After asking around, I quickly gathered that the nearest restroom was situated in the alleyway next door- anywhere between the local homeless man and the dead cat- and promptly set out to water the local gutters.

Had I known what would greet me upon doing so, however, I would rather have remained indoors and made a warm yellow puddle beneath my stool. It probably would have been mistaken for beer, anyway, and from the impression I got of the place I wouldn’t have been surprised if it then got mopped up by the bartender to serve with drinks later in the evening. Waste not want not.

Stumbling across the threshold from the hazy warmth of the inn, I was immediately met by a debilitating front of paralysing cold which sent me staggering back toward the comfort which I had so stupidly abandoned. Night had crept in without my realising it, bringing with it a bracing breeze reminiscent of the coming winter and a cruel, encompassing darkness which was only kept in check by the feeble light of moon and stars pinpricking the thick black blanket above. The wind whipped the bare flesh of my face and hands with stinging tentacles, tearing savagely at my cloak while frostbitten fingers wound icy digits beneath the folds to trace chillingly across my skin.

Summoning the mental strength that came from a desperate need to empty my bladder, I grit my teeth and ploughed on, a man on a mission. Another step and I was barraged by biting blades which whistled down the twisting streets like wailing ghosts, invisible edges slicing through the thin fabric of my shirt with such ferocity that I was surprised to find it still in one piece. If I had thought the days had been cold, then the northern nights were practically remnants of the last ice age. To hear the highlanders at the bar have it, however, it was simply ‘a bit chilly’. I pledged there and then never to be around when they described the weather as simply ‘cold’.

At this point my breath had all but been snatched away, yet after a fervent dash I somehow managed to make it to the relative shelter of the alleyway. Now, it’s not often that I find myself walking willingly into a dark alleyway by myself, but desperate times call for desperate measures and I wasn’t particularly keen on spending the night in a sodden pair of urine-soaked breeches. So, after searching briefly for the homeless man and the dead cat which marked the borders of the pub’s pissing territory and finding neither, I chose a sheltered spot against the wall and commenced emptying myself of the arseload of beer that I had consumed that evening- a lengthy yet deeply satisfying process that almost had me forgetting the cold that threatened to bite off my extremities.

I had just shaken off the last reluctant drops and was in the process of fumbling at my breeches- something which becomes a great difficulty when your fingers are so numb that you can’t feel whether it’s the laces that you’re tying in knots or your own fingers- when a soft scuffling directly to my back had me discovering that my bladder had not been quite as empty as I had previously assumed. Spinning precariously on my heels and almost tripping over my own feet in the process, I stared in bewilderment and a certain amount of fearful paranoia at the shadows which stretched before me.

A minute, then two ticked by. Nothing. Not even a drunken lecher who got off on watching young men take a piss. Just darkness, and the continued keening of the tortured air.

I cast sceptical glances all around, standing rigid in the eerie alleyway. After several moments passed without any leaping signs of murderous intent, I slowly found myself easing back against the dampness of the wall with growing relief. It had probably just been a rat scuttling amid the refuse, I assured myself, or the wind playing tricks against the stone. I suddenly remembered that I had yet to finish lacing myself up, so after breathing moist air into my cupped hands in an attempt to urge life back into my frigid fingers I swiftly finished doing so and turned to leave.

The crooked old crone who now hunched a mere arm’s length before me was ogling me with a snaggle toothed smile which had me uttering a high-pitched shriek that a five-year-old girl would have been proud of.

Dear Gods, it was the most hideous thing that I had ever seen: piled high with the weight of tattered rags and decaying pelts, the hag was hunched and buckled like the crooked silhouette of an ancient and leafless tree, skeletal fingers clutching like claws at her rancid robes to tug them tight about herself. Wispy white hair, dry and brittle as bone, sprouted in intermittent clumps from a liver-spotted skull, skin so pale and translucent it might have been formed from the thinnest of ancient parchments. Cadaverous lips writhed like pale maggots over soft pink gums proclaiming a single and protruding rotted black tooth, and as a gust of wind billowed her face a fissured tongue wetted her cracked lips with reptilian quickness. And then there was the wart; bulbous and red it swelled beneath her left eye like a plump cherry ready for the picking, bristling with whiskers and shining sickeningly in the moonlight. I felt a sudden and overwhelming urge to retch. I did. It didn’t help.

However, as I continued to stare at her- for as much as I dearly desired to, I was unable to tear my gaze away in my sheer horror- I came to notice that her eyes, when catching the ruddy light which spilled through the grimy window of the inn, held a milky hue which hovered in a thin film over the watery orbs of her pupils.

Relief swelled in my chest. She couldn’t see me. She was blind! Oh, thank the Gods, she wasn’t staring at me after all. In fact, she probably didn’t even know that I was there! Even so, I didn’t want to risk her walking into me by accident. I’m not overly fond of the elderly, and I tend to classify them along with children, peasants and most farm animals as ‘likely to harbour horrible diseases. Most likely fleas. Keep clear at all costs’. I could only hope that she was as deaf as she was blind and hadn’t heard my small manly yell of a few moments ago.

Without further ado, I immediately curled up on myself as though, in doing so, I might shrink enough to make me so small as to disappear, desperately hoping that if she were not blind after all, her old-lady eyes might mistake me for an exceptionally handsome potted plant and hobble on her merry way. The thing about the elderly, though, is that they have the uncanny ability to turn on and off their bad hearing and eyesight at will. Were one to begin talking to an old codger about your day or something along those lines, their hearing would be worse than if they were to listen to you through a stampede of rioting horses. The moment you murmur a silent word to a friend or partner at the other side of a busy room, however, their hearing magically magnifies so that it’s practically supersonic.

“I see ye standing there, ye know.”

‘Damn.’ It appears she wasn’t blind after all.

“And keep yer darn voice down, laddie, ye almost burst my eardrums with yer squealin’ like a young swine!”

Or deaf.

I reluctantly detached myself from the concealing shadows, vaguely conscious of the fact that I had been standing in the large puddle which I had created earlier, and stepped forth to confront her. Well, I stepped backwards, really. Closer to the nearest escape route.

For a good few minutes we participated in a kind of silent standoff, her eyeing me with those milky optics and a gruesome grin while I focused on taking indistinguishable steps in the opposite direction. I would have liked to say that I won our little game of nerve which played out then, and that it was I who had her in the position of stalemate rather than the other way around. I didn’t.

Finally, buckling under the weight of her macabre smile, I relented and shattered the taut stretch of silence with a heaved exhale of held breath, which whirled from between my lips in pluming clouds of steam, glistening like wreathes of frost in the polar air. For the briefest of moments, the moisture masked the harridan’s horrid physiognomy and obscured it with sparkling condensation which could almost be called beautiful; yet nothing good lasts forever, and before I could hope to billow out another breath the smeary mask had dispersed to reveal the grotesque countenance beneath.

“Alright woman, if you’re going to stand and gawk at me any longer I’m going to have to insist on payment.” I demanded with a proud chest and a raised chin so that I might look down my straight and youthful nose at her veined and twisted one. I paused for my show of superiority to take effect.

Silence. The intensity of her stare was beginning to unnerve me to the extent that I considered simply making a run for it. I’d jab her out of the way with her broomstick if I had to. Yet I managed to continue in a voice which sounded far more confident than I felt at that present moment, but which I was sure was only a quaver away from losing all sense of self-assurance.

“Look lady, if you have something to tell me then out with it! If not, then I would highly appreciate it if you averted your eyes and got out of my Goddamn way.”

I made to pass her by with a slightly stiff swagger, ensuring that I steered clear of her bow-backed form by as much as the narrow alleyway allowed, but it wasn’t far enough and, before I could proceed any further, I felt something rigid catch at my cloak. I barely had the opportunity to cast a curious glance down at whatever had snagged it when something wrapped its inflexible fingers about the bare flesh of my forearm.