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[Story removed for contest entry. Good luck!]

Duncan was in full flow, talking Angie and Scott through a demo of the Anything Catalogue System (ACS) that basically he, by himself, had designed, built, tested and delivered. There were two dozen men and women on the team, but Duncan was the visionary. All that fluffy crap – checking for spelling mistakes or making the text larger for the poorly sighted? – nah. The heart of the system was his engine, and it was flexible enough to capture information about any object on the entire mother loving planet.

He did not look like a visionary, this Duncan, a withered scrap of a man inside a white shirt flapping loosely around his skinny frame like a sagging tent. And the way he shook your hand, the way his paper dry fingers traced their tips against the inside of your wrist. A handshake from a horrifying goblin.

The real name of the system was the Automotive Cataloguing System. That’s what their company did, wrote software for the automotive industry. But his system was so clever you could configure it to be used for anything you wanted, say…medical applications?

Duncan was looking at Angie. He showed her some more of his yellowing teeth. ‘Suppose…you wanted to capture a physical attribute, say…penis size?’

Scott blinked rapidly. Angie felt the spiral binding of her notebook bite into her hand.

Duncan continued: ‘The naïve approach would be a single drop down, and you might have an option Long and Thick, if you’re lucky ladies, or perhaps Long and Thin, or Short and Thin. But the beauty of ACS is we can split it to capture individual pieces of information. We’ll capture length, we’ll capture girth, we can capture staying power, and we can add a way to capture if he’s a grower or a shower.’ He grinned slyly, and nodded to Scott– ‘Hat tip to little Scottie for that one – less of the schnapps at the next company party buddy.’

After the meeting Scott could not stop apologising to Angie.

‘He’s prehistoric,’ Scott said. ‘But it’s his system, and without him the company is screwed.’

But Angie wasn’t mad. Her job was to write the training materials. To write the training materials from Duncan’s demo.

Two days later, and she practically danced to the projector screen as the liver spotted face of Duncan sneaked itself in and took a seat by the door.

Angie said, ‘Folks. Welcome to the mother loving future. Forget the automotive industry, let’s have a little fun, shall we? ACS is a bloody powerful piece of kit. Who wants to be cataloguing spark plugs and fan belts? For this demo, let’s pretend we’re a Harley Street surgery and we are capturing the physical attributes of our patients.

‘I’m just going to dive straight into it. Name…let’s call him Big Dunc. See how we can enter his height, his weight, his age. All bog standard stuff. And now…’

Angie switched to the table labelled Genitourinary.

‘Look at the power of this system!’

‘For penis length, how about we go with “Pinkie”.’

‘Girth…let’s have “no chance”.’

‘Ooh, then there’s a drop down for staying power.’

She clicked into it.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Not even any options for staying power.’

She surveyed the room, this sea of grinning faces and Duncan’s empty seat by the door.

They call him The Creature and he has been there since the beginning of Time.

They arrive with their backpacks, Lonely Planets and bravado; two years of sixth form drinking in their pockets, believing they can take on the world. Believing they can take on The Creature.

He begins as a rumour, whispered in dorms, a cautionary tale passed down year on year, a travel guide page hastily marked in blue sharpie. All the stories are the same: no-one has ever confronted him and won.

But still they come.

He waits in the darkest corner of Time, in the cranny nearest the bar, where the striplight flickers and hisses like a wounded animal, maddened with rage, pitiless from neglect.

Our hero enters. Blinking his blue eyes at the cavernous darkness, smiling his white, cereal box smile at Time’s quaint, rustic charm. He slings his backpack onto a table.

He looks around at the dusty bottles of home-brewed schnapps, the wooden kegs of beer, the rows and rows of tiny shot glasses.

How provincial. How authentic.

Then, in the corner, the striplight flares and a liver-spotted hand reaches out; a yellowing, ragged, hooked nail beckons him wordlessly over.

It is him. It is The Creature.

He squats in his corner, a horrifying goblin in the half-light. They do not speak, but he lines up rows of the tiny shot glasses and begins, one by one, to fill them to the brim.

His face is ageless, lined and pitted and faded, laced with minute threads of red vein and black rot; his eye sockets are sunken pits, glistening orbs surrounded by bruised, drooping flesh; his teeth are blackened, few and far between, displayed in his mocking, silent, retching laughter.

These are his trophies, his signs of survival.

Our hero squares his jaw. He raises one glass to his lips and shoots it back defiantly with a grimace. The Creature follows suit.

And so it goes on. Others come, slipping silently in to watch the slaughter of this newest contender, whom they eye with pity and contempt.

But he drinks on, his hands trembling, his face pale, thin beads of perspiration glistening on his brow. Is that a hint of fear in The Creature’s eyes?

The crowd is beginning to turn, half hoping that this boy can do what no other has managed. One wipes his brow, another raises a cup of water to his lips. The air is thick with sweat and sour with rancid breath and bitter spirits.

The Creature raises his glass, then falters for the tiniest fraction of a second before drinking. But the crowd has seen and, what’s more, so has the hero.

He redoubles his speed. Down they go, shot after shot, one, two, three, four, the crowd is cheering, the room is crackling with excitement, The Creature is drooping, pallid and weakened on his stool.

And then it happens.

Our hero’s eyes glaze, his body stiffens, his lips slacken. The glass slips from his fingers and smashes to a thousand glittering fragments on the stone floor and he slides sideways to join it.

No-one catches him. Another hero is left to slink away, vomit splashed defeated after all.

They call him The Creature and he has been here since the beginning of Time

As I watched the small black mark it began to move. Ever so slowly. You wouldn’t notice unless you stared and stared. But there it was deep in the distance, movement. Something in that dark drawing near. There were three liver spots spaced across my forearm; black and deep. Deeper than skin, deeper than colour. And in them something came closer.

I Looked out across an endless mass of hills and forest. This secret place I had made. Beyond the reach of eyes and ears. Hidden away in the cracks, I thought.

I had closed the sky with fire, sealing myself in with a blazing arch of golden flame that bubbled above me, casting an endless warm light. The very edges of the land were sealed with rock and tree unmeasurably thick. A knot of nature that wound its self-made noose around me. There was nothing that could be traced here. I had taken my self to a place beyond borders, and before time.

But it was not far enough.

I knew their faces now. In those dark spots. I could see them clawing their way inch by inch closer. Schnappes his small bites and nips; that which devoured your soul piece by piece. Jaeger the hunter, relentless and unending and Barenfang the bear, the catcher the ensnarer. There is no hiding from the Goblin creatures. They exist but to hunt and through all things they find a way.

Now they had found me, through my own imperfections. A blemish of my pristine soft skin. I laughed. It had been 100,000 years and back again. And now time to face my punishment.

They would simply, cut me open and slice my heart in two. Split asunder and into two forms. One half of a whole forever cursed with a longing for the other. Destined to roam endlessly looking for the other; man and woe they named them. I would never know what I had lost, just that I was.

They would take my bones and scatter them into a hundred thousand parts across the world. Each to become a living beast of nature. Each one’s death I would feel echoing back through time. Designed to breed and die again, so I would relive it over and over, endlessly.

I screamed as they came bursting forth from me; the first birth of darkness, through me. I screamed again as they held me in their tight claws and began to slice through me. I screamed a third time when they reached my heart. That final scream was unlike anything heard before, it melted the roof of my world into liquid thundering downwards, it split the ground and hills into 7 giant forms which spun out into the new oceans. The arc of light was doused except one central spark, which hung floating in the air, drifting and in time slowly too it would fade.

And then, there was nothing left, except it all and the fading echoes of my voice, now just a breath of wind across the earth.