Mikey Campling

The cool touch of the rock soothed Waeccan. He felt its strengthflowing into him, trickling through his fingertips. The Shades wereon his side. They would bring back the peace he needed for hiswork. The intruder was just a man__othing more. He would bedealt with. Everything would be as it was meant to be. Waeccanallowed himself a grim smile. How strange it was that he, whosename meant watcher, had become the one who was watched.

Burlic screamed. He threw back his head and roared a single furious word into the night: __aeccan._ The name erupted from him in a savage wail that rasped at his throat, over and over until he could shout no more.His howls echoed along the valley. In the village, the other hunters heard and exchanged glances, shook their heads and said nothing. The women clutched their talismans, told the children to go inside. They had tried to help, but there was nothing they could do for Burlic now.

I__e never liked urban myths. I__e never liked pretending to believe in them; never understood why everyone else doesn__ see straight through them. Why is it they__e always happened to a friend of a friend - someone you__e never met? Why does everyone smile and nod and pull the right faces, when they must know they__e not true? Pointless. A waste of breath. So I sneered at the myths about Scaderstone Pit. It was just an old quarry _ nothing more. I never believed in the rumours of discarded dynamite. It had decayed, they said. It exploded at the slightest touch, had even blown someone__ hand off. I shrugged off the talk of the toxic waste. It was dumped in the dead of night, they said. The canisters rusting away, leaking deadly poisons that could blind you, burn your lungs. I laughed at the ghost stories. You could hear the moans, they said, of quarrymen buried alive and never found. You could see their nightwalking souls, searching for their poor crushed bodies.I didn__ believe any of it _ not one word. Now, after everything that__ happened, I wonder whether I should__e listened to those stories. Maybe then, these things would__e happened to someone else, and I could__e smiled and said they were impossible.But this is not an urban myth. And it did not happen to someone else, but to me. I__e set it down as best I can remember. Whether you believe it or not, is up to you.