Flight Paths - David Gaffney

Flight Paths - David Gaffney

‘The old man was still dressed in the black tuxedo and red bow tie he had been wearing on the plane and as he moved towards me over the glistening wet cobbles of the Underbank it was as if he was floating through a parallel universe.’

About Nigthjar Press: Nightjar Press publishes limited edition single short-story chapbooks. Publisher/editor is Nicholas Royle, design by John Oakey. Royle and Oakey collaborated on Joel Lane’s The Earth Wire (1994), from British Fantasy Award-winning Egerton Press, which also published Darklands (1991) and Darklands 2 (1992). Nightjar was founded in 2009. The nightjar – corpse fowl, goatsucker – is a nocturnal bird with an uncanny, supernatural reputation that flies at dusk or dawn as it hunts. It is more often heard than seen, its song a series of ghostly clicks known as a churring. Sylvia Plath, in ‘Goatsucker’, wrote that the ‘Devil-bird’ flies ‘on wings of witch cloth’; David Morley, in ‘Beethoven’s Yellowhammer’, calls it simply ‘Satanic’.