Old Stories found in the Attic

Looking through old stuff in the attic, I came across three stories I had written a long time ago. I was quite pleased as almost none of the stories I used to write exist any more, certainly very few from the 1990s, most lost over numerous house-moves as the years have gone by.
There were three stories I found -or pieces of stories- I can't tell if two of them were part of something larger or not. As far as I can remember -there are no dates on them- these would have been written 1991 - 1992, so I would have been nineteen or twenty.
The first one 'Early Summer Evening' is undoubtedly part of some larger project I never got around to continuing.  Nothing much happens. A woman called Amelia Drummond gets off a train at a quiet station. She walks through a nearby village. That's it. Still, thinking about it, the name 'Amelia Drummond' immediately dates this story to 1991 I should think. I was studying my art A-level (which I failed) at Uxbridge College, and had an unrequited crush on a girl with the same surname.

...a white metal fence, the paint peeling with time (showing the blackened material beneath) held back the bushes that vied for the attention of passengers and staff alike. A row of houses, whose red roofs were just about visible above the green, stood silent and watchful, and for the first time, she wondered what road they were in. She had lived here all her life and this was the first time she had ever thought about it...


I wonder if I had any plans for continuing this three page vignette? I was always coming up with plans and ideas for novels, none of which were ever continued. I have some vague memory of writing 'Early Summer Evening', toward the end of my one year stint at Uxbridge College, so this would have been late spring 1991 I guess... Still, You could probably have guessed that by the title.

The second story I found was later. I can tell this by the fact that the words on the paper are more faded than the first story. I used the same printer, and the ink faded over the two or three years I used it to print stories up from the word processor on my Amstrad CPC 64. You could only write 1500 words before all the memory was used... I would date this story to somewhere in 1992.
This one was called 'What Dreams Await The Ones Who Watch?' and, despite the fact this was written over a year later, people leaving a train at another deserted station. I attempt to describe them; 'the four of them were poets, writers and artists, even a musician or two'. Which, if I'm not mistaken, may well add up to more than four people... I particularly like 'even a musician or two', which somewhat puzzles me. Why or two, and why even... As if musicians were a rare and endangered species. Well, this trip to a deserted station has two musicians. Maybe. Maybe only one, definitely a musician or two though...
There is also a mathematician it seems as well:

Victor came next, a student who was able to make maths seem like poetry, his flowing equations transmuting feeling and emotion in their base formula. His wild mind able to comprehend and gleefully use the fact that logic breaks down on the sub-atomic level.


While Victor may well have been able to 'make maths seem like poetry', I obviously had no idea what I was talking about. Where on earth that last line of the above quote came from I dread to think.
So, our four characters, two of whom may or may not be musicians, leave the station, which is set upon a hill, and look down at a deserted village...

...dark neglected places give birth to desolation. The Desolate scuttle down twilight haunted paths and celebrate in the rain of a winter day. They laugh over snowmen built in the clearings of claustrophobic woods. Only they understand the crooked smile, and the fevered stare these snowmen have.
Spiders come to deserted places. Breeding spiders, feeding on desolation, on the darkness, on the memories left in places. Memories left breeding, breeding into ghosts, playing again and again, whether there is an audience or not.
Like fungus and mould.
The decay of desolation.
Breaking things down, then building them up, so no-one can remember what they once were, so everyone can only see the Now of it. Where once was a door is now a prison...


After this strange feverish epiphany, our characters run back to the station in a state of panic, board a train and 'never see the lonely, unnamed station again'. What a strange story. I wonder what on earth I was trying to describe, back over the summer of 1992 when I was twenty years old. Why snowmen? If I had said scarecrows, I could understand, but snowmen..? Did I find snowmen partiocularly creepy in my just-post teenage years. Then I start rambling on about spiders. Snowmen and spiders. Then fungus and mould. Oh dear.
The last two lines are strange. I was obviously trying to describe some kind of idea. Unfortunately I have no idea what.

The third story I found is called 'The House Where Time Decayed'. The strangest thing about this tale is that I have no memory of writing it, nothing at all. It doesn't sound vaguely familiar. Judging by the faded ink, I would say, again, written when I was twenty...

Time seemed to drip off the bricks of the house, as if the house itself seemed to be sweating, like an overworked horse in the depths of a hot day. The drops of time seemed to gather in stagnant pools around the peculiarly old house. Some of the puddles seeped into the cracks of the paving stone, and were absorbed by the earth, which the roots of the house fed upon, consuming its own waste again and again.


Well, lets quickly skate over the dreadful line about a horse sweating... My god... and anyway, remember, this was actually 1991 or 1992, why on earth did I put in a metaphor about a work horse? Anyhow, despite the fact that what follows the overworked horse analogy isn't much better, there are a number of similarities with 'What Dreams Await The Ones Who Watch', namely that strange obsession with an almost metaphysical decay.
The unnamed narrator enters the house and encounters a number of vague phantoms. The nature of these phantoms is incomprehensible; a figure sitting in total darkness on a chair, a teenage boy on the stairs with his 'head twisted backwards' and a Victorian woman whose eyes 'were more like the eyes of a dog than a human, and I was reminded insanely of a dog I dreamt of when I was a child'.
This last spectre passes through the narrator:

...my skin stretched into tiny slivers, and I felt the fevers of the past that had killed this house run sweating through my veins, and when she had gone, I found myself shivering, crying cold tears, crouched trembling on the bare wooden floorboards.


...which is where the story ended. I certainly made no attempt to make my stories comprehensible at all. Maybe that was the point. I tell you what though, despite the cringe inducing awfulness of the writing, I quite like them, if only for the fact that back then I was writing. I can't remember the last time I tried to write a story, or whatever these pieces I found in the attic are. Ten years ago? It really could be as long as that.
At least I was trying to do something back then.
More than I can say for now.
I blame that sweating and overworked horse....