The Wages of Sin

A m/m Georgian ghost story

Moonlight sucked the colour from damp grass and silvered the rising wisps of dew.  The deer-park lay dim and still to Charles' left, receding to a black horizon.  To his right the Latham family chapel loomed dark against the lead-colored sky. 

Sultan's hooves whispered across the verge as Charles rode past the wrought iron gate, averted his eyes from the white glimmer of Sir Henry's mausoleum.  It was one thing to laugh together over newspaper reports of vampires in Prussia while reclining in the comfortable lewdness of an actor's garret - lamps blazing, illusion revealed as greasepaint, squalor and hard work - quite another to think of it here, beneath a slice of pewter moon, in a silence so huge it annihilated him. 

The Boys of Summer

A M/M Holiday Romance

So close!  Tony could read the make on his wetsuit, see the individual grains of sand that dusted the black material, the drops of water trembling on the points of his hair.  He was going to walk on past!  Tony couldn’t, couldn’t.  Could he?

He stood up.  “Stop!” he said, his mouth drying out as the surfer’s dark, dark green eyes looked into his, startled and curious.  Suddenly he felt an absolute fool.  He was inviting a good kicking, at least.  But damn it, a man couldn’t always be afraid!

“Don’t go.  Please.  Sit down and drink with me.  If you go past…I think I’ll die.”

Away with the Faeries

The creature smelled of nothing, only cool night air.  Its inky gaze raked over Ben from head to toe, like being gently stroked with the leaves of nettles; a million tiny electric shocks.  His skin crawled with the prickle of it, ecstatic and unbearable, and he gasped, held on the point of a pin between violent denial and begging it to do more.    

Long platinum hair slid forward over a face drawn in strokes of starlight.  "Which eye do you see me with?"

 "I…" croaked Ben, his mouth desiccated, his lungs labouring.  "What?  I…"

 Something in the garden – something huge, covered in spikes, lifted up the house, foundations and all, and shook it like a child's toy.

 "Fuck!"

 Terror goaded him into action.  Lurching back into the hall, Ben slammed the door, locked it, shot the bolts top and bottom, fumbled the chain into its slide and reached for the phone.  999 got him a brisk, polite young woman saying "what service please?"

 Outside the door, crystalline laughter tinkled in the starless night.  The walls flexed like a sheet of rubber.  "Police please!  I…" think I'm being attacked by faeries.

 And everything went quiet.  Down the street a burglar alarm brayed into the night.  He opened the door a crack to see the streetlamps shining vulgar yellow-orange over a score of double-parked cars.  "Never mind."

Angelic Conversations

A M/M Space Fantasy

"You cannot want that. Take me home now, and I'll say nothing. It'll be another twenty years before there's more than four or five rich men with their staff on the moon - a century or more before y'have to worry about us leaving the solar system. Take me back now, and it'll be your great great great grand-child's problem, not yours. Not yours and mine. Edward please!"

"I did not give you permission to call me by my name." He had been wrong about the ice - clearly it had worked the other way, the cold of space passing through the window and into Hanson's hand, spreading through him like crystals in the blood, frozen from the heart outwards.

"Captain Hanson. This doesn't have to be our problem."

"No? Yet here we are. I am sorry, Mr.Byrne, but I have a duty. It is clear and present and standing before me, and I cannot ignore it in favour of a comfortable life either for you, or for me. Much though I might wish to. I should have hoped you could understand that."

He was asking Aidan to play the game; to lose gracefully, to do the decent thing, to be a jolly good chap. "Fuck you," said Aidan, the voice of a million ghosts, dying of starvation in the fields, speaking through him. "Fuck you and your empire and your honour. May you all die in pain and alone."

Found some progress meters thanks to Writertopia





Away with the Faeries - novel - written:



Boys of Summer - novel - written:



Angelic Conversations - novel - written:

The Wages of Sin - novella - written

Plans for this year: 'Boys of Summer' to be ready to submit by beginning of Jan 2009.  

'Wages of Sin' to be ready to send to editor by June 2009 

Research Raj novel.

Copyright © 2007 Alex Beecroft