Spectator competition winners: animal body parts that will give you nightmares

For the latest assignment, inspired by W.W. Jacobs’s macabre mini masterpiece ‘The Monkey’s Paw’, you were invited to supply a chilling short story featuring an animal’s body part. There were echoes of Jacobs in the entry: in Alan Millard’s malign machinery, for example, and Jennifer Moore’s be-careful-what-you-wish-for theme. Toni Hinckley, Roger Rengold and David Higham all stood out. And Brian Allgar’s tale about Donald Trump, a stallion and a DIY organ-transplant operation was an unlucky loser. The winners below earn £25 each. The extra fiver goes to Frank Upton.

Frank Upton ‘Sea View’. Yes, you could glimpse Morecambe Bay from the gate of the high, gruff, stone farmhouse. She would auction it, of course, with the owners disappeared. The key turned and, with a verdigris smudge on the shoulder of her coat, Alex was inside and engulfed by an insidious miasma of fungal spores. Her torch bleached a gigantic nodding polyp of dry rot. Each room had its own presiding eidolon in the form of a bloated fruiting body.