I found my way out of the building in about a million years, which must be a record leaving a hospital. I gulped down the comforting, homely mixture of fresh Yorkshire air and chemical plant, and the burning in my throat went away some. Then I remembered what Doc had said about an excruciating death and it came back again.

At least I had a year, I told myself. Just think how many nights out with the lads I’d get in. Three hundred and sixty four, I reckoned. I was too bloody knackered already for tonight.

Then I remembered the whole year of bad luck bit, and I stood there like a frightened little girl by the revolving door, just waiting for a bus to plough one of my legs off or for a passing seagull to shit on my shirt. After a few ticks, nothing had happened, so I went back to top priority - grub-time. Death in a year wouldn’t matter when I was going to starve in the next ten minutes.

Obviously I hadn’t seen where they’d taken me after the weird things got me, so I took a good look around. The building I’d been in actually was a hospital. Wonders never cease. Though somehow, I thought the creepy old gadgies practically trying to climb in my bloody bed weren’t part of a sound comprehensive medical service most places in the country. You never knew what you were getting into once you saw a welcome to Yorkshire sign on the road. Any of the Yorkshires.

The hospital was on one of those neverending brown, flat brick rows of boring buildings that everyone up here thought were great in the sixties. Architects were clearly drowning in drugs back in those days. But anyway, that sort of rubbish meant I was close to a ‘revolutionised’ or ‘rejuvenated’ town centre. It could have been left or right, so I strained my ears and followed the elephant-like booming of chavs trying to make words with their inbred gobs, over to the left. Their habitat was strictly at the epicentre of crap.

The road had the usual mixture of shops - charity, corner, or boarded up. I thought I was going to faint before I got to a Greggs so I bravely pushed my way into a run-down paper shop somewhere firmly on the spectrum between the last two types. There was the usual selection of tat, a stand of cards, and the ever-present commemorative teapots being pored over by the usual flowery-bloused WI types who’d always insist such travesties were ‘quaint’ just because some Chinese factory worker had stamped the town’s name on them. At last, I found the worryingly yellow-looking fridge over the other side and raked through the limp offerings. It took me a moment to realise I wasn’t going to get a breakfast triple. I stopped then, looking wildly from the sandwiches to the shopkeeper leaning on his Polo-festooned counter as if he was going to yell ‘cut’, smile, and inform me in a faint Indian accent that I’d been the star of a Candid Camera reboot. A gritty reboot at that.

The flavours were... quaint, the flowery ladies would have said. Something gooey and black was labelled Goat’s Blood and Cheddar. Another meaty-looking bad boy next to it didn’t look too bad until I read Tongue of Dog and reckoned the red stuff just under the top slice wasn’t ketchup. Then a nice long baguette labelled Tentacle of Cthulhu jumped to life and started wriggling along the shelf towards me and I screamed and took off outside. It’s a terrible shame, because everyone knows those sorts of corner shops are simply a treasure trove for weird crisps, and it was a while since I’d found prawn cocktail spirals.

I walked as quick as my scrawny, wasting body allowed. I’d probably lost half a pound by then, factoring in that morning’s monster of a poop. I kept telling myself that what I’d witnessed was just hallucinations, a symptom of the final stages of pastry withdrawal. I also told myself that there’d have been plenty of normal sarnies that had been snapped up by now, leaving just the bizarre vegan concoctions of mushy green stuff that I’d always been intimidated by and had now got carried away with. But, looking at my watch, it was only ten past eleven and the fridge had been pretty full.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

And, the further I walked, the more my senses took in. Yeah, it was just another shitty Yorkshire high street I merged on to, factories peeping up over the terraces, poor homeless buggers playing musical chairs along the big row of benches dividing the sea of concrete that flooded the space between the shops, a shady arcade rusting away on one side, a wall of big chalky cocks on the other. I knew it was the high street because there was also a betting shop, the very centre of proud commerce somewhere like this. But beyond all that obvious stuff, something darker lurked.

Some of the locked-up buildings weren’t exactly empty. As I walked past, I’d get a snippet of whispering, or chanting, and from the corner of my eye I’d get a hint of soft yellow, like candlelight, from around the boarded windows. Then there were the churches, two of them, like nothing I’d ever seen in my English Heritage handbook.One at each end of the pedestrian part of the street. The left one was a single round, unadorned tower, painted bright red, just one little square door at the bottom. At least, I hoped it was painted red. To the right was a circular, blackened dome with five sharp points curling up from its edges. It reminded me at once of an old gnarled hand. Or a dead spider. No-one was going in and out of either.

I don’t know why I thought ‘church’ straight away. There were no crosses in sight.

I shuddered and turned towards the tower, right into the accusing finger of an old gent in a hunting jacket and flat cap. He was shaking his finger even as it sunk into my jiggling flesh. Hope none of the ladies saw that.

“We don’t like your kind round these parts,” he called nastily.

“Ey! What kind’s that, mate?” I spat back. It’s not right to be thinking about hitting a fogie but I was a bit ruffled by that point, and worse, hangry.

“Folk who aren’t from these parts.” The man actually did spit then. Right at my feet. It was bright green... and steaming. I took a hasty step back. It was wriggling now, like that sarnie back down the road, but I told myself he must just have a really nasty version of the clap.When I looked up, the spitter had completely vanished, and it was only as I hurried on that I realised no wrinkled prune like that wouldn’t have been lucky enough to get the clap in about forty years.

It was all soon forgotten, because I’d just climbed over Raughnen’s Strangely Muttering Dirty Bearded Man’s carrier bags when I looked up to see it. Greggs! There was some light in this town, I was saved, and I jogged on with all my remaining strength to my rightful destiny.

I basked in the comforting aroma of grease for one long blissful second before I heard it. The lad behind the counter had a tattoo up his arm, so I thought all the screaming was some weird metal shit he’d put on instead of the radio. Then I realised that it was coming from all around me, and I got that funny sinking feeling again. Corporate would never pay for surround sound in a million years. And then I started listening to the words, and decided that even in the world of metal, “Please don’t eat me I don’t want to die noooooo not another bite” would still come off as corny.

There were the usual patrons all about, lightly resting tentative elbows on the table tops because it was a pretty chilly spring day out but avoiding the chairs like the plague because the eating in tax was absolute sacrilege. They all had pastries in their gobs, but it was the first time that I’d seen anyone in a Greggs holding down their grub with a fork. It was all alive, and the screams were coming from the purchases, and men and women, children and toddlers, all were taking their sweet time with it. Nibble by tiny nibble, as the pasties screamed for mercy, and with every scream, the smiles on their owners’ faces widened inch by leering inch.

“Have you tried the all-new vegan sausage rolls?” one less-vegan roll whimpered into mum’s face. “So much better! And for that one you’re only murdering once!”

The woman’s face twitched in hesitation, and she glanced over to the counter. “Pussy! Get some meat down ya!” a gruff voice shouted back. She turned and cut off her charge mid-cry. I can still hear the mechanically recovered innards in their squelching death-throes now.

And so it was that there, in the shining bastion of Northern pride and fortress of comfort to weary travellers the country over, that I concluded that the town of Raughnen in the Old Riding of Yorkshire was in the deadly grip of demonic forces, incubating evil and feeding on suffering, for if such a bastion could fall, it was the only explanation that made sense.

I still murdered the hell out of a corned beef slice, though. At least it went down in one bite.