiration too.
For more information about Witch House magazine, click here. And Issue 3, containing my story and a dozen others, can be downloaded here for free.