© Hiraeth Books
The December 2022 issue of ParABnormal Magazine, containing fiction, poetry and articles, has just appeared and I’m delighted to report that I have a short story featured in it. It’s entitled Upstairs, is a horror story and is thus attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I publish scary fiction.
Upstairs was inspired by the three years I spent living in Tunisia. Anyone who visited the ground-floor apartment I occupied at the time, in Rue d”Egypte in historical central Tunis, will recognise this description of the area behind the apartment that’s home to story’s main character:
“Behind the kitchen were nine square metres of courtyard. Stone tiles covered the ground. The courtyard walls possibly hadn’t seen maintenance since the day in colonial times when the French finished building them and their cracked stonework provided homes for geckos that emerged nightly to hunt for cockroaches. There were also stains caused by leakages from the drainpipes straddling the walls left and right of the back doorway, which resembled beanstalks as they climbed and sprouted smaller pipes at each new floor.
“The courtyard formed the bottom of a shaft running up the middle of the building. At its top was a square of fading light. Two of the shaft’s walls contained windows. The wall on his right was punctured by the windows of the building’s stairwell. The wall behind him, above the doorway, was punctured by the windows of the six apartments above his. It was from one of those windows that his tormentors kept dropping stuff.”
Just as I did in real life, the hero of the story has to contend with people in the flats above him dropping pieces of rubbish into his little courtyard. Unlike me, however, he gets sufficiently riled about it to make a point of going upstairs to knock on doors and track down the culprit or culprits. And it’s while he’s on this quest upstairs, in this old, crumbling apartment building, that the story’s horror element starts to materialise.
I should add that though my apartment building was rundown, it was certainly an atmospheric place to live. I remember arriving back from work one evening and finding a TV crew, watched by a big crowd, filming something in front of the building’s front door. My living room and bedroom windows were in the immediate background. It turned out they were shooting an external scene for some gritty, hardboiled TV crime series set in the ‘mean streets’ of Tunis.
Published by Hiraeth Books, the December 2022 edition of ParABnormal Magazine can be obtained here.
