Black Sun

Mary knew she wasn’t allowed out, but the silence of the apartment was getting too 

loud to bear. She got up from her bed and marked April 30th 1971 off her calendar 

with black Sharpie before putting on her slippers and venturing out into the kitchen. 

She had a mug of concentrated orange juice and a bowl of Kellogg’s cornflakes 

with milk, the last of all three cartons. Food was running out but it wouldn’t be too 

long before Agatha got back. Though she wanted to go outside and find her, she 

knew she mustn’t. Too much could go wrong. Tripping down the stairs and breaking 

her neck. Stepping on a rusted nail and getting an infection. 

And, as Agatha had told her, it would be her own stupid fault if it happened. 

The clock in the kitchen struck ten and Mary dropped her cereal bowl and glass into 

the sink and went to the window to see the same thing she saw everyday. 

Old Miss Mitchell walking her pomeranian with her heavy shopping bags.

Mary pushed the window open slightly and called down to her, as she usually did 

and Old Miss Mitchell waved up with a smile on her face. One of the shopping bag 

handles snapped and all of her shopping spilled out onto the road.

Mary squinted. Something was wrong, but she didn’t quite know what.

 Old Miss Mitchell packed up her shopping with unnerving speed and the 

pomeranian yapped excitedly. She bundled her shopping in her arms, picked up the 

dog lead and marched on without looking back. 

A box of cornflakes lay on the pavement, forgotten.

The front door unlatched and Agatha Fischer came through the front door. Her 

blonde hair stuck to her red and flustered face as she dropped her carrier bags on 

the kitchen island. She had been crying.

“They didn’t have lye at the store today.” she muttered. “You’ll have to make do with 

the cream soap bars this week.”

Mary felt her heart lift. The lye baths hurt like hell but she didn’t want Agatha to 

know. She wanted to be good. She wanted to be clean.

Agatha suddenly bristled and Mary realised with horror what she’s done wrong.

She rushed over to the sink and washed up the mug and glass, making sure to get 

every piece of pulp or drop of milk and making sure they were gleaming white, 

towelled both down and stored them away in the cupboard, each glass one 

centimetre from each other and each bowl two centimetres from each other. 

She turned back and saw Agatha with a glass in hand. Her eyes were bloodshot 

but she seemed less tearful. She handed her the special drink in the black ceramic 

mug.

“You’re a good girl, aren’t you?” 

Mary drank. The taste of washing up liquid caused her stomach to roil and she 

threw up in the sink and, as she convulsed, grabbed at the taps to rinse away the 

vomit.

She straightened up. ‘Thank you Mum.”

She cleaned up the mug and put it into the black ceramic mug cupboard, which 

only contained the black ceramic mug.

When she turned around, Agatha had gone. She was in the living room, staring 

wistfully at the picture. As she often did, usually with a glass of gin in her hands.

Leo had been gone for decades. And he probably wasn’t coming back.

“We’re not going to win the war, Mary.” she said. “I’ve lost a man who meant the 

world to me. I lost my nation. Everything. And I don’t think you’re going to get better

either.”

“I love you.”

Agatha simply nodded. “I don’t truly think you’re capable of love. But I appreciate 

you saying it all the same.”

She reached out and stoked Mary’s hair. 

“Why don’t you skip your evening bath and go for a walk around the town?”

“You said I shouldn’t-

She shrugged, tears falling from her eyes. “I just don’t care anymore.”

Mary stepped back, Agatha’s words still stinging. She picked up the picture and 

headed to the door. 

“I’ll go find him, Mum.”

She heard muttering from the living room.

“What was that?”

“Do whatever you want, just don’t come back.”

Her heart felt pierced.

She turned, her heart thumping, and went through the front door.

The apartment was up three flights of stairs and each one felt alien. 

She left the house, sure, but only on a weekly trip to the shop at the end of

the road.

The day was still new and the sun beat down on the pavements. She kept to 

awnings or shadows to avoid the sun as Agatha had told her all about the various 

kind of skin cancers she could get from being out in the sun too long.

She would try the store first, get answers, come home. Mum would feel a little 

better if she could find out some information on where Leo might be. 

And maybe she’d even feel a little better herself. Andrew Shultz was always kind 

and welcoming at The Little Greengrocers.

Her foot collided with the box of Cornflakes Miss Mitchell had dropped and she 

picked it up. It was a plain white box simply listed as ‘Cornflakes.’ Unlike her 

cornflakes back home there was no brand name, no rooster and no nutritional 

information. Old people cornflakes? She opened the box, breaking the seal on top 

and found inside: Nothing. Odd.

She searched around for a bin. At least Miss Mitchell had her cornflakes. But then 

why was the box…. It didn’t matter.

There were no bins. She knocked on a few doors but nobody came. A few cars 

were parked around and she looked inside. Nothing. Some were even coated in a 

thin veneer of dust. 

She kept walking towards The Little Greengrocers, cornflake box in hand looking for 

a bin. She saw several flyers attached to a billboard close to her flat and stopped to 

take a look at them. Several advertised Garage Sales and one was for a Summer 

Fayre with a pinter image of an ice cream below and a bouncy castle. She checked 

for a date at the bottom. Maybe it would cheer Mum up? There was no date.

No matter. Another question for friendly Mr Shultz.

The store was half shuttered which was odd, and the lights were off. Mary 

squeezed underneath and heard a clink as a glass bottle rolled towards her from 

the darkness. A man was keeled over against a shelving unit.

“Hello?”

The lights flickered on and Mary saw Andrew with a glass bottle in one hand and a 

lightbulb cord in his other hand. His face seemed to be turned off but swung at Mary 

in a leer like a terrible animatronic. “‘lo Mary. Come to do shome shopping?”

He laughed a weird chittering laugh at his own joke.

“No thank you, Mr Shultz. I was wondering if you’d be able to help me. Mum’s 

acting awfully strange.”

“Probably thish.” he said. He pulled out a brown envelope filled with crisp bank 

notes and tugged out a letter from within the bills. “I dunno how it went on so long 

but I guessh it’s over now.”

He belched and held a hand to his mouth.

“She’s not your mum, Mary. None of this is real.”

Mary took a step back against the metal shutter. The shop smelled of paint and the

sweat of a strange man on the ground who had once seemed so familiar but now 

so far away.

“I don’t understand.”

Andrew let out a deep sigh and hurled the empty scotch bottle behind the counter 

at the other side where it shattered against the other bottles. Only that wasn’t true,

as the drops of sickly alcohol seemed to drip down them in weird channels. 

“Painted on. This isn’t a shop.”

“So what do you do here?”

“Nothing.” he replied, gritting his yellowing and jagged teeth. “Not now. Now there’s 

nobody paying me to stop you getting out.”

He looked over at her, eyed her up and down. “Sickness has won.”

He raised an arm at that, wobbling with drunkenness, and then it dropped.

He began to snore loudly.  Loud, snarl-like snores. Mary remembered being a child 

no older than six. Stepping towards the shop and being told about the wet floor, 

how she mustn’t go in, stayed outside and looked in whilst Agatha busied herself 

and smiling Mr Shultz would come out with a frozen lemonade lolly on a white stick 

for being a good girl and not ruining the shop floor with her muddy shoes.

Her eyes brimmed with tears. She was trying to be a good girl, but nothing was 

working and everyone seemed sad. The shopkeeper rolled over, pulling the cord

and the lights switched back off.

She headed back to her home.

On her way back, she saw the silhouette of a woman on an alley between two 

dilapidated apartments and peered in. Miss Mitchell was hanging from her dog’s 

cord. Her face was purple with foam dripping from her bulging lips. One of her high 

heeled feet kicked. Mary screamed and ran, belting over the pavement steps one 

after another. She sprinted up the stairs two at a time, as Agatha lay in the warm 

bathtub in her husband’s uniform. Water sloshed over the edges of the bath and the

gramophone warbled from the living room. The tinny sound of trumpets blared as

it announced the raising of the flag one last time and Agatha closed her tear-

spotted eyes, smiled, and raised the kitchen knife to her jugular.

Eventually, Mary stopped knocking. Her arms grew tired as it was clear her Mum 

wasn’t going to let her in. Agatha. She couldn’t see it, had she not raised her since 

was a baby until her thirtieth year which was-

In all of the days events she’d forgotten why she’d been marking down the 

calendar.

She tried one more times, bruised hands letting out tiny pangs of pain and hurt.

“Mum, please let me in. I don’t mind if you’re not. But please let me stay one

more day. It’s my-

Her voice gave.

“It’s my birthday tomorrow.”

Mary started to cry. She soberly walked back down the stairs just as water began to 

creep under the front door.

Night was falling outside, a twilight glimmer reaching across the gravestone 

apartments. She saw Shultz stumbling towards her, his shirt stained and something 

metal in his hand.

“It was all for you, you fucking bitch!”

He kept staggering forward and Mary could now see the gleam of the snub nosed

pistol in his hand. He laughed and began to whistle. 

Mary had a little lamb.

Something stirred in Mary’s mind.

Her Mum- Agatha, used to sing it as a child. 

He came face to face with her.

“And her fleece was white as snow.” he finished, softly.

He pulled out a metal key on a cotton thread and held it up to her face.

He pressed it into Mary’s palm, staring at them as he did so with a mean drunken 

intensity.

“The truth’s in a warehouse at the end of town.”

He tucked the pistol under his chin.

“And the truth will set you free.”

He pulled the trigger and his head exploded in a flurry of blood and whitish gristle. 

His arms windmilled as he collapsed like a rag doll and hit the pavement with a wet 

crunch like cornflakes and milk.

Mary stood transfixed, her face and hair matted with blood. At some time later, 

though she was not sure when, she stepped over his body and walked on.

The darkness had gotten deeper and apartment lights had switched on. Yellow

sodiums mounted on the outside of the windows, burning like malicious fireflies 

and giving the illusion of life in Mary’s dead world.

She cried out but nobody heard. There was nobody there.

Only her, and a bloodstained key.

She walked.

The warehouse was on the far side of the town as the cold stars finally came out 

and the pavement began to run out of buildings, the facades simpler. Cheaper.

Wispish clouds thronged across giant rock plinths with windows painted on them.

The pavement ran out, not strangling into dirt road or wilderness and weeds 

but suddenly, like the end of a conjuror’s illusion.

Ahead was the warehouse at the centre of a massive gravel lot. Waiting.

The building itself was an ugly squat of corrugated metal and shingle roofing 

with ‘Office 1” painted in bright green lettering on the side.

If there was an Office 2 or an Office 3, Mary couldn’t see them. She found a 

padlock on the latch of a large metal door and pressed the key into it, leaving 

smears of blood on it. The lock clunked to ground, hitting the gravel.

The unlatched door swung up.

Mary stepped forward.

Immediately, as if triggered, lights came on above her.

There were aisles. Hundreds of them, going back as far as her eyes could see. 

One aisle, with an overhanging sign the size of a window frame was labelled

“Breakfast” with countless boxes of Kellogg’s cornflakes, Orange Juice cartons 

and cartons of milk. Mary picked up a box. It was the same as the milk she had 

every morning, labelled UHT. Agatha had always told her it was a brand name, like 

Kellogg’s. Now she wasn’t too sure.

Other lights plinked on above, highlighting ‘Cleaning’, a giant aisle of soap and 

washing up liquid. Mary spotted an empty aisle. The Lye. She heard a noise rattling

 from the back of the warehouse. A howling. 

She walked further, and saw where it was coming from. 

Five yapping and shaking Pomeranians in a giant crate. An ungodly smell was 

coming from within. She pulled a cross bolt and the crate opened. The dogs ran 

out, making a beeline straight towards the door and out into the open night.

She looked above at the sign. ‘Props’.

Props?

Mary looked and saw aisles upon aisles of things. Just things. Empty boxes of 

unbranded foods. Sheathes of paper that just showed food on shelves. Boxes of

Christmas lights. A gigantic section filled with plants, boxes labelled ChemGrass in 

varying sizes and colours between 1cm or 3cm. And behind it, a wooden door.

“The truth’s in a warehouse at the end of town. 

And the truth will set you free.”

She heard it and turned, convinced she’d come face to face with the owner of The 

Little Greengrocer, no longer the smiling man she had once known but something 

awful. A man who looked at you like something had unscrewed inside him and 

wouldn’t screw back in.A spider with paper webs all over his empty store. 

The mess that collapsed on the pavement, come back to haunt her.

But the warehouse was empty. The only sound was the metal door, softly clattering

in the night breeze.

She tried the door handle and found it was unlocked.

There was nothing inside the room.

Only a table.

And a small machine.

She crept towards the odd mechanical device which seemed to hum. It

had two buttons on would could have been some kind of spine.

She pressed one and jumped back with a slight yelp as a light flickered on at the 

front and a large wheel-like disc began to rotate on the thing, feeding through a-

“Our reports suggest failure this time, but we WILL prevail.”

She jumped back. The light at the front of the device had projected out a

picture of a man, a chubby middle aged man dressed as some sort of war general, 

sitting pensively in a chair. Rage filled the maddened eyes behind a pair of opaque 

spectacles.

Could she see her? She hid behind the device before realising

that no, it was a recording. Much like the gramophone records that Mum adored.

Agatha. Mum. She didn’t know. She felt her eyes sting. Nothing made sense.

“We will reign one thousand years, whether there will be failure or not. To this end,

we have divested our economic resources into one major project. Project Black 

Sun.”

“It has been the study of our psychologists through the war that we may not be able 

to displace as many undesirables, so re-education may be vital. We have found 

the use or certain stimuli to work and so we have taken a baby for such training. 

Her name shall be Mary.”

Mary felt her heart leap.

“She will be raised properly, treated as if she were not who she is until she is

is thirty years of age. Ultimately, this may be our only chance. We are running 

out of options as our enemies approach us from every side, including within.”

“We may one day find a world free of those that wish to harm us, but our enemies 

are so great we may have no choice but to hope that we may be granted a second 

attempt at a new dawn. Mary will ultimately be sacrificed, as lambs to the slaughter 

are supposed to be, but before her death she will have offered us a new day.”

The light picture on the wall flickered. The general adjusted his glasses and 

continued.

“I do not wish to see this chapter of our story come to an end, but we have money. 

We have lots of money! We have spent more capital on less ambitious projects!”

Mary looked at the general and could see, as if a sudden realisation, two things. 

One, that the general was addressing a table of men in front of him and two, that 

the man was not well. Like Andrew Shultz, something inside had been switched, 

and nothing on Earth could switch it back. The ferocity, the determinism, a madness 

behind the eyes.

The man opened his mouth to say something more but the light fizzled out. The

wheel kept spinning but let out a light clapping noise as something inside the

spool had gotten free.

She heard noise outside, the crunching of tyres on gravel. Voices outside.

She pulled back agains the wall, her heart jackhammering in her chest as 

flashlights bobbed up and down across the cracked walls. The lights got closer, and

brighter, as did the voices.

With trembling hands she reached into pocket and pulled out-

Pforzheim Zeitung Sunday April 30th 1971      

Young Girl rescued 

from Unknown 

Black Forest Village

Of all the horrors out of the earliest 20th century, 

yesterday saw the worst of its machinations rear its ugly 

head. Two Sheriffs, Alan Bauer and Chris Albrecht, were 

leading a local investigation into unsubstantiated rumour s

that The Black Forest held an odd village. The investigation 

has been underway for months, first started by the omissions 

in the archives and brought to a head by sightings of the 

village, tucked away in the southernmost top of the Forest.

The only information outside of redacted passages and missing 

pages was a singular symbol shown below:

In this village, no buildings are held or described on the 

land registry and the entire region has been missing from the 

German consensus for decades. Upon inspection, the village 

first appeared abandoned by its inhabitants. 

However, upon further review there were bodies found of 

several residents of neighbouring towns which was initially 

puzzling. 

One woman, found dead in a bath tub having committed suicide, 

seemed to have no nationality, no papers and no form of

identification. Further identification of the bodies little 

else, as did investigation into their personal lives. 

Their homes appeared abnormally sparse, containing only

sufficiencies. A bed for sleeping, a hotplate for cooking and 

a simple toilet. Each house, from the outside to the 

upholstery, was absent of any colour apart from a large stack

of brown envelopes, each one marked from a postal code that

has yet to be recognised. 

After this, it was agreed by locals that the village was 

simply Potemkin, though for what use it is still unclear.

Only one person inside has been found alive. A young black 

woman roughly thirty years of age was found shaking inside a 

derelict outbuilding. She wearing a white apron over a modest 

blue shawl of which make we could not identify but her 

fashions seemed like that of the 1940’s. When she spoke, she 

seemed exceedingly youthful and almost infantile. When 

questioned on the bloodstains on her dress, her immediate

concern was of her cleanliness and tried to wipe it down,

muttering through tears about disapproval from her mother, 

visibly distressed. When gently pressed on the matter, she 

gave the name of a ex-military captain, deceased since 1941 

and gave an accurate description of a man found in the 

village having died of a self inflected gunshot wound to the 

head. In the room with her was a projector. Despite the 

efforts of both detectives, neither could get the projector 

to work. However, examination of the film strips showed

a decorated general who has gone missing between May 1944

and September 1945 (Given the limited archival records of

that period, we are unable to find more information other 

than a significant grant was given to him. His location, and 

if he is indeed still alive, is unknown at this time.)

Both detectives managed to coax the woman, calling herself 

Mary, to leave the building and drove her to Pforzheim to 

be medically and psychologically assessed. 

She is thin, to the point of starvation. Aged caustic burns, 

chemical in nature, mark all visible parts of her body, 

though she does not seem aware of this. Her only possessions 

were a simple key in her pocket and a picture she wordlessly

presented to the detectives upon being found that she claimed

belongs to her mother. This story is ongoing and developments

will be published in further columns. 

Both detectives sat in the car. They watched as the wheelchair, probably 

unnecessary, was carted inside. Mary lifted a hand to wave to them, though 

she seemed too frail and thin to move her hand. Then the doors were pushed 

open by an orderly and then she was out of sight.

Chris Albrecht drew out a cigarette and Detective Bauer, his small flip-lighter.

As Alan flipped and sheathes his lighter and Chris took a pull from the cigarette,

they looked out at the midnight raid.

Alan looked down at the greyscale photograph, peppered in blooded thumbprints.

A couple with blue eyes and blonde hair were shrieking with animated joy near a 

beach front. 

“She really thinks that’s her mother? And that’s-

“Her father. Who left for the war before she was born.”

Chris let off a plume of smoke that turned the car into a mist of burning tarry 

nicotine.

He kept coming back to it. The elated face of the woman, looking at her husband 

with joyful abandonment, her cheek nuzzled against the pressed and ironed SS 

uniform.

“I just have so many questions.” said Alan, running a hand through his thinning hair.

“The newspapers will be wanting this, for at least a week.” Chris replied.

Both stared out at the windshield as the rain clattered against it like hailstones until

Chris’s cigarette was a glowing orange nub, yellowing his fingers.

“I just feel so damn bad for her. Locked up and abused, underfed, tortured and 

burned. And then after all that, she comes with us. Trusts us. Gets in the car and 

comes with us. Even waves goodbye to us.”

Chris feels something stir. His eyes widen as the nicotine from the cigarette hits his 

bloodstream, his synapses seem to all snap into place. He stubbed out the 

cigarette on the dash and turned to Alan.

“Alan?”

“What?”

“She wasn’t waving at us.”