The Light Ages by Ian R. MacLeod

and trolls and milk souring and babies being eaten seemed like nothing but gossip across the back fences of Coney Mound. But on a high shelf in the corner of the library so dim and dank and unvisited that the shadows seemed to give a resistance, I heaved down a tome embossed with a cross inside a letter C and flopped it open.
    It could almost have been one of those books from Redhouse, but this one contained foggy photographs the colour of nicotine stains amid long columns of text. Flesh rippled and sluglike, or white and blooming. Faces cracked like peeling paint. Limbs strung with cascading cauls.
    ‘What are ye lookin’ at?’
    It was Masterlibrarian Kitchum, a half-blind man of such dumb illiteracy that it was hard to imagine that his appointment hadn’t been some kind of joke. Cursing, he dragged the book from me and chased me into the rain.
    But there was so much I still needed to know. So, within three shifts, and on a grey Nineshiftday of irredeemable ordinariness, I set out to make my way back to Redhouse. I left home at the usual time carrying my school satchel, then doubled down and back around the edges of lowtown, trod the cabbage leaves through the failing allotments, crossed Withybrook Road and followed the railway tracks around the side of Rainharrow to the point where that lonely branch line dipped across the moors. It was past midday when, plodding on beneath dulled loops of telegraph as the wind bit into me, I took the path through the greying heather beside the old quarry. The late autumn sun was already ominously low by the time I entered the wood leading down to the clearing where my mother and I had had our picnic. Despite the new bareness of the trees, the path grew darker as I descended it, drowning in riots of thorns and holly. Wading through the undergrowth, no longer sure if I was following any kind of path, I began to panic. I was running, breathless. Then, when I was sure I was utterly lost, the wood suddenly relented and I found that I was standing again at the edge of the moor. Darkness was flooding in and the greyish path threaded back towards the empty platform of Tatton Halt. I took it at a grateful run and trotted homewards along the track, pausing only to ease the pain in my sides. The telegraphs glowed faintly above me with distant messages, and, far beyond that, the stars began to glimmer in clusters and strings. One, beckoning towards Coney Mound, was red.
    Tired and afraid and disappointed, I followed the dim strings of lowtown’s gaslights and the milky wyreglow of the quickening pools, and climbed the familiar streets past St Wilfred’s. The cobbles were wet, each glinting with a fleck of that red star. The houses were black. The air was silent. Then I heard something screaming, and my heart chilled. It sounded as if claws were being dragged across the surface of the night. Then the noise emerged from the alley opposite me and became a dark figure. Its eyes, like the cobbles, burned with twin flecks of red light, and the air seemed to grey and shimmer around it. The night shrank and pulsed. I was sure at that moment that the devil himself had decided to walk Coney Mound, or at the very least that Owd Jack, aged and pained beyond belief and yet still living, had come to reclaim me. SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM. Stretching its rags, the thing shuffled towards me. And I ran. I was leaning against the gate of our back yard and catching my breath in ragged yelps before I realised that I’d only glimpsed the Potato Man. This was, after all, the time of year for him.
    ‘You’re late.’
    My sister Beth barely glanced up at me as I slumped down before the kitchen range. She thumped a dried-up meal on the table as I worked off my boots. I studied the chipped plate. A slice of shrivelled bacon. Some fibrous lumps of sea-potato, that ever-ready standby of the poor. Not even a slice of bread.
    ‘Where’s Mother?’
    ‘She’s upstairs.’ Beth’s look stopped any further questions. And she