DAVID I. HUGHES
Contemporary Stories Forged from Cornwall's Rugged Soul
Inspiration for Other Work
Alongside the main novels, The Listener has inspired a growing collection of short stories and poems - smaller echoes from the same world. These pieces explore the quieter moments between the case files: fragments of memory, landscapes that speak in their own way, and characters whose voices linger at the edges of the main narrative. Each stands alone, yet all are rooted in the same questions of place, silence, and what the land chooses to remember.
Some of these stories and poems have been entered into literary competitions and are unavailable at present. Please feel free to pass on comment or share your own stories and I will endeavour to share.
The Unwanted Gift
Inspired by The Listener
A Short Story
for Christmas
The memory came to Dr. Elowen Carne wrapped in the scent of pine needles and roasting turkey. It was a bright, brittle thing: a modern family on Christmas morning, the living room a chaos of ripped wrapping paper and excited voices. A boy, perhaps ten, sat quietly amidst the storm, turning a small, clumsily wrapped present over and over in his hands.
His mother’s voice, bright with the effort of cheer, cut through the room. “Go on, Liam. Open it! It’s from Uncle Mark.”
But Elowen, tethered to the boy’s silent hesitation, felt it—the cold draft under the door of the memory. This wasn’t just shyness. It was a deep, intuitive dread.
The paper tore. Inside was a small, wooden soldier, its paint chipped, one arm a mere stump. It was not a new toy, but an old, discarded thing. A regift from the bottom of a drawer.
“Oh,” said the mother, her smile faltering. “How… thoughtful.”
But Liam didn’t hear her. As his fingers closed around the cold, painted wood, Elowen’s world dissolved.
The warm, cluttered room vanished, replaced by the stark, cold clarity of a different Christmas. The same house, but a century earlier. The air was thin, sharp with coal dust and frost. A boy, of a similar age, sat in a chair by a meagre fire. He was gaunt, his clothes too thin. In his hands, he held the very same wooden soldier, whole and perfect, his most cherished possession.
His name was Thomas. His mother, pale and coughing in the corner, smiled a weak, watery smile. “For you, my love,” she whispered. “To keep you safe.”
It was the last gift she would ever give him. The memory was saturated with the knowledge of her death, mere days later. Of a heartbroken father, unable to bear the sight of the toy, bundling it away into a box with a sharp, final snap. The soldier was not just a toy; it was a vessel, filled to the brim with a child’s devastating, pre-emptive grief.
Back in the modern warmth, Liam stared at the broken soldier in his palm. A single, hot tear tracked down his cheek. He didn’t understand why. He only felt a crushing weight of sadness, a loneliness so profound it stole his breath.
His mother misread the tear. “Don’t be upset, sweetheart! It’s just an old thing. We’ll get you a proper one.”
But Elowen knew. The gift was not unwanted; it was received. It had been passed down through the years, an unmarked parcel of sorrow, waiting for a heart sensitive enough to unwrap it. Liam was not crying over a shoddy present. He was crying for Thomas. He was feeling the echo of a loss that had happened long before he was born, a ghost of grief that had found a home in his small, open heart.
The connection broke. Elowen opened her eyes to the silent, festive decorations of her own study. The merry jingle of a carol from a neighbour’s house felt like a mockery.
They were all exchanging gifts wrapped in shiny paper, trying to bury the old year’s sorrows under new things. But some sorrows were too tenacious. They waited in the soil, in the walls, in the chips of painted wood, for someone who was still listening. On this day of giving, Liam had been given a sadness that was not his own, and Elowen was the only one who knew.
​
The Pyre
Inspired by The Listener
A Short Story
for Guy Fawkes Night
The memory came to Dr. Elowen Carne on the scent of woodsmoke and roasting potatoes. It was a pleasant fragment, at first. The crisp November air of a back garden in a modern Cornish village, the excited shrieks of children piling broken branches onto a nascent bonfire. A father stood by, a smile in his voice as he cautioned, “Not too high now, Ben. It’s not a beacon.”
But Elowen, adrift in the echo, felt the familiar, cold current beneath the warmth. This was not just a memory; it was a palimpsest, and a far darker text was bleeding through.
The boy, Ben, dragged a heavy, gnarled branch from the hedge. “This’ll be good for the Guy!” he declared to his younger sister. They had crafted their effigy with gleeful ignorance, stuffing old clothes with newspaper, giving it a lopsided, comic face.
As the boy heaved the branch onto the pile, Elowen felt it. Not the rough bark against his palms, but a searing, phantom pain in her own. A splinter, not of wood, but of memory, driven deep.
The world shifted.
The tidy garden vanished, replaced by the same patch of land centuries earlier. The air was thick with a different smoke—acrid, hungry. The cheers of the children became the roar of a different crowd, their faces grotesque in the flickering light of a much larger pyre. This was not a celebration. It was an execution.
On the pile of wood and furze, bound not with string but with rough hemp, was a woman. Her name, torn from the collective memory of the stones, came to Elowen: Anya. Her crime was a knowledge of herbs, a refusal to bend, a love for the old ways. Her face was not one of comic terror, like the Guy, but of a profound, weary defiance.
The children’s father in the present-day memory walked towards the bonfire, a box of matches in his hand. “Ready for the big light?” he called.
In the overlay of the past, a torch, dipped in pitch, was touched to the base of the pyre. The flames caught with a vengeful gasp.
Elowen tried to pull back, to un-hear the sound that was not a sound but a scar upon the air. It was the sizzle of flesh, the crackle of bone-dry wood, and beneath it, a low, guttural chant from the woman that was not a scream of pain, but a curse of binding. A final, desperate act to tie her spirit, her rage, her truth, to this very earth.
The father in the garden struck a match. The small, modern flame flared at the tip of the splinter.
A wave of heat, ancient and brutal, washed over Elowen. It carried not the smell of roasting potatoes, but of burning hair and sorrow.
The connection broke.
Elowen gasped, stumbling against her desk. The taste of the 21st century was ash in her mouth. Outside her window, across the valley, a dozen small bonfires began to prick the dusk like cheerful stars.
They were lighting their Guys, their comic effigies of a failed conspirator. But on one patch of land, a child was about to light a pyre that had already burned. He was not burning a traitor. He was rekindling a witch’s funeral pyre.
The land had not forgotten the shape of the flames, or the sound of a curse being woven into the soil. And tonight, it was asking to be heard.
​
The Pumpkin Carving
A Mousehole Echo for All Hallow’s Eve​
Inspired by The Listener
A Short Story
for Halloween
It began not as a sound, but as a scent, carried on a salt-edged wind. Dr. Elowen Carne registered it in the liminal space between wakefulness and trance: the sweet, vegetal decay of pumpkin guts, cutting through the peat-smoke and sea-spray of her own study. It was a memory, thick with place, and she let the current of it pull her down to the ancient granite of Mousehole.
The cottage kitchen was a cave of light against the pressing Cornish dark. Here, on a narrow lane that funnelled the sea gale into a constant, low moan, two children worked at their ritual. Their small hands were slick with pulp and seeds, scooping them from the great orange globe on the scrubbed wooden table.
“I’ll do the teeth,” the boy, Liam, declared, his voice competing with the wind rattling the latch. “Proper monster ones, like the Bucca.”
“I want a happy one,” his sister, Maya, countered, her voice a softer note against the din. She drew a lopsided circle on the pumpkin’s flank. “A light for the dark lanes.”
Their father’s shadow filled the doorway to the snug, a silhouette of fond exasperation. “Mind you don’t get bits all over the floor,” he said, his voice warm. The back door, a stout slab of wood against the encroaching night, was slightly ajar, letting in the smell of damp stone and the distant, rhythmic boom of the sea against the harbour wall. It was a moment of defiant warmth, a luminous sanctuary in a landscape of primordial shadow.
Elowen, the silent passenger, felt the love in the room. But her gift was not for feeling; it was for listening to the land. And beneath the children’s laughter and the wind’s keen, she heard the first dissonant note. A low, grinding pressure, like the sea chewing at the cliffs below. It was the sound of a future, collapsing in on itself.
Liam’s knife, a small serrated tool, sawed carefully at the lid. Scratch-scratch. Scratch-scratch. The sound was rhythmic, a tiny counterpoint to the gale. But to Elowen, it began to morph. It became the sound of tires losing purchase on a slick, winding lane, a brief, terrible skitter of gravel that hadn't yet been kicked into the air.
Maya pressed her eye to the star-shaped hole she’d carved, giggling. “It’s a different world in here,” she whispered, “all orange and safe.”
And it was. Elowen, listening through the child’s eye, suddenly saw it. Not the warm kitchen, but the same steep, narrow lane outside, minutes from now. The car’s headlights, blinding against the wet granite. The sickening, hollow thud that was not a pumpkin hitting the slate floor.
The vision crashed over her. The cottage door would soon be wrenched open, not by the wind, but by a neighbour, their face a mask of rain and horror, their mouth opening to form a name. The children would look up, their happy confusion a heartbreaking prelude to the void.
The connection shattered. Elowen gasped, the taste of Mousehole’s air - salt, iron, and ancient stone - sharp in her throat. She was back in her chair, the weight of this impending, coastal tragedy settling deep into her bones.
They had been carving a light for the dark lanes. But the land of West Penwith, old and unforgiving, had shown her the truth they were carving out. It was not a ghost she had been listening to, but an echo from a future already written in the winding, rain-lashed streets. The last, luminous moments before the sea of darkness rushed in.
If you are drawn to stories that listen before they speak, you may find yourself at home here.
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