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This was going to be hilarious. Top bantz.

He found the simple costumes sold best; Murderous Clown had too much padding and Haunted Bunny was hot and itchy. Masks were always a winner. Whenever he got a delivery, Lisa from the shop next door came round for a preview before he put them on display.

He’d kept this one secret though, after she’d said she liked scary films, liked being scared.

The line of her neck dipping into the smooth satin of the Alice costume, the cold metal of the zip tracing the line of her body.

Her footsteps were drawing nearer. She was going to freak - maybe even scream a bit, then laugh, probably hug him. They’d go see a horror film together, she’d snuggle in for protection...

But instead she froze, terrified, the silence between them growing, thickening until he lowered his arms and pulled off the mask.

The cold brush of her fingertips on his arm in the half light.

She’d trembled then, nodding trying to hide the beginnings of her tears. Yes, it really was funny, she’d said, trying for that breathy, girlish giggle. She’d pulled off her damp hat and ruffled her frizzy hedgehog hair.

Then she’d shut her door to her shop before he could follow her in for their morning cuppa. Gareth heard the key turn and now she was standing very still behind the closed blind, waiting for him to leave. He’d fucked it.

Back in his costume shop, he thumped the rubber mask onto the counter. The dummy with the staring eyes and sheriff’s badge watched him pityingly and Gareth decided he’d dress it in Haunted Bunny. That’d show it.

Why choose the scariest mask he could find? Why not dress as something Johnny Depp had played? He could kick himself.

The swell of her breasts against the thin fabric, the smooth, bare skin of her back.

Suddenly the electric doorbell buzzed him into the present. The shutters were still down, and by the time he’d opened them whoever it was had gone. He sighed. Kids, probably. He’d better start unloading the costumes from the basement

The stairs creaked as he clumped heavily down. It was damp down here, dark. Dummies struck carnivalesque poses, waiting for this sad, lonely man; statues that watched him with flat, dull eyes. Sometimes he felt they were all he had in the world.

Her pale skin prickling, peppered with goosebumps, her breath coming faster, the delicious curve of her spine.

The door at the top of the stairs slammed shut plunging him into darkness. He heard the panic in his breath, forced himself to be calm. The door was just a few steps away. It had probably blown shut. But Gareth felt the eyes of the dummies penetrating the dark, watching for his humiliation.

He held up his phone for light, reaching for where the door must be, had to be…

Her hot breath steaming in the damp air.

Then a dangling figure, inches from his face, its mouth a rictus grin, all dripping teeth and malevolence. And he was down here, alone with it, no way out. He stumbled, panicked, terrified, scrabbling.

Almost imperceptibly he heard the ghost of a breathy, girlish giggle...

The last gasp of his torch light splodged off into the darkness. He expected nothing less. Sighing he waded on. He wasn’t sure if he was wet from top to bottom or bottom to top but he could feel his damp hat creeping down the side of his head, weighted down by the rain. Each step was like wading through a chocolate river. If by chocolate you meant mud, rotten leaves and god knows what else.

Obviously the car hadn’t started so it was this 30 minute trudge through the woods, a bad idea during the tail end of a storm. Finally he saw the distant light and headed into the overpriced and under performing circus of the train to town.

There was a certain smell about the carriage. When mixed with his own rotten, mud fuelled musk it almost bought him some space. Almost.

He was off to see Janey, another of life’s constant disappointment, so full of ideas and promises and so consistently letting him down. Cancellations, false promises, cauliflower as a main course. It wasn’t her fault she could never fill the void that had been left.

He wondered how it had come to this. He was sure he’d done everything right, got the right education, the right job, the right phone, found the perfect partner. Helen had always been there for him well for the last two years. Beautiful, soft eyes and heart, that’s not to say she could be prickly at times. But he’d loved that too. Quietly calming him after work chaos or making him laugh at just the right time.

He had happily been ticking off every box society laid out for him. But now he felt so wholly and utterly alone. Scrunched against the carriage side wall like half a mackerel, skinned and boned in a can full of assholes. He dreamed of the simpler frontier days when a simple token of a sheriffs badge could justify the murder of idiots like these. He was always angry. At people. Running around wildly, driving like idiots without a thought or care for others. Angry at Janey for just that. She hadn’t even looked back, just driven off as if nothing has happened. Helens dead eyes staring after her, once beautiful features distorted, flattened.

Games night Friday Janey had shouted as she pulled out the drive. Helen must have popped out the back for some food, he thought thinking back to that night, dusk was always her favourite time.

Well now it was payback. If it was Games night she wanted, she’d get one. A new game for every prickle, every spike. But there would be no winners.

Five in the morning and he was awake. It was the postman’s fault, eighteen years up with the sparrows, and he carried his training through into the cell they shared together. John never worked out was it the postman woke then broke wind lovingly and lingeringly, or was it the wind came first and that’s what woke him?

Either way, it always came next, the man murmuring, ‘How’s that Cynthia? You like that?’

Five in the morning and he was free of the postman. He had swapped one cell for another, this one with a single bed and a wardrobe, both of them taking one entire half of the room, an unpadded wood chair and white sink beneath flat plain mirror cluttering the other half.

The postman in his head, telling John that Cynthia never moved or made a sound as he got up and dressed, dead to the world she was, but sure could she bitch about him waking her when he came home from the bookies. When the postman said it again – dead to the world – and then began his cackle, John threw back the blanket and rose.

He pulled on his jeans and took the family size of supermarket own brand cornflakes from his larder in the wardrobe. Barefoot he went down the corridor, lights clicking into harsh brightness a step after he’d passed, following him down the stairs and tracing his own footsteps the floor below to their shared kitchen.

The room was slick and Spartan as per rule number two on the laminated typed sheet stuck to the fridge, two dozen rules in over small font to make you squint, most of the page given over to a badly drawn hedgehog underneath a speech bubble that read “Sheriff Stan Says!”

Why was it a hedgehog? How about a special forces badger, or a mole who spent his hours off from the riverbank moonlighting as a Special Constable? John wondering that out loud day two in this place, a sea of blank faces looking back at him and he hadn’t said a word since.

He fetched a bowl and a spoon and set them down next to his box of cornflakes. From the fridge he took the pint of milk with the J scraped in the lid with the tines of a fork. Sitting at the table he turned the bottle slowly, squinting to be sure that the plastic seal at the top was still intact. He ate five small bowls one after another, sparing with the milk to stop them going soft. They were delicious.

First in the showers, and first out of the front door, going from the chill of the home he shared with eight other men recently paroled, out into the only slightly colder rest of the world. Spray in the air, misting down, settling in little globes on the raised bobbles of his sweater, slicking up the peak of the cap he pulled down across his eyes.

Day four of freedom and so far they had all come with rain.