The King’s Gold — 10:54 p.m. The pub is packed, South London voices rising beneath battered beams, pints gleaming amber under yellow light. Roger stands behind the bar, posture loose but watchful. I’m nursing my gin, scanning the crowd with my fieldworker’s eye—noting every shift in tension, every too-loud laugh that might mean trouble. Harry…
Tag: The COMC Files
The COMC Files: King’s Gold
Old Foxes and City Spring I set the burner on the counter beside my forgotten groceries. Two hours. The old Fox doesn’t waste time. I strip off my coat, catch my reflection in the hall mirror—hair still wild from travel, shadows under my eyes that haven’t lifted since Romania. My body carries the toll: months…
The COMC Files: Flashes-back&forth
My spine stiffens; I exhale through a grin I can’t quite suppress. “Dr D”—that’s one of the boys, then. But the voice continues, and I catch the gravel beneath the mischief, the particular cadence that only decades, and heaps of rye, can build into a throat. Not Bartley. Nor any of the siblings. The old…
The COMC Files: Flash-back&forth
The Visitor Spring in London is a redrawing of boundaries. Green creeps up the ancient plane trees in Regent’s Park, daffodils thick in the shadier corners. I move through it all half-ghost, hands clasped behind my back, ignoring my vibrating phone, stopping to watch the dogs or ferrying trays of coffee back to my armchair…
The COMC Files: Limbo
Between Two Worlds Sunlight fingers through tall pines, casting shifting lace onto mossy stones. The sanctuary courtyard smells of woodsmoke, crushed grass, damp earth. Children crouch by the stone gutter, daring each other to touch the cold water. Older women in braided red sashes gather by the spring, their laughter spilling into the mountain air….
The COMC Files: Update
London, when the cab spits me out by my townhouse, is grey and humid, the air smelling of diesel, toast, and river. My feet strike the pavement with purpose, but there’s a tremor beneath every step: exhaustion, awe, the shock of clocks resuming. I unlock the door, inhale the familiar scent of home—old books, ground…
The COMC Files: Samhain
The Black Veil. Mrs. H rang at four-thirty, just as the October light was failing. “Elena, darling. Don’t hang up.” I shifted the phone against my shoulder, still wrapped in the cardigan I’d been wearing since morning. Possibly since yesterday. The heating was on but the cold wouldn’t leave—not the surface cold of autumn in…
The COMC Files: London
Book of Burned Bridges The Heathrow arrivals hall is a fluorescent dawn after so many nights of myth. I stand still just past the immigration gates, letting the static-pated crowd flow around me—families, suits, tourists blinking at arrival boards. I am unaccompanied: Tarmo had cajoled, pleaded for me to board his Zurich-bound jet, but I’d…
The COMC Files: The Big Brave Wolf
A subtle scrape, the faintest ahem. I startle. Asdar stands just inside the natural arch, one hand braced on stone—habit or ritual, I can’t tell. His silhouette flickers: tattooed arms, copper-blond hair loose, eyes pale and steady in lamplight. I smirk, annoyed but amused. “Damn it, you really do move like a wolf. Are you…
The COMC Files: The Pivot
The Living Thread A pale sun claws over the ridge, sending light in trembling bands through the narrow window, gilding the swirl of smoke in the hearth. I take my coffee black—the only appropriate colour for a woman straddling the border of legend—and stack my notebooks, pencils, and a battered digital recorder. The villagers have…
The C.O.M.C. Files 