Author: Adam Nevill
Date: 2017-10-30 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Short Stories; Fiction; Anthologies; British Literature; Thriller; Supernatural
Description: These selected terrors range from the speculative to supernatural horror, encompass the infernal and the occult, and include stories inspired by H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell. Hasty for the Dark is the second short story collection from the award-winning and widely appreciated British writer of horror fiction, Adam L. G. Nevill. The author's best horror stories from 2009 to 2015 are collected here for the first time. The hardest journeys in life and death are taken underground. No blackmail is as ghastly as extortion from angels. A swift reckoning often travels in handhel
Publisher: Ritual Limited
Rights: © Adam L. G. Nevill 2016

Free Download

If you like horror stories, missing chapters from an award-winning author’s novels, advice for writing horror, articles on horror fiction and films, and much more, click the link and register on the next page to seize your next Free Book today.

Click here to summon Cries from the Crypt
adamlgnevill.com

Start reading Adam Nevill’s Horror Companion right away

Hasty for the Dark: Selected Horrors
by Adam L. G. Nevill

Published by

Ritual Limited

Devon, England

MMXVII
rituallimitedshop@gmail.com
www.adamlgnevill.com

Stories © Adam L. G. Nevill

This Edition © Ritual Limited

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address above.

Cover design and artwork by Simon Nevill
eBook formatting and conversion by Bluewave Publishing

ISBN 978-1-9997242-2-1[Mobi]

ISBN 978-1-9997242-3-8 [ePub]

Hasty for the Dark / Adam L.G.Nevill. —1st ed.

For my readers, who must endure my horrors each year, but whose contribution to my motivation and morale has been priceless. Thank you all for being so hasty for my darkness.

“What is it that keeps you so wide awake and restless?’

‘The winds,’ she whispered in the dark. For hours she had lain watching the tossing of the trees through the blindless windows. ‘They go walking and talking everywhere tonight, keeping me awake. And all the time they call so loudly to you.’

And this strange whispered answer appalled her for a moment until the meaning of it faded and left her in a dark confusion of the mind that was now becoming almost permanent.’

Algernon Blackwood, ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’

Contents

Author’s Preface

On All London Underground Lines

The Angels of London

Always in Our Hearts

Eumenides (The Benevolent Ladies)

The Days of Our Lives

Hippocampus

Call the Name

White Light, White Heat

Little Black Lamb

Story Notes: About These Horrors

Publication History

Acknowledgements

More Horror Fiction from Adam L. G. Nevill

Author Biography

Author’s Preface

You hold the second published selection of my short fiction. These stories were written between 2009 and 2015, and published between 2010 and 2017. My original aim with Ritual Limited was to anthologise stories that I deemed worthy of single-author titles, in two volumes. So this collection completes the first twenty one years’ worth of my horror and weird short stories, with the final tales written as late as 2015. I intend there to be more stories in the future, but for now these are the last of the stories that I have raised from the darkness and want to keep within the light.

The stories are arranged in the chronological order of their composition, but I think there are subtle differences between the stories in this collection and those in Some Will Not Sleep. Chiefly, the stories in this collection, I would say, are more speculative in tone; the monstrous and supernatural may be expressed more abstractly and enigmatically in this volume.

This collection also presents four tribute stories: conscious homage to other writers within the field of horror. Some Will Not Sleep only contains one story in that vein, ‘Where Angels Come In’.

I was also a more mature writer when these stories were written; I don’t think that makes these stories stronger or weaker, but different, if only in nuanced ways. Readers of both volumes of my selected horrors, however, may be the best judges.

Hasty for the Dark contains nine stories, not the eleven of Some Will Not Sleep. But ‘Call the Name’ came out at near novella length, and my gut tells me that the length of this collection remains comfortable. Too many more pages and the stories risk blurring in the reader’s mind. I draw this hypothesis from my own reading experience.

This volume is also published from the advantageous position of the author and publisher, me, having more experience in an independent publishing capacity. When I cast the first book into the maelstrom of modern independent publishing I was inexperienced as an independent entity. But the appreciation of the first collection provided an auspicious wind that filled my sails as I produced this second anthology. And such was the enthusiasm of readers for the first book, the second is dedicated to you. Ritual Limited would not have risen upon its hind legs without your interest and patronage.

The collection’s title suggests that I might be guilty of indulging myself, because it is taken from one of my recent novels, Under a Watchful Eye – part of a quotation from my character M. L. Hazzard, writer of strange experiences and a cult leader. Looking back on his life, one filled with mental projections into spheres invisible to the naked eye, the nefarious Hazzard concluded that ‘none should be hasty for the dark’. Neither living or entirely dead, the good doctor Hazzard becomes proof of this within his ghastly limbo. But from the safety of our homes, or during our own travels, in these stories we can vicariously experience the travails of those who sought the darkness, or clawed at what they believed to be the light . . .

Manes exite paterni.

Adam L. G. Nevill

Devon, May 2017

On All London Underground Lines

‘There is a good service running on all London Underground lines.’

There are too many of us down here.

‘’Scuse me. ’Scuse me,’ a voice cracked by age says to my left, and a face with dirty teeth is turned towards me.

No. Not now. Please. Can’t you see I’m in a hurry. The smile I show the woman becomes a grimace. I think I’m showing too much gum, like her.

‘I was wondering if you could tell me which way to the Piccadilly Line,’ she says.

Her hair is brittle, the perm a carapace of dead coral that could be snapped off. Her face is deeply lined, as if it’s been put through a pane of glass. I doubt there is any blood in that head. No make-up either. She’s really let herself go. This London lifestyle is hard on people: all the rushing about underground with long hours of pressure and stress between journeys; impossible aspirations for professional advancement in this recession; the ambition to find the right partner and start a life; the need for peer approval, status, glamour, fulfilment. It makes them all mad, then mummifies them. Once the hair’s gone all wiry like this, with tufts of grey and odd patches of orange mixed in, sprouting like the trees on a model railway, it’s all over for a woman too. Then they’re just slow nuisances down here, asking for directions.

I’m too thick-headed with dehydration to think of anything to say to her, or even to form words into a sentence. Inside I’m dry, my joints are stiff and my muscles ache. I need to sleep more. I forget what it was she asked me. Thoughts of bottled water I can buy from a concession at Victoria Station spur me on towards the end of the platform.

A page from a free newspaper catches on my shin, clings and flaps at the same time. Makes me kick that leg out. It won’t come off. I turn around and it slides down and over my shoe.

The woman speaks to another man. ‘’Scuse me, ’scuse me.’ He is sitting down, bent over his lap, on a bench at the rear of the platform. He doesn’t move. Maybe he’s asleep. I suddenly remember her question.

‘Central Line Eastbound,’ I call to the woman. ‘To Holborn. Change there.’

All I can see in her expression is incomprehension. She wants to tell me something. Her question was just a ruse. How can a face be so grey? She returns to her position beside the intercom where passengers can call for assistance. She presses the green button. No one answers. I don’t think the service is working. I have a vague memory of pressing that green button myself, a long time ago, but no one answered.

‘’Scuse me. ’Scuse me,’ she says into it.

From my position on the Central Line Eastbound platform at Oxford Circus, I can see the queue for the Victoria Line Southbound has already begun in the distance. The delay on the Victoria Line must be colossal if they’re all waiting on this platform. I could just fall to my knees and weep.

When I get closer to the queue, I am confronted by a wall of slumped shoulders. Are all of these people hoping to reach the distant platform promised to them on the stained direction board above their bowed heads? It’s hard to tell if they are standing still or shuffling forward one inch at a time. And how long have they been waiting to ascend anyway?

I’ll have to take the Bakerloo Line to Embankment and then pick up the Circle Line to Victoria. If I don’t, at this rate, I’ll be hopelessly late for work. Again.

I can just squeeze up the side of the staircase. None of the pale faces in the crush even turn to look at me; they are committed to their immobile, futile yearning upwards. A smell hangs about the crowd, like old clothes left in airless spaces, and something else: the sweetish, hormoney smell of spoiling meat.

At the top of the staircase, I duck into the tunnel forking left and head for the next staircase, which should lead to the Bakerloo Line. I follow the curved roof, discoloured like a long-empty swimming pool, and arching over a scattering of figures that appear to have come to a halt under the flickering striplights. They are moving, but not progressing, as if lost. Confused perhaps. No time to find out. Fuck them; I have a train to catch.

I duck to miss the wires hanging through an aluminium mesh. Surely that is not safe? I wipe the face of my watch and check the time: 9.15 a.m.

‘Shit. Damn.’

I have fifteen minutes to be at my desk. Not going to happen. I have at least twenty minutes underground ahead of me, and then a fifteen-minute walk from Victoria to the office. At this rate, I’ll be lucky if I’m in by ten. My chest is tight with so much frustration I’ve given myself indigestion, or heartburn. I feel weak. When did I last eat?

The air is hot and thin in the tunnel housing the second staircase. I can smell sweat, and something like old curtains ruined by damp in a garage that I once investigated as a child.

At the foot of the stairs a small woman gets in my way and brings me to a sighing halt. She is trying to lift a suitcase on wheels to the next step. The terrible smell is coming out of her case. Ordinarily I would stop and help, but I am in a rush and can’t waste a moment.

With tight thighs I climb the second flight of stairs and enter a connecting tunnel. This leads to the Bakerloo Line platforms.

The lights are so dim in the tunnel I bump into someone coming the other way. Neither of us apologises and we both rush on, but I can still feel the impression of his bony elbow against my ribs, as he can feel mine in his.

Temporarily bewildered by the collision and bad light, I tread on something that crunches beneath my foot.

Looking into the silty shadows, I see a shape huddled against the wall. I stepped on its leg. I see a flip-flop and some kind of robe extending across the floor from the side of the tunnel. But whatever I stepped on with my entire weight made the sound of a handful of breadsticks being snapped in half. I look down, wince. ‘Sorry.’

Does the head wrapped so tightly in the dirty scarf look up at me, or is it not bothered? In the thin light I’m reminded of a balloon I once covered in wallpaper paste and strips of newspaper at school, before painting it. Within days the balloon was punctured and removed, leaving a dry, hollow head behind that I didn’t want to take home with me, and was glad to see crushed into a bin that smelled of orange peel and pencil shavings.

This head doesn’t have defined eyes either. They look papery and flat in their sharp-edged sockets. But something moves under the robes. An arm extends, I think, and then drops to the grubby tiles upon which the figure sits. The hand clatters as if it is holding dice.

At the end of the tunnel, the platform marked Bakerloo Eastbound is thick with commuters, who don’t seem to be making much progress into the waiting train. I assume they wait for people to alight from the carriages.

Vanilla light leaks from within the stationary train carriages and glows between the crowd’s motionless forms. Against the grimy windows the heads of those passengers lucky enough to be seated at this time of the morning are visible. Some of the heads are dipped to read newspapers and books, or to just look away from all of those crammed around them. Who wants the sudden glare of a stranger’s eyes in the enforced cohabitation of a Tube carriage?

I shuffle into a gap in the crowd waiting on the platform. Make my way around the edge, hoping to see a chink in the bodies through which I can squeeze close to a carriage door. But I can’t get nearer the train because each open door is encircled by a ring of immobile people looking for a similar opportunity to get on board. No one seems to be alighting and there is no room on board for any more bodies. Standing before the open doors, the passengers inside the train look out in silence. No one meets anyone else’s eye.

‘Passengers are reminded to keep their belongings with them at all times.’

The announcement is repeated twice before I lose patience and ask the man closest to me, ‘What’s up?’

But then I see the trickle of a white wire trailing from his ear and disappearing inside his overcoat. iPod. His overcoat has seen better days and I wonder why he doesn’t brush the dandruff from the shoulders.

‘Due to a person under a train the Jubilee Line is suspended in both directions.’

Maybe there is a knock-on effect to the Bakerloo Line; I know how a terrible momentum of malfunction can spread down here.

I turn around and catch the eye of a young woman. I raise my eyebrow and shake my head – the familiar sign of the thwarted London Underground passenger. But her face remains blank. And her skin is in a bad way, and it would be rude to stare for any longer than I already have. She wants no parley anyway; just wants to get going again and is standing still, with all of the others, quietly willing the Bakerloo Line trains to move again.

I look to the digital display to see what that has to impart. It reads NO SMOKING AT ALL IN ANY PART OF THE STATION. Then it changes to inform us that the next train bound for Elephant and Castle is 7 MINS away.

Oh, enough of this; I can’t stand here for hours staring at a stationary train. This one will have to go and, when the next train arrives, everyone already clustered at the edge of the platform will get on first. I’ll have no chance.

I bump and sidle and squeeze my way through the silent, fixated crowd and go back into the tunnel to check progress on the Victoria Line. Maybe the crush will have cleared by now.

Back inside the darkened connecting tunnel three indistinct figures are walking very slowly in front of me, and abreast of each other so that no one can pass in either direction. Tourists, no doubt. No etiquette. Ambling in rush hour, unsure of where they are going. Just blithely unaware of the needs of those who actually work in the city. Walk on the left, for fuck’s sake, in single file. The whole system would fail if we all took this attitude.

I try to step around them but end up on my toes, overbalancing and clipping the heels of the figure on the left. She must be infirm or elderly because the merest touch of my toe against her heel makes her stumble forward. She raises her arms on either side of her hunched body, like she’s trying to keep her feet on ice.

Have I hurt her? Her? Is it a woman, with those thin legs ending in some kind of white sports shoe? She’s wearing a skirt too, I think. It’s hard to see. The other two stop and turn their heads to the side to watch their companion totter like a child taking baby steps away from a parent’s hands. They say nothing.

‘Sorry. Please. Excuse me,’ I say, but the two upright figures don’t react beyond turning their faces, that I cannot see properly, towards me. I sense animosity within the silhouettes of their heads, or defiance, and possibly outrage at being rushed.

Am I being inconsiderate, or unnecessarily aggressive? I pause to examine my behaviour. But then they all start milling about on the spot as if the interruption or change in direction is disorientating for them. One of them looks at the ceiling as if trying to remember a distant event in its life, and sighs. With slow and deliberate movements, they seem to spread further apart, while still leaving no easy way through. I reach out to help the figure I have knocked aside.

‘Sorry,’ I say again.

But I quickly pull back my hand when my fingers encircle something hard, but no thicker than a flute, inside the thin sleeve of a blouse. And even though the tunnel is only illumined by the ambient light spilling from the Bakerloo Line platform, I am sure the figure I have touched has just bent forward at the waist and tried to bite my retreating hand. I hear the sound of something clacking, like two domino pieces in a wooden box. I step away.

All three of them have turned to watch me.

‘You’re walking three abreast in rush hour. Jesus!’

I push through them and continue on. Behind me, there is a moan, a shuffle of clothing and then a slapping sound like the palm of a hand on a ceramic surface. Back there someone is moaning too.

I turn around at the end of the short tunnel and peer back, guiltily, into the darkness I have emerged from. Against the distant semicircle of white light at the far end of the tunnel, I can only see one of the figures standing upright. Its head is tatty, like an old man with unkempt hair grown long at the sides.

I go past the squat woman with the big suitcase on wheels; her luggage is still on the first step and she’s just staring at it now.

Tough shit. Why bring something that size down here? I’m supposed to put my back out heaving it up the stairs? Those cases are always heavy enough to be carrying an anchor, or an anvil. You might be on holiday, but some of us have to get to work, dear.

The crowd eager to get on the Victoria Line Southbound are still as they were when I passed them minutes before. Still huddled together, with their heads lowered, the wedge of bodies stretches from one side of the staircase to the other. The only difference I can spot now is that they are packed even tighter together and a sense of brittle impatience has risen to the point when someone will soon start shoving.

Maybe I should return to the Bakerloo Line East platform and walk to its farthest end. Why didn’t I think of that before? At the far end of that platform I will be able to cut through to the Victoria Line Southbound, and then arrive on the opposite end of the platform to the crush on the stairs here.

I turn about and re-enter the darkened tunnel. Mercifully, there is no sign of the three old figures I confronted. And anyway, in the lightless tunnel, they will not recognise me as I pass. But halfway along I become aware of voices close to the floor. A muttering. I look down and in the thin light I see the suggestion of a group of bodies huddled together and moving slowly. They are pressed against the wall and on all fours, groping forward as if searching for something that has been dropped.

Nothing has changed back on the Bakerloo Line platform either. The crowd of thwarted commuters standing about the open doors of the stationary train has not moved. Those I brush past at the rear of the platform mumble and totter.

Inside the carriages, the same indifferent faces stare out of the same open doors, arrogant as if they are members of a superior social class because they are actually inside the train, while those on the platform can only look in at them with envious eyes.

No one inside the train moves at all. They are perfectly motionless but still expectant, like manikins; dishevelled parodies of people in formal working attire, standing under the dusty yellow lights of a warehouse.

All of the benches at the rear of the platform are full of those tired of standing. Some lean into their neighbours, mouths open, eyes vacant. With no room on the seats, I am soon stepping over those sitting on the dirty tiled floor. Men in two-piece suits sit with their legs thrust out, socks showing, laces undone. They have such thin ankles. Scuffed briefcases are clutched by white fingers.

Ahead I can hear the monotonous beat of a drum. A sound too hollow and feeble, like something old and worn in the music room of an impoverished school.

A busker makes the noise. He stands at the mouth of the interconnecting tunnel from the Bakerloo Line South to the Victoria Line South, no doubt getting in everyone’s way.

An elderly man, stooped over. He wears a black overcoat that once complemented a smart suit. His feet are wrapped in dirty bandages and he steps from one foot to the other, in time to the beats of a stained tambourine that he strikes with a wooden peg. His hands resemble cold chicken with see-through skin. The knuckles are so swollen I doubt he could manage anything but the hopeless banging of the wooden stick against the tambourine.

What I can see of his head is the purple colour of a hairless baby mammal, save for a crown of white wisps at the base of his skull that tendril over the collar of his overcoat. It must be the light that discolours his skin, or alcohol. An enamelled mug is positioned before his shuffling, side-to-side stepping feet. I peek inside and see the dull brass of a twopence coin.

Ahead of me in the connecting tunnel, a group of scruffy people walk in a rocking side-to-side fashion. They barely move forward, as if they are caught in the busker’s primitive rhythm. I fall into the same pattern of steps, and then wrench myself out of it, feeling hateful.

I strike out for the end of the tunnel. Pick up my pace until I am nearly running to the Victoria Line platform. The drumming follows me.

Under the arch to the Victoria Line platform, a figure is slumped on the floor. Looks like a woman has fainted. I can’t see much beside a hand, liver-spotted with age. It trembles. Her body seems to be shivering too, or is she crying? I don’t have time to stop and check, and there are two people bent over her anyway, talking to her, so she is being looked after.

As I rush past the commotion, the Samaritans sound as if they are making the cooing sounds of people feeding their pets.

‘Passengers are reminded to stand behind the yellow line.’

The Victoria Line Southbound platform is crammed with commuters at this end too. Every one of them has turned their head to the left and is staring into the dark tunnel from which the train will come. Their mouths hang open and are as dark inside as the tunnel they watch. They must all be hoping to see the distant headlights of the train, and are desperate to feel that sudden unnatural wind against their unsmiling faces, and to hear the distant scream of the tracks while static snaps beneath their soles.

There are far too many people on this platform for it to be safe. As I squeeze down the rear of the platform, I have a sense that a few figures have dropped from the edge and on to the tracks. It must be an illusion because I hear no sound of them landing on the gravel and rails below, and those figures that appeared to topple didn’t even flail or put their arms out.

Everyone here must be worn out by the wait because no one is talking at all for the entire length of the crowded platform. I look up in desperation at the electronic information board. The glass could do with a good clean, because the amber letters and digits are hard to make out under the dross. Eventually I figure out its information: ALL STATIONS TO BRIXTON – 1 MIN.

I wait for a lot longer than one minute, my head turned to the left, with all of the others, staring at the black mouth of the empty tunnel. I wait long enough for my neck to ache and for someone to faint further down the platform. I hear what sounds like a sack full of sticks rattling to the floor. There follows a brief commotion as if the fainter has taken at least three people down with them.

My eyes start to burn and smart and I have so little energy I do wonder if I should just stand here for a while longer and try to regain some strength.

‘Due to a signal failure at Blackfriars, the District Line is suspended in both directions. Passengers are advised to seek other forms of transport.’

I close my eyes for a while. My chest tightens, my teeth grind. I need to make a call to the office to tell them that I just can’t get through.

I’ll have to go up to street level to get a signal on my phone. And I’m getting nowhere here; it’s time for a change of plan.

The Northern Line.

I need to get out of this station and walk down Oxford Street to Tottenham Court Road station. From there I can travel south on the Northern Line to Embankment and pick up the Circle Line to Victoria.

I bump my way from the Victoria Line platform, apologising quietly as I go, but no one acknowledges me. I re-enter the tunnel between the Victoria and Bakerloo lines. The busker is still stepping from side to side on his dirty cloth feet and those in the tunnel seem unaware that they are performing basic, imbecilic, dance steps to the beat of his filthy tambourine.

I sidewind through them, and then rush through another arch that leads into another tunnel that also seems to have problems with its lights. These flicker, cut out, then sputter back to life for a few seconds. I look up and spot a sign that says WAY OUT.

A tall blonde woman strides out of the darkness toward me. She is wearing a tight-fitting suit. The tipped heels of her stilettos click-clack a staccato that fills the tunnel and echoes beyond it. Even in the unstable light I can see the definition of her sharp bone structure, and the imperious cast of a face set with a purpose no greater than self-importance. Some eye-candy nonetheless and something to relieve this interminable search underground. I get ready to discreetly admire her before she strides away.

As she draws level the flickering light strikes her. But under closer scrutiny she is not the young firefox that I presumed she was. With that posture, that chin held so high, those cold beautiful eyes, that tight tapering skirt and those feet mounted on pedestals with heels like blades, how could I have been so wrong?

Her hair is not blonde, but white. The dead white of the pantomime wig. That haughty catwalk face is actually more like a skull too, with aged parchment stretched across it; a dry surface freshly painted with a palette more suited to the circus clown than the city girl.

Appalled, I peer closer and see a shrivelled ear, a neck loosely papered with brownish skin. She must be some kind of drug addict or former vamp with an eating disorder, because I have never seen legs so thin. The manner in which her bracelets clatter about her bony wrists is disquieting.

The suit she wears was once chic but is now a dirty relic, and she must have recently sat in something foul, because the scent of things left forgotten in the moist spaces beneath old houses drifts from her stained clothing. And that wig, or whatever it is that she has upon her mottled head, smells of something recently burned.

The woman teeters down to the drummer, and before I turn my head I suffer the illusion that she has thrown her thin arms into the air, as if with joy, and shaken that terrible head about.

I’m so tired now my breath is too loud about my own head and if I don’t drink water soon I am sure I will hallucinate and then faint. I think of the shrivelled organs of Pharaohs inside canopic jars up at the British Museum. That’s what my insides must look like.

‘Due to a security alert at Barons Court, the Piccadilly Line is suffering severe delays in both directions.’

Illuminated signs read WAY OUT all the way to the broken escalators. A loosely assembled crowd stands and stares upward in disbelief at the motionless iron stairs. Halfway up there is a seated figure, surrounded by bags. He’s either collapsed or sat down with exhaustion, and isn’t moving at all. You see a lot of that down here.

Beside the escalator, a temporary sign indicates that we should PLEASE USE THE STAIRS, referring to the adjacent spiral staircase ascending to street-level. There is an additional warning that 139 STEPS will have to be climbed to leave the underground by this route.

I bend double and place my hands on my knees. Can my journey get any worse? And this is not the first time this has happened; I have lost count of the times this scenario or a similar one have repeated themselves. The infrastructure seems to have collapsed in this city. And yet we still pay these prices.

I begin my ascent, slowly, with one hand clutching the cold rail on the inside of the staircase. With a monotonous and solemn slap of feet, a stream of people descend from above. Others join me in my ascent and stand too close behind me, as if to hurry me upward. Round and round we all go.

I mostly look down at my shoes, which need a good clean and polish. The toes are scuffed like the shoes of a schoolboy who kicks stones about a building site. Even this exhausted and thirsty and tired, I’m still able to feel shame at how I’ve let my footwear go. But with all of this travelling and the hours I work, I don’t have the headspace to even engage with such chores.

And when I do look up, the grey and miserable faces and the expressions so long with worry that solemnly bob down the spiral staircase towards me just lower my spirits even further. Why do we go through this? Have we forgotten what quality of life is? No one is smiling on the stairs.

I stop a few times to get my breath and there are moans of irritation from those close on my heels. Inside my suit, my back is wet with sweat. It is the last of my body’s moisture leaking out. Little white dots speckle my vision. I feel dizzy. It passes.

When I eventually reach the top of the staircase, I trip over my own scruffy feet and stumble into the gassy yellow light of the station entrance. Can I not even walk in a straight line any more?

The ticket office is in darkness and I can’t see the station assistants. On the other side of the turnstiles, a thin, bald man feeds coins into the ticket machine. He watches the coins ejected into the refund slot, and is mesmerised by the sound of a seaside amusement arcade. He feeds the coins in again. The shoes he is wearing are far too big for his feet. They are a tan colour and clash with his navy suit. They have either come from a different decade or have been taken from another man’s feet.

A long queue has formed behind him. A woman looks over his shoulder and bites her bottom lip, as if impatient to see what it is he has won from the machine.

A thick huddle of commuters stand at the foot of each of the two staircases leading up to street level. They are silent, but I can tell they are impatient by the way they stretch their necks upwards and by how their mouths hang open.

I swipe myself through the turnstile and go and join the back of the crowd. ‘What now?’ I say out loud and surprise myself with the volume of my own voice. No one is listening to me.

At the top of the stairs the steel grille is down. An emergency measure designed to regulate the flow and volume of crowds when too many people crowd into the station during rush hour. There is a large crowd up there. Between a backdrop of dark sky and the people on the stairs queuing to leave the station, the silhouettes of many heads are visible, close together. Pale fingers press through the grille from the other side. Commuters are trying to get inside the station. They have raised their arms to hang on to the gate.

I pause to marvel at how dark it remains outside, long into these London winter mornings. I thought the sun would be up by now.

But this is just hopeless; no one can get in or out of this station here. I march across to the ticket office. Nothing clearly visible behind the glass of either counter. There might be someone in the chair. I’m not sure. Maybe someone in the murk, slumped over or looking at the floor between their legs.

‘Look. I need to get to Victoria. Is anything working today?’

I notice the sign for POSITION CLOSED at the foot of the glass screen.

I return to the turnstiles. In the free newspaper stand, a few yellowing copies of the Metro remain. RECESSION ENTERS EIGHTEENTH YEAR shouts the headline. Those must be weeks old because I remember that headline a long time ago. Or do I? Maybe it was something very similar.

I swipe myself through the turnstiles, run to the broken escalators descending to the Victoria Line Southbound. I clatter down the steps, losing my balance just before the bottom to knock aside a sign informing people to use the stairs.

I’m going to have to find some water.

I take a different tunnel that promises to deliver me back to the Central Line platforms. Central Line West will bring me out at Marble Arch. I can get any number of buses from there to Victoria Station.

Inside this tunnel is a cleaner, a tall, spindly man in a luminous bib, pushing a mop at the floor. He’s cordoned off the affected area with a barrier of canvas tape stretched between four plastic poles. Someone has dumped a pile of rags in a London Underground tunnel. Or perhaps this is the nest of the homeless, one recently abandoned. The Tube mice are certainly active about it; scraps of food have been left inside the rubbish. My mouth fills with saliva.

A woman in high heels leans over the barrier tape. Her head is bowed and the thin wrist that emerges from the sleeve of her suit jabs a bony hand at the grubby pile on the tiles as if she has spotted something of value.

I rush past them; who has the time to mess about like this on their way to work? The lack of urgency down here never ceases to amaze me. I just wish everyone would damn well step aside; their thoughts and movements are as slow as the transport service we’ve all come below to use. Like this fellow here, drunk at this time. On all fours and dragging that dirty sheet of cardboard behind him. Stand up straight, man! Tuck your bloody shirt in!

The chap ahead of him is moving much faster, faster than me, and he’s on crutches. Swinging those wooden poles back and forth and moving like he’s on stilts. But when a man has lost that much hair on top, he really should get his hair trimmed at the sides. The top of his head looks like a greasy eggshell with freckles, fringed with that wispy stuff that hangs off tree branches in swamps. He makes me shudder.

At the end of this passage the lights are out in the arch. Something rushes across the mouth of the exit and catches a bit of the flickering illumination from the one working striplight. Disorientation must account for what I think has crossed the arch: something moving on all fours, quick as a dog, thin as a greyhound. Couldn’t have been a dog; there had been a tie about the wizened throat.

At the Central Line Eastbound platform I’m exhausted. My feet burn, my throat is cracked; I doubt I can speak.

A few others seem to be taking time out on this platform. They are all packed on to the benches. They’ve had enough. Anyone can see that. They can barely sit up straight, and those that are able to keep their spines upright are just resting their heads against the dirty walls, eyes closed, mouths open. In this dim brownish light they resemble the inhabitants of an ossuary under a cathedral, or something the Allies found at the end of the war, piled behind barbed wire.

I put my briefcase on the floor beside a crowded bench and sit upon it. I’m too tired to feel any shame at sitting on my arse like this, as if I’m some kind of crazy art student. I laugh out loud. It echoes.

My briefcase could do with being replaced too; I can see the metal frame poking from two corners. The case was a present.

A shoelace has come undone. I don’t have the strength to tie it. I just need to sit here and get my breath back. Close my eyes. Calm down.

Something brushes my face. I snap awake, sticky eyelids tearing apart. Surely I couldn’t have seen a shape slipping over the edge of the platform to the tracks. So whoever just touched me must have made off pretty quick down a side tunnel.

Did I miss an announcement? My head feels heavy and my neck aches.

‘Due to overcrowding at Finsbury Park we have severe delays in both directions on the Victoria Line.’

The directional board is still promising a train to Ealing Broadway in one minute, like it was when I got here. I’m pretty sure a train pulling up would have snapped me out of a doze. No one has moved from the bench.

I get to my feet, reminded of how the suppleness has gone from my knee joints.

The billboard on the other side of the platform is advertising mineral water, and even though the giant bottle of water on the poster is so stained by soot that it looks undrinkable, it still makes me groan at the idea of liquid passing my lips. To my shame, I even shake an old can of Coca-Cola that I spot under the bench. But the tin is as dry as the skin of the chap sitting above it, who seems to be just as puzzled by the same crossword clue that he was staring at when I sat down a couple of minutes ago.

I pass through the short interconnecting tunnel between Central Line platforms Eastbound and Westbound.

‘There is a good service running on all London Underground lines.’

Oh, at last. Maybe we’ll all get somewhere now. The morning’s service has been a damn disgrace.

I pull back the sleeve of my overcoat to check the time. Jesus, I must have rubbed the cuff of my shirt sleeve against something filthy.

When I wipe the face of my watch and check the time I see that it’s already 9.15 a.m. That gives me fifteen minutes to be at my desk. Not going to happen. No chance. I’ll be bloody lucky if I get there for ten.

The Angels of London

Still a little surprised such things were tolerated in the city, Frank stared at the mess.

At the base of the lamppost on the street corner, rubbish bags spilled their entrails across the pavement. Someone had once dumped a bin bag. Others followed their example until a pyramid of refuse rose up the lamppost to waist-height. The core of the structure had since rotted as if the body of the king that the pyramid honoured was poorly embalmed. A mattress had been thrown against the pile too. Rusted springs were visible and watermarks formed continents on the quilted fabric. Now a broken pushchair, with canvas rags hanging from the aluminium frame, augmented the installation. A disturbing element of squalor and human fragility, something London’s occupants became immune to or a part of. He wasn’t sure which of the two paths he would follow: indifference or collaboration.

He thought of submitting the entire mess to the Turner Prize but never had the energy to smile at his own joke. And he had no one to share it with.

Above his head the pub’s sign creaked. It was wooden, the mounting of iron nearly rusted through. He wondered how long it would stay up there. It was amazing how many old and broken things just kept going in the city.

The actual picture of The Angel of London was painted on the wood inside the corroded frame. The paint had weathered and given the picture a wholly different aspect from the one originally intended. With its scaly-looking face, tight skullcap and wreath of leaves, the angel now resembled something Francis Bacon might have painted. Whenever Frank saw the hideous peeling face he knew he was home.

The pub was dead, had been closed for years. Through the grimy window panes he could see the silhouettes of wooden chairs placed upside down upon tables, a bar that resembled an unused plinth inside a dusty tomb, and a poster for a long-expired competition connecting rugby to Guinness.

Indicating a high turnover of tenants in the rooms upstairs, a mass of uncollected post was slung upon a shelf inside the door next to the bar. Why was the old post not forwarded to past residents? Or did the current tenants operate a wilful resistance to the outside world? Few of his questions about people in the city were ever answered.

There was no post for Frank. Someone was taking his mail; not even junk reached him.

After four months as a tenant in a room above the derelict bar, Frank acknowledged that he was vanishing from the world entirely. Becoming a thing withered, gaunt and grey, shabby and less substantial. Anxiety about money, finding the right kind of work, his future, isolation – all of it was intent on reducing him to a ghost. And one that only a few dimly remembered.

He wondered if his image in photographs was disappearing too. If he didn’t find a better job and get out of the building, he imagined himself disintegrating into a stain on the murky wallpaper of his wretched room. He’d already disappeared from the social radar of his two friends. A relocation to London to catch up professionally still hadn’t landed him a job anywhere near the film industry. His plummet to the bottom had been immediate.

London had golden rules. Never take the first accommodation you view, but he had done so because the room above The Angel in Dalston was the only place he’d found on Gumtree at £100 a week, all that he could afford. Never take the first job you’re offered, but he had done so because the one grand he came to town with was gone in a month. He worked security in Chelsea, on shifts, which was nowhere near Dalston. Poorly paid jobs for the semi-skilled were plentiful, but affordable accommodation in the first three zones was scarce enough to not exist.

Frank wearily made his way up through the dimly lit dilapidation to his room. Familiar smells engulfed him: damp carpet warmed by radiators, cooking oil, an overflowing kitchen bin.

When he reached the first floor, Granby was waiting outside his room.

Frank jumped. ‘Fuck’s sake.’

Fright subsided into loathing. Granby knew what time he came in from work, had surreptitiously learned his movements by watching him from inside the building. When a tenant came out of their room, if he listened carefully, Frank would always hear the click of Granby’s door on the third floor. Like a spider behind a trapdoor the landlord appeared to do little but watch his captives. Frank had never heard the murmur of a television, or music, coming from Granby’s attic room; had never seen him prepare food in the sordid kitchen either, or even leave the building. The landlord was so thin he didn’t appear to eat.

‘Right, mate,’ came the whispery voice out of the gloom. Granby’s bony face, watery eyes and peg teeth were barely visible. The figure sniffed, was always sniffing hard up one nostril. Frank knew what was coming.

‘Need to speak wiv you ’bout the rent, mate.’ Granby had no conversation beyond insincere small talk and attempts to scratch money from the people who barely existed within the building.

Frank had come to wonder whether The Angel was an abandoned building that utility companies had forgotten to disconnect. Maybe Granby had assumed proprietorship of the rooms upstairs. Whatever was going on was some kind of dodge, and it contributed to his doubt that Granby had any right to charge rent for the squalid rooms. He’d once attempted to start a conversation with Granby, but the shifty creature never revealed any details about himself, or the property, beyond claiming that The Angel had been in the hands of his family for years.

After deductions from his wage packet, Frank took home nine hundred pounds a month. Nearly half of that went to Granby. Food took another two hundred, and credit-card debt one hundred. That left a hundred for transport. Frank saved as much of the remaining hundred as possible for a deposit on a room he hoped would be less wretched than the one he lived in at The Angel.

ATM machines informed him he had saved three hundred pounds, but Frank hadn’t seen a bank statement in four months. He suspected Granby was opening his mail to learn about his finances. Which would mean the lies he had told Granby about his savings his landlord would now be wise to. Granby must know about the one hundred he saved each month and wanted it for himself.

The small figure moved in front of his door as Frank released his keys from his jacket pocket. ‘Ain’t just you, mate. Times is hard for all of us. But fings go up, like. For everyone.’ The weasel’s harassment was predictable.

He had no idea how old Granby was. He could have been thirty or sixty. His movements were agile, his voice wasn’t aged, but his face was worn. The eyes had seen too much. The spirit inside them was blunted and only occasionally enlivened by feral intent when money was being discussed; acquiring money was his only purpose. The same vulpine self-interest applied to the teeming millions in the city.

But what was most remarkable, or memorable, about Granby’s features was that they reminded Frank of a particular kind of working-class face: the type you saw leering out of a black and white photograph taken during the Second World War. Granby’s face was not contemporary at all. But the white sport leisure wear and curly hair were utterly incongruous and made Granby look ridiculous. He was like a person from the forties masquerading as someone from the eighties.

‘That right?’

Frank’s irritation cooled when he detected a tension in Granby’s wiry arms, and a narrowing around his eyes. When angry, Granby paled in a way that was horrible to behold. Resistance to Granby took things to a new level, quickly. When his loquacious wheedling for money fell flat, physical confrontation never seemed far away. Frank suspected there was a great capacity for violence in the man. Granby communicated the sense that everything was at stake, that he would be ruined if Frank didn’t meet his demands.

Frank intended to leave The Angel anyway, and within four weeks. But four weeks was an eternity in the same building as a man determined to make life a condition of incremental blackmail, with insinuations of terrible consequences if his extortion was not placated. But, for once, Frank’s inherent caution around unstable people took a back seat. ‘We’ve been through this before, Granby. There’s no shower. One bathroom. I’m washing in a sink.’

Granby didn’t like the disadvantages of The Angel being pointed out to him by the tenants. ‘Everyone has to put up wiv it, mate. That’s life. What you fink you should be in, some top hotel for a hundred a week? You is having a laugh, mate.’

‘What improvements have been made that can justify another rent hike?’

Granby was also a firm believer that if a conversation remained one-sided for long enough, then the tenant would see his point. His Cockney voice rose to drown Frank out. He started bouncing on his heels like a wiry puppet, or something much worse: a bantam-weight boxer. ‘I gotta look after my family. My family’s the most important fing in the world to me. If our personal financial situation is freatened, I tell you something, mate, I don’t know what I’d do. What I’m capable of.’

Frank had never seen any evidence of this ‘family’. The hard-pressed ‘family’ had initially been used as a sob story during the second month of his tenancy, when Granby first asked him for more money, with tears in his doleful eyes. Frank had only enjoyed one harassment-free month to get settled in. Something that also stank of a well-rehearsed tactic.

‘What fucking family?’

Granby’s fists clenched; Frank sensed they would feel like wooden hammers against his face. He lowered his voice, but kept an edge in his tone. ‘There are four tenants in this building all paying you four hundred quid a month. For what? Half the lights don’t work. The furniture’s either totally wrecked or barely serviceable. My post isn’t delivered. Or is it? And you’ve got nearly two grand a month coming in. For what?’

‘What you mean, two grand a mumf? Vat’s got nuffin’ to do wiv you.’ Granby started walking backwards and forwards. He took his white tracksuit top off. Rolled his head around his shoulders as if preparing for physical exercise. ‘Nuffin. Nuffin. That’s personal. Now you is going too far.’

‘There’s no inventory. No contract. Cash-in-hand. Do you even have a right to collect money on this place?’

‘What you talkin’ about? Eh? You’re freatening me? You is freatening my family. You need to watch your mouf. I’ve warned you.’

‘I’m leaving. This last month’s rent comes out of my deposit.’

‘You’re going nowhere. Free months’ notice. We agreed.’

Sleep deprivation from night shifts, three hours a day travelling on the bus to and from work with a dark shabby room at the end of the journey, the ever-present sight of his clothes on the floor because there was no chest of drawers or wardrobe, the endless trips to the laundrette, the indifference of strangers, being dead on his feet, never having any money, the fidgeting anxiety that accompanies failure like a crowd of persistent children, the cold terror about his future: all of this rose through him and became a terrible pressure. It would soon release in a steam he could no longer cap.

‘Agreed? We agreed one hundred a month! In my second month you try and hike the rent twenty-five quid a week. So am I to stay here for as long as you decide, while you keep upping the rent? And making threats? Do I subjugate my life to your “family”’s financial security? You don’t scare me, Granby. One visit to the police, the DHSS, whoever, and your little operation’s over. I bet you’re signing on too, eh? You’ve not done a day’s work in your life, have you?’

By the time he’d finished, Frank knew he’d gone too far; he’d tripped every wire in the little man’s mind by using off-piste words like ‘subjugate’, by sub-legal diction like ‘rights’, and adopting a sarcastic tone about the man having a family. There was no place for a concept like fairness at The Angel. The Angel was an extortion racket, run like a prison, and the tenants were inmates.

Granby circled him. ‘I gotta go. I gotta go. Get out my fuckin’ way.’ He made for the stairs. ‘You is taking me for a cunt. A cunt! There’ll be trouble. There’ll be trouble if I don’t go right now.’

At first, Frank assumed Granby was all mouth about not being held responsible for his actions, and was possibly backing off. And he felt triumphant as if a bully had been faced down, a petty tyrant dethroned. But Granby’s bloodless face and glassy eyes, the muttering of the lipless mouth, the repetition, also suggested that Frank had committed a terrible offence.

Granby had just barked at him as if he were less than human. ‘Cunt’ wasn’t just a word to Granby, it was a statement of an unfairly conferred status, a belittling judgement. Frank’s protest would surely be countered with the most severe reprisal. Frank understood this in a heartbeat. Once you’d taken someone like Granby for a cunt, anything could be done to you. That’s what the word meant down here. In places like The Angel.

He also had a suspicion that direct action, one-on-one, might not be Granby’s style either. Frank’s neck prickled at the thought of his throat being slit in the night. Or maybe the curly head would move swiftly through the dark, with peg teeth grinning, before the steel went deep into the meat as Frank bent over the sink to wash his armpits.

What a time to realise this now. Frank’s words could not be taken back or ameliorated.

Granby had keys to his room.

He should leave now.

But what about his stuff? If he abandoned his CDs and books they were gone for ever. They were all he owned. And where could he go? Were there any couches he could borrow? Three nights in a London hotel was his limit, so what came after?

‘Look, Granby. Hang on.’

Granby was on the staircase and rising to the second floor. Was he going back to his room to get a weapon? Recent news stories of people burned alive, of acid thrown in faces, of knifings, closed Frank’s throat and made him feel sick. He wanted to make amends and hated himself for being craven.

Granby’s feet bumped up two flights of stairs. At the top of the house a door slammed.

Frank let himself into his room.

In less than a minute there came a gentle tapping at his locked door. Sat immobile on the end of his bed, Frank swallowed but failed to find his voice.

‘Frank. Frank.’ It was the Irishman, Malcolm. An old decorator with haunted astigmatic eyes, who hung off the payphone in the entry most evenings, muttering into the plastic handset, usually in defence of his involvement in some protracted dispute that Frank only heard one side of. The two men were on nodding terms, but rarely spoke despite sharing the first floor. London was that kind of place. The other tenants of The Angel were either uninterested in him or wary of a new arrival.

Frank approached the door. ‘What?’ he whispered back.

‘Can I speak with you? It’s all right, Granby’s back in his room.’

The insinuation that he was hiding from Granby behind a locked door made Frank ashamed. He opened the door. His hand trembled on the handle.

‘Can I speak with you?’ The man’s eyes looked in two directions and the skin of his face was yellow-grey from smoking. The first floor reeked of hand-rolled cigarettes, amongst other things.

Frank let his neighbour inside, closed the door and locked it as quietly as he could.

The small man spent a few seconds looking about the room, studying the walls. There were no pictures, just wallpaper thick with paint the colour of sour milk. There was little else to look at, if you discounted unpacked boxes of possessions, and the incongruous office chair before a sash window that overlooked a yard, the space filled with broken furniture.

Without looking at Frank, the man said, ‘Oh, you’re all right, son. For a few days. And he won’t come down to sort you out. Don’t operate like that here.’

‘Then how does it operate?’ The question was out of his mouth before he could consider it.

Malcolm turned to face him. Frank didn’t know which eye to look at. He chose the one that wasn’t dead and bulgy and always directed at the floor. ‘You want to be careful, son. You don’t want to mess with Granby. You might have a day or two to straighten this out, but not much more.’

‘I’m not letting him rob me. We agreed a hundred a week. He tried –’

‘I know. I heard.’

‘So?’ Frank held out his hands, questioningly, at the man’s presence in his dismal room. If he’d just come to reiterate Granby’s threats he might as well leave.

‘Take it from one who knows, my friend, you best pay the man what he asks to avoid trouble. Serious trouble. He’s very upset now.’

Frank opened his mouth to protest. Malcolm held up one thick-fingered hand. ‘You have to adapt. You’re with the Angels now, my friend.’ The man’s use of ‘with’ confused Frank, as if his neighbour was suggesting he’d joined a community established around angels. ‘With the angels’ was also a phrase that had an uncomfortable association with death.

‘I’m leaving. So there won’t be any trouble.’

Malcolm smiled. ‘Oh, they won’t let you leave, son.’

‘What do you mean, “they”? Granby can’t stop me.’

‘No, true. But they’ll come and find you to collect the debt.’

‘There is no debt.’

‘In your mind, son. But not in theirs.’

‘What? Who’s they?’

‘It’s been decided. See if it hasn’t, my friend.’

‘This is crazy.’

‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You’ve a good heart, son. I can tell. So I’ll go and –’

‘No. I’m not mixed up in anything. I took a room. A piece of shit in a broken-down building. And now I’m leaving it because I am being threatened. Simple.’

‘I wish it were, son. But at The Angel there are different rules, ones we’ve all had to learn.’

‘This is getting silly.’

‘Oh, no, son, it’s deadly serious. You can trust me on this. I shouldn’t even be here. There’ll be hell comin’ down those stairs if he knows I’m in here, talking like this.’ The way the man mentioned the stairs made Frank’s legs feel weak.

‘He’s bullying you all. Robbing you.’

‘Oh, it ain’t just Granby. No, no, son. It’s those he has the ear of, if you know what I mean.’

‘I don’t.’

The man whistled between what was left of his brown teeth and raised an eyebrow. ‘Granby works for others. A bad lot. Very bad. He’s the last of your worries.’

‘What, loan-sharks?’

‘No, no. Worse than that, my friend. A family. A very old London family. Granby don’t have much say in things. He just does favours for them.’

‘You mean organised crime. Like the Krays?’

‘No, son.’

‘I’m really not following. I appreciate the heads-up, but –’

‘I’ll tell you what. You give me the money and I’ll go and see Granby about the disagreement.’

‘What?’

‘Before it gets out of hand.’

Frank shook his head. The old scratcher was trying to get a cut of Granby’s scam. More threats from Granby delivered by a patsy. ‘No way. I’m not giving you any money. I’m not frightened of him.’

Malcolm smiled at the lie. ‘It’s no place to go taking a stand, my friend. Not here. Won’t get you anywhere. I’ve seen what happens. And as I said, it ain’t him you need to worry about.’ Malcolm dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘It’s them others he’s got up there with him at the top of the house. They’s running things. Always have done. Granby’s a go-between. But he has their ear, like I said.’

Frank swallowed the lump in his throat that tried to shut his voice off. ‘He’s alone up there. Surely?’

Malcolm shook his head, his expression grave. ‘No, my friend. You don’t want to go believing things like that. And it’s best to keep them up there. Keep the peace, like.’

‘So . . . what . . . what do you mean? They attack people, this family?’

‘When Granby came here he brought a bad lot with him. An old family that’s been in this city a very long time. Long before Granby and most of them out there.’ The man waved one hand at the windows. ‘This used to be a different place, I can tell you. Was once called The Jerusalem. Clean. Good sort of people lived here. We used to drink in that bar when it was open. Even women lived here. But there’s not been a woman here in fifteen years. Not since they come and changed the name. It all went downhill when Granby brought them here.’

‘Fifteen years. You’ve lived here for fifteen years?’ He nearly added, ‘Jesus Christ’ to add weight to his horror.

‘Twenty,’ Malcolm said.

Frank could see the man wasn’t joking.

‘I used to be upstairs. On the second floor. Better room. But Granby moved me down here. I couldn’t pay enough, see?’

Frank slumped more than sat on his bed and tried to comprehend what the man was alluding to: some kind of hierarchy of favouritism connected to the rooms and rental rates. ‘You mean . . .’ He couldn’t form the words.

‘What, son?’

‘He demoted you from the second floor. Because you wouldn’t pay more rent?’

‘Couldn’t keep up with the cost. Down here I can manage. But think of this, son. You’re on the first floor. Where can you go that’s further down? There’s no rooms on the ground floor. Nowhere to live. So you’re already on your last life.’

Frank thought of the dusty, abandoned bar, then became irritated with himself for even considering the man’s nonsense.

Malcolm nodded. ‘You can’t afford to make enemies when you’re already at the bottom.’

‘I can’t believe you put up with this. Do the other two upstairs?’

‘Oh, yes, we all keep to the rules, son. There’s no other way. I’ve been here long enough to know that. Jimmy on the second floor still works in the City, and he’s been here as long as me. He’s the only one left who has. So why do you think a man like that lives in a place like this? You think he chooses to?’

Returning from night shifts, Frank often saw an elderly man in a suit. He always left the building early. They’d never spoken and the man refused to meet his eye. ‘How much does he pay?’ Frank’s curiosity had taken over.

‘That’s between Jimmy and Granby. You never discuss money here. They don’t like it. That was your first mistake.’

‘Oh, they don’t like that? What a surprise. This just gets better and better. So some guy in finance is trapped here and has been shaken down by Granby for fifteen years? Fuck’s sake. This is unbelievable. What about the drag queen?’

Malcolm didn’t return Frank’s grin. ‘The fella who dresses like a woman, Lillian. That’s what he calls himself now. And that’s a bad business right there, my friend. Oh, Lord. But it shows how bad it can get if Granby is upset about rent not being paid.’

Frank had caught sight of a frail and elderly cross-dresser more times than he wished to remember, but never outside the building. A habitual haunter of the bathroom and its speckled mirror, the cross-dresser often clattered around inside while Frank waited on the stairs to use the toilet. ‘Lillian’ also played opera records and made the stairs stink of perfume. Frank didn’t know anything else because they’d never spoken. The man may have once been a convincing female mimic, as he was small-boned, but now looked haggard and was always drunk.

‘He was an actor once,’ Malcolm said.

‘What?’

‘Oh, yes. On the stage. West End. Long time ago. Work dried up and he couldn’t keep up with Granby. That’s when he made the change. To go on the game.’

‘Game?’

‘Whore.’

‘No . . .’

‘These days he sucks cocks down The Duchess to keep up with Granby.’

Frank started to grin. He was close to screaming with hysterical laughter.

‘It’s terrible. He lost everything. Now he drinks. He let this place get to him. But you can’t afford to let it get to you. Never. You have to learn to adapt if you want to enjoy any kind of life here. This is how it is once they let you inside. Lilly can’t keep up with his rent now. He’ll be the next to go, unless he gets your room at the reduced rate.’

His visitor never intended the story to be amusing, but Frank couldn’t stop grinning. ‘Go? Go where? Where will Lillian go if he doesn’t get demoted into this shit-tip of a room?’

‘What I am trying to tell you is that I’ve known others here too, who also thought like you, and who held out on Granby. But they’re not around now.’ Again, Malcolm dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘But they never left either.’ He winked the eye Frank had been looking at. ‘Granby will give anyone a few months to make arrangements and you’ve had that. But then the collecting goes to others. And Granby don’t like that because it makes him look bad. And they are all he’s got going for him. If he can’t collect they have to get involved. They come down. You follow? And them coming down to sort things out makes them very angry at being disturbed. Angry at Granby, angry at us. And I’d guess we’re close to that time now.’

‘He and his imaginary family up in the attic are not getting another penny from me. I’ll be gone in four weeks, or less.’

‘Oh, son, don’t go getting ahead of yourself. There’ll be no four weeks. Like I said, you have to pay now. That’s how it works here. To keep them others up there. And no one leaves unless they say so. That’s the arrangement.’

Frank had heard enough. ‘OK. OK. I appreciate the advice. But I know a racket when I see one. This is bullshit. Do you honestly think I’ll stay here and let myself get threatened? Maybe for fifteen years, while Granby takes my money, whacking up the rent whenever he wants to? And if I can’t pay then I have to put on a friggin’ dress? Christ almighty, what is wrong with you people?’

Frank briefly entertained an image of himself as an older man, wearing a dress in The Duchess, wherever that was. He wanted to howl with laughter.

He stood up and unlocked his door. Malcolm understood it was time to leave, but hesitated. ‘You’re in The Angel now. You’re in their house.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Thanks. I get it. But no thanks.’

The old man stepped out of his room into the half-darkness of the corridor. The one begrimed window of the stairwell let a little light through. A silvery-grey infusion illumined half of the decrepit old figure’s silhouette, which stood perfectly still. Without blinking either of his mad eyes, Malcolm watched Frank’s door close.

Outside his room, Frank heard a trace of opera music. A muted fanfare. He shuddered.

Night fell and Frank paced his room, from the windows to the radiator, back and forth. The carpet looked as if it had been worn down by the similar movements of previous inmates.

Neither of his friends, Nigel or Mike, would help him out with a sofa to sleep on: girlfriends were cited as reasons in both cases. Cheers.

Frank had twelve-hour shifts across the next three days, so looking for a room was not an option he could pursue in the morning. As a temp he could not afford to lose the money by taking a day off work. He’d have to stick it out at The Angel for a few more days. Maybe return to his room late after work and keep a low profile for a bit. When the shift pattern concluded he could find a new place and split.

Worn out by his nerves and thoughts, Frank placed the office chair under the door handle and flopped onto his bed.

Sleep came quickly. Sleep hectic with dreams.

He saw a fat man stood by a window that opened above the pub’s sign. The room must have been situated at the front of the building. The man fed pigeons and shouted, ‘Bitch, fucking bitch’ at most of the women who passed in the street below.

In another room similar to his own, an old man crawled in circles on the carpet. His false teeth were lost and the host of a quiz show spoke about angels to him through the window of an old television.

In a chaotic and nonsensical carousel of what resembled excerpts from a seemingly unending collection of ethereal footage, his own room was featured several times. The carpet was brighter and the walls not so sallow in each brief episode. In one scene he vividly dreamed of a bearded man with a thickly haired body lying on the bed. A yellow candlewick bedspread covered him to his stomach. In one hand he held a two-litre bottle of vodka. The man stared at the ceiling with what looked like revulsion and terror.

In another dream a yolk-eyed drunk also appeared in the same bed. This time the mattress was partially covered by a tatty purple sleeping bag. The man sang a music-hall song while someone shouted ‘Cunt!’ through the door. In that scene there was a strange sound too with no visible source. It sounded like a large bird was stuck inside the room and was beating the walls with its wings. Either that or the creature was desperately trying to flap its way inside.

Frank awoke and sat up in bed. His face was wet with tears. He was exhausted. Shaken by the dreams, he didn’t go back to sleep. He got up and dressed in his security guard’s uniform.

It then took him a few minutes to summon enough courage to open the door of his room and to enter the dark passage outside. He urgently needed to empty his bladder.

As he came out of the bathroom, and before his scrabbling fingers could locate the switch and turn the timed light back on, he realised that he was not alone in the corridor that passed between his room and Malcolm’s.

At first he thought the scuffling sound was being made by a dog. But thin bluish light, falling through a sash window on the stairwell, illumined something that was not a dog, rising from the floor outside his room, until it was standing on two thin legs.

Someone frail, with unkempt hair. Perhaps an elderly woman. What may have been a nightgown fell to the form’s scrawny knees. But the arms of the figure appeared to be too long for a person of any age. And behind it something that sounded like a pair of broken umbrellas was being shaken with fury and thrashed at the air.

Frank whimpered and slapped the light on to reveal an empty corridor. Paper peeling from the walls, red skirting boards, faded green carpet, but no sign of life.

He stood still, stunned. The thud of his heart filled his head. His thoughts groped for an explanation. The light clicked out, leaving him in the dark.

At work, Frank was often stood before the plate-glass doors, at the entrance of the residential building he guarded. Staring at the forecourt of Clarendon House, without really seeing the parked cars, he contemplated the hallucination and his dreams from the night before. He wondered if the building was some kind of hellish trap, where alcoholics and the unstable came to die. Or maybe the actual building damaged the occupants enough for them to see things, to hallucinate.

By the end of the afternoon, he’d more or less convinced himself that the tourniquet of stress constricting his life had tightened and led to the dreams and the episode endured the night before. A growing sense of entrapment, Granby’s threats of violence, and Malcolm’s elliptical suggestions of a sinister ‘family’ housed within The Angel had all played their part. The resulting strain had caused him to half-glimpse the remnant of a nightmare in a dingy, unlit corridor.

After Frank clocked off, he whiled away four hours in Islington, sipping beer that he could ill afford to buy, before making his way back to The Angel.

At 10 p.m. he inched open the front door, removed his shoes and crept up to the first floor. He used the sides of the stairs to reduce the noise of his ascent. Despite his best efforts to move silently, once he reached his room, with his keys at the ready in one hand, he heard the distant sound of Granby’s door opening, two floors up. The idea of something slipping out of that attic room was too horrible to entertain, and Frank eschewed all attempts to keep quiet in his haste to get inside his room, before locking the door behind him.

From ten o’clock until midnight the total absence of Lilly’s opera music, the lack of a mutter from Malcolm’s television, and no sign of any congress in the communal areas beyond his door, Frank interpreted as unwelcome signs of anticipation, if not apprehension, among the other occupants of The Angel. Something was about to happen. And the suggestion by his neighbour the previous evening that something would come down from the top of the house to ‘collect’ rent from him no longer seemed as absurd to Frank as it had done during daylight hours.

He managed to stay awake in the large silent building until 2 a.m., when sleep overcame him.

At 4 a.m. he sat up with a small cry, convinced that the group of thin figures who were standing around his bed, had actually come out of the dream with him and were now present at the bedside.

He removed his hands from his face and sat still in the darkness. The figures from the dream faded quickly.

Some ambient light from a distant streetlamp distinguished his thin curtains from the surrounding walls. The rest of the room remained dark. Which was galling because the sound of scratching from the wrong side of the ceiling, directly above his bed, was not something he could investigate with his wide open, beseeching eyes.

He turned sideways and scrabbled for the switch of the bedside lamp. He was so frightened, and his cringing among the bedclothes impeded his movement to such an extent, that it seemed to take about a minute for him to get the lamp switched on.

During the appalling wait for light, he’d imagined that something was hanging from the ceiling by its feet, and that a face was no more than a few inches from his own. Moments before the room was lit, he’d also heard the sound of determined wings beating against the plaster of the ceiling. He’d imagined that an animal was struggling to squeeze back through a small hole.

With the overhead light on, as well as the bedside lamp, the noise ceased. Frank could see that there was nothing on the ceiling either, and no evidence of any intrusion to account for the commotion above his bed. But he was left with an enduring fear that something within the building was now determined to show itself.

He dressed hurriedly and picked up his wallet and phone. He’d leave the building and wait out the remainder of the night, walking the streets if necessary, because that was infinitely preferable to staying inside the building.

Frank never made the stairs.

Once the door to his room was open, he became too afraid to enter the corridor.

Out there, on the staircase, the air was being cracked by the sound of dry wings. The noise of a dirty pigeon rising from the greasy cement of Trafalgar Square, but one hundred times louder. At the end of the passage, where a little light fell through the window over the stairwell, the silhouette was visible of someone who wasn’t Malcolm, Jimmy, Lillian or Granby.

Nor could Frank be certain that the wizened figure’s feet were even touching the stairs. He lacked the presence of mind to speculate how it was possible for the figure to hover like that, as well as flicker in and out of his sight. The image appeared and then disappeared before the window. But whoever, or whatever, it was, the intruder was in a state of great agitation at the sight of him.

What he could see of the form’s outline shook a misshapen head about in the air. What might have been fingers at the end of the long arms repeatedly clenched into fists, then unclenched. The idea of turning the corridor light on and seeing the figure in more detail was something Frank found too unbearable to contemplate.

Cringing inside his doorway, he only found his voice after he’d swallowed the constriction in his throat. ‘Money. I’ll get it. Please don’t. The money. I’ll get it.’

Somewhere upstairs in the house he heard Granby’s voice over the sound of the beating wings. ‘Cunt! Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!’ the man screamed in a kind of mantra, as if he had entered into an animal frenzy, one part fury and one part intense sexual excitement at the thought of violence and blood within the wretched building.

Frank was sure he was about to be torn apart by the thing on the stairs. Or, even worse, taken somewhere else that the building offered access to, through the ceilings of its scruffy rooms. And it was at that point that enough clarity returned to his mind for him to make a suggestion. To offer a compromise to the noisy and foul air batting against his face.

He was never sure whether he spoke, or whether his offer was a thought or even a prayer to this unnatural thing that was moving from the window and up to the ceiling of the first floor. But he closed his eyes and made a pledge that he would collect money on behalf of the thing before the window. And he boasted that he would be better at collecting than Granby ever had been.

When a stench fouler than anything he had ever experienced engulfed his face and made him vomit onto his shoes – a miasma that might have hung over a cluttered battlefield, or a plague pit – Frank collapsed upon the hard carpet.

What revived him was the commotion of the old wings moving upwards and through the centre of the stairwell. This noise was soon followed by a series of screams in the attic, human cries made amidst a terrible thumping, that of a solid object connecting with a wall, and with tremendous force.

Gradually, the noises died away and silence returned to the building. A respite blessed to Frank’s battered senses.

When he got to his feet he knew what he had to do.

The door to Granby’s room was open, but Frank never entered. Instead, he peered inside from the doorway.

Frank never turned the light on either. What he could see of the room was half-lit by the residual streetlight shining through the skylight. That was more than adequate.

A ceiling sloped either side of a central roof beam.

Bulging black bin bags covered the floor. The nearest bag was packed taut with bank notes. He assumed that all of the other bags were filled with money too.

On the table under the window, wristwatches and items of jewellery glinted. In one corner of the room a large collection of shoes formed an ominous pile.

In the centre of the room, as if adored by the congregation of rubbish sacks, four stone rectangles stood upright. Each short column had a small stone figure mounted upon it.

Frank only glanced at the sculptures; he found himself unable to look upon them for longer than a second. But, as he stood in the doorway, he was in no doubt that they were rifling through his mind. Inside his thoughts, he heard a flock of little wings.

Being so close to the figures, for so long, must have driven Granby half-mad. Even though the inanimate quartet appeared to have been carven from rock, and had since become rusticated by a great age, for a man with more intelligence and imagination than Granby, cohabitation with the figures would have been a guarantee of the fullest insanity. Merely being in their presence assured Frank of this.

To withstand the angels for so long, Frank could only assume that Granby had sealed himself inside the old sleeping bag. It was rolled up beneath the table covered in watches and rings.

There wasn’t much of Granby left to ask about the sleeping arrangements. What remained of him was mostly still inside the white tracksuit. The fabric was near luminous in the faint light – a sodium glow, occasionally supplemented with bursts of red from the flickering signage of the fried chicken takeaway across the street from The Angel. But the former landlord of The Angel had recently been rearranged into new configurations, fresh contortions of limb and posture.

The curly hair had been completely torn from his head, along with most of his scalp. The top of Granby’s skull shone wetly upon the floor, directly beneath the closest column. It was not possible for the legs and arms of the living to bend in the way that Granby’s limbs now did. The man’s spine had come to resemble broken crockery covered by a handkerchief.

As Frank’s eyes became more accustomed to the gloom, he was aware of the shapes hanging from the picture rail on wires. There were at least a score of them. At first he had mistaken the shapes for overcoats, but now realised that, although he had correctly identified at least two coats, their owners were still inside them. The other hanged figures were naked and had withered to not much more than bones. Not seeing greater detail was a blessing.

Inside the vast house below, Frank heard the first signs of life: Malcolm closing the bathroom door and running the only working tap over the basin.

On the second floor there must have been two empty rooms, and Frank was sick of the sight of Lillian, so make that three empty rooms.

Frank took one final look at the smashed figure of Granby, and noticed the man’s teeth were also missing. He thought it a strange city that allowed its old gods to keep such odd tokens.

But now he needed to get the empty second-floor rooms occupied quickly. £125 a week seemed like a reasonable rate. At least to start with.

Always in Our Hearts

I could turn quickly on a wet road, fail to execute an emergency stop in time when a child runs into the road . . . lose concentration and plunge into oncoming headlights, drive too close to the vehicle in front, fall asleep on a motorway at night, reverse over a toddler not visible in the rear-view mirrors, or just get slammed into by another car at any time . . .

Ray Larch often marvelled at the sheer range of potential traffic accidents awaiting motorists. Such thoughts mostly occurred to him in the few hours when he wasn’t driving a taxi. As a mere speck among millions of other motorists, from the moment he turned the ignition key he knew he risked an involvement in any number of incidents, at any time, as did anyone inside a vehicle. It was a lottery and every driver and passenger had a ticket.

He guessed the clincher about the outcome of an accident came down to reactions. In critical situations, his reactions needed to adequately respond to a situation within the time it took him to inhale a breath. The speed of his reactions required cooperation from the equally rapid reactions of the other road users and pedestrians involved. Considering the outcome of the wrong choice on either side of this nexus, was there even a full second available to make those crucial choices of stop, accelerate, swerve or jump?

When he thought of the deaths, the physical torment and human misery of long-term physical rehabilitation, the lifelong grief or disability that he could inflict upon an individual through a traffic accident – in the amount of time it took a person to realise they were having an accident – he often wondered why he was even allowed to drive a car at all. Or why anyone else was allowed to drive one either.

He’d still had near misses. He had them all the time. He drove a private hire car seven days a week. He never slept more than five hours in any night and would haul himself, baffled and blinking, out of bed at 3 a.m. for an airport fare, or to pick up drunken girls in short skirts at the weekend when the clubs closed. The upskirt potential alone on those latter jobs could be the cause of any number of accidents, because when he looked in the rear-view mirror he wasn’t always checking the traffic behind him. Endeavouring to glimpse gusset, it would be so easy to jack-knife a tipsy pedestrian over the bonnet and bring an end to their days of unassisted mobility.

The more he thought about potential accidents, the more Ray also wondered why more vehicles out there were not suddenly crashing. Or why the entire network of roads did not become one long sequence of traffic accidents. How did it all just keep going with such fallible, easily distracted creatures behind the wheels? Maybe drivers should undergo the same assessments as train drivers and airline pilots? Or did that come down to a matter of scale?

We drive because we forget, he decided. We forget pain, we forget fear, we forget the hot-cold paralysis of near misses, we forget consequences. We forget our vulnerability: the very fragility of our bodies. We forget about our wobbling heads packed with brain matter, mounted on a thin spinal column – the weakest link in the entire animal kingdom. And we forget how we are dependent upon those minuscule threads of nerve tissue that, once severed, remove all sensation from the legs, and introduce the wheezing apparatus that will stand sentinel at our white-sheeted beds.

We forget the picture of the car smashed beneath the truck on the hard shoulder, and the blackened silhouette of a figure burned into its seat in a motorway pileup. We forget the vestiges of wreckage in a newspaper picture in which four teenagers died. We look away from the dirty, wilting flowers tied to metal railings on that corner that you have to slow down for (if you know the road). In time, we’ll even begin to forget how we felt at the funeral of a child.

Our entire existence was contingent on forgetting horror. Maybe the repeated infractions of our species were a direct result of us not remembering the horrors of our past infractions.

Case in point: Ray was beginning to forget the worst of the time he clipped a cyclist on Rocky Lane, two years before. He never stopped his car. After a sudden metallic thunk against one of the passenger doors, he barely heard anything else because of the volume of his radio. Only at the edge of his hearing, as he drove away, was there a suggestion of keys hitting tarmac, somewhere behind his car.

At the time, Ray had been doing at least forty m.p.h. in a thirty zone, and weaving around a row of badly parked cars. He never noticed the cyclist until the back of a man’s jacket filled his windscreen.

The kid was black, he thought, though he wasn’t sure. He’d glanced into his rear-view mirror and there was absolutely no cyclist in the road. He’d put his foot down because he’d barely touched the guy, or so he told himself later. Not for a fraction of a second had he thought of stopping. Getting away had been his only consideration.

When he decided against buying the next day’s Mail, Ray realised that he did not want to know anything about the night before. He avoided television and left the radio switched off for three entire weeks. By avoiding all local news, he felt that he’d not been involved in what might have happened. By the end of his self-imposed news blackout he was almost certain that his car had in fact only grazed the cyclist’s knee. The kid must have quickly turned his bicycle onto the pavement, which is why he had vanished from Ray’s rear view of the road. Ray told himself this so many times that he eventually believed it to be the truth. But only for a while.

Three weeks after the incident, and long after the paint job on his car had dried, Ray was compelled to return to Rocky Lane on his way to a fare at Alexander Stadium. A great mound of flowers at the roadside was tied to a lamppost in more or less the same place where he’d come upon the cyclist so unexpectedly.

Two days later, at the taxi rank on Colmore Row, Ray made an offhand mention of the flowers on Rocky Lane. As he spoke out loud he fiddled with his phone to appear casual. He learned from another driver that he had indeed killed a teenager. The youngster had been riding a mountain bike to the Hamstead chip shop, without a helmet or lights. The other taxi driver wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think there were any witnesses.

‘Fucking cyclists,’ they’d both agreed, and rolled their eyes knowingly.

Ray had never again driven along Rocky Lane and still circumnavigated that entire estate if he was ever asked to pick up or drop off close to it. He’d also arrived at the conclusion that if we vividly remembered the misery of every cold, cut and bruise, in anticipation of the next illness or misfortune, we would all go mad. The ability to forget was a kind of advance braking system of the mind. The effectiveness of his own mental ABS surprised him.

So, did the insane have perfect recall? Did they possess the ability to imagine the consequences of existence, and the full horror of those consequences? Now there is an idea, Ray thought, and turned into the street to pick up his next fare.

Ray had never made a pickup from this part of North Birmingham and was unaware that residential houses were even still standing in the area where Hockley became Aston and the Jewellery Quarter. The place was close to the city centre and remained a labyrinth of closed redbrick warehouses, revived industrial estates and hole-in-the-wall commercial interests attached to broader industries. These were interspersed with cash-and-carries, mostly closed retail units, developments of unsold flats, barely functioning churches and one or two old-school Midlands pubs.

His satnav directed him to a small settlement of houses by a wall of red brick. The houses were opposite a patch of waste ground used for storing white commercial vans.

The side of the street that remained residential was typical of a Midlands terraced row: the houses remained permanently in shadow, slouched at the curb as unappealingly as a group of scruffy labourers stood in line for work both soul-destroying and poorly paid. This street had somehow escaped clearances, Luftwaffe bombs and gentrification.

The eight terraced houses also looked to be shuffling away from the road as if they didn’t want to meet the eye of any passing motorist. Their dark, begrimed windows and peeling window frames didn’t give much away about their interiors. At a glance, Ray would have guessed the houses were all unoccupied. From the rear of one of the properties dirty black smoke rose into the sky, suggesting a bonfire.

The man who emerged from number 129 came out with a smile that Ray found disproportionate to the prompt arrival of a taxi at his address. He wasn’t wearing a coat and his feet looked too big for the pair of brown slippers at the end of his legs.

The front garden was small and a wreck, filled with sodden cardboard boxes containing bottles, rusting tins and what looked like garden waste. Bracken sprouted high enough to obscure the ground-floor sash window.

The call from the controller had listed this address and provided the name John and a landline phone number. ‘Wants taking to various places’ was the only instruction. Apart from the last piece of information it was an ordinary enough job.

Ray watched the grinning elderly man make his way to the driver’s-side window.

‘Afternoon!’ the man said, and then looked at a sky glooming towards a rainy dusk.

Ray nodded, and looked about the man’s person as if querying the lack of a jacket. ‘John, is it?’

‘She’ll be out soon,’ John said.

Perhaps the tatty bastard in slippers was not the passenger. Ray hoped so; he disliked the man’s half-smiling face. Unless they were attractive and female, or an airport fare, Ray found it hard not to greet every passenger with an attitude of weary, surly impatience. He didn’t like this tendency, but couldn’t help it. Working from seven until eleven and providing a service to the general public would make a saint irritable.

Behind the thick lenses of his spectacles, John’s eyes were alight with excitement. ‘I’ll need a hand with her.’ He appeared surprised that Ray didn’t share his enthusiasm for the task.

Not a fucking wheelchair.

‘You’ve a very special passenger this evening. You’re going all over. But she’ll look after you eventually.’ The man winked to embellish the tantalising suggestion of a generous tip.

‘Where to first, mate?’ Ray climbed out of the car and hurried up the overgrown path to escape the rain, which didn’t bother John at all. ‘How many places does she want to go?’

John stopped and in a show of exuberance spread his arms wide as if to indicate vastness. ‘She knows where to take us. Where to start and where to finish. Who will come and who will go. She knows.’

Ray made a second, desultory inspection of the elderly man’s grey slacks, which looked as if they had once belonged to a suit. They were held above his navel by a white plastic belt. A diamond-patterned pullover was tucked into the waistband. A real oddball with an elderly relative. The fare would probably be paid out of a mobility allowance. But he would have preferred clarification on the destinations of the journey and some assurance that the man in slippers had enough money to pay for it. Ray waited for him to catch up on the front path.

‘Yes, yes, she’s in there, waiting,’ the man said, misreading Ray’s yearning for reassurance, while jabbing a stubby forefinger, yellowed with nicotine, at a black doorway. His pullover stank of sweat. The front of his trousers was greasy.

Even now, Ray still came across pockets of the world that hadn’t changed, like this one. These places often reminded him of old films. And for good or ill, he knew that houses were also similar to people. Just as you never really knew what was going on behind a face, you also had no idea what a home really looked like behind the façade.

‘Takes me time to get her up. Taken me an age this year,’ John said. ‘But she is raring to go now, I can tell you. And a lot of people are waiting for us.’

Ray didn’t ask what these people were waiting for because he wasn’t interested. He’d already decided to keep conversation to a minimum. Just get the job done. He wondered if his disgust at the living conditions inside the house was obvious. But then realised that he didn’t care if it was.

The house was cold and smelled of full bins and gas. And something else, like the odour that gathers around thunderstorms. That was as strong as the underlying fragrance of gas and domestic waste.

One low-wattage ceiling light revealed the first room that Ray entered. All of the curtains were drawn. What yellowy illumination existed was sufficient to indicate that John hadn’t taken the rubbish out of his dismal home in a long time.

Following the shabby figure, Ray noted a narrow track had been made in the living room, a path between bulging rubbish sacks and cardboard boxes packed with what looked like old clothes. Perhaps the man was in the rag trade.

Ray peered inside a box. A little girl’s dress and a pair of brown sandals were placed inside pink plastic bags. The evidence of juvenilia in the house inspired Ray to look about himself more carefully. He peered into a second box and was relieved to see a suede coat made for an adult. It lay beside a plastic bag containing a pair of broken glasses and some scuffed men’s shoes.

The second room may have been a dining room once. Any indication of its former function had been obliterated, though, by what looked like a collection of every free paper printed in Birmingham within the old man’s lifetime.

‘I’ll get her out the kitchen,’ John said.

The entrance from the dining room to the kitchen was missing a door. Through the rectangular doorway Ray glimpsed a dark silhouette. It was as small as a child, and soundlessly turned away from a kitchen counter near the doorframe. The motion slipped the figure deeper into the unlit kitchen. John vanished into the darkness as if in pursuit of the occupant. He never switched the light on.

While John messed around out of sight, Ray peered about the dining room. In the background, he heard the old man say, ‘Your carriage awaits, your Highness.’

Ray thought about taking a picture of the room on his mobile phone to show the other drivers at the coffee stand. His anxiety about not being paid swamped the idea. ‘All right in there?’ he asked the darkness. ‘Minimum fare is a fiver, mate.’

‘Yes. Yes. Why wouldn’t it be? A lot of preparation has gone into this evening so we don’t want any snags. And you’ll do a lot better than a fiver too, driver. You will be justly compensated.’ This was said from inside the unlit kitchen with a tinge of sarcasm that made Ray uneasy.

‘Ain’t me that’s not ready,’ he fired into the darkness.

There was no reply.

A row of pictures on the dining-room wall were half-concealed by a bale of newspapers, but they caught Ray’s eye. There were three framed photographs. The first was a studio shot of a plump, middle-aged woman. She sat alone and wore spectacles with white frames, and a dress with a white collar. Dated. Another featured a younger version of the owner of the house. John had been better dressed in those days, well groomed too, and he was sat beside the woman at a table in a restaurant. Dead wife, Ray thought without a trace of emotion.

It was hard to see what the middle picture depicted; a painting that gave nothing away beside an impression of black smoke billowing from a section of the scene that was concealed. The smoke moved across a grey sky.

John returned from the kitchen. He wore an anorak with the hood pulled tight around his face. This made him look imbecilic. Held in his arms, the lid tucked beneath his chin, was a cane-work laundry basket, painted yellow. ‘If you get the other side, driver, I think we can manage.’ The lid was secured to the bottom with gardener’s twine.

‘What is . . .?’ Ray started to ask, but didn’t know how to finish.

‘It’s all I’ve got that’s big enough. And it will suffice. Now, you must drive very carefully, you understand? I hope that was explained to you by your operator.’

‘We going to the laundrette?’

What he’d suggested was offensive enough for the elderly man’s face to darken with rage, before he said, ‘Just get the other side!’

Ray felt like he was carrying most of the weight of the heavy basket as they picked a path through the rubbish on the floor of the house. John muttered instructions: ‘Be careful. Careful! That’s it. Careful.’ Whatever was inside the basket was living. Maybe some kind of animal. Ray heard it skittering around inside, perhaps seeking a way out, or a stable surface, in the way that animals do in transit. Probably a dog. Was that what he had seen in the kitchen? A dog? No, because he was sure that what he’d seen had been standing on two legs.

‘This a rare breed or something, mate?’

‘You have no idea of her value.’

‘Ain’t you got no cage?’

John ignored that question.

Outside, after much fussing, the old man clipped himself and the wicker basket into seat belts in the rear of Ray’s car. The vehicle filled with the odour of the old man’s sweat.

Ray climbed into the driving seat and cracked a window.

‘Please close that, in case she . . . it’s cold out, you know,’ John said.

Ray sighed and started the car. ‘Where to, mate?’

‘I have the first address.’

‘Let’s have it.’

The first three digits of the post code, B20, indicated Handsworth Wood, a mostly affluent Sikh area. And the satnav quickly found Somerset Road, a place Ray was familiar with; a long, quiet road flanked by large Victorian houses.

‘A vet’s, is it? Or you breeding her or what?’ Ray asked, while eyeing the cheap yellow basket in the rear-view mirror. ‘Sure you ain’t got one of them carry cases? Can’t be very comfortable for the animal. Dog, is it?’

The old man sat close to the basket and rested one arm across the front as if to protect the cargo if the car should stop suddenly. He said nothing to Ray, and seemed content to grin at the rear-view mirror in a way that made Ray uncomfortable.

‘What is it?’ Ray repeated.

The man’s mouth loosened into a sneer. ‘Maybe you better continue with the role you have been assigned, driver.’ The way he said driver was oddly formal, old-fashioned, with a trace of condescension.

‘Some manners never go amiss, mate.’

‘We don’t want to be late.’

Ray wound his window down further and pulled away from the curb.

Ray helped John and his laundry basket to the front door of their destination. He returned to his car and waited a good ten minutes for a new passenger to emerge, as per his instructions; John had told him that a second passenger required picking up at the address. An odd request, but it was another fare. The meter was ticking.

From inside the car, with the windows cracked to dispel the miasma of John’s sweat, Ray smelled smoke.

Peering through the passenger-side window, he spotted a plume of black smoke. The smoke billowed over the roof of the house he was parked outside, before drifting into the sky. The fire must have been burning in the back garden of the house that John and his basket were inside. Over the sound of his radio, Ray was also sure that he heard a sharp human cry issue from the rear of the property. But the shriek was immediately muffled by the laughter of a large group of people. They must have been in the garden.

‘Not the weather for a barbecue,’ he said, in an attempt at humour, and as a tactic for drawing out some information from the new passenger, after she’d shuffled to his car and settled herself in the rear seat. ‘Lot of smoke back there. What’s it, bonfire? Festival, like?’

The ancient Indian woman in the rear never answered him. Once she and her Samsonite suitcase had been installed in the rear of the vehicle, she had merely passed a piece of paper between the seats. Printed in capitals was an address Ray recognised in Handsworth, near the park. He wouldn’t need the satnav.

As Ray pulled away, he glanced through the passenger-side window. There was a space between the house and the equally vast neighbouring property. The sound of laughter, and now applause, at the rear of the house continued. Ray assumed that the scream had been part of some Asian festival or tradition. The people who had initially crowded about the front door to welcome John and his laundry basket were all well-heeled Sikhs, as Ray had expected them to be. Though their smiles and greetings were warmer, and more excitable, than he’d expected to see on any face after the arrival of a little scruffy man with a pet inside a laundry basket.

During the journey to Handsworth Park the elderly Asian woman never looked up from staring at her withered hands. She held them together on top of her lap. Bonfire smoke had caught in the folds of her sari. Ray suspected that she didn’t like him.

Ray parked outside a large semi-detached Victorian house, across the road from Handsworth Park – the address requested by the old Indian woman. A middle-aged white couple appeared in the doorway before Ray applied the handbrake. They came into the street to help the elderly woman out of Ray’s taxi.

The couple looked alternative yet fashionable. Ray recognised the type; they’d migrated into Asian and West Indian neighbourhoods because the big houses and long gardens were half the price of the houses in Moseley and Kings Heath. Two older children, both boys with long hair, skipped around the Indian woman’s case as if Father Christmas had arrived.

The mother held a toddler in her arms. She came out to Ray’s car. Without looking him in the eye, she said, ‘We need you to take another passenger. She’ll be out shortly.’ She handed a twenty pound note through the window.

When Ray slipped a hand inside his jacket pocket to find change, she said, ‘No, no, keep it.’

‘You sure?’ Ray said. ‘That was only a fiver’s fare.’

‘We need you to hang on for a few minutes. You know, keep the meter running.’

Ray shrugged. ‘No problem. You need a hand with that case?’

But the woman had already turned away and Ray could see her husband lifting the Samsonite case over the threshold of the house, with the help of his eldest son. The husband never looked at Ray either. The elderly woman was already inside; she had been in a hurry to get off the street.

More perplexed about his work than he could remember being in some time, Ray waited another ten minutes for the next passenger to emerge from the Handsworth Wood house. And while he waited, he heard another desperate wail, which he guessed was human; a cry cut short by the burst of a firework, howling and shattering, before sprinkling sparks above his car.

Ray alighted and looked at the sky. Glittering vestiges of the firework dispersed into the cold black air. He could smell smoke. Wood smoke and meat cooking.

The door of the house opened and shut quickly behind another elderly woman. She pulled a tartan-patterned shopping trolley on little wheels. Her association with the family was almost as incongruous as that of the elderly Asian woman whom he’d dropped at the address. Maybe the new passenger was a cleaner and the family wanted Ray to drop her home now that the party had started and her work was done.

There was much laughter and applause and excitable shrieking coming from the children at the rear of the house. Someone shouted, ‘I don’t believe it!’

The woman who’d come out of the house stood on the doorstep and pointed at the shopping trolley. ‘Give us a hand, please, driver.’

Ray collected the trolley. The top of the bag on wheels was tightly secured with the elasticised cords usually employed to attach objects to roof racks. The trolley was heavy. When he carried the baggage from the porch to the pavement, the contents flopped against one side of the case. Whatever was inside then seemed to kick itself upright.

‘Party they’s having, is it?’ he asked his new passenger.

‘Once a year you’s gets your chance. This year mine come round,’ she said, but didn’t elaborate. A cloud of black smoke rose from the rear of the house, then billowed over the red roof and dispersed into the darkness smothering the park.

‘Another pet in here?’ Ray asked, nodding at the trolley as he wheeled it across the pavement to his car. ‘Sure it’s legal to have an animal inside? Can it breathe?’

The woman said, ‘It’s all I got and she don’t mind.’

He dropped the woman and her shopping trolley off at an address in Sandwell Valley. The large private house had high walls and was close to a large farm open to the public. Like the elderly Asian woman, his passenger did not speak during the journey until its conclusion. ‘Here, here it is. This one, it must be,’ she said, as Ray pulled up outside. ‘I can’t wait to see her,’ she added.

‘Who?’

Judging by her gleeful expression the woman was too excited to answer. She clambered out of the vehicle, groaning. She’d been utterly indifferent to the person who drove the vehicle, the person responsible for her safety and a vital component of her enigmatic schedule. Nothing new there.

Ray wheeled the tartan-patterned trolley up to the white house. It banged against his leg and he heard the scrape of what he imagined were claws against the trolley’s lining. The trolley also reeked of smoke. Ray left it outside the front door and returned to his car.

And so the curious nature and sequence of his afternoon and evening’s work continued. He’d already made forty quid and was on a roll, but his curiosity about his passengers and their cases was beginning to stifle his delight at the abundance of work. So he decided to be more assertive with the next passenger, an elderly black man.

Ray helped him position a large holdall in the rear of his car. A brass lock secured the end of the bag’s zipper. The interior of the car bloomed afresh with the fragrance of cold air and wood smoke.

Ray cracked his window wider. ‘Where to, mate?’

‘He say he gonna be here.’ A piece of paper was passed between the seats.

Ray frowned. It was the first address, where he’d picked up that weirdo John, with the cane basket, at the edge of Hockley.

In the rear-view mirror, Ray studied the man behind him. The passenger met his eye without blinking, but with a stolid, unfriendly, obstinate, and somewhat entitled expression.

Ray glanced at the bag set beside his passenger. It was the type of canvas sports bag that teenagers favoured. It had West Bromwich Albion’s badge at one end. ‘Baggies fan?’ Ray asked, to defuse what he felt was an inexplicable tension.

‘My son,’ the man said, and looked out of the window.

Ray drove in silence, but struggled to keep his mind on the road. Just as well he knew them so well. ‘Not being funny, like, but do you mind if I ask you a question?’

As if he hadn’t heard Ray, the passenger never moved his head.

‘But I pick your mate up at this address that we are going to. And he gets in the car with his pet in a basket. And then we go to another house and another house, and each time it’s the same thing. I pick up someone with an animal, I think, in a bag. So I’m guessing you’ve got one in there too, yeah? So what’s it all about, yeah? Cus I am clueless.’

The man remained silent for a while. He just stared at the buildings they passed as they neared the city centre. Ray found it hard, from his repeated glances into the rear-view mirror, to read the passenger’s mood, though he intuited a grave sadness in the man’s eyes whenever the headlights of a passing vehicle flashed through the car.

‘Life is full of repetition,’ the man eventually said. ‘Same bad things keep happening.’

The statement mystified Ray. Nor was it information he felt capable of responding to.

‘You all right, mate?’ was the best he could do. ‘Ain’t none of my business, but I’m just wondering out loud what you’re all doing. Curiosity, like.’

‘You realise it’s not just you. There’s others who been through the same thing.’

‘What like? You talking about John and that Indian woman, and that old dear with the shopping trolley?’

The man looked up from his morbid self-absorption, but never spoke.

Ray pushed. ‘I’m talking about the others, like? With the bags that I been picking up here, there and everywhere?’

‘Here, there and everywhere,’ the man said and then sighed. ‘I don’t know them. Only met John once.’ He pinched his fingers in his eye sockets as if he were stopping tears.

As his curiosity became discomfort, Ray looked forward and drove through the dark within his own silence. The next time he spoke he’d pulled up outside the house in Hockley. ‘Fifteen pound.’

The man paid him with a hand that shook with nerves or palsy. ‘Help me with my bag, please.’

‘Right ho.’

The two men held a strap of the sports bag each, and carried what could have been a well-behaved dog, zipped inside a holdall, up to the front door of John’s address. The passenger pressed the bell.

Though Ray heard nothing chime inside the house, John opened the front door within seconds. ‘You made good time,’ he said, as if the passenger had driven the car. ‘She’s been in there long enough. Bring her through.’ He ignored Ray.

With the bag wedged between them, Ray and his passenger squeezed into the hovel. There were more lights on inside the house now, though the place was still dim, as if the shadow upon it would never allow any brightness to grow. When they passed through the room filled with boxed clothes, the passenger paused and said, ‘All these?’

Over his shoulder, John said, ‘And more every year. Mostly kids. Aged nine and ten we tend to find. Now, to the kitchen, if you please. And I’ll tell you where you can set her down.’

Ray struggled into the kitchen with the holdall. Whatever was inside the bag had begun to sniff at his trouser leg through the side of the canvas bag.

The kitchen was remarkably tidy in contrast to the rest of the house. A small table, with a floral pattern printed on its surface, stood at one side of the room with two chairs pulled out as if in anticipation of imminent use.

‘He’ll come in through here, Glenroy,’ John said to the passenger, once they were all inside the kitchen with the holdall.

‘Here? You sure?’ Glenroy asked his host.

Ray’s bafflement and curiosity compelled him to stay a little longer. He wanted to see what was inside the bag.

‘Never fails,’ John said, in a softer voice that Ray hadn’t thought him capable of. ‘This was Wendy’s favourite place. And I always use it for those of you that can’t entertain at home. As long as this is your son’s bag, there won’t be any problem, I can assure you.’

Glenroy nodded and then looked at the back door. It opened onto a cold darkness flickering with firelight. ‘Through there?’

‘We done? I gotta get on.’ Ray said to the men. Neither seemed to hear him, or they were ignoring him. ‘Look –’

‘Just set it down on the patio,’ John said curtly to Ray, and stepped through the back door.

‘Come on, we got to get this done,’ Glenroy said to Ray.

‘What?’ Ray asked.

‘Once you have helped me outside with this, it’s over,’ the black man said.

Ray carried the bag out of the kitchen. He came into a paved yard that cringed beneath an overarching viaduct. But his attention was gripped by the size of the pyre in the yard, set against the far wall. Beside the pyre of bracken and wooden pallets was an oil drum that belched black smoke.

Upon the top of the pyre was an old vinyl car seat. A small set of metal steps, the kind you see in warehouses or large libraries, had been positioned at the foot of the pyre and led to the seat.

Glenroy muttered, ‘Dear God.’

‘This part is always difficult,’ John said, to soothe the nerves of the elderly man.

‘What is this?’ Ray asked, looking from one man to the other.

They ignored him.

John touched the passenger’s elbow. ‘Glenroy, believe me, you won’t even notice the fire as soon as you see your son. Just go and find yourself a seat at the table, and he’ll be here shortly. I suggest you sit with your back to the garden to avoid distractions in what will be a very precious time. You will probably hear a bit of fuss out here, and then your son will arrive and embrace you. There is no need for you to see this part of the proceedings, though some clients prefer to make the offering a joyous occasion.’

Glenroy nodded and headed into the kitchen.

The undisclosed connection between the fire and the contents of the bags made Ray eager to return to his car. It was all getting too weird for his liking, and the sinister implications of the backyard installation was not lost on him. He thought of the black plumes of smoke he had seen at each address that evening. He also recalled the painting of the smoke on the dining-room wall that he’d studied earlier, and not least the distant screams at each address he’d driven to. Ray turned to follow his last passenger out of the yard.

‘Not you, driver,’ John said, in a tone of voice that made Ray tense. There followed the sound of a zipper being quickly undone in the cold air of the cement yard. ‘We’re not done with you yet.’

Ray had heard enough. ‘What’s your game, eh? I’ve been driving –’ he said as he turned to confront the man standing behind him.

But then Ray immediately lost the ability to speak. At the sight of what had just climbed out of the sports bag, and stood upright, the strength in Ray’s legs drained through the soles of his driving shoes. This had travelled in his car all evening. And it wasn’t a dog, a cat or any kind of pet.

‘Now.’ John raised both hands into the air and made a series of rapid gestures as if he were performing sign language. ‘You either take your seat unassisted up there –’ John nodded at the summit of the unlit pyre ‘– or she will be forced to seat you.’

The back door closed. Ray heard a key turn in the lock. He turned and watched Glenroy take a seat at the kitchen table.

‘The duration of the event is mercifully short,’ John said. ‘Only a bit longer than it took you to knock Glenroy’s son from his bicycle on Rocky Lane.’

‘I . . . I . . . I . . .’

‘Yes, yes, that’s all very well. But there are consequences, and it’s getting late and you’re the last one this year, and there’s no time for any fiddle. So please take your seat.’

‘What . . .’

Within the ebb and flow of the firelight, even though the thing on the patio was as tall and hairy as a full-grown chimpanzee, what had been inside the sports bag was not an ape. For as long as he could bear to look at it, Ray could see that it wasn’t a primate because there were trotters on the end of its short rear legs. And though the thing’s face was horribly reminiscent of a pig, it wasn’t a pig either because it stood upright like a child. The little figure shivered in the night air.

When it grinned at Ray, he whimpered and stepped towards the garden fence.

John’s brusque voice penetrated his shock. ‘You’ll only feel the flames for about three seconds, driver. Nothing more is required of you. Then she’ll bleed you out. So I always suggest that you raise your chin, or you will burn for longer than is necessary in this particular ritual. Now, to your chair, please, driver.’

Ray turned and fell at the fence. It was old and sagging with rot. He would kick it down, run.

‘Soon as I drop my hands, driver, she will be released. I can assure you that you will get no further than my yard.’

‘Wha–?’

‘Hit and run,’ John said with all the pomp of a scoutmaster. The firelight from the oil drum flickered across the lenses of his spectacles. Ray could no longer see the old man’s eyes. ‘She followed the scent of your callousness. A challenge we set her. Guilt, shame and even pride are more established spores. And she’s had three of you today, and reunited three mothers with their children, albeit for an incredibly short time.’

‘What is –’

With the impatience and irritation that he had previously shown him, the scruffy old man cut him short. ‘She became a good friend of my wife. After Wendy was killed on a pedestrian crossing, not far from here in 1994. And her killer sat in the chair far longer than you will tonight, driver. So be thankful that time has mellowed me. Time even heals, they say. You even start to forget. This is how I remember. Now, shall we begin?’

Ray gripped the top of the wooden fence. ‘Fuck off!’

John dropped both of his arms and his palms slapped his hips.

Even before he sat in the car seat at the summit of the pyre, Ray had begun to scream.

John stuck a blazing taper of rolled newspaper into the base of the bracken. The kindling had been soaked with petrol; the fumes clung to Ray’s face. He looked to the kitchen to appeal for mercy.

Through the glass panel in the kitchen door, Ray saw his last passenger, Glenroy. Over the kitchen table the old man embraced another darker and more indistinct figure. One who had already buried a face that Ray could not see on its father’s shoulder.

Ray screamed afresh when the heat of the flames burst upwards to crisp the hair on his exposed ankles. He dropped his head back, between his shoulders, exposing his throat.

‘Now!’

Eumenides (The Benevolent Ladies)

During his first day at work the only thing that had enthralled Jason was Electra, and her legs. For the next two months, in the logistics office of the distribution centre of Agri-Tech, his admiration became a fixation.

Whenever Electra walked away from his desk, Jason was mesmerised. When his wayward scrutiny lowered to her legs, she seemed to be forever moving away from him, whilst tantalising him in a way that was more torment than pleasure.

Electra was the only light within the darkness of his working life, the sole distraction he welcomed. And even though his position at the distribution centre seemed intent on erasing the last of his individuality, and his hopes for anything better in life, Jason secretly tingled in anticipation of each working day because she was always in those days: sweetly perfumed, tastefully painted, soft, virtually mute, a silky presence with thighs that susurrated between the desks and the grey metal shelving. Electra was a siren mounted upon tipped heels that created their own strange music as she teetered along the concrete-floored aisles, or sent a staccato beat across the vast tarmacked spaces, designed for cars and delivery vehicles, under the forever grey of sky engulfing Agri-Tech.

Jason’s job and office, both confined within the enormous but sparsely staffed ‘logistics hub’ for agricultural machine parts, were in a place that did not matter. Agri-Tech and the town that hosted it, Sullet-upon-Trent, were part of the North Midlands that wasn’t quite the Black Country or Staffordshire; a bit of both but not regarded as either. Sullet-upon-Trent, or ‘Sully’, had no meaning geographically, culturally or politically. It boasted no public life or attractions for visitors. The area was a kind of anti-matter, stuck at the intersection of new, fast roads that swept people past it.

Within a week of Jason’s hasty departure from another dead space just beyond the M25, in what might have been Buckinghamshire, where he had landed after university, five years before, when aiming for London’s media world, he’d become even more disappointed with Sullet-upon-Trent. It now seemed to him that his life was destined to waste away among dual carriageways, metal fences, eerily quiet industrial estates, white vans, new houses built on railway embankments, and warehouse-style shopping malls containing pet suppliers and white-goods stores the size of football stadiums.

He’d found that Sullet-upon-Trent and its ilk offered the antithesis of a life that one could engage with, embrace or be invigorated by on any level. Such locations offered existences rather than opportunities to attain any kind of essence. They remained areas devoid of vitality. He’d also discovered that the places of work within them were usually created, and peopled, by concentrations of the unimaginative.

Sully filled Jason with a particular apathy and inertia common to such zones. They made him listless, but occasionally eager to scream or laugh hysterically, or to inflict physical damage upon his surroundings. Increasingly, the longer he lived in Sully, he thought of himself as a caged ape, a primate dressed in a cheap suit, one abandoned in a narrow and littered cement enclosure, forever bereft of visitors; a forgotten and unexceptional creature that incessantly slapped its own face with a big leathery hand.

Jason only kept his mind alive by ordering books online and reading them patiently in his room. He sought self-knowledge as well as answers about how better to deal with his lot until he managed to escape Sullet-upon-Trent. His reading was also an attempt to cup his hands around the small, bright flame that three years at university had ignited. If that tiny fire were doused he feared who he might become; perhaps a man who would forget who he had once been.

Here, as with his last job, his colleagues were mostly men. Painfully ordinary men, but somewhat cynical and given to a limited discourse that revolved around football, cars, IT, gaming, drunkenness and handheld gadgetry. Even in its briefest form the office discourse made Jason’s heart smoulder with a frustration born of morbid boredom.

Online dating sites had only returned the profiles of eight single females within his reach geographically, and the profiles had all looked fake. Romantic opportunities to relieve his demoralising loneliness were slender. The Sully women that didn’t leave the area appeared to marry early and become mothers even earlier. Only Electra appeared different. Who was she and what was she doing here? No doubt she had not long left further education and had a boyfriend.

Whenever he came across her during the lunch intervals, she was sitting on one of the solitary benches set around the warehouses on grass verges. These grassy patches were criss-crossed by roads without pavements. Jason would pick his way clear of subjects that might encourage any mention of a man in her life. If she did ever confess to such, Jason knew that his reaction would be so emotional that he would be unable to disguise his colossal disappointment. For as long as she never revealed a significant other – a Gaz, Baz, Nigel, Anton, Leon, Jay or Ste – his wishful thinking about her might continue undiminished. When one of his male colleagues stood before her desk and made an innocent stock-related query, it evoked spasms of jealousy so intense they left Jason dizzy.

Perhaps she was religious and saving herself. This was possible because the only jewellery she wore was a crucifix of white gold. Jason fancied that he might convert to anything just to be with her.

In Jason’s company, during his lunchtime intrusions, Electra remained passive, half-smiling and monosyllabic. But he often harboured a suspicion that she shared some knowledge with his colleagues about him, and that his interaction with her was embarrassing to her. He suspected that Electra was humouring him.

On the occasions Jason sat beside her, his head would thump with blood while his mouth issued inanities and observations so lifeless and charmless that self-mutilation seemed the only fitting antidote. She would twist strands of her shoulder-length hair around a finger and then peer at them intently with her young green eyes, not nervous but not restful either. Her legs would always be crossed, her lined skirt slithering back from the leading knee while one foot bounced a high-heeled shoe upon its hidden toes.

Such was his obsession with the girl that on the final day of his probation period he summoned the courage to ask her out. As Electra made tea for the entire office, Jason followed her into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door for no reason and said, ‘We should go out sometime?’

After he’d made the request a silence thickened within the staff kitchen as if the very air had become gelatine. The space inside his ears roared as loudly as an underground tunnel filled with freight trains. As quickly as his disintegrating thoughts could manage, he tried to remember his rehearsed get-out clause.

What had he been thinking? He was at least ten years her senior. He was a pest. The insidious word hissed through his mind like a serpent in dry grass. To finally be reduced to this at his age. It made him want to tear his shirt from his untrained, freckled torso. He’d embellish the action with the howl of a thwarted beast. He had finally lost his reason and was no longer an acceptable person.

‘OK. Where’d you wanna go?’ Electra said, without looking at him, her indifference created anew as boredom in his eyes.

She was bored. Bored with it all, like him. Not enigmatic, mysterious, coquettish or coy, or any of the things that his imagination had conjured up. She was merely young and bored. He perceived this as the stark walls of the room shuddered back to their former dimensions.

So certain was he of failure and rejection, Jason had not thought as far ahead as where they might go. ‘Where’s good to go . . . to go round here?’

Electra frowned. ‘Nowhere much. Beside the zoo.’

Jason rented a room in a large subdivided Victorian house in the town’s oldest street, an area unhappily separated from where it had originally been founded after the county’s lines were redrawn in the sixties. Initially, Jason had hoped to have his own place in Sullet-upon-Trent, but, even so far away from London, his credit-card debt consumed most of his income and he was forced to cohabit.

All of the residents of the house were male, older than Jason, and appeared even more weary and disappointed than he felt. If he could not break his current encirclement of poorly paid employment without prospect, in negligible places set beside motorways, then his new neighbours, he realised, were portents of his entire remaining future.

Only one resident of the house ever engaged him in conversation, though Jason wished Gerald had remained as secretive, sullen and retiring as the other grey figures that huddled in front of muttering televisions in their rooms. But Gerald was one of those unfortunate individuals who hated being alone, yet had few social graces and no emotional intelligence. Gerald was also an autodidact on council politics, which he interspersed with political history, both moribund and local. He always spoke through a knowing half-smile, in an ironic tone that helped Jason understand why housemates often murdered each other.

But Gerald liked an audience and had selected Jason to fulfil that function when Jason, making an effort to be the gregarious new boy, had been moving his meagre belongings into the house. A geniality he now paid a heavy price for whenever he used the kitchen.

That part of the building had become a kind of trap laid by the spidery and withered Gerald. His door on the first floor would click open whenever anyone entered the kitchen to boil a kettle or prepare a meal. The insect-like figure would then descend silently and hover about the kitchen door, as if weaving an invisible web that his victims would fail to break through, should they decide, quite reasonably, that hunger and thirst were better alternatives to Gerald’s company.

But the night before his ‘date’ with Electra Jason saw a rare opportunity to employ Gerald’s local knowledge to some purpose. An opportunity he had never before discovered in their one-sided interactions.

Jason took a ready meal down to the ground-floor kitchen, and, with a magician’s flourish, hit the open door button of the microwave. The appliance’s bell pinged loudly, and within three seconds the door of Gerald’s room clicked open.

‘Evening,’ Gerald said from the doorway, and followed this with his customary embellishment, ‘How’s life down pit?’ At which he chortled through his beard, close to tearing up with delight at his own jest.

Jason cut the preliminaries. Tonight, he’d let Gerald in. ‘I had no idea that Sullet had a zoo.’

Gerald stopped smiling and frowned. ‘It doesn’t. Not in all the years I’ve lived here. And I would know. You can trust me on that.’

Jason had such faith in Gerald’s local knowledge that this news filled his head with a terrible confusion that lapsed into dread. Electra had made a fool of him then? If Gerald said there was no zoo in Sullet, then none existed. And wasn’t a zoo a place where older men, like dads and uncles, traditionally took younger girls, like nieces and daughters, on innocent days out? Electra’s offer to meet him outside the gates of the zoo the following morning, on Saturday, must have been a disingenuous, mocking rejection that he’d been too stupid to recognise.

When Jason arrived at work on Monday and he accused her of playing a cruel trick, she would say, Did you really think? No, tell me you didn’t. I was only joking. No, wait, don’t tell me you actually went and looked for a zoo? In Sully? He could almost hear her voice. His disgrace and humiliation would reach the forklift drivers by elevenses. The material he’d gifted his colleagues with, for endless pranks and jibes about all things zoological, was limitless. Why had he been so gullible? Sullet had no cinema, no theatre, museum, bowling alley. It was simply a place where people existed. Recreation was sought out of town. So how could it possibly boast a zoo?

‘But that was a roll-up right there. Typical really.’ Gerald’s voice returned to Jason as he stood in shocked stupefaction before the microwave oven. ‘As usual the money wasn’t there. Gibbet was running the council into the ground at the time. So instead they used the budget on roads that no one needed.’

Jason’s horror at Electra’s deception turned to anger. ‘What the hell are you wittering on about? I asked about a zoo, not budgets and roads.’

Gerald grinned as if Jason was positioned exactly where the older man wanted him to be. ‘What you need to understand, what you need to know, is how it all came about –’

‘No, I don’t. There is no zoo. I know what I need to.’

‘Oh, but there was once. Pentree Zoological Gardens. In ruins now. You can still see it from the A2546. If you’re going towards Bunridge, just before you get to where the Man in the Moon used to be . . .’ And this continued for some time. Another of Gerald’s interests was interminable road directions using landmarks that no longer existed.

‘Stop.’ Jason even held his hands up as if pleading. ‘Please, stop. The zoo. There was a zoo, but it’s no longer open?’

‘That’s what I said. When Gibbet –’

‘Stop. Slow down. Please. This zoo. The zoo itself is still there? So what else is there?’

Gerald frowned.

‘In terms of leisure activities? Funfair? Restaurant? Pub? Whatever? Why would anyone go there now?’

‘Well, they wouldn’t, unless they belonged to the local historical society. I was once the secretary, from –’

‘Gerald! Why would the local historical society go there?’

‘Because of the architecture, of course. It’s one of the last remaining Victorian zoos built by Bellowby. A testament to inhumanity. If you were an animal shipped over from Africa or Asia, then the last place you’d want to end up was Sullet zoo. You see, what you need to understand –’

‘So it’s a museum of sorts, open to the public?’

‘Not likely. There’s never been enough money to pull it down, let alone preserve it.’

‘So it’s derelict? This is a derelict Victorian zoo?’

‘More or less. Why do you ask?’

‘I’m going there tomorrow. To meet a friend.’

Gerald’s eyes burned with an opportunist’s glee. ‘Well, all right, I’ve nothing on. I’ll come too. There’s no point going unless someone’s with you who knows the story.’

‘No. No. Thanks, but no. It’s a date.’

‘A date? With a girl? There?’ Gerald’s shock was shared in equal parts between the idea that Jason knew an actual woman, and the idea that they intended to visit the abandoned zoo together.

‘The story we don’t need. Sorry, local history, that sort of thing. Wouldn’t quite work.’

Gerald deflated at the rebuff. ‘Maybe she knows all about it then.’

‘I doubt that.’ And then Jason wondered if he was meant to find the zoo locked up and in ruins on Saturday morning, as if that were to serve as an epitaph to his romantic aspirations. Or was Electra suggesting that he was an animal that should be locked up? The best place for him after pestering her at work and staring at her legs for months? My God, he thought, and seemed to shrink inside. Was it that noticeable, his leering?

‘A bad business. Religious nutters finished off what a shortage of funds began.’

His miserable reverie broken, Jason looked at Gerald. ‘What? What did you say?’ A question he’d never thought he’d ask Gerald. ‘What bad business? What nutters are you talking about?’

Gerald appeared to expand anew with the spirit that had so recently deserted him. ‘The animals all died. Horribly. Poisoned, they suspected, from chemicals that drifted over from the works out at Bunyip. Place had been in decline, of course, for years, so the poor beasts were in bad shape. No money, you see. Way before the animal rights lot got organised, the animals’ welfare was in serious decline. But a group of swivel-eyed evangelists had actually been going into the enclosures and poisoning the animals at night. The Sisters of the White Cross, they called themselves. They had a temple out Ruddery way, but it’s a teeth-whitening place now . . .’

And for the first time as a resident in the house, Jason stood still, without fidgeting or looking at his watch, or breaking away to make phone calls that he did not need to make, and he listened to Gerald.

‘Hi.’ Electra’s eyes smiled with a warmth he’d not known them capable of.

Questions he wanted to ask her tripped over each other in his mind like clowns wearing long shoes. His thoughts were enshrouded by a fog of confusion and desire that refused to lift. But there was no doubt that this was a date. The realisation made him shiver.

A young woman would not have worn boots with spike heels and tights so shimmery that they appeared wet, or a stretchy miniskirt and that much make-up, unless she intended to impress. She must have spent hours on her hair too.

A long wooden frontage bore faded depictions of animals with humanlike faces. ‘How do I get in?’ He followed this with ‘Why here?’ when the girl he was now struggling to recognise as his colleague showed him a gap between a metal pole and the tented security wire attached to the upright. Electra didn’t answer, but smiled and dipped eyes made entrancing by a pair of false eyelashes, when he said, ‘You look amazing, by the way.’

One turnstile of the four attached to the ticket booths soon turned with a loud metallic knocking as they each passed through the original entrance. The mildly unpleasant notion of the turnstile’s sound echoing far out to what lay beyond the gates, like a curious doorbell, was dispelled when Jason was confronted with what stretched around him.

He found himself on a wide tarmac forecourt once designed to receive large crowds. Opposite the turnstiles was a boarded-up gift shop and a shuttered Go-Ape café. Façades of animal-themed sideshows stretched to a disused toddlers’ fairground, where the gaudy plastic reds and yellows of the little fairground rides remained bright against the encroaching treeline. In the distance, a small train, intended for children, slumped on punctured tyres against a miniature platform that was embellished with gingerbread filigree ironwork. A toilet block with a flat roof had mostly been engulfed by moss and dead tree branches. Tall, busy weeds erupted through the footpaths. Food wrappers faded enough to appear bleached covered most of the ground.

But above the concessions, a steep hill, reminiscent of a small Alpine mountain, rose into low grey cloud. Peering toward the mist-enshrouded summit, he glimpsed concrete enclosures, rusty metal poles and tatters of wire hanging from them, a decaying cable-car ride, and signs of footpaths cutting through the wild deciduous foliage. The zoological gardens had been built into tiers around the hill, all connected by a winding path that began on their left.

The bizarre and exotic surroundings excited Jason as if he were a child. He wondered if he’d underestimated the girl at his side. Had she a sensitivity to the strange beauty of dereliction? An empathy, unfettered by intellectualism, with past grandeur? An interest, at the very least, in local history? He wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her pretty mouth hard and move his hands over her diminutive curves. She seemed to read his ardour but not be appalled by it. She smiled.

‘This might be the only interesting thing about Sully.’ His remark also pleased her. Amidst such ruin her sudden laugh was melodic, magical. He’d never heard her laugh before.

‘There’s nothing like this anywhere else.’ She raised her face to the hill as if in adoration. ‘Never makes me want to see this place when it was open.’

Jason wasn’t sure he grasped the sentiment but wanted to agree with her. Though there was something about Electra’s enthusiasm that also made him suspect that she might be mad. Mad but beautiful, like the Sisters of the White Cross, according to Gerald. One of them had been a local beauty too, who’d once been crowned Miss Great Britain. She’d taken the veil for the sect after succumbing to its obsession with the Garden of Eden before the fall of man.

‘Why here? Why do you come here?’

Electra’s face adopted the half-concealed smile he knew too well from Agri-Tech. He hoped this one was merely playful. ‘Cus it makes me happy. Peaceful, like.’

‘You come here a lot?’

‘Loads.’

‘On your own?’

‘Mostly. Sometimes I meet friends.’

The idea should have been reassuring, but such was his greed for the girl that Jason preferred the idea of her always being alone here, in a place she would share only with him.

‘They might be here later. We can meet up.’

‘Your friends are coming?’ He hoped his disappointment wasn’t obvious.

Electra set off up the path on their left, as much to cut off his interrogation, he sensed, as to show him more.

Her face betrayed an eagerness to get higher more quickly than his new shoes would allow. Her posture also seemed looser, more limber, while her face remained angled upwards as if to catch a sun’s rays. He was seeing a side to the girl he’d never glimpsed at work and she was becoming harder to recognise as each minute passed. He tried to combat this estrangement by talking to her.

‘You know what happened here, in the seventies, before you were even born?’ He found himself in danger of reciting parts of Gerald’s monologue, which had lasted for over an hour the previous evening: a discourse rich with details about the cult who’d gradually destroyed the zoo’s complement of animals, embellished with the council politics that had subsequently kept the place shut. More than the breathlessness caused by the ascent, a sudden horror at the insidious influence of Gerald in his companionless existence made Jason stop talking.

‘Oh, you know about that?’ There was a spine of sarcasm in Electra’s tone. She stopped by a vast canopy constructed from steel poles and netting. Great rents and holes gaped in the overgrown enclosure’s covering. Rotten logs and a deep lake of dead leaves consumed the floor. In the centre of the area was a thicket of unmanaged tree growth. High on the rear cement wall were the unappealing mouths of two artificial caves. Electra grinned at the abandoned enclosure as if she had spotted a rare and shy animal inside.

Jason cleared the signage with one hand: a steel placard upon which a map of Asia was embossed. With a finger he traced the species of the former occupants: GELADA BABOONS. ‘How did they get in, I wonder. The women. The nutters who poisoned the animals.’

Electra chose to remain mute. It irritated Jason. He filled the uncomfortable silence again. ‘One of the women was killed. Did you know that? But not by the lions or the tiger they had here back then, like you’d think. An elephant got her. Can you imagine that?’

According to Gerald, an ancient and blind pachyderm called Dolly had used its head to press one of the Sisters of the White Cross against the floor of its pen: the beauty queen. She’d crept in to soak the straw with arsenic but had the life crushed out of her instead. The elephant had also placed its knees upon her legs and held the position, while pressing her with its vast skull, until she was dead.

Concluding her silent communication with the stained rocks and dead wood where baboons had once scampered, Electra turned away from the railings and moved further up the hill. ‘They always get things wrong,’ she said, though Jason was confused as to who ‘they’ signified. ‘People don’t know what happened here,’ she added.

‘Oh, they do. Nutters killed every animal except the reptiles. Apparently they bludgeoned the smaller ones they could corner. Doesn’t surprise me at all that the . . . town –’ he’d nearly said ‘council’ and that would just not do on a date ‘– wants to keep the place quiet. Makes it all a bit eerie, don’t you think, once you know the story? I think the surviving women were committed.’

Jason was aware his comments were displeasing Electra. Perhaps it was their morbidity, a tone that he could not shake from his thoughts now that he was inside the zoo.

‘People don’t know why it happened. They wasn’t there.’ Electra said this sharply, but with a sly look in her lovely eyes, as if she were privy to a secret that she could not disclose. It made her seem simple and immature. ‘You shouldn’t have opinions if you don’t know the facts,’ she added. ‘Horrible things happen for good reasons. Don’t you know that?’

‘Yes, of course,’ he said too quickly, desperate to return her mood to what it had been.

He followed her in silence and was led past horribly small, overgrown cages for owls, kookaburras, macaques, scarlet macaws and Amazon parrots. The ascent made Jason sweat and wheeze, which he tried to conceal by dropping just behind her line of sight. Electra clipped on, her small and lovely legs sheening in the thin metal light and effortlessly sending her ahead to the foot of a long cement staircase that led to another level.

A sign beside the worn metal handrail at the foot of the stairs indicated that orang-utans, gibbons, chimpanzees and lemurs once whiled away their captivity somewhere above. Dense branches of small trees arched over the steep passage, sealing out most of the natural light. Jason would have to bend over to get through.

‘You coming or what?’ Electra said.

He was almost too winded to speak. ‘Is there another way . . .’ The heel of his left foot was suddenly smitten with a hot and painful blister.

From the hilltop, from out of the fog-wreathed trees, came a sharp cry that Jason wanted to believe was human, though knew it was probably not. And into his mind came suggestions of yellow teeth, of dust being kicked up in clouds by clawed black feet. He imagined thin, hairy limbs racing up tree branches in enraged pursuit of other furred shapes.

Electra giggled. And for a moment, before she slipped into the dark tunnel that surrounded the staircase, her expression had seemed especially salacious. Wanton though cruel, and much older than it should have appeared on such a young face.

So quickly did Jason turn to where he guessed the noise had issued that he fell against the railings at the mouth of the staircase. His eyes groped about the dark, wet trees above. He peered into the distance, at the pointed cement roofs, vaguely alien in the way they poked through the mist and treetops nearer the summit. And where the mist hung about the peak he was also struck by the unappealing suggestion of a ruined temple returned to some steaming jungle on an Asian mountain range. The shriek, the fog, the wildness of the trees, all conspired in his mind to make him suspect that he had passed beyond the margins of Sullet-upon-Trent, a town not really belonging anywhere either.

Further up the stone staircase, Electra’s tipped heels clicked through the shadows.

Jason followed. He called her name twice and said, ‘Hang on!’ She laughed, sweetly, from a greater distance than seemed feasible.

Within the smothering canopy of tree branches, Jason soon struggled to see where he was placing his feet. His breath was loud about his head, and his heart beat inside his skull. Stumbling forward, one hand flailed to where he hoped the railing might be. But amidst the scents of leaf mulch and wet earth, a trace of her perfume lingered. He chased the fragrance.

Daylight eventually formed a coin of white gold when he rounded a corner on the cement staircase. As he neared the top, Electra’s lovely blonde head appeared and she joyfully cried, ‘Keep up!’ before vanishing. The comment made Jason feel twice his age.

He only stopped struggling upwards when startled by a second shriek, a cry at the side of the staircase, mere feet away from where he laboured. An animal scream followed by a boisterous scampering towards where he was, which swiftly evolved into the determined progress of a presence that he could not see, passing over his head. It was aware of him below, though, of that he was certain, as much as he was certain of the speed and strength of whatever thrashed through the darkness above.

When Jason eventually made the top of the staircase he was near insensible with exhaustion and fear. But Electra was not waiting for him on the wide and greening concrete path.

With the taste of blood and panic in his mouth he peered back into the narrow tunnel he had emerged crouching from. Down there, all was quiet again. But he was now certain that the Sisters of the White Cross had failed to destroy every animal that had been kept in captivity here, four decades earlier. Some kind of ape must have survived and bred descendants. Indigenous British wildlife included nothing of that size, capable of such agility so high above the ground, that could have made such an infernal cry.

These vestiges of feral animal survival must form part of the appeal to Electra and her trespassing friends; they knew that the zoological gardens were not quite as empty as the town thought. She’d wanted to surprise him with something special and secret that he could not see anywhere else. Her cryptic comments made more sense to Jason now.

But where was she? He feared their date had degenerated into a childish game of hide-and-seek. He was too tired and shaken to get into the spirit of something like that now. Even if the taste of her mouth was waiting as a reward for his being a good sport, Jason wanted to go home.

Enclosures for animals lined each side of the only possible route onwards, fronted by raised viewing platforms. His repeated cries of ‘Electra!’ were greeted with a misty silence that he mistook for anticipation in the verdure around him.

The only tolerable way out of here for him was up, to eventually get down again. The original design of the zoo was much clearer; visitors would move to the summit, circling the sides, while viewing the animal attractions on their ascent. Other features must await on the descent.

He was now flanked by the orang-utan and chimpanzee houses. He worked this out from the badly painted depiction of an orange ape on a viewing platform. In the opposite pen, chains still suspended a complex arrangement of logs from which chimpanzees once capered. To his dismay, and a dread that he now tried to swallow like a lump in the throat, he noticed that some of the hanging logs were gently swaying as if from recent use. He expected to see a black face peer out from one of the lightless doorways that burrowed into the cement wall of the chimps’ old home. A detritus of tree stumps and dead tree branches littered the broad discoloured basin.

Behind him, in the orang-utan area, there came a sound of a heavy object flopping into water.

Wide-eyed, breathing like an asthmatic, and eschewing the viewing platform that looked structurally unsafe, Jason rushed to the railings closest to the sound.

There was a moat twenty feet below. It must have once kept the apes inside their pen or provided recreation. It now brimmed with a thick soup of dirty rainwater, upon which bobbed a carpet of dead leaves, the mulch of ages, and woody flotsam. One portion of the surface had been disturbed. A circle of expanding ripples had stirred to lap greasily against the greening cement banks on either side of the moat. Whatever had just submerged did not resurface.

Beyond the moat stood a half-rotten tree house and two large and rusticated stone figures of apes. To Jason, they appeared like the crude effigies of imbecilic gods, forgotten and left behind in a polluted grotto.

A rich and bestial spore – sulphurous, fresh, nitrate-rich, reaching brain-deep and in danger of turning his stomach – assailed Jason from each side of the path.

‘Electra!’ he roared in fear as much as anger, though his voice sounded feeble and broken among the damp trees. If he wasn’t mistaken the air was now much warmer, and odiferous with the scent of a wet forest floor.

A response seemed to come from high up. A horrible cry that whoop-whoop-whooped before croaking into what could have been demented laughter. Another descendent of escaped apes, he hoped. But what could they have found to eat in here?

Jason was closer to the summit now, about halfway up in fact, and had a better view of what awaited up there. A series of domed cement roofs, like a miniature Sydney Opera House, poked between two large oaks. Perhaps this was one of the stylistic features to which Gerald had attributed historical value.

The head of a dirty penguin statue was also visible. The chipped stone beak was open beneath the blank and indifferent sky. The cement bird was forever poised to call out a lament of solitude and imprisonment, a shriek from the accursed place in which it had been abandoned.

Jason’s imagination began to chatter like a frightened monkey in flood water.

He walked on for a while. On the very summit, part of a red-tiled roof became visible. Directly below that, where the tops of the trees parted, Electra walked into view. She was not alone. She was talking to at least three other people. Women, Jason thought, and all wearing dark clothing. But against a background of discoloured cement, the faces of her companions appeared especially pale.

They all turned and looked down at him. Electra waved enthusiastically. Her friends remained still and were content to stare.

At a trot, Jason rounded a walled paddock for giraffes, now filled with broken bricks and masonry. Tapir, capybara and Barbary sheep had once paced back and forth here, but their fiefdoms had long been given over to choking bracken, blackberry vines and long grasses.

Hobbling past on blistered feet, he intuited an atmosphere pregnant with apprehension, or perhaps one even tense with animosity because he was intruding upon a territory in which he was unwelcome. Ridiculous to feel this way, or so he tried to persuade himself. A few wild descendants of the original apes had given him a turn. That was all. Once he reached Electra he’d make her explain the strange cries. But what could she offer as an explanation of what had slipped into that oily moat about the orang-utan enclosure?

Steeling himself not to look beyond the iron bars he rushed past, so as not to allow the rubbish-strewn and increasingly smelly dereliction to affect him, Jason finally arrived, out of breath and wet through with perspiration, at the place he had last seen Electra.

Once again, he found himself alone and overlooking a lagoon of miserly proportions: a dirty cement cavity, cramped with dead verdure, where sea lions had once glided before being forced to make a turn. Impossibly, despite four decades of dereliction, the stagnant concrete bowl still issued the scent of decaying marine life.

On the opposite side of the broad paved area was the domed concrete structure he had seen from below, the painted roof designed to resemble ice and snow. It had once housed penguins. The only flightless bird remaining was the worn, sad and peeling stone creation he’d seen above the treetops. From this angle, age and weathering had made its one visible eye mad with what looked like panic.

The doors to what was called the Arctic Arena were long gone, but the stench that wafted from out of the darkness overrode Jason’s curiosity to see beyond the aperture.

When he called out for Electra again, three times, his cries incited a repetitive scrape of what sounded like the raking of dry leaves from inside the Arctic Arena. Whatever was disturbing the most recent leaf fall was not, he was sure, his date.

Having now burned right through his patience, and any reasonable and reliable sense of where he was, he ruled out retracing his steps or following random paths. The area below and around him felt neither stable nor safe.

His breathing was ragged, his thoughts hapless. His clothes were sopping and his throat was salted with a terrible thirst. When he tried to push on to locate his date at the very summit, he tripped over his feet twice.

Up. Some deep and rarely used instinct told him she would be up there, waiting at the top. He continued upwards.

He found Electra at the summit.

She sat at one of a score of metal picnic tables arranged outside a boarded-up restaurant with a red roof. She looked preoccupied, if not bored again, like she did at work. Her lovely pink lips had been freshly glossed and were parted as she gazed at the one-storey reptile house on the far side of the outdoor dining area. She’d crossed her legs and allowed the hem of her skirt to slither back to a pair of golden stocking tops, each welt impressed with short suspender clips.

Her companions were nowhere in sight.

Jason could not readily find the will to speak. Had his thoughts been unlocked from the stupefied paralysis brought on by his fatigue and fear, he would not have been sure what he might say to her about his experience below.

More than the sudden presence of Electra, it was the air temperature that brought him to a halt. A withering heat smouldered through the whitish vapours above him and sank upon the dining area.

He stripped his overcoat from his shoulders and arms. Sweat clouded his shirt and jeans. The heat of his body might actually have steamed into the thick atmosphere. He couldn’t be certain.

‘You took your time,’ Electra said with a cruel smile.

‘Where . . . the others?’ Jason blinked the sweat out of his eyes and looked at the sky. There was no sun.

‘You want to know why it was done?’

‘Sorry?’

‘I’ll show you the way.’

‘What?’

Electra screamed out, ‘We’re ready!’

Behind the closed metal doors of the reptile house, something began to thump and thrash against the walls, the ceiling and the floor. The sounds suggested an impressive weight and size. The occupant then made a circular swishing sound in what might have been sand. The metal doors shook within their frames.

Jason fell as much as turned to the bench where Electra sat, but pulled up short when the girl stood and raised the hemline of her tight skirt to her waist. What would have been a shocking though arousing exposure in other circumstances now struck Jason as crude and unpleasant. Electra’s hairless sex was barely concealed by her transparent black underwear, cut like shorts around her shapely buttocks and tummy. Her strong legs shimmered in nylon.

‘We’ve got to be like beasts to go with the others. Quick. Do it quickly,’ she said, and dropped her head back as if she were already in the throes of ecstasy, or suffering a fit.

Despite his revulsion, Jason’s penis thickened and unfurled like some insensible python, motivated only by scent and instinct.

The girl was offering herself, but whether it was to him or something else he wasn’t sure. Her eager anticipation of the imminent appearance of whatever coiled, writhed and butted against the metal doors of the reptile house made Jason whimper like a child. Electra’s moans were caused by her own fear, or arousal, or both.

Beneath the summit erupted a din of bestial shrieks, bellows and roars, as if the zoological gardens were full again and anticipating a long-overdue feeding time. The treeline around the leaf-strewn picnic area began to thrash like a clash of arms in some ancient battle. Heat from an invisible sun beat Jason’s uncovered head more intensely and boiled his thoughts into higher spikes of panic and terror.

‘Come on. Let him into your heart. Into your heart,’ Electra said, as she lay back upon the picnic table and widened her thighs.

Jason fled for the mouth of the path that must lead down and away from the summit.

A much older female voice cried shrilly from behind the shuttered ice-cream counter of the derelict restaurant, ‘Lie down with the little black lamb!’

Jason tried to look in that direction but lost his balance and fell, cutting both knees and hands. The pain sobered him enough to get back to his feet.

The double doors of the reptile house were broken apart from within. They grated horribly across the paving. A great hot stench of rotten meat and chitin, belched like poison gas across the summit.

Two painfully thin women wearing dusty black gowns came through the opening and staggered across the paving. As they stumbled forward, they batted the sides of their heads as if to concuss the very horrors concealed within their skulls.

Electra thrust her sex higher into the air as if eager for penetration.

The two haggard female spectres fell to their knees and wept. Between them leaped a thick black form.

Propelled from the reptile house and into daylight, it uncoiled like a horrid tongue. A girth as thick as a soil pipe flopped heavily against the dirty ground. The thing’s head slapped the paving just short of Electra, a head covered in soiled bandages that were open and reddish at their ends. What Jason glimpsed of the form’s black hide appeared as sandy as that of a dead Leviathan found upon a beach at low tide.

Jason fled over the lip of the hill.

A great turnstile ground behind him, or somewhere within the low, hot clouds above. He bit through his tongue and kicked off both shoes.

Halfway down the hill, he climbed over the wall of a reeking enclosure once intended for brown bears, and then squashed himself deep inside the open cage at the rear of the pen. The occupant within, half-buried under the dead leaves, appeared even more frightened than he felt.

The Days of Our Lives

The ticking was much louder on the first floor. Soon after it began I heard Lois moving upstairs. Floorboards groaned as she progressed unsteadily through areas made murky by curtains not opened for a week. She must have come up inside our bedroom and staggered into the hall, passing herself along the walls with her thin hands. I hadn’t seen her for six days but could easily imagine her aspect and mood: the sinewy neck, the fierce grey eyes, a mouth already downcast, the lips atremble at grievances revived at the very moment of her return. But I also wondered if her eyes and nails were painted. She had beautiful eyelashes. I went and stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up.

Even on the unlit walls of the stairwell a long and spiky shadow was cast by her antics above. Though I could not see Lois, the air was moving violently, as were parts of her shadow, and I knew she was already batting the side of her face with her hands and then throwing her arms into the air above her scruffy grey head. As expected, she’d awoken furious.

The muttering began. It was too quiet for me to clearly hear all of what she was saying, but the voice was sharp, the words sibilant and almost spat out, so I could only assume she had awoken thinking of me. ‘I told you . . . how many times! . . . and you wouldn’t listen . . . for God’s sake . . . what is wrong with you? . . . why must you be so difficult? . . . all the time . . . you have been told . . . time after time . . .’

I’d hoped for a better mood. I had cleaned the house over two days, thoroughly but hurriedly, for when she next arose. I’d even washed the walls and ceilings, and had moved all of the furniture to sweep, dust and vacuum. I had brought no food indoors but loaves of cheap white bread, eggs, plain biscuits and baking materials that would never be used. I had scalded and boiled the house free of dirt and rid the building of its pleasures, with the exception of the television that she enjoyed, and the little ceramic radio in the kitchen that only picked up Radio Two from 1983. Ultimately, I had bleached our rented home of any overt signifier of joy, as well as those things she was not interested in, or anything that remained of myself, which I forgot about as soon as it was gone.

The last handful of books that intrigued me, anything of any colour or imagination that enabled me to pass this great expanse of time that burned my chest and internal organs as if my body was pressed against a hot radiator, I finally removed from the shelves yesterday and donated to charity shops along the seafront. Only the ancient knitting patterns, gardening books, antique baking encyclopaedias, religious pamphlets, old socialist diatribes, completely out-of-date versions of imperial history and indigestible things of that nature remained now. Faded spines, heavy paper smelling of unventilated rooms, leprous-spotted, migraine-inducing reminders of what, her time? Though Lois never looked at them, I’m pretty sure those books never had anything to do with me.

I retreated from the stairs and moved to the window of the living room. I opened the curtains for the first time in a week. Without any interest in the flowers, I looked down at the artificial iris in the green glass vase to distract my eyes from the small, square garden. Others had also come up since the ticking began, and I didn’t want to look at them. A mere glance out back had been sufficient, revealing the presence of a mostly rotten, brownish snake, one still writhing and showing its paler underbelly on the lawn beneath the washing line. Two wooden birds with ferocious eyes pecked at the snake. Inside the sideboard next to me, the little black warriors that we had bought from a charity shop began to beat their leather drums with their wooden hands.

On the patio and inside the old kennel that had not seen a dog in years I glimpsed the pale back of a young woman. I knew it was the girl with the bespectacled face that suited newsprint and a garish headline above a picture of a dismal, wet field beside an A road. I’d seen this young woman last week from a bus window and had looked away from her quickly, to feign interest in the plastic banner strung across the front of a pub. Too late, though, because Lois had been sitting beside me and had noticed my leering. She’d angrily ripped away the foil from a tube of Polo mints and I knew that girl by the side of the road was in deep trouble.

‘I saw you’ was all that Lois had said. She’d not even turned her head.

I wanted to say, ‘Saw what?’ but it would do me no good and I couldn’t speak for the terrible, cold remorse that seemed to fill my throat like a potato swallowed whole. But I could now see that the girl had been strangled with her own ivory-toned tights and stuffed inside the kennel in our garden. The incident must have been the cause of Lois’s distress and the reason why she’d withdrawn from me to lie down for a week.

But Lois was coming down the stairs now, on her front, and making the sound of a large cat coughing out fur because she was eager to confront me with the displeasures lingering from the last time she was around.

The ticking filled the living room, slipping inside my ears and inducing the smell of a linoleum floor in a preschool that I had attended in the 1970s. In my memory, a lollipop lady smiled as I crossed a road with a leather satchel banging against my side. I saw the faces of four children I’d not thought of in decades. For a moment I remembered all of their names, before forgetting them again.

Reflected upon the glass of the window, Lois’s tall, thin silhouette with the messy head swayed from side to side as she entered the living room. When she saw me she stopped moving and said, ‘You,’ in a voice exhausted by despair and panted out with disgust. And then she rushed in quickly and flared up behind me.

I flinched.

In the café on the pier I cut a small dry cake in half, a morsel that would have failed to satisfy a child. I carefully placed half of the cake on a saucer before Lois. One of her eyelids flickered as if in acknowledgement, but more from displeasure, as if I was trying to win her over and make her grateful. What I could see of her eyes still expressed detachment, anger and a morbid loathing. Tense and uncomfortable, I continued to mess with the tea things.

We were the only customers. The sea beyond the windows was grey and the wind flapped the pennants and the plastic coverings on idle bumper cars. Our mugs held watery, unsweetened tea. I made sure that I did not enjoy mine.

Inside her crab-coloured vinyl handbag the ticking was almost idle, not so persistent; but far below the pier, in the water, I was distracted by a large, dark shape that might have been a cloud shadow. It appeared to flow beneath the water before disappearing under the pier, and for a moment I could smell the briny wet wood under the café and hear the slop of thick waves against the uprights.

A swift episode of vertigo followed and I remembered a Christmas tree standing on red and green carpet that reminded me of chameleons, and a lace cloth on a wooden coffee table with pointy legs like the fins on old American cars, and a wooden bowl of nuts and raisins, a glass of sherry, and a babysitter’s long shins in sheer, dark tights that had a wet sheen by the light of a gas fire. Legs that I couldn’t stop peeking at, even at that age, and I must have been around four years old. I’d tried to use the babysitter’s shiny legs as a bridge for a Matchbox car to pass under, so that I could get my face closer. The babysitter’s pale skin was freckled under her tights. And right up close her legs smelled of a woman’s underwear drawer and the material of her tights was just lots of little fabric squares that transformed into a smooth second skin as I moved my face away again. One thing then another thing. So many ways to see everything. One skin and then another skin. It had made me squirm and squirt.

Across the table, in the café on the pier, Lois smiled and her eyes glittered with amusement. ‘You’ll never learn,’ she said, and I knew that she wanted to hit me hard. I shivered in the draught that came under the door from off the windswept pier, and my old hands looked veiny and bluish upon the laminate table top.

Slipping the gauzy scarf around her head, she indicated that she wanted to leave. As she rose her spectacles caught the light from the fluorescent strip, a shimmer of fire above sharp ice.

There was no one outside the café, or on the pier, or the grassy area behind the esplanade, so she hit me full in the face with a closed fist and left me dazed and leaning against a closed ice-cream concession. Blood came into my mouth.

I followed her for ten minutes, sulking, then pulled up alongside her and we trudged up and down the near-empty grey streets of the town and looked in shop windows. We bought some Christmas cards, a pound of potatoes we’d boil fluffy and eat later with tasteless fish and carrots from a tin. From the pound shop we picked up a small box of Scottish shortbread. In a charity shop she bought a pencil skirt without trying it on, and two satin blouses. ‘I have no idea when I’ll be able to wear anything nice again.’

As we passed Bay Electrics I saw a girl’s face on two big television screens. Local news too, showing a pretty girl with black-framed glasses who never made it to work one morning just over a week ago. It was the girl inside the kennel.

‘Is that what you like?’ Lois whispered in a breathless voice beside me. ‘Is that what you fancy?’

Increasing her pace, she walked in front of me, head down, all the way back to the car, and she never spoke during the drive home. At our place, she sat and watched a television quiz show that I hadn’t seen since the seventies. It could not have been scheduled, possibly never even recorded by ITV either, but it was what she wanted and so the show appeared and she watched it.

She couldn’t bear the sight of me, I could tell, and she didn’t want me watching her quiz show either, so I removed my clothes and went and lay in the basket under the kitchen table. I tried to remember if we’d ever had a dog, or if it was my teeth that had made those marks on the rubber bone.

An hour after I lay down and curled up, Lois began screaming in the lounge. I think she was on the telephone and had called a number she’d recalled from years, or even decades, long gone. ‘Is Mr Price there? What do you mean, I have the wrong number? Put him on immediately!’ God knows what they made of the call at the other end of the line. I just stayed very still and kept my eyes clenched shut until she hung up and began to sob.

Inside the kitchen the ticking lulled me to sleep among vague odours of lemon disinfectant, the dog blanket and cooker gas.

Lois was doing a one-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, the one with the painting of a mill beside a pond. The puzzle was spread across a card table and her legs passed beneath the table. I sat before her, naked, and stayed quiet. Her toes were no more than a few inches from my knees and I dared not shuffle any closer. She was wearing her black brassiere, a nylon slip, and very fine tights. She had painted her toenails red and her legs whisked when she rubbed them together. She had taken her rollers out and her silver hair shimmered beside the fairy lights. Her eye make-up was pink and gloriously alluring around her cold, iron-coloured eyes. When she wore make-up she looked younger. A thin gold bracelet circled her slender wrist and the watch attached to the metal strap ticked quietly. The watch-face was so tiny I could not see what the time was. Gone midnight, I guessed.

Until she’d finished the puzzle she only spoke to me once, in a quiet, hard voice. ‘If you touch it, I’ll have it straight off.’

I let my limp hands fall back to the floor. My whole body was aching from sitting still for so long.

She mostly remained calm and uninterested for the remainder of the time it took her to finish her puzzle, so I didn’t have many memories. I only recall things when she is agitated and I forget them when she calms down. When she is enraged I am flooded.

Lois began to drink sherry from a long glass and to share unflattering reminiscences and observations about our courtship. Things like: ‘I don’t know what I was thinking back then. And now I’m stuck. Ha! Look at me now, ha! Hardly the Ritz. Promises, promises. I’d have been much better off with that American chappie. That one you were friendly with . . .’

Increasingly roused, she padded back and forth through the living room, so long, thin and silky with her thighs rasping together. I could smell her lipstick, perfume and hairspray, which usually excited me, particularly when her mood changed to something ugly and volatile. And as I sensed the vinegar of spite rising through her I began to remember . . . I think . . . a package that arrived in a small room where I had lived, years before. Yes, I’ve remembered this before, and many times, I think.

The padded envelope had once been addressed to a doctor, but someone had written NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS on the front, and then written my address as the correct postal address. Only it wasn’t addressed to me, or anyone specifically, but instead to ‘You’, and then ‘A Man’, and ‘Him’, all on the same line above my postal address. There were no details of the sender, so I’d opened the parcel. And it had contained an old watch, a ladies’ wristwatch, with a thin, scuffed bracelet that smelled of perfume, so strongly that when I held the watch I received an impression of slim white wrists. Within the cotton wool was a mass-produced paper flyer advertising a ‘literary walk’, organised by something called ‘The Movement’.

I went along to this walk, but only, I think, to return the watch to the sender. It was a themed walk on a wet Sunday: something to do with three gruesome paintings in a tiny church. The triptych of paintings featured an ugly antique wooden cabinet as their subject. There was some kind of connection between the cabinet and a local poet who had gone mad. I think. There were drinks after the tedious walk too, I am sure, in a community centre. I’d asked around the group on the walk, trying to establish to whom the watch belonged. Everyone I asked had said, ‘Ask Lois. That looks like one of hers.’ Or, ‘Speak to Lois. That’s a Lois.’ Maybe even, ‘Lois, she’s looking. She’s due.’

I’d eventually identified and approached this Lois, spoken to her and complimented her on her fabulous eye make-up. She’d looked wary, but acknowledged the remark with a nod and tight smile that never extended to her eyes. She’d said, ‘You’re from that building where the down-and-outs live? I was hoping you were going to be that other chap that I’ve seen going inside.’ And she’d taken the watch from me, and sighed resignedly, ‘But all right then,’ as if accepting an invitation. ‘At least you returned it. But it’s not going to be what you think, I’m afraid.’ I remember being confused.

That afternoon I’d not been able to stop staring at her beautiful hands, or thinking of her wearing nothing but the tight leather boots she’d worn on the walk. So I was glad that the watch had a connection to this woman called Lois. I think my attentions made her feel special but also irritable, as if I were a pest. I wasn’t sure how old she was, but she had clearly tried to look older with the grey coat and headscarf and A-line tweed skirts.

From that first sighting she had made me feel uncomfortable, but intrigued and aroused also, and at the time I had been lonely and unable to get the cold, unfriendly woman out of my mind. So I had gone to the community centre again, knowing that it was where the strange group of people, The Movement, met monthly.

This dowdy, plain and depressing building was the centre of their organisation, and had pictures painted by children covering the walls. On my second visit, red plastic chairs had been set out in rows. There was a silver urn with tea and biscuits on a paper plate: Garibaldis, lemon puffs and stale iced gems. I was nervous and didn’t really know anyone, and those that I thought might recognise me from the walk seemed unwilling to converse.

When something was about to occur on the stage, I sat in the row behind Lois. She was wearing a grey coat that she didn’t take off indoors. Her head was covered by a scarf again and her eyes were concealed by red-tinted glasses. She’d put on those boots again too, but had seemed indifferent to me, even after I’d returned the watch and she’d suggested some kind of enigmatic agreement had been made between us that first time we met. I did suspect that she was unstable, but I was lonely and desperate. I found it all very bewildering, but my bafflement was only destined to increase.

To replicate the image in one of the hideous paintings that I had seen on the literary walk, the picture responsible for sending a local poet mad, a motionless elderly woman had sat in a chair on the low stage. She was draped in black and wore a veil. On one leg she wore a large wooden boot. Beside her chair was a curtained cabinet, the size of a wardrobe but deeper, the sort of item that budget magicians used. On the other side of her was a piece of navigational equipment; naval, I had assumed, made from brass, with what looked like a clock face on the front. A loud ticking had issued from it.

Another woman with curly black hair, who was overweight and dressed like a little girl, came onto the stage. I think she wore very high heels that were red. When the woman in the red shoes read poems from a book, I felt uneasy and thought that I should go, just get up and leave the hall quickly. But I lingered for fear of drawing attention to myself by scraping a chair leg across the floor, while everyone else at the meeting was enraptured by the performance on the stage.

After the reading, the woman dressed like a little girl withdrew from the stage and the hall darkened until the building was solely lit by two red stage lights.

Something inside the cupboard on the stage began to croak. The sound made me think of a bullfrog. It must have been a recording, or so I thought at the time. The ticking from the brass clock grew louder and louder. Some people stood up and shouted things at the box. I felt horrified, embarrassed for the shouters, uncomfortable, and eventually I panicked and made to leave.

Lois had turned round then and said, ‘Sit back down!’ It was the first time she’d even acknowledged me that evening and I returned to my seat, though I wasn’t sure why I obeyed her. And the others near me in the hall had looked at me, expectantly. I had shrugged and cleared my throat and asked, ‘What?’

Lois had said, ‘It’s not what, it’s who and when.’

I didn’t understand.

On the stage, the elderly woman with the false leg spoke for the first time. ‘One can go,’ she’d said, her frail voice amplified through some old plastic speakers above the stage.

Chairs were knocked aside or even upturned in the undignified scrabble towards the stage of at least four female members of the group. They’d all held pocket watches in the air as they stumbled to the stage. Lois had got there first, her posture tense with a childlike excitement, and had looked up at the elderly woman expectantly.

The old veiled head above her had nodded and Lois had climbed the stairs to the stage. On her hands and knees, with her head bowed, she crawled inside the curtained cabinet. As she moved inside, kind of giggling, or maybe she had been whimpering, the elderly woman in the chair had beaten Lois on the back, buttocks and legs, quite mercilessly, with a walking stick.

The stage lights went out, or failed, and the congregation fell silent in the darkness. All I could hear was the clock ticking loudly until a sound like a melon being split apart issued wetly from the direction of the stage.

‘That time is over,’ the amplified voice of the elderly woman announced.

The lights came on and the people in the hall started to talk to each other in quiet voices. I couldn’t see Lois and wondered if she was still inside the cabinet. But I’d seen enough of a nonsensical and unpleasant tradition, or ritual, connected to those paintings, and some kind of deeper belief system that I cannot remember much about, and couldn’t even grasp back then, and so I left hurriedly. No one tried to stop me.

I think . . . that’s what might have happened. It might have been a dream. I never really know if I can trust what appear inside my head like memories. But I’ve visualised that scene before, I am sure, on another evening like this one as Lois bemoaned our coming together. Maybe my last recall was as recent as last month? I don’t know, but the vision felt so familiar.

Lois began calling me after the night she entered the cabinet on the stage of the community hall. On the telephone she would be abusive. I remember standing by the communal phone to receive the calls in the hallway of the building in which I had rented a bedsit. Her voice sounded as if it were many miles away and struggling to be heard in a high wind. After that I told the other residents to tell all callers that I was not at home and the phone calls soon stopped.

I met someone else not long after my brush with Lois and The Movement . . . yes, a very sweet woman with red hair. But I didn’t know her for long because she was murdered; she was found strangled and her remains were inside a rubbish skip.

Not long after that Lois came for me in person.

I think . . .

Yes, and there was a brief ceremony soon after, in the back of a charity shop. I remember wearing a suit that was too small for me. It had smelled of someone else’s sweat. And I was on my knees beside a pile of old clothes that needed sorting, while Lois stood beside me in a smart suit and her lovely boots, with her fabulous eye make-up, and her silver hair freshly permed.

We had been positioned before the wooden cabinet that I had seen at the community centre, and in the odd paintings inside the chapel on the literary walk. And someone had been struggling to breathe inside the box, like they were asthmatic. We could all hear them on the other side of the purple curtain.

A man, I think he was the postman in that town, held a pair of dressmaker’s scissors under my chin, to make sure that I said the words that were asked of me. But there had been no need of the scissors because even though our courtship was short, by that time I was so involved with Lois that I was actually beside myself with excitement whenever I saw her. At the charity-shop wedding service, as we all recited a poem by the poet that went mad, Lois held up the ladies’ wristwatch with the very loud tick that had once been sent to my address, though intended for someone else.

We were married.

She was given a garish bouquet of artificial flowers, and I had a long wooden rule broken over my shoulders. The pain had been withering.

There was a wedding breakfast too, with Babycham and cheese footballs, salmon sandwiches, round lettuces, sausage rolls. And there was a lot of sex on the wedding night too, the kind of thing I had never imagined possible. At least I think it was sex, but I can only remember a lot of screaming in the darkness around a bed, while someone kind of coughed and hiccupped in between lowing like a bullock. I know I was beaten severely with a belt by the witnesses, who were also in the room. A Travelodge had been rented for the occasion.

Or was that Christmas?

I’m not sure she’s ever allowed me to touch her since, though Lois takes her pleasures upstairs with what I can only assume was inside that box in the community centre and at our wedding. I may be her spouse, but I believe she is wedded to another who barks with a throat full of catarrh, and she cries out with pleasure, or grunts, and finally she weeps.

The betrayals used to upset me and I would cry in the dog basket downstairs, but in time you can get used to anything.

On a Thursday Lois killed another young woman, this time with a house brick, and I knew we’d have to move on again.

The disagreement culminated in a lot of hair pulling and kicking behind some beach huts because I had said hello to the attractive woman who’d been walking her dogs past our picnic blanket. Lois went after the dogs too and I had to look away and out to sea when she caught up with the spaniel.

I got Lois home, up through the trees when it was dark, wrapped in our picnic blanket. Shivering, stained down the front, she talked to herself the whole way home, and she had to lie down the following day with a mask over her face. The episode had been building for days and Lois detested younger women.

While she convalesced I watched Ceefax alone – I had no idea that channel was still on the telly – and I thought about where we should go next.

When Lois came downstairs two days later, she wore lots of eye make-up and her tight, shiny boots and was nice to me, but I remained subdued. I was unable to get the sound of the frightened dog on the beach out of my mind, the yelp and the coconut sound and then the splashing.

‘We’ll have to move again. That’s two in one place,’ I said wearily.

‘I never liked this house’ was her only response.

She relieved me into a thick bath towel, using both hands, kissed me and then spat in my face.

I didn’t see her again for three weeks. By then I had found a terraced house two hundred miles away from where she’d done the killing of two fine girls. And in the new place I’d begun to hope that she’d never return to me. Vain and futile to wish for such a thing, I know, because before Lois vanished at the seaside, she’d slowly and provocatively wound up her golden wristwatch while staring into my eyes, so that my hopes for a separation would be wishful thinking and nothing else. The only possible severance between me and Lois would involve my throat being placed over an ordinary washbasin in a terraced house and her getting busy with the dressmaker’s scissors as I masturbated. That’s how she rid herself of the last two: some painter in Soho in the sixties and a surgeon she’d been with for years. Either a quick divorce with the scissors over vintage porcelain, or I could be slaughtered communally in a charity shop on a Sunday afternoon. Neither option particularly appealed to me.

In the new town there is evidence of The Movement. They’ve set themselves up in two rival organisations: a migratory bird society that meets above a legal high shop only open on a Wednesday, and an M. L. Hazzard study group that meets in an old Methodist church. No one in their right mind would want an involvement in either group, and I suspected each would convulse with schisms until they faded away. There are a few weddings, though, and far too many young people are already missing in the town. But I hoped the proximity of others of Lois’s faith would calm her down or distract her.

Lois eventually came up in the spare bedroom of the new house, naked save for the gold watch, bald and pinching her thin arms. It took me hours with the help of a hot bath and lots of watery tea to bring her round and to make the ticking in the house slow down and quieten, and for the leathery snakes with dog faces to melt into shitty stains on the carpet. She’d been through torments while away from me, I could see that, and she just wanted to hurt herself on arrival. But across several days I brought Lois back to a semblance of what we could recall of her, and she began to use a bit of lippy and do her hair and wear underwear beneath her housecoat.

Eventually we went out, just to the end of the road, then to the local shops to treat her to new clothes, then down and along the seafront, where we’d eat child-size vanilla ice creams and sit on the benches to watch the misty grey horizon. We’d not been down to the sea much before a drunken, unkempt man asked Lois to do something rude. He frightened her. And then another dirty youth in a grimy tracksuit on a bike followed us for half a mile and tried to tug her hair from behind.

That second time, while I pumped twopence pieces into an arcade machine to win some Swan Vesta matches and Super King cigarettes tied up in a five-pound note, Lois got away from me. I ran the length of the pier and shore looking for her and only found her after following the sound of what I thought was someone stamping in a puddle in the public toilets. And then I saw the bicycle outside.

She’d lured the lad who’d yanked her hair on the promenade inside the ladies’ toilets and had been thorough with him in the end cubicle. When I finally dragged her out of there, little was left of his face that I could see, and the top of his head had come off like pie crust. When I got her home I had to put her best boots in a dustbin and her tights were ruined.

Two people from The Movement came and saw us at home after the incident and told me not to worry because hardly anything like that was investigated any more, and besides, the police had already charged two men. Apparently the smashed-up lad was always knocking about with the accused and they had form for stamping on people in the town’s grubby streets. The visitors from The Movement also invited us to be witnesses at a wedding, which I instantly dreaded despite hungering to see Lois all dressed up again.

The wedding was held in the storeroom of a Sea Scout hut that smelled of bilge and in there, within minutes, Lois met someone else: a fat, bald man who did little but leer at her and sneer at me. She also did her best to lose me in the crowd, and although there were a lot of people there to whip the bridegroom with leather belts, I kept my eyes on her. At the wedding breakfast I saw the fat man feeding her the crisps that come with a sachet of salt inside the bag. He wasn’t married and wasn’t in The Movement either, so I was appalled by the fact that they’d let single men attend an event like that. At one point, as I hid below Lois’s eyeline, I even caught her slipping the fat man our telephone number. All of the other women felt sorry for me.

I barely recognised Lois after the wedding in the Sea Scout hut. For days she was euphoric and acted as if I wasn’t even there, and then she was enraged because I was there, and clearly preventing her from pursuing another opportunity.

The fat man even approached me in the street when I was out shopping and spoke down to me, saying that I might as well give up on Lois, as our relationship was dead and he intended to marry her within weeks.

‘Is that what you think?’ I said, and he slapped my face.

I writhed beneath the kitchen table for three days after the incident with the fat man, before getting up and dressing in Lois’s clothes, which made me giddy. When I got the eye-shadow just right, my knees nearly gave way. But I still managed to leave the house in the early hours to pay a visit to the fat man. Lois ran into the street after me, shouting, ‘Don’t you touch him! Don’t you touch my Richey!’ When some of the neighbours started looking out of windows, she retreated indoors, sobbing.

Well aware that Lois was forbidden from making such an overture to a new partner without my voluntary participation in a divorce, Richey hadn’t been able to restrain himself from making a move on her. Through the spyhole in the door of his flat he saw me with my face all made up and thought that I was Lois. He couldn’t get the door open fast enough. Then he stood in the doorway smiling, with his gut pushing out his dressing gown like a big shiny pouch, and I went into that bulb of guts with a pair of sharp scissors, my arm going really fast. He didn’t even have a chance to get his hairy hands up, and into his tubes and tripes I cut deep.

We cannot have oafs in The Movement. Everyone knows that. I found out later that he’d only been let in because the woman in the bird migrating group, the one who always wore her raincoat hood up indoors, had her eye on ‘Richey’ and had believed that she was in with a chance. She was only one week from crossing over too, but I think I saved her a few decades of grief. Later, for sorting out Richey, she even sent me a packet of Viscount biscuits and a card meant for a nine-year-old boy with a racing car on the front.

Anyway, right along the length of the hall of his flat, I went through Richey like a sewing machine and made him bleat. I’d worn rubber washing-up gloves because I knew my hands would get all slippery on the plastic handles of the scissors. In and out, in and out, in and out! And as he slowed and half-collapsed down the wall of the hall, before falling into his modest living room, I put the scissors deep into his neck from the side, and then closed the door of the lounge until he stopped coughing and wheezing.

Heavy, stinky bastard, covered in coarse black hair on the back like a goat, with a big plastic bully face that had once bobbed and grinned, but I took him apart to get him out of his flat piecemeal. Unbelievably, as I disjointed his carcass in the bath, he came alive for a bit and scared me half to death. He didn’t last for long, though, and I finished up with some secateurs that were good on meat. I found them under the sink in the kitchen.

Took me three trips: one to the old zoo that should have been closed years ago, where I threw bits into the overgrown cassowary enclosure (they had three birds); one to where the seagulls fight by the drainage pipe; and one to the Sea Scout hall with the head, which I buried beside the war memorial so that Richey could always look upon the place where he got the ball rolling.

When I got home, I shut Lois in the loft and took down the smoke alarms and burned all of her clothes, except for the best party tights, in the kitchen sink with the windows open. I went through the house and collected all her things, and what I didn’t dump in the council rubbish bins I gave to charity.

Before I left her growling like a cat, up in the loft amongst our old Christmas decorations, I told Lois that I might see her in our new place when I found it. I went downstairs and put her ladies’ watch on my wrist and listened to it tick rapidly, like a heart fit to burst. Inside the sideboard, the little black warriors began to beat their leather drums with their wooden hands.

Lois was still clawing at the plywood loft hatch when I left the house with only one suitcase.

Hippocampus

Walls of water as slow as lava, black as coal, push the freighter up mountainsides, over frothing peaks and into plunging descents. Across vast, rolling waves the vessel ploughs, ungainly. Conjuring galaxies of bubbles around its passage and in its wake, temporary cosmoses appear for moments in the immensity of onyx water, forged then sucked beneath the hull, or are sacrificed, fizzing, to the freezing night air.

On and on the great steel vessel wallops. Staggering up as if from soiled knees before another nauseating drop into a trough. There is no rest and the ship has no choice but to brace itself, dizzy and near breathless, over and over again, for the next great wave.

On board, lighted portholes and square windows offer tiny yellow shapes of reassurance amidst the lightless, roaring ocean that stretches all around and so far below. Reminiscent of a warm home offering a welcome on a winter night, the cabin lights are complemented by the two metal doorways that gape in the rear house of the superstructure. Their spilled light glosses portions of the slick deck.

All of the surfaces on board are steel, painted white. Riveted and welded tight to the deck and each other, the metal cubes of the superstructure are necklaced by yellow rails intended for those who must slip and reel about the flooded decks. Here and there, white ladders rise, and seem by their very presence to evoke a kang kang kang sound of feet going up and down quickly.

Small lifeboat cases resembling plastic barrels are fixed at the sides of the upper deck, all of them intact and locked shut. The occasional crane peers out to sea with inappropriate nonchalance, or with the expectation of a purpose that has not come. Up above the distant bridge, from which no faces peer out, the aerials, satellite dishes and navigation masts appear to totter in panic, or to whip their poles, wires and struts from side to side as if engaged in a frantic search of the ever-changing landscape of water below.

The vast steel door of the hold’s first hatch is raised and still attached to the crane by chains. This large square section of the hull is filled with white sacks, stacked upon each other in tight columns. Those at the top of the pile are now dark and sopping with rain and seawater. In the centre, scores of the heavy bags have been removed from around a scuffed and dented metal container, painted black. Until its discovery, the container appears to have been deliberately hidden among the tiers of fibre sacks. One side of the double doors at the front of the old container has been jammed open.

Somewhere on deck, a small brass bell clangs a lonesome, undirected cry – a mere nod to tradition, as there are speakers thrusting their silent horns from the metallic walls and masts. But though in better weather the tiny, urgent sound of the bell is occasionally answered by a gull, tonight it is answered by nothing save the black, shrieking chaos of the wind and the water it thrashes.

There is a lane between the freighter’s rear house and the crane above the open hatch. A passage unpeopled, wet, and lit by six lights in metal cages. MUSTER STATION: LIFEBOAT 2 is stencilled on the wall in red lettering. Passing through the lane, the noise of the engine intake fans fills the space hotly. Diesel heat creates the impression of being close to moving machine parts. As if functioning as evidence of the ship’s purpose and life, and rumbling across every surface like electric current in each part of the vessel, the continuous vibration of the engine’s exhaust thrums.

Above the open hatch and beside the lifeboat assembly point, from a door left gaping in the rear house, drifts a thick warmth. Heat that waits to wrap itself round wind-seared cheeks in the way a summer’s sun cups faces.

Once across the metal threshold the engine fibrillations deepen as if muted underground. The bronchial roar of the intake fans dulls. Inside, the salty-spittle scour of the night air, and the noxious mechanical odours, are replaced by the scent of old emulsion and the stale chemicals of exhausted air fresheners.

A staircase leads down.

But as above, so below. As on deck, no one walks here. All is still, brightly lit and faintly rumbling with the bass strumming of the exhaust. The communal area appears calm and indifferent to the intense black energies of the hurricane outside.

A long, narrow corridor runs through the rear house. Square lenses in the steel ceiling illuminate the plain passageway. The floor is covered in linoleum, the walls are matt yellow, the doors to the cabins trimmed with wood laminate. Halfway down, two opposing doors hang open before lit rooms.

The first room was intended for recreation to ease a crew’s passage on a long voyage, but no one seeks leisure now. Coloured balls roll across the pool table from the swell that shimmies the ship. Two cues lie amongst the balls and move back and forth like flotsam on the tide. At rest upon the table-tennis table are two worn paddles. The television screen remains as empty and black as the rain-thrashed canopy of sky above the freighter. One of the brown leatherette sofas is split in two places and masking tape suppresses the spongy eruptions of cushion entrails.

Across the corridor, a long bank of washing machines and dryers stand idle in the crew’s laundry room. Strung across the ceiling are washing-line cords that loop like skipping ropes from the weight of the clothing that is pegged in rows: jeans, socks, shirts, towels. One basket has been dropped upon the floor and has spilled its contents towards the door.

Up one flight of stairs, an empty bridge. Monitor screens glow green, consoles flicker. One stool lies on its side and the cushioned seat rolls back and forth. A solitary handgun skitters this way and that across the floor. The weapon adds a touch of tension to the otherwise tranquil area of operations, as if a drama has recently passed, been interrupted or even abandoned.

Back down below, deeper inside the ship and further along the crew’s communal corridor, the stainless-steel galley glimmers dully in white light. A skein of steam clouds over the work surfaces and condenses on the ceiling above the oven. Two large, unwashed pots have boiled dry upon cooker rings glowing red. From around the oven door, wisps of black smoke puff. Inside the oven a tray of potatoes has baked to carbon and they now resemble the fossils of reptile guano.

Around the great chopping board on the central table lies a scattering of chopped vegetables, cast wide by the freighter’s lurches and twists. The ceiling above the work station is railed with steel and festooned with swaying kitchenware.

Six large steaks, encrusted with crushed salt, await the abandoned spatula and the griddle that hisses black and dry. A large refrigerator door, resembling the gate of a bank vault, hangs open to reveal crowded shelves that gleam in ivory light. There is a metal sink the size of a bath tub. Inside it lies a human scalp.

Lopped roughly from the top of a head and left to drain beside the plughole, the gingery mess looks absurdly artificial. But the clod of hair was once plumbed into a circulatory system because the hair is matted dark and wet at the fringes and surrounded by flecks of ochre. The implement that removed the scalp lies upon the draining board: a long knife, the edge serrated for sawing. Above the adjacent work station, at the end of the rack that holds the cook’s knives, several items are missing.

Maybe this dripping thing of hair was brought to the sink area from somewhere outside the galley, carried along the corridor and up the flight of stairs that leads from the crew’s quarters. Red droplets as round as rose petals make a trail into the first cabin on a corridor identical to the communal passage on the deck above. The door to this cabin is open. Inside, the trail of scarlet is immediately lost within the borders of a far bigger stain.

A fluorescent jacket and cap hang upon a peg just inside the door of the cabin. All is neat and orderly upon the bookshelf, which holds volumes that brush the low white ceiling. A chest of drawers doubles as a desk. The articles on the desktop are held down by a glass paperweight and overlooked by silver-framed photographs of wives and children at the rear of the desk. On top of the wardrobe, life jackets and hardhats are stowed. Two twin beds, arranged close together, are unoccupied. Beneath the bedframes, orange survival suits remain neatly folded and tightly packed.

The bedclothes of the berth on the right-hand side are tidy and undisturbed. But the white top sheet and the yellow blanket of the adjacent berth droop to the linoleum floor like idle sails. There is a suggestion that an occupant departed this bed hurriedly, or was removed swiftly. The bed linen has been yanked from the bed and only remains tucked under the mattress in one corner. A body was also ruined in that bed: the middle of the mattress is blood-sodden and the cabin reeks of salt and rust. Crimson gouts from a bedside frenzy have flecked and speckled the wall beside the bed, and part of the ceiling.

Attached to the room is a small ensuite bathroom that just manages to hold a shower cubicle and small steel sink. The bathroom is pristine; the taps, shower head and towel rail sparkle. All that is amiss is a single slip-on shoe, dropped on the floor just in front of the sink. A foot remains inside the shoe with part of a hairy ankle extending from the uppers.

From the cabin more than a trail of droplets can be followed further down the passage and towards the neighbouring berths. A long, intermittent streak of red has been smeared along the length of the corridor, past the four doors that all hang open and drift back and forth as the ship lists. From each of these cabins, other collections have been made.

What occupants once existed in the crew’s quarters appear to have arisen from their beds before stumbling towards the doors as if hearing some cause for alarm nearby. Just before the doorways of their berths, they seem to have met their ends quickly. Wide, lumpy puddles, like spilled stew made with red wine, are splashed across the floors. One crew member sought refuge inside the shower cubicle of the last cabin, because the bathroom door is broken open and the basin of the shower is drenched nearly black from a sudden and conclusive emptying. Livestock hung above the cement of a slaughterhouse and emptied from the throat leaves similar stains.

To the left at the end of the passage, the open door of the captain’s cabin is visible. Inside, the sofa beside the coffee table and the two easy chairs sit expectant but empty. The office furniture and shelves reveal no disarray. But set upon the broad desk are three long wooden crates. The tops have been levered off, and the packing straw that was once inside is now littered about the table’s surface and the carpeted floor. Mingled with the straw is a plethora of dried flower petals.

Upon a tablecloth spread on the floor before the captain’s desk, two small forms have been laid out. They lie side by side. They are the size of five-year-old children and blackened by age, not unlike the preserved forms of ancient peoples, protected behind glass in museums of antiquities. They appear to be shrivelled and contorted. Vestiges of a fibrous binding have fused with their petrified flesh and obscured their arms, if they have such limbs. The two small figures are primarily distinguished by the irregular shape and silhouette of their skulls. Their heads appear oversized, and the swollenness of the crania contributes to the leathery ghastliness of their grimacing faces. The rear of each head is fanned by an incomplete mane of spikes, while the front of each head elongates and protrudes into a snout. The desiccated figures have had their lower limbs bound tightly together to create a suggestion of long and curling tails.

Inside the second crate lies a large black stone, crudely hollowed out in the middle. The dull and chipped appearance of the block also suggests great age. A modern addition has been made, or offered, to the hollow within the stone: a single human foot. The shoe around the disarticulated extremity matches the footwear inside the shower cubicle of the crew member’s cabin.

The contents of the third crate have barely been disturbed. In there lie several artefacts that resemble jagged flints, or the surviving blades of old weapons or knives of which the handles are missing. The implements are hand-forged from a stone as black as the basin that has become a receptacle for a human foot.

Pictures of a ship and framed maps have been removed from the widest wall, and upon this wall a marker pen has been used to depict the outlines of two snouted or trumpeting figures that are attached by what appear to be long, entwined tails. The imagery is crude and childlike, but the silhouettes are similar to the embalmed remains laid out upon the tablecloth.

Below the two figures are imprecise sticklike figures that appear to cavort in emulation of the much larger and snouted characters. Set atop some kind of uneven pyramid shape, another group of human figures have been excitedly and messily drawn with spikes protruding from their heads or headdresses. Between the crowned forms another, plainer figure has been held aloft and bleeds from the torso into a waiting receptacle. Detail has been included to indicate that the sacrificed figure’s feet have been removed and its legs bound.

The mess of human leavings that led here departs from the captain’s cabin and rises up a staircase to the deck above and into an unlit canteen.

Light falls into this room from the corridor, and in the half-light two long tables, and one smaller table for the officers, are revealed. Upon the two larger crew tables long reddish shapes lie glistening: some twelve bodies dwindling into darkness as they stretch away from the door. As if they have been unzipped across the front, what was once inside each of the men has now been gathered and piled upon chairs where the same men once sat and ate. Their feet, some bare, some still inside shoes, have been amputated and are set in a messy pile at the head of the two tables.

The far end of the cafeteria is barely touched by the residual light. Presented to no living audience, perversely and inappropriately and yet in a grimly touching fashion, two misshapen shadows flicker and leap upon the dim wall as if in joyous reunion. They wheel about each other, ferociously, but not without grace. They are attached, it seems, by two long, spiny tails.

Back outside and on deck, it can be seen that the ship continues to meander, dazed with desolation and weariness, perhaps punchdrunk from the shock of what has occurred below deck.

The bow momentarily rises up the small hillside of a wave and, just once, almost expectantly, looks towards the distant harbour to which the vessel has slowly drifted all night since changing its course.

On shore, and across the surrounding basin of treeless land, the lights of a small harbour town are white pinpricks, desperate to be counted in this black storm. Here and there, the harbour lights define the uneven silhouettes of small buildings, suggesting stone façades in which glass shimmers to form an unwitting beacon for what exists out here upon these waves.

Oblivious to anything but its own lurching and clanking, the ship rolls on the swell, inexorably drifting on the current that picked up its steel bulk the day before and now slowly propels the hull, though perhaps not as purposelessly as first appeared, towards the shore.

At the prow, having first bound himself tight to the railing with rope, a solitary and unclothed figure nods a bowed head towards the land. The pale flesh of the rotund torso is whipped and occasionally drenched by sea spray, but still bears the ruddy impressions of bestial deeds that were both boisterous and thorough. From navel to sternum, the curious figurehead is blackly open, or has been opened, to the elements. The implement used to carve such crude entrances to the heart is long gone, perhaps dropped from stained and curling fingers into the obsidian whirling and clashing of the monumental ocean far below.

As if to emulate a king, where the scalp has been carved away, a crude series of spikes, fashioned from nails, have been hammered into a pattern resembling a spine or fin across the top of the dead man’s skull. Both of his feet are missing and his legs have been bound with twine into a single, gruesome tail.

Call the Name

Upon sand the colour of rust and beneath a sulphur sky, a great shape is stretched across a long, flat beach. Embedded haphazardly about the vast bulk, scores of milky eyes stare at nothing. Black salt water slaps the grey mass of lifeless flesh and cloaks the corpse with foam. In the far distance, unto the reddish headlands at either end of the shore, the body remains shiny where unbroken, and pulpy where deterioration has ulcerated the smooth flanks. The only mercy here is that in dreams there is no sense of smell. In yolky light falling through thickening, stationary clouds, a long beak is visible, open and lined with small killer-whale teeth that suggest a smile. What might have been a great fin or flipper is as ragged as a mainsail hit by grapeshot but still points to the heavens.

In other places, on a shoreline that might have bordered an empty lake on Mars, long pellucid protrusions of jelly streak the sand, as if the wall of flesh was disembowelled during a battle between Leviathans in the lightless depths of the black ocean.

Cleo cannot tell. No birds fall upon the beached giant.

Her appalled study of the corpse occurs upon a shore she now recognises as the old Esplanade of Paignton. What remains of the Shoreline restaurant becomes visible. Its supporting steel posts have fallen; the building must have been smashed onto its face and taken away by the sea. A shore as much transformed as the atmosphere and ocean. Changes that her mind aches to comprehend, until Cleo realises she is no longer alone on the beach.

Behind an outcrop of red rubble, a few hundred feet from where she stands gaping, two whiskered heads appear. The heads are black and as sleek as seals. But those aren’t seal faces that grin upon the necks of these creatures. Nor do seals have muscular shoulders and arms.

Looking over her shoulder at the rocks, Cleo moves away as fast as one can move on loose sand in a dream, which is neither fast nor far.

The smooth heads disappear only to reappear closer to her position, beside a cement wall washed as smooth as a pearl. The black things raise their snouts in the manner of expectant dogs amidst the fragrance of food.

Somewhere behind the long headland of rubble and rock at the rear of the beach, a great shriek rends the air. A terrible whimpering follows the roar. This piteous cry issues from a second party. The sound of distress breaks a shard from Cleo’s heart.

Beyond the shore, the dull thump of a heavy body being thrown to the ground registers as a tremor as much as sound. What resembles the breaking of a tree’s thick limb is augmented by a series of excited shrieks. Something large is being put to death by something bigger and fiercer than itself.

In her haste to flee, the thing that Cleo runs over is crispy beneath her bare feet and recoils into itself as she treads the form deeper into the sand. She peers down at what she has crushed.

A face, once human, looks up at her. The long bleaching body beneath the face is that of a seahorse. A spiny tail flicks hopelessly. The beast’s expression conjures a sense of a living thing reaching the end of deep suffering. An all too human mouth gulps at the air. Pink gills flutter in an increasingly translucent neck.

Cleo sobs and wishes to obliterate the delicate head with a rock to end its misery. But her own pursuers now lean over their rocky perches. They hiss as her panic and weariness increase.

Ahead, the way is barred by a mottled trunk, white-spotted with disease. The vast, inert bulk at the shoreline must have flung this appendage up the beach in its death throes.

Cleo’s belief that her attempt to escape in any direction will be futile is matched, horribly, by the instinctive certainty that her end in the sand will not come easy. Among the corpses on the beach, and amidst the audible splinterings of bone behind the seawall of rubble, she understands that this is the way of things here, in this time. This revelation is the worst thing of all.

Cleo shivers awake. Her face is wet. She’s been talking in her sleep, or crying out.

Her throat is sore.

She nearly weeps with relief as her familiarity with the living room’s interior slowly returns. Some parts of the room remain strange and are not part of her home; at least not part of the home that she can recall. Maybe tomorrow these alien features and objects will be recognisable and bring comfort instead of anxiety.

Another twenty-degree night.

Cleo drinks water from the teat of a closed cup that sits upon the tray attached to her easy chair. Once she’s calmed herself with two anti-anxiety tablets, she turns on the media service and watches the world fall apart on a screen.

Fifth refugee ship intercepted by Italian Navy in three days. Thousands confirmed dead. No survivors.

Night-vision footage in a live broadcast, beamed from the Mediterranean.

The metal walls inside the drifting vessel are the tragic grey that Cleo associates with war at sea or maritime disaster. Pipes traverse a low ceiling studded with rivets. Paint bubbles with rust. Dust glitters and drifts through darkness like plankton in a sunken wreck. As the moving camera pans the greenish air a moth’s frantic capering is lit up.

Immobile forms haphazardly cover the lower deck. They create a lumpen procession reaching out of sight: blankets, exposed limbs, discarded sandals, disparate piles of baggage, and the pale soles of feet that have walked so many miles to reach the ship but will never walk again. The far end of the wide space is a void.

A figure moves into view. Bulky, too upright, it emerges slowly like an astronaut in zero gravity; a CDC or military scientist encased in a protective biosuit, carrying an equipment bag. Another two men appear, identically dressed in unventilated suits attached to hoses. Waddling cautiously through the jade umbra, their faces remain undefined behind the tinted lenses of their masks. They also carry plastic crates. All are being filmed by a fourth figure with a camera attached to a helmet.

There are close-ups of swollen faces, eyes open and bloodshot, the mouths slices through which ochre-filmed teeth grimace. Long-necked, his expression a rictus chiselled from agony, one man opens his jaws wide as if his last act was to scream at death itself. Beside him, a mother clutches a motionless child in a papoose. The small head of the child is turned away as if afraid of the camera. Most of the dead face the floor, suggesting the life they have departed was too unbearable to look back upon, even once.

The footage cuts to the exterior of a large, antique merchant freighter, bloodied with tributaries of corrosion. The bridge is lightless; a vessel adrift. Flares colour the water red. PT boats and a frigate circle at a distance while white searchlights fix the vessel as if it were a specimen on the black surface of the sea. Rubber dinghies rise and fall with the swell alongside the hull. Marine commandoes huddle within the smaller craft, but peer up with their weapons trained upon the railings above.

The fore and aft decks of the merchant vessel are similarly littered with the unmoving lumps of a discarded humanity. The oily sea laps with the usual indifference about another ancient vessel that never made it across.

The children.

So far away, in the relative comfort and safety of her apartment in Devon, England, Cleo closes her eyes and her mind swims in a ruddy, private darkness. She wants these sights to remain poignant, but to see too much horror is to normalise it and stop caring.

And even this new disease and the never-ending refugee crisis are trifles in the scheme of things.

When she opens her eyes, politicians and civic authorities, military personnel and scientists are announced by subtitles that she lacks the energy to read. Each speaks in separate portions of the broadcast.

The ship sailed from Libya, its cargo entirely human, more of the desperate from east, west, central and north Africa.

A new recording occupies the report within seconds.

Amidst a panorama of dark green foliage, enshrouded by mist, a scattering of black shapes can be glimpsed amidst long grass. A subtitle and map indicates a forest in Gabon. Recent footage too, because Cleo has never seen these pictures on any of the twelve news channels that she flicks between whilst remaining motionless in the infernal heat.

Though her academic discipline and background are in marine life in British coastal waters, as a retired conservationist she is unable to resist any news story about the desecration of the natural world. Like a masochist, she watches the Sixth Great Extinction unfold in detail and at its own inexorable, determined pace in this short Anthropocene Period. Guiltily, she feels no more compassion for her kind than for the fates of the other species with whom humanity shared the world, and which it subsequently annihilated. Sixty per cent of the world’s wildlife is now extinct because the planet has to accommodate so many people: nine billion and rising. Cleo wishes she’d never lived to see this.

She alters the setting and the room fills with sound. The recordings originate from one of the last stretches of trees in Equatorial Africa. This is believed to be a record of the very end of the wild gorilla. She had no idea that any were still alive. It appears that a final 237 gorillas have clawed out an existence deep inside one of the last private forests. They now lie with their silver bellies up, or are hunched, heavily furred, stiff with death and wreathed by flies.

The news service confirms that the seventh outbreak of Gabon River Fever is responsible for this extinction event; the same pandemic that swept away the remaining wild primates from the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Republic of the Congo, and Uganda. The gorilla had become officially extinct, along with the entire complement of refugees on board another freighter carrying the same virus.

The only question she asks herself is the same one she asked over forty years earlier, in 2015: what did we think would happen once food aid and food exports eventually ceased? How could the countries of Equatorial and then North Africa not collapse? As with the viruses that have scattered across the planet in their multitudes over the last three decades, Cleo knows that Gabon River Fever is zoonotic, spread from animals to humans. Those people still hanging on in Equatorial Africa have little to eat but game. In desperation they have eaten the dead flesh of the last apes, fed upon the bush-meat carcasses and so contracted and then spread a deadly virus from its origins in bats; another species driven from its habitat and thus panicked into unleashing a pandemic that was benign in the reservoir host.

Invaded ecologies always seem to call us out eventually and fight back. But Cleo is convinced that it is not only the virus in the bats that had its survival in mind.

‘In mind’: was that even the right phrase for what was stirring beneath the world? Could something so vast and enduring be considered to have a mind that we would understand? Or was it an independent living cosmos in which our feeble shreds of consciousness make feeble comparisons between ourselves and it?

On screen, an academic commentator from Rome comments upon the irony of another species of our closest ancestors ceasing to exist, reaching its end in the very place where our own precursors emerged. He likens the burden of man upon the Earth to that of a flu infecting an eighty-year-old woman. The comparison is, at least, sixty years old. Not much use recycling it now. Metaphors only reshape horror, they don’t prevent it.

The heatwave, the forest fires in Europe, the Chinese famine and the escalation between India and Pakistan have been greedy and monopolised any news she’s seen in months. At least the fate of the last apes is given a late-night spotlight. Though even that is soon swept away by additional reports of another lethal virus; this outbreak reported from Hong Kong and not yet named.

Breaking news, reporting its endless cycles of catastrophe, continues to flicker and flash through the humid innards of Cleo’s living room as she stares at the window, a black rectangle of hot darkness. She can smell the warm, foamy brine of high tide. The distant sighs of the wind in the bay fail to move the curtains. Those as elderly as Cleo are told to stay indoors and be still, even at night. They cannot cool down after the sweltering days. Right across Europe, for three months, heatstroke has cut another swathe through the aged. A perennial event for the continent and its islands.

But what Cleo discovered within a few miles of her own home is of far greater significance than anything that is reported on the news.

The women of her family, distinguished scientists and environmentalists, whose pictures line her sideboard and whose framed specimens decorate her home, all believed that the desecration of the planet by mankind’s thoughtless extensions disturbed something greater than we could ever amount to.

The very rapacity of her own species has functioned as the worst wake-up call since the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction, 65 million years before. Life can never be still or silent; the cries of infants for succour will always be heard by predators.

Cleo knows the world will no longer continue as it is. Not while the great fields of permafrost in Alaska, Siberia and Canada so hurriedly release their terrible, long-withheld breath into the air – enough methane and carbon dioxide to nullify and exceed all revised greenhouse gas emission targets.

The forests and oceans are absorbing far less carbon dioxide now too. The feedback loops are a tourniquet around mankind’s throat.

The average global temperature is three degrees higher than it was in 1990. The higher latitudes are five degrees warmer. Nine billion pairs of fingers are clutching at the wire strung about their throats, some more frantically than others. Sometimes, in her daydreams, Cleo believes that she can sense nine billion pairs of feet kicking up the dust as the chokehold tightens.

The subtropics and mid-latitudes have all but lost their rain. The great collision of the polar cold and the heat from the equator, up there in the sky above the vast, heaving, warm bodies of water, now retreats like another refugee upon the exhausted Earth. Tired, spreading out and meandering to higher latitudes and distant poles, the great writhing cables of wind that once reeled so fast and so high, those great definers of air masses, are taking their precious cool air and delicious rain away with them. The winds are removing all that they can carry out of the heat. The fresh water and the nourishing blankets of gentle, golden warmth are vanishing, along with those near-forgotten climates that allowed so many to exist.

Her own precious oceans are becoming deserts. Canadian salmon are all but gone. North Sea cod is as extinct as the pliosaur. The shell food upon the rocks is dissolving to debris. Great coral reefs from Australia to Asia, the Caribbean, the Virgin Islands and Antilles are a cemetery of exhumed white bones, patchily buried beneath six feet of seaweed.

One in three of all the creatures in the oceans is dying. Corpses blanket the ocean floor in the way that dust and ash sand-dune the crematoria. If any human foot could walk where there were once great vivid cities of coral antlers and waving banners, the ruins would crumble like sandcastles bleached by the sun’s relentless heat and aridity.

Vapours and gases have carbonated and acidified the monumental depths and vast glittering surfaces of the seas. Great masses of life, the megatons of phytoplankton that were responsible for producing half of the biosphere, have slowed their engines – vast green factories poisoned by man, the blundering chemist.

The colossal leafy lungs in the Amazon produce the other half of the atmosphere. But the trees burn while the sea bleaches.

Momentarily paralysed by the range of her thoughts, Cleo imagines the epochal destruction man brought to the fetid shores around it, where it lay stinking.

The old trespasser. He created us a long time ago, accidentally, unthinkingly, beneath the grey and furious waves. The great visitor has always existed beneath the surfaces of the world, never upon them.

As her mother taught her, as her mother was taught by her mother, and so on, and as Cleo reported to all of the scientific journals that no longer even replied to her submissions: all life evolved from the tiny organic scraps of an impact against the planet.

Something once tunnelled through space, 535 million years gone.

As a subspecies of it, we have grown into a multitude of treacherous usurpers.

She has no doubt now that it will finish the destruction initiated by the burning of coal on an industrial scale. Mankind has obliviously, yet fastidiously, spent its last two hundred years waking an angry parent.

Cleo long ago decided to see out the end while close to her beloved coves: near the shoreline where her family had been finding the signs for generations, and where she too found her own first signifier. Portents that the world should have been studying, signs obscured by the incremental collapse of civilisation.

New voices now sang through the wind, rain and relentless tides, and in dreams that required a lifetime of interpretation. But every shriek in her nightmares foretells far greater horrors, yet to be endured.

Who has listened to a 75-year-old woman, fighting her own last stand against dementia, the local eccentric whose mother committed suicide in an asylum? As Cleo ambled round supermarkets and the seaside attractions of this insignificant little bay in the southwest of England, she has told the few who will listen that something too terrible for anyone to fully comprehend, let alone believe in, exists. She has told them that it has been stirring for many years in local waters.

Out there, under the world, but also within life as we know it.

Eventually Cleo finds the strength to break from her inertia, a blank listlessness often interspersed with racing thoughts. She turns off the media service.

The darkness of the room intensifies. The heat about her chair thickens.

That night Cleo dreams of polyps, tens of thousands of blue gelid forms rising from the seabed, growing and trailing their translucent rags until the water of the bay resembles a pond dimpled and thickened by frogspawn.

Among them many elderly men and women stand upright, submerged to their chests. They raise their withered arms to a night sky unlike any Cleo has seen before. A canopy of impenetrable darkness wreathed by distant whitish vapour trails that appear wet, or webbed, and glisten like dew-drenched spider webs.

The old people wear hospital gowns, tied at the neck. They laugh or cry with happiness as if witnessing a miracle. One or two call out for help. Among those, she recognises her dead mother.

When the surface of the water is a vast, rubbery carpet reaching unto the distant horizon, that rises and slops nauseously in the swell, the thousands of grey and white heads call out a name in unison.

Issuing the scream of a frightened child, Cleo breaks from sleep.

In the early morning it is cooler. Cleo begins the short walk to Broadsands Beach, intending to walk over the headland to Elberry Cove. She inspected and protected the seagrass in that cove during forty years of marine conservation work for the Environment Agency. Too old to dive now, she still visits the cove, as often as she is able, to monitor the progression of another matter.

Cleo isn’t supposed to leave her home unsupervised. Yolanda, the nurse and carer who visits her home three times each day, isn’t due for another two hours. By then it will be too hot to venture outside.

Before someone sees her in the street and calls an ambulance, Cleo shuffles home; she’s left the house without dressing properly. Halfway down Broadsands Road, as she passed beneath Brunel’s abandoned viaducts, those stone Leviathans that still bestrode each dawn, she realised she was wearing nothing besides a nightshirt and underwear.

By the coatrack in the hall she looks at the notice she can’t remember writing or tacking to the wall, reminding her to take her medication as soon as she awakes each morning.

Finally dressed and medicated, she stands upon the sea wall on Broadsands.

Five a.m. and the sun is rising, turning the bay a withering blue. The sky is polished a piercing silver that will broil brains in a few hours.

Cleo watches an unusual formation of black-necked grebes. So strange again are their number and positioning on the sand below. She fumbles for the camera about her neck and finds it missing. She has forgotten to bring it, and not for the first time.

Until this last year, she has never seen more than three grebes fishing together at this spot. She spots twenty today. A white debris of gulls litters the sand. They gather in their hundreds. They watch the sea disconsolately. None take flight or call out.

Where the beach huts once stood, a viewing platform has been erected by the council for the coming solar eclipse. That too is festooned with seabirds engaged in an uneasy silence and a motionless peering at the horizon.

As with each recent summer, a great green skirt of Himanthalia elongata, or thongweed, coats the beach like wet wool and is piled at the water’s edge. It floats, entirely concealing the surface of the sea for a good fifty metres offshore. Within the broad blanket of immobile weed that appears to have suffocated the very tide, she sees a vast barrel jellyfish, stranded.

Other large, pale discs of barrel and moon jellyfish become visible along the shore. They resemble unsightly blisters poking through the diseased pelt on a large animal’s back. Beneath the weed she imagines their great white tendrils coiled about the impenetrable green fronds of the weed.

Once, the waters of the bay resembled those of the Mediterranean. The officers in Nelson’s navy settled the area because it had reminded them of Gibraltar.

Cleo ponders the hundreds of thousands of spectators who will soon flock to Torbay to watch the cosmic event. She believes they are destined to see a sight that the subdued birds, who are too afraid to fish, already anticipate.

Her progress is interrupted by frequent stops to catch her breath as she walks the coastal path, and crosses the common, to reach Elberry Cove. She has less than two hours before the heat becomes unbearable. Power shortages have rationed the air conditioning so her apartment won’t be much cooler, but her thoughts are convoluted and troubling enough without the sun’s heat lighting a fire under them.

As she walks along the cliffs, the defunct fishing port of Brixham visible ahead, a familiar hot wind picks up from the sea and rustles the trees circling the common. Cleo struggles with her balance and wayward hair. She believes she just heard those trees call a name.

From the beach behind her, as the wind strikes the shore, the gulls break their unnerving silence and cry out in alarm. They take flight. Cleo watches a great squadron of dry wings beating a passage inland, away from the bay where they once felt safe.

About her on the coastal path, the gnarled trunks of pine, sweet beech and larch bow away from the sea. Their posture suggests they are striving to uproot and flee the moorings that anchor them perilously close to the water. Across the last decade, from Dorset to Cornwall, the leafy heads of the remaining trees on the cliffs and open shores have taken on an aspect of fearful supplication. Or perhaps their decrepit tilt is a despairing acknowledgement of the danger restlessly building out there, deep down, that nothing will evade.

Few notice how these trees lean, or they attribute the slant to the wind. Most people have lost the ability to understand what the natural world whispers. But not all. Ever restless in winter, or motionless and sullen in summer heat, the trees of the bay know only a tense expectation of what nears the shore, something felt but unseen. Right here, she is sure, is clear evidence of a peculiar apprehension that shudders through the natural world.

Long ago, Cleo learned to identify the Earth’s signs, just as her great-grandmother, grandmother and mother had done before her. She knows the trees will soon thrash their last in the coming storms. They will crash beneath great carapaces of turbulent seawater as the oceans rise even higher than the levels reached in the last three decades.

At the end, as the creator rises, the trees will shriek out that name, in a deafening chorus of panic before they all fall silent for ever. As we must too. She has seen and lived through the coming when she sleeps; has visualised what comes after. Sometimes, now, the portents flicker into chaotic life within her open eyes.

The name: the younger trees sheltered in Marriage Wood call it now too. She can hear them responding to the unnatural wind in the distance. Older members of that ancient woodland hush them.

And as she rounds the headland and descends to Elberry Cove, Cleo hears the name arise from the very water. Not for the first time either. In the retreating pull of the surf across a myriad pebbles, all rolling together, she often hears that name. In the slap and hiss of the sluggish waves upon the baked shoreline exists that dreadful signifier.

No one has seen the face of God and it remains ineffable, but Cleo believes she knows its name, in the many languages of the trees, the birds, the sea, and also from the strange languages of her dreams. Her mother once told her that it was only a matter of time before she would hear that name everywhere and in all living things. That she would become a receiver.

When Cleo first heard the calling of the name her doctors were certain that the voices were the beginnings of the family taint, the early onset of the bedlam in her bloodline, a hereditary taint of dementia that remained strong after three generations of daughters were all declared insane. Mercifully, Cleo is childless and the curse will end with her; she would never willingly inflict what she knows upon a child.

Most days, she struggles to recall her dead husband’s face, or even when he died. Yet Cleo refuses to believe a hereditary illness is transmitting this name into her thoughts. She believes the disease that slowly shrivels her brain creates a susceptibility to the natural transmissions from the Earth. Messages that only a disordered sixth sense can detect.

She takes the pills, or some of them, and never utters her family’s theories to her doctors.

Her ancestors all claimed the name was first heard in fossils in this bay. Her own experiences began in this cove too, though not in fossils, but at the edge of the seagrass pasture.

In the woodland dividing the cove from the drought-resistant maize that grows on the old golf course, Cleo scratches about the paths and undergrowth until she finds the tracks she seeks.

The ‘ambulances’ have made recent deliveries at high tide; tyre tracks, the thinner tracks of barrows, and the parallel furrows of the gurney wheels carve the pebbles apart.

The grooves lead Cleo to disturbances upon the red clay in the wood behind the cove. More evidence of a commotion – a procession, no less, of those who try to adapt to the future world they have dreamed. Some local people wish to undergo a great transformation for a creator whom they have worshipped in secret for generations. A few of their number have already sunk beneath the waves and not returned.

Cleo wonders if some of them survived in the colder water, beyond the seagrass, or if their drowned, contorted carcasses were washed ashore to be buried amongst the bent and mournful trees of the woods.

The sea quickly grows deep in the cove. A bank of pebbles drops to smooth red sand. Thirty metres out, at a depth of six metres, eighty hectares of seagrass still thrive. One of the largest surviving meadows in the British Isles. Until she was too old to dive, Cleo spent hundreds of hours in the pasture. Down there she would scour the marine flora with torch and camera, watching the thick, lustrous grass moving in the currents. She took a thousand samples across three decades and discovered nothing untoward amongst those fronds. But she still asks herself now, from where did that stone come? A dolmen that stands sixty metres offshore, hidden on the sea floor where the sun’s light barely reaches.

During one of her last dives, before she was retired, she caught sight of a large, black silhouette at a distance, at the end of her torch’s reach. Where the currents caused by the slipway and the reef made it unsafe to swim, something had been deposited. She found the effigy five years ago and believes that it remains in place.

Once her fear and panic crashed, Cleo realised that the object was stationary: a rock formation. Drifting out another ten metres – a risky business as the tide was turning and she was not at her fittest when pushing seventy in the spring of 2050 – she had been able to see more of the rock that reared from the underwater gloom like a saurian head. To her enduring astonishment, Cleo found herself approaching what suggested the presence of a large black chess piece – a knight, no less – upon the sea floor. Emerging from preserved grasslands was an installation, clearly manmade, though crudely, and casting an onyx gaze around itself over the seabed.

The object suggested a monument or underwater marker; even an idol. At first she believed it must have been pitched over the side of a boat. Eventually she found evidence of its congregation, and one that needed no illumination by a marine biologist’s lamp; because those responsible for the sculpture existed on land, in the village of Churston Ferrers.

The memory prompts her to make another visit to the Kudas, who live in the village. And soon, when she regains the stamina to walk that far, because she wants to determine whether the Kudas have made their final leap beneath the waves. They seemed due the last time she looked in on them.

It is getting late and will soon be too hot to move around. Cleo takes a pained look at the water and marvels again at what has lain hidden here for so long. According to the women of her bloodline the visitor relocated to this bay from south of the Equator, 235 million years ago, to slumber as the Earth reshaped its surface.

Time was running out; that was all that mattered. The eclipse was mere weeks away. The sun had turned up its infernal heat. There would be no autumn.

Cleo sits alone and perfectly still inside her living room. The blinds are drawn across the balcony doors. The media service is silent and blank. A familiar agitation spreads through her body as the anti-psychotic medication nears the end of its cycle. A palsy quivers in her hands and feet.

Yolanda medicates Cleo until she has calmed, stroking her hair until she settles. Yolanda is a former refugee from Portugal who works as a carer for a few of the multitude of dementia sufferers in the bay. She arrived minutes after Cleo returned from the cove.

Reclining on the sofa, while Yolanda busies herself preparing a midday meal, Cleo’s attention drifts to the portraits of her forebears: Mary Anning, Amelia Kirkham, Olive Harvey and her mother, Judith Oldway. She wipes at the tears that immediately film her eyes.

As you were, so am I.

Around their pictures are the polished madrepores that her mother had passed down. Upon the walls, pressed seaweeds hang, mounted and framed by Amelia Kirkham; Cleo’s great-grandmother.

After making significant contributions to marine botany and Earth science, Cleo’s forebears all died raving. Once Cleo began to hear the natural world issuing that name, five years ago, and building to a veritable din inside her own head, she took measures to prevent a repetition of her ancestors’ fates. To dampen the shrieks and the visions, she swallows the psychotropic salves that her earliest forebears had lacked.

Her mother Judith chose to eschew anti-psychotic medication. As a result of what her mind struggled to contain and process, Judith was one day shy of her sixtieth birthday when she took her own life.

Looking at the family portraits never fails to make Cleo ponder the futility of her conservation work in a world that could not reach consensus. A world incapable of saving itself. And a species that could not conceive its insignificance upon the Earth, let alone the Earth’s insignificance in the cosmos. The women of her family all endured their own Damascene moments, haplessly. They had changed none of the minds around them, but had deranged their own.

‘The women of your family were beautiful,’ Yolanda says, as she fastens the tray on the armrests of Cleo’s chair. She follows her patient’s gaze to the photographs on the sideboard.

‘And clever too. Thank you, dear,’ Cleo says, her interest briefly moving to the neatly cut sandwiches. ‘My great-grandmother was none other than Amelia Kirkham. You won’t have heard of her, Yolanda. Her aunt was the world famous Mary Anning.’

Cleo isn’t sure if she has told Yolanda this before. But evidence of the visitor, the creator, was first discovered by Mary Anning, and then passed on to her niece, Amelia Kirkham, who pursued these curious traces of evidence with vigour. The knowledge she recovered, the very sense of it, had driven her mad.

‘Mary Anning was an amateur palaeontologist. A near-unique woman in her time. This was the early nineteenth century, dear. Careers in science were forbidden to women. But she, my dear, was a true pioneer. Much of what we know of prehistoric life and the Earth’s history is owed to her.’

‘You too, I think, will live so long.’

Cleo tries to smile but lacks the strength.

After winter landslides on the Blue Lias cliffs, it was Mary who found and correctly identified the first ichthyosaur. She also uncovered a plesiosaur from the same rubble, and the first pterosaur beyond the borders of Germany, as well as many other fish fossils whose uncanny influence contributed to the decline of one branch of her family: Cleo’s.

‘Your lunch, ma’am. You need to eat.’

‘Yes. It was those damn belemnites, Yolanda. Mary Anning showed them to her clever niece. And they began my great-grandmother’s obsession. Amelia then made an astonishing leap of faith. Few scientists will even acknowledge this. Though in secret, oh, how they whisper now.’

‘Of course.’

Cleo’s great-grandmother, Amelia Kirkham, eventually died, raving aloud her belemnite dreams to the very end in Churston Hospital.

‘That’s Amelia, next to Mary Anning. A brilliant woman. But the great love of Amelia’s life was seaweed, Yolanda. Not fossils. Her first two books are still in print. The first editions are on display at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum. That’s in Exeter. I’ve seen them.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Amelia’s first two volumes of Algae Devonienses (Seaweeds of Devon) were relative bestsellers. Much of Phycologia Britannica, which catalogues and illustrates all known British marine algae, was dependent upon Amelia’s lifetime of study. But any talk of Amelia’s books inevitably led Cleo to thoughts of Amelia’s third and final volume, though Cleo does not share this information with Yolanda. That third and final book was mostly destroyed by embarrassed members of the family. A single copy was passed down to Cleo by her mother, just before she too was put away to scream that name.

Cleo speaks between the mouthfuls of bread and ham that she slowly chews. ‘My great-grandmother, Amelia, collected fossils and seaweeds all the way from Cornwall to North Devon, and along the East and South Devonshire Coasts. You know, one large weed was even named after her.

‘The leading botanists of her day were her close friends, dear. With them she shared her finds, and some of her theories . . .’ She also shared ideas augmenting her own late aunt’s more radical theories about the southwestern coastline. But why trouble Yolanda with that? She couldn’t possibly understand. And Amelia’s end was neither illustrious nor happy.

It was Amelia Kirkham’s third volume, A Dark, Slowly Flowing Flood, that caused such grave damage to her reputation; the work was a surrealist dream narrative. Amelia was a scientist who attempted to encapsulate great spans of time and the ever-changing position, shape and environment of the local coastline, but through the media of poetry, water colours, pen and ink.

The book never enjoyed anything but a brief, meagre print run from a local publisher, part-funded by Amelia. But the lurid contents of Amelia’s only non-scientific work remain the sole evidence of what beset and preoccupied her for ten years prior to her incarceration in an asylum.

When Amelia took up with an unorthodox spiritualist group, The Fellows of the Broken Night, towards the end of her liberty, she was already binding her eyes with scarves, and threatening to claw them out from the root should her blinds be removed. But layers of linen strips did nothing to stop the sights unfolding behind her eyes. And these sights formed the ghastlier revelations recorded in A Dark, Slowly Flowing Flood. The visions that she was stricken with informed her notorious ravings upon the seafront and piers, where she stood upon a wooden crate, her face bound save for her mouth, to address the ladies and gentlemen of Torquay.

A Dark, Slowly Flowing Flood was filled with drawings of the fossilised marine life that Amelia Kirkham had uncovered and scraped clean. Even more detailed impressions of what she derived from the partial fossil forms were fleshed out in Amelia’s imagination, a creative faculty informed by her visions. It was those images that resembled the creator, this destroyer and re-maker of worlds. A visitor to the Earth that Cleo’s lineage had long dreamed of, but recreated and expressed in ways only communicable through the medium of insanity.

Cleo didn’t need to open Amelia Kirkham’s book to see again the gelid grotesques that drifted through the last, harrowing, tormented years of her great-grandmother’s turbulent consciousness. Merely imagining those things had driven her witless. When these forms had opened their flabby mouths to sing the name in her dreams, Amelia had been lost to the world for ever.

Amelia had always believed that she was dreaming of an alien species, adrift amidst the deepest oceans of space and time in the cosmos. Forms that had been creating life out of themselves, and then extinguishing that very life, for eight billion years: the lifespan of the universe.

The following week, on Friday, at dawn, Cleo attempts to see through the dimpled glass panel set beside the Kudas’ front door. She is confronted by a greenish light that ripples like water reflected upon the wall of a swimming pool. During her first hurried scrutiny of this reception, four years before, she realised that the entire lower floor of the Kudas’ home was sunk beneath the level of the ground and tiled aquamarine like a swimming pool.

Cleo opens the letter box and stares into one of twenty four houses in Churston Ferrers with their ground floors permanently converted to the storage of liquid. Could she have subsequently suffered the same hallucination so many times in the same place? Her dementia is better controlled than that.

Despite three restraining orders, and two cryptic threats upon her life, she still comes here.

The death threats, she believes, originated from a local faith group, either The Latest Testament or One Eye Opening. Her age and mental instability were the only factors sparing her the punitive sentences of the magistrate’s court.

She moves to the rear of the Kudas’ property and experiences a familiar delinquent glee at her daring trespass.

Like always, the windows at the rear are shuttered, as are those of the Kudas’ similarly affected neighbours. The garden is ordinary and typical of the neighbourhood: palm trees, the Trachycarpus wagnerianus, pink stone paths, tall fences, immaculate lawns and flower beds and a honeysuckle-covered pergola.

The only remarkable feature of the orderly rear gardens is the variety of stone lawn ornaments, all of which, inside the Kudas’ yard, depict black seahorses, perched upon what are either castles or reefs – Cleo has never been able to decide. She knows the Kudas’ sculptures were created by an artist who worked with living models, stark realism his aim.

Cleo intuits an ugly provocation in the bestial eyes of the four Hippocampus pieces on the lawn.

Her suspicions about this village were first aroused when she followed tracks from Elberry Cove, through Marriage Wood, and linked them to the activity of the private ambulances in the surrounding lanes of Churston Ferrers at night. This at a time when one of the newer ‘scientific’ religions burned through the area with an intensity of devotion not seen since the Black Death cursed Devon, 700 years before.

The arrival of new faith groups preceded her discovery of the statue beneath the sea in Elberry Cove by a few years, though she believes the churches were active for a long time, albeit disguised in plain sight as something else.

The ambulances belong to one of the age-care charities created by the new churches, who have bought the Church of England buildings of Paignton, Brixham and Torquay, and then set about changing all of their windows into a single curious design. Few local antiquarians have seemed bothered, or they have been silenced. Cleo doesn’t know. But attendances, she’s heard, are way up now. The congregations are almost entirely elderly.

Cleo has resisted their repeated attempts to entice her into their faith-based care programmes, along with their extensive leisure activities within the community. Her neighbours used to regale her with stories about the wonderful entertainments and events, until she told them to shut up.

The mayor and council are happy because the church groups are relieving the beleaguered local health services of much of their burden. Seventy per cent of the population of the bay is now over sixty. The corporate charity wing of the church, One Eye Opening, has also purchased over half of the region’s care homes within the last five years. The quality of the care is unsurpassed.

But Cleo will never consider an association with any faith that reshapes church windows into that eye. One great eye. Big, luminous but somehow idiotically blank and unsympathetic, and always in a green, yellow and black stained glass that she considers reptilian.

The design suggests the church windows are engaged in a penetrating scrutiny of those who pass below. Surreptitiously, building by building, and even in the listed buildings, she has noted the removal of the cross.

These days, the garden ornaments of Churston Ferrers are no longer odd to her, because the actual interiors of that settlement, upon which she has spied so diligently, have proved far more interesting.

Much of the rear patio closest to the Kudas’ house has been taken over by an apparatus consisting of white plastic tubes or hoses attached to a generator that produces enough heat to warm her entire body when standing a few feet away. The air near the machines contains an oily electric odour. The two largest tubes pass through the rear wall of the affected houses. Vibrations can be felt through the hoses. If she moves her face close enough she can hear water bubbling through the PVC piping.

The apparatus is some kind of pump. Above the machine, an extractor fan expels tepid air with a not unpleasant odour of salt water. Each of the church’s ambulances that visit the village has been similarly fitted with a mechanism for filtering seawater.

Standing on tiptoe, Cleo peers through the mesh screen before the whirring plastic blades of the fan. Until the balls of her feet burn, and her old spine cramps, she remains fixed in position and stares with wonder and revulsion at the Kudas’ wide living room.

The lens of a light fitted into the front of a limestone rock illumines the watery space. There is no conventional furniture, only several large boulders arranged around the edges of the room and all containing embedded lights. Upon the floor, a gentle swaying motion is produced by a pasture of submerged Alismatales, or seagrass.

In the dim, greenish illumination she sees Mrs Kuda first, crouched upon her rocky perch. And above this bizarre grotto, the naked lady of the house observes an activity out of her sight, in another region of the room.

Until she found this pair, Cleo had never before seen a human being covered in such unsightly skin below the neck. Not only has Mrs Kuda been cursed with a hunched back, or a great mane of flesh spiked by the vertebrae beneath, but her skin is mottled by large plates of pink-orange psoriasis. Cleo’s initial suspicion was that this indicated the presence of a rare disease in which an amphibian environment offered comfort to the sufferer. But this is no medicinal pond. Judging by the rock-effect walls and lifelike encrustations – shells, molluscs and several kinds of hermit crab – the Kudas’ living room is fashioned into a facsimile of a rock pool.

That morning, at least five minutes pass before Cleo catches her first glimpse of the man of the house – if his condition justifies the title. What Cleo sees of Mr Kuda is often obscured; he mostly remains submerged and facedown. Only when his gleaming body passes through the beams of the three rock-mounted lights can she make a fuller assessment of his disability.

His skin condition matches his wife’s, while his chest, arms, shoulders, head and neck are those of an adult man, albeit one aged, hunched and stooped. But Cleo has become convinced that Mr Kuda has no legs. Or perhaps only one leg. And that morning, whatever it is that extends from his lumpy abdominal region curls around a clump of grass in the manner of a tentacle. Using the long, wavering weed for grip, he then wheels his large body around in the water while his head remains hidden. Cleo has never yet observed him rise to take a breath.

Agilely, Mr Kuda now swishes himself through the water. Ripples from his silent, circular activity spread out and lap the rock upon which his wife sits. At the foot of her outcrop, he stops wheeling and, like a child, gently raises his face to just beneath the water’s surface. Carefully, unsteadily, his scaly wife shuffles off the stone seat and sits beside him in the water. Facing each other, they engage in something approximating a kiss.

What troubles Cleo about this intimate activity is the gap between their faces, and the way in which Mrs Kuda rolls her eyes upwards and so whitely within her lined face. What remains of her withered bosom also palpitates, suggesting a pumping action or rapid respiration.

When Mr Kuda eventually detaches himself from the ghastly contact, Cleo sees a thin, dark object, resembling a long tongue, dart back inside his wife’s wide-open mouth.

Evidently Mr Kuda has been dancing, down in those verdant seagrasses, to woo his partner. That hideous wheeling in the paddling shallows is some kind of mating display, one that Cleo has repeatedly observed in the Hippocampus of the local coves.

Since her first sighting of this pair, and the other less well-formed couples in the village, she finds that the sound of the Kudas’ generator and fan will follow her home, locked inside her skull. When she closes her eyes to sleep, she is sure that the white ceiling of her bedroom ripples like the ceiling of a cave into which the sea flows at high tide. What also abide in her mind, in unwelcome fashion, like incorrect slides inserted into a projector, are her unpleasant observations of Mr Kuda’s belly, and of the bellies of the other retired men in the neighbourhood. After they break from the kisses with their wives, and glide out of sight across the watery floors of their living rooms, their gently distended bellies often move, as if from the squirming of a multitude within.

In the warm, shallow seawater of their village dens, Cleo has observed so many who are infirm on land but have managed a miraculous transformation, or second life, in water. These aged people now frolic and glide through the swaying seagrasses with which they have sown the sunken floors of their living rooms.

If she tells anyone, she will be thought mad and delusional. She will be accused of hallucinating, and although she does plenty of that, the same was also said of her mother, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother. But the burden of what she knows, she is sure, will soon bear the most unappealing fruit in the local waters of this cursed bay.

That night Cleo dreams of small islands with faces formed from black shadows cast by the great sun that rose behind them, near blinding her sight and turning the seawater the colour of polished steel.

She stood upon a cliff edge she didn’t recognise and looked across a panorama of new red cliffs. Great fresh gouges of scarlet rock were exposed along the coastline. Vast slopes of rust-coloured rubble had tumbled into the shining water below, as if a great storm had caused centuries of erosion in a matter of days.

From what she could see of the distant hills, she might have been near Goodrington. But if she was, the coastline of South Devon was undergoing rapid reformation.

Whatever bobbed in the sea beneath her position tried to attract her attention. Large, black lumpen forms, but slippery and shining as they turned and wallowed, dived and surfaced, barking out sounds that seemed similar to human voices if she listened closely enough. The distant faces bore doglike suggestions of whiskered snouts and flattened ears. The eyes and teeth were human.

Cleo awakes in her living room. The first thing she sees is Yolanda rising from her chair. The nurse approaches on soft feet, her face one big smile, her lovely eyes wide and glittering with an excitement that Cleo assumes has little to do with her patient waking up.

The nurse must have let herself in as Cleo slept; it has gone nine. She slept badly for the first half of the night, and then tried to stay awake on account of the dreams that her anti-psychotic medication was failing to suppress. Cleo has been in a bad way in the week following her visit to the Kudas.

On the far side of the room the media screen flickers with the sound muted. Her carer was watching the news and leafing through the journal Cleo writes to keep track of each day, the sudden emergence of memories, the effects of medication cycles. Perhaps Yolanda has been amusing herself with Cleo’s recollections. Cleo doesn’t think her journal offers any comic value, but then she can’t recall much of what she’s written in it. Her prescriptions will never preserve her mind, but they have slowed the deterioration and moderated her mania successfully – providing Yolanda visits three times each day to make sure that Cleo takes what has been prescribed.

Cleo reaches for her glass of water, drinks through a straw. It has become tepid in the languid heat of night. She notices her hands are trembling and hastily swallows the three pills that Yolanda has already placed upon the side table.

Yolanda attempts to block the screen with her body. ‘This news is not so good. Let me turn it off.’

‘Is it ever good? But let me see. What have I missed?’

The world. She certainly hasn’t missed that while she’s slept. A narrowing space in her mind is often fatigued by a weakening attempt to understand how people have allowed things to get so bad. And in the last few days the seemingly endless war between Turkey, Iraq and Syria has escalated to new levels over control of the headwaters of the Euphrates and Tigris. The Indians still have their rain, but the Pakistanis have none; they are also going to war again over water.

Even with the sound lowered, Cleo no longer cares to watch the great dust clouds of the continual air and drone strikes, the detritus of devastated vehicles, the moonscape of obliterated cement blocks that is now much of the Middle East, Kashmir and North Africa. Cleo assumes Yolanda has been following updates on the various escalations.

‘Something terrible has happened here,’ Yolanda says, her face stiff with shock.

‘Here?’ It is local news on the screen. ‘Turn it up! Quickly.’

There have been several arresting events of late, portents and signs on her doorstep, but they rarely make the local news. But this was national news on the screen broadcasting from Berry Head, not two miles from where she lives.

Cleo can see footage of the nature reserve’s unmistakable shape, shot from the air. A limestone headland, and the vestiges of what was once a great tropical coral reef, 375 million years before. The women of her family, whose portraits stood on the sideboard, had even considered Berry Head to be one half of a very old doorway.

As Cleo watches the report, augmented by Yolanda’s excited narration, she can see that a great many people recently tried to step through that doorway.

‘Dear God,’ Cleo says. ‘Those people are from local care homes.’

‘It is terrible. I do not think you should watch.’

‘Nonsense. You think I am surprised by this? They’ll do anything to get them into the water.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Open Heart, Open . . . never mind.’

How those poor creatures flap and flail after they step from the edge and plummet to the sea. At least seventy people from two local care homes. The infirm and the demented, all shrieking as they plummet through two hundred feet of empty air.

There are only two films of the incident that took place during early morning as Cleo slept: footage from the lighthouse security camera, and a shaky film taken by a carer who is now in police custody. Yolanda says the films have been on repeat every thirty minutes since she arrived at eight. Despite all that is happening in the world, Torbay is making international news; the elderly people from two retirement homes have all leaped from the edge of a cliff, together.

The police are looking for the staff who drove these confused people to the precipice. Speculation is rife. The carers helped the victims on and off the buses, before guiding and wheeling them by torchlight to the terrible precipice that Cleo had never liked standing near.

In the recordings, the din of the seabirds is excessive: guillemots, razorbills, black-legged kittiwakes, the gulls. They are always noisy in their cliff-side nests, but as that tired and stooped parade of the thin and infirm hobbles and shuffles off and into the abyss, and down to the terrible black rocks and the churning, bitter sea below, the noise of the birds becomes a cacophony rising to a crescendo of panic. Those birds should have been sleeping. But in that riotous avian climax, Cleo hears the name screamed with abandon and with the ecstasy that precedes tribute. Because that is what she is watching: sacrifice. Those were sacrifices at Berry Head; not the victims of mass suicide, or mass murder, as the press are claiming. This is human sacrifice at the doorway, at the very threshold of what is waking.

Those poor fools who were taken to the cliffs by their carers, nurses, doctors, porters and orderlies of the Esplanade and Galmpton Green nursing homes all shrieked the name, raising their frail but impassioned voices to join the din of the birds. They dropped out of sight individually or as couples holding hands, and even in one disoriented clump, down into the waves and the rocks where they must have come apart like kindling. None was pushed; all walked, calling the name.

The residents of those care homes were promised they would see out their final days in as much comfort as anyone could hope for in such desperate times in the country. But Cleo knows that long preparations had facilitated this mass evacuation from life.

The news moves to breaking reports about a dozen similarly affected retirement homes in Plymouth and North Cornwall. There, many elderly residents have been discovered making their way, slowly, on walking frames and in wheelchairs, in the early hours of the morning, toward Whitsand Bay and other beaches. Perhaps with the intention of throwing themselves into the sea too. It is unclear how many were not prevented from achieving their goal.

Cleo always thought it strange, and perplexing, and unnerving, how local fossils have been shaped into the exterior walls of the Esplanade Care Home in Roundham Gardens in Paignton, as if to create some decorative feature using local materials. This alteration occurred once the property came into the possession of One Eye Opening.

Cleo has written to the council to explain the hidden activity within these very stones, but never received a reply. The same innovation has been replicated in the churchyard walls in Paignton after the crucifixes were taken down. Cleo guesses those fossils were embedded in the mortar to influence the end-of-life decision made by so many last night.

She can only assume that the dimming and deranged minds of the aged provided the best material for such manipulation. They were the best receivers of transmissions from down beneath the waves of the bay; such transmitters, the fossils, were deliberately placed in proximity to these poor, confused minds.

Each of the affected care homes in the morning news is owned by One Eye Opening, a wealthy nonconformist religion, or so it is being described on the news, for want of a better definition, which Cleo has ready: a cult. A cult that made its disingenuous inroads into the religious community, and end-of-life care, in a county overrun by an elderly population.

It seems unfair, and horribly Darwinian, that some are being transformed while others were sacrificed to the sea in this manner. Though the residents of Churston Ferrers, like the Kudas, are wealthy; perhaps the selection of who swims and who leaps to their death depends upon nothing more sophisticated than money.

Cleo is shocked but not surprised. During the last five years she’s noticed many other local curiosities. The great ructions on the seabed reported by both the Royal Navy and the marine biology unit at Plymouth University. Fishermen using sonar have also claimed that new topographies are emerging upon the seafloor. Sailors, from what was left of the South Hams fishing fleet, have long been fetching unusual catches from local waters.

With her scepticism in suspension, Cleo never debunked the stories she found online about what was tugged out of the fishermen’s nets and quickly confiscated by the Environment Agency. Some of the catches were still being examined in the Plymouth University labs. The two marine biologists in Brixham, Harry and Phillip, with whom Cleo retains a vague and hardly reciprocal association since her retirement, are desperate to eschew any classifications or rumours of a Fortean nature that Cleo immediately attaches to them. Harry and Phillip know why Cleo was retired, but won’t admit that they have personally examined five specimens of Eledone cirrhosa, the curled octopus – creatures generously exceeding all previously recorded sizes and weights. They were caught in waters off the South Hams coast during the previous year.

Cleo’s contacts have also confirmed that the rumours of a giant squid spotted in local waters are not entirely fictional either. They have yet to refute claims that an impossibly sized Haliphron atlanticus octopus, with only six legs but of lengths stretching to ten metres, has been caught and killed by a Royal Navy PT boat near the mouth of the Dart Estuary. There were reports that the creature had menaced a ferry, and made several attempts to drag at least one passenger overboard. Her contacts claim that what was found in the thing’s belly, partially digested, link to the rumours of the fate of three missing canoeists, who were last seen in the channel below Greenway and heading towards Totnes the previous year.

Has Plymouth’s harbour not been deluged with Octopus vulgaris, not three years ago in 2052? A species not seen in British waters since the early sixties of the previous century.

And it didn’t stop there for anyone predisposed to seek synthesis amongst the freakish incidents and recent curiosities found in the county’s waters. Stone plinths, carved with designs the Celts had imitated and Iron Age man replicated in stone throughout Cornwall, were found off Salcombe by engineers tasked with building a wind farm. Great undersea basalt circles, arranged like teeth in the untidy mouths of what resemble eyeless faces, have been discovered close to Start Point, South Devon, during the laying of new cables to transport British nuclear power to the drought-stricken parts of Southern France. Two discoveries that revived local folklore about the possibility of the ruins of Atlantis existing off the coast of Devon and Cornwall. Something is down there for sure, though Cleo doubts it is Atlantis.

The newly managed care homes of Torbay have fossils in their walls, and the windows of the churches have been altered to represent an eye. A geriatric cult has willingly extinguished itself at the cliffs of Berry Head the night before the solar eclipse. Have they not been hearing the name and receiving its imagery inside their failing minds? Cleo wonders if she should cuff her own ankle to the bedstead and swallow the key, during what time remains before the cosmic event, lest she join Torbay’s flightless snow birds who seem so intent on leaping to their deaths.

Yolanda returns at 4 p.m. that day, thirty minutes late, and wakes Cleo from a short doze.

Yolanda claims the news from Berry Head is upsetting for her, and asks Cleo if she can change the television channel. ‘I cannot see it again. But it is all they show today. They are bringing in some bodies. I would rather watch the wars.’

Cleo acquiesces as Yolanda will only be around for an hour. The nurse’s visit was delayed by the traffic congestion that has built ahead of the eclipse. Thoughts of the cosmic event are making Cleo feel sick.

‘Why not tell me about your family?’ Yolanda asks as she carries Cleo’s tea into the room on a tray. ‘I know these women are so important to you. Maybe they can take our minds from this terrible day.’

I doubt that, Cleo thinks, but she looks at the pictures of her grandmother Olive Harvey, who continued her own mother’s work, with the weeds and rock pools. Olive was a conservationist and artist, selling shells, polished madrepores and pressed weeds to tourists.

As she eats, Cleo tells Yolanda how Olive spent most of her life outdoors and on the Paignton Coast, south of Goodrington Sands, dipping into the rock pools of Saltern Cove and Waterside Cove. A woman who fastidiously continued the family trade, photographing and collecting the intertidal flora and fauna: the flat wracks, knotted wracks, red seaweed, snakelocks anemones and spotted gobies, and, most importantly, Galathea strigosa, the squat lobster. Olive’s mother, the brilliant but tragic Amelia Kirkham, had both dreamed and then screamed about what that thing had originally dispersed from.

Olive spent decades scraping and digging her way into the cliffs, and in places where fluvial breccia from the Permian Age amassed about the slates and sandstones from the Devonian Period. The locations of the best fossils were suggested to Olive by the work of her predecessor. With the promise, or warning, that future generations of scientists would uncover even greater marvels and terrors from those cliffs, her forebear led Olive to the shore at low tide.

After decades of coastal erosion, the shore of Goodrington revealed a submerged forest bed, the very tree stumps emerging after the last ice age. That was Olive’s own find. The discovery made her name in the circles that cared about such things. It was Olive Harvey who also discovered the breccia burrows and then quickly reburied them.

In those preserved burrows were the restless relics of animals that had lived in the deserts of the Permian Age, 248 million years before. One extinct occupant issued the grave songs that initiated the destruction of Olive’s mind; the song wailed from a burrow left by a giant Arthropleura myriapod, a millipede at least four metres long.

In her journal, Olive recorded how she’d once sat in the fossil bed to rest and lost two days and nights. Her mind, in her own words, ‘unravelled through its substance and memories’ and entered a psychosis that Cleo most commonly associated with a bad experience on LSD. What Olive had rubbed against, and become irradiated by at a deep subconscious level, was nothing more than a near-microscopic fragment of a substance that had originally dripped from the writhing and shedding of some monumental form. This occurred 248 million years previously, when this part of the British Isles was a desert, near the Equator. But so began another member of the family’s inexorable decline into socially unacceptable enlightenment.

Cleo continues with her story and tells the captivated Yolanda about her own mother, the tormented and twice-divorced environmentalist Judith Oldway. Judith put an end to her own severe and unmanageable cerebral rout at 59. Judith succumbed to what was thought to be early onset dementia and took an overdose. Despite the great blanks in her memory, Cleo had never forgotten that day.

When she’d been alive, Judith often reminded Cleo of what Amelia and Olive had each explored, discovered and subsequently believed. She told Cleo all about what her own mother, Olive, had passed down to her: the knowledge that our planet was but one tiny krill floating amongst billions of fragments in a cold, hostile ocean of gas and debris. And that our infinitesimal fragment was transformed by a visitor 535 million years before. A world subsequently destroyed and remade so many times over as a consequence of the visitor’s dreadful whims and rages as it stirred. Her forebears all shared the same dreams; the fossils they exposed were the equivalent of a few smudged fingerprints on the walls of a vast crime scene, as big as a planet.

Cleo’s mother would flavour her own interpretation with her background in Earth science. Judith passionately claimed that had we crept across this Earth in smaller numbers, and not congregated in such carbon-rich cultures, while flashing our arrogant, thoughtless presence into the stars, and had we not made toxic and eroded the soils, bled our faecal wastes and effluents into the black deeps, crisscrossed the ocean floors and mountain ranges with cables to broadcast our infernal jabber, exhausted the fresh water and melted the glaciers, changed the wind and rainfall, heated the Earth’s belly and melted the ice caps, exhausted the great populations of fish and mammals . . . if . . . we had not grown to nine billion minds and created such an intensification of teeming consciousness on one small planet, whose neural activity transmitted so far outwards . . . if none of this had happened then it, the visitor, might never have half-opened that one eye, down there, where it slumbered.

In the preface to Amelia Kirkham’s A Dark, Slowly Flowing Flood, the author wrote: ‘Just as every God has slept through our Godless endeavours, any God can yet awaken.’

Amelia’s final words to the priest who administered the last rites were also alleged to have been: ‘What have we done? Oh, God, what did we call out to? Is that thing God?’ Not ‘a god’, but ‘God’, the God: the ultimate creator.

Judith used to wonder aloud to Cleo, and ask why, as a species, we’d not had more sense than to create the requisite conditions in which that name could be called out by the exhausted, dying planet, and by what expired upon it. The Earth now heralded an awakening; Judith had told her that before she was ten.

Near the end of her life, Judith even begged Cleo to bear no children. ‘For God’s sake,’ she’d cried from the bed in which she was often restrained, ‘don’t continue this!’

Cleo had assumed ‘this’ was the hereditary taint of insanity, but had subsequently realised that Judith referred to us. To all of us, the species. Judith had wanted to end our burden upon the outer skins of this little planet in our solar system, in which resided a far older occupant, one that had dreamed such foulness as the great lizards, the food chain, viral life, decomposition and mortality, and us too, around its eternal self, and across so many billions of years that our understanding of age bore no relation to its own. Cleo had obeyed her mother and remained childless.

And Judith always made sure that Cleo wrote down her dreams.

When Cleo has finished speaking, she remains unsure for how long she has been talking, or whether much of what she’s said, has been said only to herself. The medication is strong.

Yolanda is already putting on her sunhat. ‘On Friday, we watch the eclipse together, from here, yes? On the balcony. I will come early.’

‘I’d rather you spent that day with your family, my dear.’

‘Oh, Cleo! You still think the world will end during the eclipse?’ Yolanda laughs.

No, Cleo doesn’t think that. Not exactly. ‘The end of us will be the end of us, my dear, but not the end of everything.’

She does often wonder, though, if the coming eclipse will herald an extinction-level event. How can she not after all of those dreams? And will it be a cataclysm heralded in true biblical fashion by the transformation of the firmament?

Cleo is not entirely convinced by the idea, or by her predecessors’ thoughts in this area, or by proclamations made by the new churches, who are far too dependent on A Dark, Slowly Flowing Flood, among the other, older texts that they favour from Providence, New England.

‘I believe our end will be near total, Yolanda, but with a partial evolutionary transformation of whatever survives. I can’t give you any timescale, or date, but it will be relatively swift in Earth-life terms. And miserably incremental like the consequences of climate change, surrounded by diebacks we’ve not seen since the bubonic plague in Europe and Asia. So, I’m giving us, at least, another two centuries amidst the rubble of our civilisation. But those will be times like nothing we’ve had to cope with so far. I mean, how many of us can breathe underwater? It may really be that simple, in most places on the Earth.’

‘Oh, Cleo! You make me smile.’

‘The world has been changing rapidly and bewilderingly towards a critical mass, Yolanda. Surely you have noticed? And I believe dear old Torbay has a specific role to play in this epochal event.’

Yolanda laughs as she swings her bag over her shoulder. ‘Whatever you say, Cleo! There is so much going on in your head. But you are making great progress. You must take the relaxants if your mind races. The doctor says so.’

‘And you may ask –’ Cleo was not to be stopped, even as Yolanda was halfway through the door ‘– why don’t I flee to higher ground? But if you consider what the women of my family discovered, who would want to survive what is coming?’

[Excerpt from the diary of Cleo Harvey]

July 18th, 2055

My dearest Yolanda,

I may not remember to tell you this. I may become distracted, or sleep through your next visit. But as I am enjoying a good period of clarity this afternoon, I feel I owe you some explanation so that you can better make sense of the disparate stories that I have been telling you over the last two years; stories about my family and our work here in this bay.

My great-grandmother, Amelia Kirkham, whom I may have mentioned to you during our association, was certain that what she called the Old One, or Great Old One, as she was wont, arrived on our planet in the Ediacaran Period, 535 million years ago, and during the last gasps of the Pre-Cambrian ages.

Her methods for deducing this timeline were complex, and involved as much science as imagination; or where the two enmeshed in her dream life. Even with her eyes closed, and while she was away in other places and times as she slept, she still had an eye for the landscapes that she saw, and for the forms of those things that left the imprints she found in the cliffs.

Amelia surmised that the arrival occurred during the time of the great soft-bodied inhabitants. Those that had existed for hundreds of millions of years, ever consuming each other and recycling their drifting forms. These indigenous denizens of the young Earth left almost nothing for fossil hunters to find, because they had no bones, shells or teeth. But she learned that vast creatures had burrowed through the Earth during Ediacaran times, and trawled the oceans too; great tunnels and gouges were found here in Torbay and in Australia, though nothing of what left the creases in the stones.

Amelia, however, caught sight of them, the vast iridescent jellies and the great drillers of the planet, as if she was floating among them, or scurrying through the debris of their excavations. And in her waking life what Amelia recalled both fascinated and traumatised her. These tremors of shock loosened her rickety mental foundations. But the monstrous shapes, the diaphanous swellings of the poisonous skirts, the viscous trailings through the hot green deeps and the blind squirmings that she tried to describe and paint, were nothing compared to that which blasted through the atmosphere and then dispersed itself into incalculably new forms. The visitor.

The Cambrian Period, as we know, is renowned for the creativity of its seas. Nothing lived on what little land existed. That far back, the maelstrom of creation was still in the deeps, and what wallowed in the watery expanses became varied and all too abundant. But it was our visitor who made these new ways of life possible. What it stimulated into being about its landing site crept and leaped, crawled, swam and burrowed to escape parental predation. There were shells, encasing such young life, at least in these Cambrian times, carapaces made in the image of the old visitor’s armour. What was still soft and boneless was mostly swept away, or simply reinvented.

But the visitor, the Great Old One, was not satisfied, or so my forebears all muttered in their bloodless and traumatised states in a local hospital that is now long gone (luxury apartments, would you believe?).

Great ructions and upheavals were emitted as the slowly rusticating visitor remade and remade again the environment that flooded past its often slumbering form beneath the waves. One such mighty cataclysm was the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction. The trilobites, brachiopods and graptolites were mostly rendered obsolete because of decisions that we can only guess at, if ‘decision’ is the right word. Human terms are imprecise, for although we share a minute fragment of the Old One’s vast consciousness within our own sentience, we are not like it.

This slaughter or genocide of what had either been created or adapted from the insensate drifters of the fathoms occurred 443 million years ago, in two stages divided by hundreds of thousands of years in which the monarch of our watery rock rested between its annihilations.

My poor forebears all cited the alien deity’s sensitivity to temperature and climate, and claimed that it drew great ice sheets over itself and its resting places following the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction. It also used a new armour of ice to drastically alter the chemistry of the oceans and the atmosphere above the waters. But the ruler continued to vandalise its own newly created habitat, repeatedly, across the next 380 million years, whenever its meditations became fitful or disturbed. The planet was plunged into apocalypse and collapse in the Devonian, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods. There were smaller mass extinctions too, and in each of these eruptions of the roused tyrant’s rage, half of the species that it had formed or evolved were destroyed again.

Varied evolving parts of itself were discovered upon our shores by my fossil-hunting family. Most of the clues to what came before mankind were from the Devonian and Permian Periods, and because the slaughtered littered their corpses in the bare cliffs of our beautiful, sheltered Torbay, my forebears dug them up. Do you see?

The Devonian was the Age of Fishes. The sea levels were so very high and the temperature of the water too hot for some, like our ruler, at thirty degrees in the tropics. So a great wrath from below was invoked by this heat. Now this is important, if you consider the temperature of our own world now. But three quarters of all the species on this planet were made extinct across a slow, deliberate and sadistic cull lasting for several million years. At one point, you could say chemical weapons were employed by the Great Old One. The oxygen was removed from the waters, as the creator noted such a chronic dependence upon that gas amongst its myriad subjects. The wiping of the slate was also embellished by the Old One’s wilful alterations in sea level, by changes in the climate and by disruptions in soil fecundity.

Even great rocks, passing through the heavens, were pulled down by its rage on the seabed; a rage that our own baboonish antics today inadequately mimic. The fury that destroyed what had been created must have been incendiary, incandescent, and so cruel. My relatives only found fragments of the war-torn carcasses. They had been buried in rubble for 359 million years, but they were still smoking with a psychic trauma at a bacterial and subatomic level.

The visitor covered the world with ice again. It banished the Earth from its sight and slept in the ruins. The survivors struggled on. The land welded together its wreckage into the Pangaea supercontinent, in which every bleeding and shell-shocked continent came together to shiver in the ice. This diaspora began 290 million years ago. But what life and activity there was heated the planet all over again and melted the ice.

Such was the savagery and merciless genocide of the visitor upon awakening this time that all previous mass extinctions were rendered irrelevant. You could say that the Great Old One came out swinging with both eyes open, and The Great Dying began. The fish, and even the insects, were smashed and cast aside. He called down a rain of stones from that canopy of debris that flowed through the solar system. He opened his bellows and poisoned the Earth with methane, rid the air of oxygen and suffocated his multitude of abandoned children. Up rose the tyrant’s seas and down they crashed upon what we call life. The annihilation was near total. All but four per cent of the species of the Earth were put to death. My mother told me that his indifference alone had allowed the four per cent to survive. All of what is left alive today began life in the four per cent that survived The Great Dying.

Two hundred million years ago, and then 65 million years ago, he laid waste again and again to what swam, flew and crawled anew around his throne. And again, he used the climate as his weapon.

Sixty-five million years after that final massacre, our species heated this Earth again, and we have become noisome, noisy and populous. Only the flora, water and the animal kingdom can sense the destruction and extinctions of the past ages, and they have begun to scream that name in alarm and terror again. They know that one of our creator’s eyes has opened. Bleary with slumber maybe, but red with a demented rage that is as hot as a star.

As I watch the news on the screen in my home, and as I reel through the data from every kind of scientific observation and analysis that overloads our poor and troubled minds, in all of this chaos, I believe that we have fatally roused the Great Old One with our careless tenancy. We have begun to wake him with the heat we created. The visitor is the sole creator, and always has been, but we have dared to ape a deity’s excesses. So this time his wrath will explode with a creativity that not even the cruellest god or devil in any of our mythologies could imagine to inflict upon its subjects.

This is why I think it best that you spend the day of the eclipse with your loved ones.

I sincerely wish that I, and my mother, and her mother, and her mother, really were nothing but insane, deranged and delusional old women.

Your fond friend,

Cleo

At the end of sleep, Cleo dreams of the bay. The same dream she’s suffered for months. Or has it been months? It feels familiar, but how will she really know? But from Hope’s Nose to Berry Head, she dreams of the great body of water turning as black as oil before roiling like a weir as wide as an ocean.

The thin outline of the sun’s silhouette diminishes, then vanishes.

Stars she recognises, and many that she does not recognise, and many other shining objects, crisscross the vast canopy of sky, leaving silvery trails like snails upon patio stones.

And when the sun begins to reappear the people who gather on the shore all call out a name. Their myriad, faraway voices sound like a small wave washing upon sand before dying into silence.

The horizon changes its shape.

Soon, it is as if all the water in the world is rushing forward from out there, in the form of a long black wall. Behind the great wave, she thinks she sees something, vast and lumpen in shape, that could be a new mountain emerging from the Earth’s crust, rising to conceal the sun again.

Cleo awakes to the sound of screams. Tens of thousands of them. Screams on the shore one mile away combining in unison with the screams on the television screen that flickers beside the balcony doors of the living room. The whole world seems to be shrieking at the same time.

Yolanda is on the balcony. She is naked.

In her waking delirium, for some reason that Cleo cannot understand, her nurse has entered her home that morning and removed all of her clothes.

‘Yolanda!’ Cleo calls out with a throat so dry the word sounds like a croak.

Even in the din below the balcony that now resembles a crowd in a football stadium, or a hundred school playgrounds filled with terror, Yolanda hears Cleo. The nurse turns around, smiling.

As Yolanda steps into the room the first thing Cleo notices is the eye tattooed upon her flat brown stomach. An eye that she recognises. She’s seen it around and the tattoo is a good likeness.

The wind that hits the building turns the curtains vertical and Yolanda staggers, but never stops smiling. Her face is wet with the tears of an intense, private joy.

The ground shakes and everything in the apartment rattles. Amelia, Olive and Judith’s pictures fall upon the sideboard, as do the preserved and pressed weeds that hang upon the walls.

The din outside might have been caused by a plane crashing in a thunderstorm; or the roar might have been the very Earth being twisted and broken within a pair of great hands. The sea doesn’t sound like the sea any more. It becomes a bestial roar.

No more than a few feet before Cleo’s seat, Yolanda opens her mouth, but Cleo has no chance of hearing what comes out of it. From the movement of the nurse’s lips she can still be certain that a name has been called.

Yolanda helps Cleo out of her chair and begins moving her towards the balcony, either to see what is happening or to make her a part of the commotion. Cleo winces and whimpers when she sees the long, livid gills where Yolanda’s ribs should be.

White Light, White Heat

There was no true light in that place. Nothing at all to transport the spirit. Nondescript and forgettable, like so many others in the company, I would sit at my desk in silence, facing forward, staring at a screen. Sometimes my body suggested to me that it could catch fire from the inside. Frustration was incendiary. It had the potential to ignite the black lump of my despair, a slow-burning and inexhaustible fuel. Boredom fanned the embers red. Futility was the by-product of my smouldering; the cinders and ash that my hopes and purpose had been reduced to. My efforts and thoughts were the smokeless exhaust from a life wasted and rendered meaningless.

A silent furnace of anxiety and dissatisfaction dressed in a white shirt. That was me, sitting before a computer monitor with my face reflected in the screen, same every day, year after year after year. My features were made ghoulish by the glow of the monitor that I longed to smash my forehead into.

I was one of many. Call us Legion.

I worked in a long room of many desks. Behind each desk sat a hunched, tense and mostly silent colleague. With an increasing regularity towards the end of my tenure, the woman at the neighbouring work station would occasionally expel a huge sob, and then declare, ‘Oh God’, in a voice made thin and unstable by her misery. After each episode she would sniff and swallow noisily, then dab her eyes and nose with a tissue, before falling silent again. No one looked at her during these outbursts. We all knew that she was approaching the end of her consultation period and would soon receive the white envelope from the executives.

During my last days at the company, other than the sobs of the woman in the midst of an emotional collapse (who resembled so many others in the past, whose faces and names I have mostly forgotten), and beside the creak of the chairs, the predominant sound that arose from the other thirty eight desks in the office was the incessant clicking of fingers on keyboards. Hands raced across dirty plastic keys all day long. I was reminded of termites or beetles, relentlessly chewing rotten wood. Or ants burrowing inside a mound of soil, somewhere sunless and sealed from the world, behind wire fences on forgotten and forgettable waste ground. Like the very site of the industrial estate that housed the company.

Sometimes I would also become aware of the buzzing of the lights in the ceiling. I imagined they were broadcasting the ghostly monotones of the dead insects that littered the transparent plastic sheaths, beneath tubes emitting a sickly illumination. Outside the windows, the sky invariably resembled the smoke from an oil fire.

The office was a large rectangle, flanked on two sides by identical rows of glass-fronted cubicles. There were eight of these private work spaces allocated to the middle managers. The blinds were always closed and these offices remained in darkness. We never saw the managers enter or leave their offices. Some claimed that the offices remained empty unless a consultation period was under way, and that they had been largely deserted for years; others said the middle managers were forbidden to leave their offices while a single employee remained at their desk; that’s why you never saw them come and go. I never knew what to believe, but I often sensed a presence behind the black glass and the drawn blinds: someone monitoring every message, phone call and open file on our screens. How else did they know so much about our work?

The executives occupied the floor above. We were never sure what they did up there. But they were never ferried to and from the company, like cattle, in public transport. They arrived and left the building in black cars that were parked at a subterranean level. During the working day, they never left the executive floor. Their only face-to-face contact with the staff occurred during our consultancy periods.

Many former colleagues whose performances for the company became unsatisfactory, and were deemed incompatible with the company’s brand values, were eventually summoned into the glass cubicles of the middle management. After the consultations began, an employee would then be called upstairs, only once, to the executive floor. That meeting was always final. Following their exit interview, the employee would return to the office clutching a white envelope, flanked by the building’s security, to clear their work station. A replacement would be sitting in their chair the following morning and the redundant employee was never seen again.

Only the recipients of the white envelopes ever met the executives, but their departure from company premises was so guarded that we were never able to ask them about the contents of the white envelope, nor what, or who, they had seen upstairs. Fraternisation outside work was forbidden. Those that somehow formed office romances quickly received the white envelope. Perhaps they held hands as they starved together out there.

We all lived in terror of the white envelope.

The momentum of the process that advanced a colleague toward the receipt of a white envelope was unstoppable. I had worked in the office long enough to know that the consultation process could never be curtailed or even slowed, no matter with what renewed vigour one worked. Earlier starts and later finishes were irrelevant. Irrespective of a change in one’s demeanour as one approached the office block, through the footpaths of the industrial estate, and walked up the cement stairs, or rode the lift to enter the spoiled-cream uniformity of the company premises, once the consultation process had begun, the white envelope would always find its way into a pair of trembling hands. I observed the process 213 times in 15 years while sat at my desk. Only one man, whom I stopped making an effort to speak to a long time before my own demise, and who reciprocated my indifference, outlasted me in the company.

Work was very hard to find in the city. We were fortunate to have those awful jobs. The alternative out there did not bear thinking about. We were professionals.

Towards the end, my end, I often found blood in a sink in the staff toilets. One of my silent, anonymous colleagues had been self-mutilating.

There was often a trail of blood leading from a toilet stall to the sink area. I only looked inside the stall once and saw that the epicentre of the mutilation had not been flushed away. Swirls of black hair and a yellow jelly substance floated in the bowl, surrounded by toilet paper and fresh blood. The mutilator wanted their mess to be found; they wanted a physical manifestation of their pain to be seen by the next person who used the facility. This was not uncommon. Like caged animals driven neurotic by uniformity and captivity, we often smeared the walls of the staff toilet with our matter.

I wondered, not for the first time, if someone had also offered a pound of flesh, in ironic tribute, to the silent sterility, to the humming of the lights and the clicking of fingers on keyboards, to the callous, inscrutable but unscrupulous executive and to the almost pointless endeavours that we were engaged in at our desks. Many years ago a woman even took one of her own eyes out with a letter opener. I didn’t see the incident, but there was whispering for hours about how she was spirited away by security, soon after the incident, and dragged screaming down the stairs. There was more screaming outside the building and then silence.

Sometimes, when work was simply insufferable, I felt an urge to open my throat over a bathroom sink, to hold myself upright and to gush euphorically onto the porcelain; to beard myself in blood, to sacrifice and martyr myself in a way that would not be forgotten, at least not for a few days, while also punishing myself for my inability to escape the situation or change my circumstances.

About four weeks before my end, I returned to my desk after I had been contemplating this mystery colleague’s self-destruction in a communal toilet facility, to read a new message in my inbox. A message that would change not only my life but the world I had known. The company’s internal communication service had delivered a message from middle management entitled: CONSULTANCY PERIOD.

I had been anticipating the white envelope, but that did not prevent my stunned disbelief and the cold tourniquet of dread that reduced me to paralysis. But by the day’s end the shock had gradually eased into a heavy, fatiguing, though curiously warm sensation, born of something deep-seated, wild and reckless. This might have been acceptance or acknowledgement. It might have been my response to something that signalled the end of the apprehension that had sickened me for as long as I had worked at that company as an editor. The notification might also have signified a profound psychological fracture that rendered me irreparably broken, and unsure of my thoughts and actions thereafter. I still don’t know.

Messages that had been sent to me from my authors during the previous month must have precipitated my demise. My work had always been beset by problems, but never of the magnitude of that final month. I had become unable to think of a way of surviving a series of setbacks that had been the result of a long momentum of decline within my publishing responsibilities.

So traumatic was that day that I deliberately suppressed any thought of my grim future. I only allowed myself to think of the light that I kept hidden at home. Back then, in my darkest hours, my only comfort came from the light. My Reliquary of Light. And that night I knew that I must open that simple wooden box once more, to gaze into what may have been the last ember of celestial light on Earth.

Working alone, each editor in the company published at least one hundred books per year. The company kept all rights to the authors’ works and paid a competitive seven per cent net royalty. But, as all of our books retailed at ten pence, and because the retailer kept sixty per cent of every ten-penny sale, and because nearly all of our books were pirated anyway, I had been finding it increasingly hard to keep authors on my fiction lists.

A fortnight before my consultancy began, I had been informed that my best author, a writer of mystery stories, had killed himself. He used to write a novel every eleven days and had produced half of my list during the last ten years of my service. Despite his productivity and reasonable popularity, he was able to earn just enough to occupy part of the communal area in a block of flats. He’d lived under a staircase in a cardboard shelter and fed himself on sufficient soya and yeast products to remain alive and committed to his work. Without leaving a note, or delivering his last commissioned work, he had leaped under a high-speed train in a place where this city joins with the next.

The news was catastrophic to my professional life and prospects, and was soon augmented by another heavy stroke of misfortune.

My second most productive and popular author wrote romances. All of her books featured executive tycoons, from the top hundred corporations. These men met lowly service industry workers, and then transformed the existences of these women into lifestyles of affluence and luxury that involved exotic destinations. Eventually these tycoons were unable to live without these heroines. Every book the author had written featured more or less the same story. I’d assumed the repetition was evidence of an undiagnosed mania. But each of her final seven novels revealed even more worrying signs: the author was parting from the strict guidelines of my Flame of Passion imprint. Her last books featured graphic scenes of anal rape and cannibalism.

The author was one of the company’s top performers and occupied a position on the front list, but she had suffered a colossal nervous breakdown around that time. She lived with her elderly mother in one room of a building near a chemical plant that produced chicken portions made from soya. The author was mainly supported by her mother’s small pension, a tiny stipend granted in return for sixty years’ service in a factory that had led to the mother’s blindness and infirmity caused by a respiratory condition.

Without those two authors, who had kept me in a job by producing nearly sixty of my scheduled titles in each year’s catalogue, I could not see how it would be possible for me to continue working as an editor at the company. It seemed the executives had arrived at the same conclusion. I had many other authors who filled the remainder of my lists, but they could only write around punishing work schedules, or around caring for elderly parents, and sometimes children at the same time, in dim and cramped lodgings.

The company was also embarking on a major crackdown on ‘downbeat storylines’. Most of the fiction delivered to me had a tone of despair and misanthropy and was written from what seemed to be a bottomless well of exhaustion and depression. But I had been instructed by the management to reject any manuscripts featuring divorce, suicide, mental breakdown, assorted social ills (they supplied a list) and physical ailments (they supplied another list). Within the new guidelines that I was to follow, the language of our fiction had to be simplified further than it already had been; the novels needed to become shorter and more episodic. Description was to be treated as superfluous, ‘unless absolutely necessary for the progression of the story from A to B’. My new editorial guidelines put particular emphasis on the removal of ‘strangeness’ and ‘imaginative excesses’. All ‘authors [were] to be encouraged to fulfil the material aspirations of our many readers.’

Most of the population was too poor, sub-literate, ill or fatigued to buy the tenpenny books. They had little interest in what we produced anyway. But in the sixty per cent of the workforce that was employed, and in those who had retired at a subsistence level and had leisure time, there were just enough readers to support the publishing industry. Because the bookshops and libraries had all closed, there was no competition in the still functioning retail areas, so that also helped.

All books were downloaded from the Rainforest Cloud, which had a 98 per cent share of bookselling. This was a vast subscription service onto which four million new books were uploaded each year. My authors only contributed one hundred titles, and without my two top mystery and romance authors I knew I had become ‘unsustainable’.

On my journey home on the day that my consultancy began, and within a crowded train carriage, I passed the usual landscape: busy motorways and carriageways, soya crops, grey apartment blocks built too close together, stunted, dirty trees and piles of refuse.

I recalled my holiday the previous year, taken in one of the few places remaining on the coastline that was unspoiled by intensive farming, overdevelopment, industry and overpopulation. But on the evening the consultation commenced, I felt as I had done on my return from the coast.

It had taken me five years to save enough money to spend four days in a grubby caravan. But the views of the wind farms out at sea and the shoreline were spectacular, as were the vast sulphur sunsets.

My return journey to the city from the seaside was much the same as my two-hour journey to and from the office, though stretched across half the country. The landscape, topography and living conditions had gradually degraded into a greyish smear of tarmac, wires and cement. Only the flat and stifling uniformity of the soya crops offered any relief between the grim and dirty cities. By the time I reached my destination my face was strewn with tears.

The train guard must have seen my reaction many times before. He said to me, ‘If you’re going to top yourself, I can recommend the facilities under the viaduct. They’re just behind the station on Gradgrind Street. You can find the best euthanisers in the huts by the scrapyard. But stay off the tracks.’ He must have been on commission because he gave me a business card that offered potential suicides ‘Unbeatable Rates’.

I lived in an overcrowded building in the outer suburbs. I shared a room with another man. My salary as a publishing professional did not allow me to live nearer the commercial districts, nor would it allow me much privacy at home. But at least there were only two of us in the room; it could have been much worse.

Our room was divided down the middle by an old curtain on a plastic rail. Each side contained a small bed, a bedside table, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe. These old and scuffed articles of furniture contained all of our possessions. But as soon as I entered the room, on the evening of the day that I was notified of my participation in the consultation process, I could see that there had been incursions from the other side of the curtain.

Like me, my roommate was childless and unmarried. He worked underground and did something dangerous in the construction of new subterranean housing. Unlike me, though, he was a chronic alcoholic and just as selfish, thoughtless and manipulative as the many other addicts that I encountered in the city.

In that room we were unable to avoid hearing each other’s every move, sigh and sob. Graham’s drunken rambling could continue for hours. If he felt that I was not listening, he was prone to tear the curtain aside so that he could rant and spit into my face. When sober and hungover, he was sheepish and pretended that these altercations had never happened. He also continually asked me for money.

Often, I would find evidence of his rummaging for valuables and money on my side of the room. The only item of value I possessed I had concealed behind the skirting board in a place where the wood had come loose beneath the headboard of my bed. Despite all that I had endured at work and at home, and while travelling between those two reservoirs of misery, the idea of the Reliquary of Light not being in my life was the only thing I considered completely unbearable.

When I returned home from the worst day at the office that I could remember, Graham was not in residence; I always counted small mercies whenever I encountered them. I peered around the curtain where it swayed near the entrance to the room, to make certain of his absence.

His side of the room had been reduced to an impenetrable jumble of unwashed clothes, rubbish and empty plastic bottles. His detritus made the curtain bulge and issued a terrible miasma of stale ethanol and male sweat. Whenever his mess seeped beneath the fabric divider, I would kick it back under. I did a lot of kicking in that room.

I retrieved the Reliquary of Light from where it lay hidden. By that point in my life, this object supplied my sole pleasure and purpose. But what the small wooden box contained was of far more significance than me, or any of my worldly concerns. It was of far greater importance than the entire city and all who lived within it. The Reliquary of Light was a receptacle containing a holy relic. A mere fragment, maybe, but one that had its origins in the paradise belt. It was a splinter of the most intense and forgiving and transporting love. Its joy was instantly euphoric and carried a sign from another place that was far greater and infinitely more beautiful than the earthly prison in which we are all trapped. A priest I once knew, called Father Suarez, used to call our world ‘the greylands’.

The Reliquary was given to me by Father Suarez, in the days before he died of cancer. At the time of his demise, I was his youngest parishioner at the Temple of Inmost Light and of the Saintly Martyrs of the Smooth Field. The church is long gone now. Its consecrated ground and hallowed masonry were reused for a block of luxury apartments intended for executives. But before Father Suarez died, and before he saw all that he had maintained and administered demolished, he passed on the Reliquary to me. He told me in a hushed whisper that he had distilled the inmost light from the church and placed it within the box.

I thought him deranged from morphine, but accepted the gift; at the end, the disease had ravaged his small body and reduced him to a barely living skeleton. But that very evening, when I opened the innocuous wooden box in my room, I found myself down upon my knees, and soon weeping from the most intense joy.

In my deepest self, I knew in an instant that all of my troubles were irrelevant in some vast scheme that I instinctively understood but could not define. Language simply does not have the range or depth to describe this light and the wisdom that it issues. As if from a distant place filled with the most piercing and yet soft and gentle light, my entire being was suffused from a mere spark contained within the box. I felt weightless, unburdened. I knew that those who had loved me dearly until their deaths were ever present and waiting for me in another place. Within that small wooden container was a tangible sign of sanctuary and salvation, hope, answers, comfort and love. The transmission of this knowledge was instantaneous; I needed to make no conscious reflection. A dormant part of me that I could not even remember, that had been ground down by my life and its pressures, would awaken in the presence of this scrap of light.

My relationship with the Reliquary was always instinctive and I knew not to overuse the receptacle. A few seconds’ exposure was sufficient to make my spirit soar, for it to rise up and become shrived of its burden within that forever of white light and golden warmth.

I also lived in constant fear of the light source depleting or vanishing. Over time I had noticed its rays dimming, so I preserved my interaction with the Reliquary for the most trying days, like that one, and for special occasions.

Long after I had closed the Reliquary during the evening following notification of my consultancy period, I lay upon my bed in a soporific state. I was entirely satiated in body, soul and mind. Tracks that my tears had made upon my face cracked when I smiled beatifically. I seemed to be gazing at some great secret thing beyond the grubby yellow ceiling of the room. But what I smiled at and acknowledged I do not know. It was ineffable and immanent.

Perhaps the world’s then moribund religions once yearned for that very light. And so suffused had I been by what poured from that box, I was transported to the borders of another place, where there is no time or suffering. That is why I barely heard Graham enter the room. After I had opened the box, albeit briefly, his drunken stumbling was nothing to me anyway. His dismal existence in this cold and unfeeling world remained far outside my private and lingering bliss.

‘You pissed?’ he asked. His grimy, bearded visage had appeared like the face of prehistoric man at the entrance of a cave. ‘You is pissed,’ he added as if stating a fact. His bloodshot eyes flitted in their sockets as his vision skittered about my orderly space. Like a rat seeking sustenance he was searching for evidence of the intoxicants that he would demand a share of.

‘Go away,’ I said quietly. I did not want him to intrude and trample upon the last vestiges of the heavenly glow that was slowly receding inside me as the world reclaimed me, and the usual bustle of anxiety and preoccupation sought an insidious passage back into my thoughts.

Graham ignored my request and continued to scrutinise my half of the room. He could barely contain himself from intruding further on those great bemired feet.

‘Will you piss off!’ I roared at him.

He withdrew behind the curtain reluctantly and sat heavily upon his bed. But not soon enough; my experience of the heavenly light had been eliminated by his very presence.

As I expected, I was summoned into one of the management cubicles the following day.

I rose from my chair and approached the nearest cubicle door. I noted a static of tension pass across the shoulders and bowed heads of my colleagues who sat nearest my desk. But no one in the office looked at me, the dead man walking.

As instructed in the message that had been waiting for me when I came in that morning at 8.30, I knocked on the door of the cubicle office and entered.

Inside the semi-darkness of the tiny office I took my seat behind the desk. I was the only person present. A metal filing cabinet stood in one corner. The ceiling had the same polystyrene tiles as the main office space. The floor was tiled with linoleum squares the colour of the grey sky outside (at least when the black, toxic clouds dispersed from above the city).

The sole source of faint light was produced by a dim and occasionally flickering lamp. There was nothing else on the desk beside a black telephone. I sat and waited, and waited. I repeatedly checked my watch. I only realised that I had been sitting in silence for twenty minutes when a voice abruptly filled the room and drilled into the marrow of my bones.

Flinching in my chair, I gasped loudly, and then became angry when I understood the obvious management technique; to let apprehension and fear build within an interviewee, before startling them by the sudden breaking of the silence at an unnatural volume.

The voice was broadcast from the phone’s speaker, a small grid built into the base of the phone that enabled conference calls. The voice reminded me of an old ventriloquist dummy, or even Mr Punch: the sound was camp but screechy, its tone amused and insincere. I suspected the voice was a recording too, because it gave me no opportunity to respond at any point during the monologue. I was also unsure of the speaker’s sex, but, as I listened to the voice, I imagined the gaudily painted face of a horrible little man. A figure who had once sat down, read from a card and recorded his voice onto a machine, somewhere upstairs in this building. As the company’s official spiel was recited, I imagined the eyes in the speaker’s face had been alight with sadistic mirth.

The monologue concluded with a command: ‘Return to your desk!’

By the end of the interview I was at stage two of the consultation procedure. This boiled down to one month’s salary. With my savings, I could scrape through two more months in the room I shared with Graham. After that, I would fall into arrears in rent unless I found work quickly. It was doubtful that I would find new work. All I knew was books and I’d heard terrible things about the other two publishing companies that operated in the city. They were repeatedly shedding staff. Those were my only thoughts: my limited chances of survival.

The voice from the phone also had the temerity to pitch the information to me as if I were being offered a great opportunity, like a promotion or pay rise. ‘We offer you a competitive new opportunity outside book publishing . . .’ Like all management missives imparted from the Communications Department on the executive floor, this was pure spin. A rewriting of an employee’s immediate future prospects, which amounted in my case to penury, homelessness and perhaps even starvation before the year’s end.

The hideous, buzzing voice also recounted to me how proud I should be of the company’s continuing success after my departure, as if the company should always be in my thoughts. ‘You will agree the future is brighter than it has ever been for our company. You will wish us the best as we maintain our global reach and success. You will be proud of your former association at all times with our brand values for producing the highest standards in creative excellence.’ It went on and on praising itself, the company.

There was a brief administrative acknowledgement of my service too, but that was incorrect. They had my length of service as three years, but I had worked there for fifteen. My name was also mispronounced and my home address was incorrect. The records had not been updated in at least ten years.

Following the propaganda about the company’s greatness, which made no mention of the authors whose work it soullessly and unscrupulously exploited for its own benefit, the pitch of the voice became faux solemn. In fact, I had a sense throughout the entire interview that the voice was mocking me, and perhaps even the company whose virtues it extolled at such mind-numbing length.

During the final phase of the prepared speech, in which the voice deepened and took on a mock-sinister tone, I was regaled with many official warnings and threats of severe legal action should any information about my work, my authors or the company be made available to its competitors.

I was given a date for my exit interview on the executive floor. Leaving parties were forbidden, and the day following my exit the staff would ‘be vigorously urine tested for illegal substances and alcohol exceeding the safe limit imposed by the company for maximum efficiency and safety on company premises’.

Finally I was offered a ‘generous compensation package’, subject to VAT, in exchange for several donor organs from my own body that the company would sell on my behalf through its medical insurance division. In exchange for a kidney, bladder, length of intestine and both eyes, I realised that I would be able to pay for the room I shared with Graham for another five months, while blind and writhing in agony in my pathetic bed, unable to see and experience the Reliquary of Light.

I would of course refuse the offer, but shuddered at the thought of those in this city who had signed up to these corporate donor packages out of desperation. I sometimes saw those victims that could still walk, milling around the municipal dispensary that provided clean water and basic foodstuffs to the destitute and lame, in return for handing out flyers, or wearing sandwich boards for the corporations.

When I returned home that evening, gravity seemed especially crushing. The air of the city was fouler, the wind colder than usual, the traffic more belligerent. I found myself fumbling with my transport pass at the station. My movements were poorly coordinated. I frequently lost balance in the street. The weight of what awaited me, what I had effectively postponed for fifteen years, became heavier and better defined in my thoughts as reality, not merely a nightmare.

People glared at me. Workers tutted on the train. I believe they could sense my failure and looming ruin in the city. There was no empathy left here. There was only a fear of one’s own demise and the struggle to keep on existing, while dead on one’s feet and demoralised.

I should have been saving my money for the struggle ahead, but I treated myself to a carton of Thai-style soya and a small bottle of rum. I intended to consume them quickly and then huddle under my bedclothes with the Reliquary of Light. The light would reveal to me that this dilemma was a worldly trifle, insignificant in the vast scheme of things, my suffering and misfortune irrelevant compared to what awaited me in the afterlife.

As I entered my room, anticipating this private moment of bliss and revelation, I was actually light-headed and tearful with happiness at the mere thought of that tiny receptacle of inmost light waiting behind the skirting board.

But the day was about to become truly intolerable and my position in this world insufferable.

I could see how thorough Graham had been this time while searching my half of the room. Mistaking my epiphany the previous evening for intoxication, because he knew of no distinction between the two states of being, he had ransacked my portion of space while I had been at work.

After his search for drink or narcotic substances he’d only made poor attempts at concealing his trespass because he did not fear me. The drawers were not shut properly. My bed was at least one foot from the wall. The door to my bedside cabinet was wide open.

Already ashen-faced and quivering, bloodless with a dread that was almost suffocating, I fell to my knees and burrowed beneath the bed to the skirting board that hung loose from the plaster. The cavity in which I had sealed the Reliquary of Light was empty.

I scampered to the curtain and tore it aside. Whimpering, and by this time physically shaking, I scanned Graham’s debris. I then began searching on my hands and knees through what resembled, and smelled like, a landfill.

I found the Reliquary upside down and empty of its light in a corner of the room. The lid had been left open for too long and the light of heaven had leaked away into Graham’s soiled clothes. The very sainted wood of that box, that portal, was actually concealed beneath a shirt with yellowed armpits that stank of a farm animal. But the front of the shirt still cast a faint luminescence, like that of a glow-worm, where the light had spilled and dispersed. Despite the stench in the fabric, I pressed the wretched shirt to my face in an attempt to savour the last dregs of heaven on this Earth. And such was my despair and such was my rage that I believe they even heard my cries in the paradise belt that night.

Once I had finished the bottle of rum, and finished urinating onto Graham’s greasy pillow, I went down to the communal kitchen and fetched the only sharp knife in the cutlery drawer. I returned to our room and unscrewed the light bulb from the ceiling. I emptied Graham’s wardrobe onto the floor, then crept inside the cabinet and waited for him to come home.

Even after my toils that night – the gristly wet work of getting Graham disjointed and unspooled upon his bed, before distributing his various parts into plastic bags – my rage did not abate. Having the keyhole into paradise blocked, a peephole that had offered me a glimpse into a place where all of the answers awaited, and where love eternal burned like the middle of a star, was not a matter that I could forgive or react to reasonably. I felt as if dear Father Suarez’s purpose on this Earth had also been dribbled into the vomit-speckled carpet of a degenerate alcoholic’s room. It was not my task to forgive such an act of desecration. But I believed that it was my responsibility to address it. I’d had a really bad day too.

The act of dismembering Graham represented something of an awakening for me. I already knew that little in this world even came close to matching the harmony, resonance and perfection of the light. But the gulf between the world and what was accessible to all through love and a devotion to simply being better had widened to such an extent that the only happiness worth aspiring to now was that of wealth and acts of status-completion to move one gradually upwards within an unjust and callous hierarchy.

And yet the rules of the game were fixed; the receipt of the white envelope was inevitable. Only the monstrous could ever be ascendant. Sadists and sociopaths had completely enslaved us and removed any chance of inner or spiritual life. The inmost light had been doused within a whole species. These are broad brush strokes, admittedly, but they were the beginnings of an epiphany that presented itself inside my imagination in vast, epochal, even monumental visions that night and thereafter.

Day by day, as the date of my exit interview approached, after I returned home from work I slowly but fastidiously removed Graham’s body and his belongings from the room. I took up the carpet and gave away his furniture to the local offices of charities. I scrubbed the bare wooden floors, the walls and the ceiling. I took down the curtain. I erased him.

Upon my bedside table I placed the empty Reliquary, arranging it upon a piece of starched white cloth. I cultivated my memories of what once existed and issued from that box while I sat cross-legged before my shrine. I made notes. I used as much description and strangeness and imagination as took my fancy, and I revised and whittled and then polished these words endlessly through the cold nights until I had begun, albeit feebly, to capture some sense of that wondrous light and all that it promised and imbued in oneself.

Though his phone rang continuously at one point, not long after I freed myself of his burden, no one ever came to the room to ask after Graham. I gave his phone to a vagrant in the street.

By the time of my final interview, in which I was to be given the white envelope, I had made the room a place of solace and reflection, Spartan but clean, though not without a sense of sacred mystery engendered by my simple shrine, and by the words that I would recount before it each evening after a simple meal taken with a glass of cold water.

The security detail remained outside the main doors of the executive floor and informed me that they would wait for me until the meeting was concluded. They would be present to supervise the mortifying ritual of my clearing my work station before the eyes of the terrified and cowed staff. My ex-colleagues would then commit themselves to their useless endeavours with a renewed energy in order to avoid the white envelope and my fate.

I found the corporate process and the building just as crude, simple and horrid as I had ever done. But that morning I was no longer afraid. Since the very light inside the Reliquary had been taken from me, I had nurtured a sense of its celestial wonder inside myself that had grown daily.

I had no doubt about the existence of this light somewhere better than this. At that point, I had also come to accept that I had nothing left to lose besides my life. My death, however, would only hasten my entry to what I had experienced from a fragment inside Father Suarez’s little wooden box. Living without fear, and with my spirits engorged with a memory of that light, I began to experience a sense of weightlessness and freedom that I had never known before in my daily existence. Emancipated from the indentured slavery of the company, I was also free to pursue a new purpose, and by means as extreme as I deemed necessary on a case-by-case basis. As an agent of light, I had also decided to permit myself a certain monstrousness with any monsters that I encountered, until my inevitable end.

Once the doors to the executive floor closed behind me, I dropped to my knees and slid two rubber wedges beneath the doors to prevent them being opened from outside.

I proceeded as instructed into the boardroom where I was greeted by a shrunken individual in an expensive suit. He wore a gingery blonde wig atop his withered face, and had lifts in shoes that were too big for his feet. A clownish gargoyle who reminded me of an ape.

A fat woman with masses of glossy, coiffured hair that was far too young for her bloated head joined him. Her corpulent hands were encrusted with gaudy golden rings. They each had quick, rat-like eyes that glittered horribly. Each half-smiled odiously, as if trying to repress their mirth at my anticipated distress.

I understood immediately that their destruction of my career – and therefore my life, as they saw it, because what else defined us now? – gave them great pleasure. But this, these things that sat at the end of the long table, and those others that they served in some other building that was also, no doubt, a pressure cooker of fear and intimidation, made us afraid? These gibbons cowed us in our multitudes across the grimy cities? It was not enough that their rapaciousness had poisoned the environment. We also subjugated ourselves to these things that walked on their hind legs in expensive clothes, in return for existences blighted by anxiety and privation. People carved and mutilated their own bodies in the bathrooms of these companies, and leaped under high-speed trains, because of them, these quick-thinking, fast-talking apes that contributed no light to the world.

As the little monkey in the suit chattered and taunted me with its corporate double-speak, and while the great pudding with its absurd, regal hair nodded its head at key words and phrases like ‘competitive’, ‘added value’, ‘rationalisation’, ‘taking ownership’, ‘repositioning’ and ‘market share’, I fingered the paring knife in my pocket. At last the devil had a face, but its theology was as empty and meaningless as the lives it had reduced around it.

I held back from destroying them. Since the dismemberment of my roommate, I realised that my patience must become as deep and boundless as the light that I now served; my bestial compulsions and impulses must be tempered by thoughts of paradise. Returning some light to the world would only be possible if my incarceration or execution was delayed. I had much work to do before I left the stage.

At the end of its spiel, the little gibbon was clearly unsettled by my indifference and my failure to writhe and beg for mercy. The porcine creature that sat beside the monkey even became petulant, as if I were guilty of an unprofessional affront by merely standing still and staring at them with revulsion. In that room they liked to witness terror and despair, not defiance.

‘You must not open the envelope until you have left the company premises. Nor will you discuss its contents with your former colleagues. If you do, the future opportunity contained therein will be void.’

He hurriedly concluded his prepared speech by repeating an offer for me to donate my vital organs in return for a miserable stipend. The creature was at its most loathsome at that point in the interview. As it sat there and offered to recycle my body, I was no longer even sure that it was human. But I had no doubt that the creature had been sustained by the bodily organs of others. How else could something so ancient, with a face that reminded me of dried fruit stretched into a human likeness by cosmetic surgeons, still be alive?

I tore open the white envelope before their horrified eyes. Such an act would have been unthinkable before my awakening in the very blood of the vandal of light, the thief, Graham.

The envelope, as I suspected, was empty. A representation of the future. This piece of empty folded-and-gummed paper served as a reminder of a world without human rights, the lightless consensus. This was their final act of revenge on those who failed to generate enough capital to sustain the vulpine roles of the executives, which in turn maintained a status quo in which they were the sole beneficiaries. And we actually feared them. Them! It was time someone shone a simple, pure, bright light upon their faces.

I moved around the table as if to shake their hands. Such a manoeuvre had clearly not been attempted before and their bewilderment bought me time. Enough time to uncrown the apes. Simultaneously, I seized a handful of hair atop each executive’s head and then tore upwards with all of my strength.

There were shrieks and both figures rose from their chairs like puppets that I had taken control of. The great royal curls of the woman came away after a tearing sound reminiscent of sticky tape ripped from fabric, and I revealed the ghastly grey wisps and the pasty scalp beneath its tresses.

The monkey’s locks appeared to have been stitched into its remaining glandular hair around the ears. But the wig partly lifted like a carpet tile and the creature’s little legs, which ended in those canoe-like shoes, skittered about the floor. When I released his donor-hairpiece, he fell and kicked out like an insect on its back in the soil. And in that moment of triumph, I realised that the executive, and its most loyal acolytes, could only be dealt with effectively through a rapid dehumanisation followed by physical destruction. Only after such a reign of cleansing rage would any light rise and bathe a world freed from the entitled.

‘I’ll come back for your heads another time,’ I said. As I left the boardroom my body suffused with a light and energy that seemed to make me capable of raising and pitching great rocks through the tinted windows of the buildings that rose like cathedrals in the commercial districts.

I left the building by the executive fire escape and passed a private ambulance parked onsite. It was waiting expectantly to perform extractions from my torso.

My first tenpenny Book of Light has been a great success. Since it was published four years ago, another sixteen million books have been uploaded to the Rainforest Cloud, so it took a while for the book to shine its solitary ray of light through that mass of wishful thinking and delusion. It took me three years of giving the book away free before it became sufficiently visible to gain its present unstoppable momentum.

And while The Book of Light worked its way to the surface, and to discoverability, I took to the streets and shared my message with anyone who would listen. This message was greater than me; it had been imparted to me from a higher source.

The recalcitrant, the rude and those I deemed so helplessly entangled in the hierarchy and its sophisticated system of lies and false hope were occasionally dispatched by my own hand. I likened my wet workings to the smashing of false idols, or the destruction of grotesque puppets. I lived off the proceeds that I looted from their broken remains.

I found that others with nothing to lose were only too happy to engage in such acts of holy vengeance too; many even took responsibility for my excesses. But in prison they found there was no greater opportunity to evangelise and recruit more soldiers of light, and those with greater skills and motivation for the more direct and uncompromising side of our faith.

The acts of destruction and chaos attributable to The Book of Light swiftly led to it being banned, but its verses and cantos will never go away. For one thing, they have been sprayed all over the city. And though brutal attempts to belittle and suppress the book were generated from the highest levels of commerce and government, and punishments were excruciating for the book’s advocates, The Book of Light persisted orally and was evangelised by the multitudes of the put-upon, disenfranchised, dispossessed, exiled, imprisoned and left behind.

I had hoped for a slow and bloodless revolution, but the implementation of the Light’s core tenets was inevitably crude at times. During the initial sackings of the luxury apartments, and of those giant monoliths of glass in the heart of the city, many died, and many continue to die as hell is consumed by the very rage that it created within its subjects. Once people realised that the pain should be projected outwards, and not bled into toilet bowls, and that we were only held in check by a few bewigged apes and self-crowned impostors, and as long as we maintained our stamina for the promise of future light, great changes could be effected quickly.

I have no more control of the dispersal of the book and its message, and the subsequent anarchy that it causes, than does the man whose foot carelessly treads upon a nest of ants. But out of destruction grows new light in the myriad shrines and temples that have spread through this city, appearing anywhere from the many wretched blocks of flats to the garbage fires of the homeless who gather beneath the stars.

There also remains a great and bloody wrangling between factions who vie for my favour, and who misinterpret my message of love, fairness, equality and justice. It is hard to see my egalitarian vision among streets filled with so much broken glass, burned-out cars and charred corpses, and particularly when all that one can hear in the city is the sirens, screams, the distant crumps of explosions, and the clatter of small-arms fire. But gradually things are simplifying and becoming clearer. When people ask me, ‘Where is this light?’ I say, ‘Soon. Soon, my friend. Soon, you will have eyes to see this light.’

To have got this far is the cause of much satisfaction to me as I sit in my plain little room and continue to reflect before Father Suarez’s small wooden Reliquary. In the mornings I can peer down from my solitary window and observe the genuflections of the naked executives who have been found guilty of exploitation. They are brought here in chains and smeared in their own excrement, at gunpoint, each day. And yet, alongside their daily debasement, I also receive news of how meritocracies and cooperatives are forming in the industries, and how the vast divide between the wealthy and the poor is narrowing. The enforced dispersal of hoarded wealth, I am told, has been like an explosion of light and hope through a blighted land.

The light itself remains curious in its absence. Its source is as ineffable as it ever was. Its distillation is proving impossible. But it is out there, somewhere, and inside all of us. Of that I must remain certain.

Little Black Lamb

The memory would just appear in Douglas’s mind. The occurrences were similar to those odd dreams that occasionally woke him with a jolt, and he could never fathom the origin of those. There seemed to be no trigger to explain his recall of this particular place, and no personal context in the recollection of the location either. But the memory repeatedly returned to Douglas at random moments, so he assumed he was either recalling a specific place and unable to attach it to an experience of his own, or he was imagining the site.

The image was also accompanied by apprehension. The kind of response he’d usually associate with the recollection of unfortunate episodes from his own past, or acknowledgements of unflattering revelations about himself, after long-dangling pennies had finally dropped.

The insistent and repetitive appearance of the location in his thoughts, and the shortening periods between each recurrence of the scene, eventually compelled him to consider the episode with a great deal more effort. And the more he pondered the fragment, and the more detail and context he attempted to extract, the greater was his alarm – for he was uncertain that this was even one of his own memories.

Perhaps something bad had happened there. But where was there?

Dread became entwined within his unease when the replays became hourly, repeated like radio commercials that he detested. And after another week of insistent replays, Douglas was more convinced by the bizarre notion that the scene was someone else’s obsession that he’d been loaned; the uncomfortable equivalent of mistaking a similar coat for his own, only to discover that the fit around his shoulders and the contents of the pockets were unfamiliar.

He eventually mentioned the situation to his wife, Sandra, and she immediately said, ‘That is so strange, Doug. Me too.’

Following the onset of their first false memories, more of the weird visions began to occur in Douglas and Sandra’s minds. Each occurrence remained unprovoked by a particular situation that either of them could determine.

For Douglas, each scene that formed in his thoughts suggested that he was on the edge of a much broader scene, after an event under an open sky. These unpopulated images all featured irrelevant spaces too, or ‘non-spaces’ as he was soon referring to them. ‘Dear, another non-space just popped into my mind.’

The very first scene had featured an area of uncut but flattened grass, surrounded by dim trees, their lower trunks choked by nettles and blackberry vines. In the middle of the grass clearing was an old tin drinking trough for cattle. The following scene had featured gravel and litter interspersed about long weeds, beside a railway embankment. A grassy area beside a phone mast, or some kind of telecommunications antenna, ringed by a spiked fence, followed the glimpse of the railway sidings. Overgrown turf between the uprights of an electricity pylon came swiftly on the tail of another persistent image of a strip of weeds, beside the chain-link fence of an industrial estate; a grey, featureless building set some distance away. The latest and most persistent scene featured a few yards of wet soil adjacent to an agricultural building with boarded-up windows.

‘Mine are similar to what you describe, but all indoors,’ Sandra confided in him during their first exchange on the matter. ‘There is no before, or after, in these rooms. There is only this place from another time. Drab, poorly decorated rooms, from the sixties or seventies, I think. And I feel that I was once there, and that I was even present for something that happened there, only I don’t know what it was. And whoever else was involved is no longer there either . . .

‘When I see the rooms I sense that I was sickened at the time that I was there. Not ill, but repulsed . . . remorseful, and very tired. That fatigue you get after a period of excitement.’ She was close to an analogy of sexual misconduct but stopped short to spare Doug’s feelings. They were both on their second marriage and had been together for ten years. Shortly before she met Doug, and while her previous marriage disintegrated, Sandra had been susceptible to many temptations and had drunk herself into a persona that she hardly recognised now, and preferred not to remember. Doug didn’t know about any of that.

‘I was ultimately unhappy in these places that I am seeing, but I also know that I have never lived in any of these rooms. I can’t even remember visiting them either. Yes, it is like I am remembering a place where something unpleasant happened to me. Or that I did something regrettable there. Maybe a combination of both. An incident that caused a trauma that never faded, only I have no idea what it was.’

‘Because you’ve never been in those places and whatever happened was never your own misfortune?’

‘But I remember these rooms more clearly than I remember important scenes from my childhood. These are quite . . . urgent. I can’t even imagine when I was supposed to have been in these rooms either. They seem timeless, even enshrined, but completely ordinary.

‘I’m getting a bit worried, Doug.’

‘As am I, but I’d be far more concerned if they didn’t appear so natural. So authentic.’

Sandra didn’t need to communicate her agreement with more than a look, but on the subject of communication she did venture, ‘Is someone sending them to us?’

Her embarrassment became obvious, as was Doug’s on her behalf for saying something of this nature so easily. Though he’d been struck by the same idea too.

The problem with the online checklists that help to identify the early onset of Alzheimer’s or dementia was that both Douglas and Sandra felt they’d already been suffering from every symptom before the visions began. ‘Visions’: that’s what they had taken to calling them.

Douglas and Sandra were both sixty four and drank moderately, and neither of them was a high risk for dementia according to their family histories. The questionnaire asked if they were regularly forgetting names and dates and repeating themselves. Yes. Difficulties with concentration? Yes. Having trouble with what should be familiar appliances? Yes, and especially the boiler for Doug and one of the television remotes for Sandra. Difficulties with language, finding the right word, stopping in the middle of sentences? I should say so. Getting confused about times and places? When have we not? Misplacing things? Check: every day. Growing increasingly tired of obligations? Hell, yes. Not recognising your own reflection? Well, no, but we can’t recognise our own thoughts, dear!

They each took a medical and a neurological assessment at their local surgery. Douglas’s blood pressure had worsened and Sandra discovered that she was borderline diabetic, but the GP and nurse were unconcerned about dementia in either of them and advised dietary adjustments.

Unconvinced by this, they pursued a second opinion and paid a specialist private clinic for a home visit and screening. On the ‘Mental Status’ test, Doug scored 26 out of 30; to her delight, Sandra hit 28 out of 30. On that scale only a dip below 24 was cause for concern about dementia.

The remaining options, to make certain that they were not losing their minds, were gene testing and mental imaging, but both their GP and the clinic believed these assessments unnecessary.

Douglas began to wonder if there might be a connection between the visions and their home. They had lived in the three-bedroom terraced house for five years and been content and undisturbed by anything besides one break-in the previous year. Their shed had been broken into but nothing was taken. In fact, something was left behind. A pair of protective gloves that were heavily soiled and brittle with age.

The house had been built in the twenties and little untoward had shown up on the survey, besides some work required for the roof. The vendor had been an ordinary middle-aged woman called June, who’d been tasked with selling her elderly mother’s house to pay for her care. At the time of the purchase, the mother, Alice, lived in a care home. She had owned the house with her husband since the early seventies.

The neighbours had said nothing remarkable or even specific about the previous owners, besides their being devoutly religious.

Alice’s husband had died in the early nineties and the widow had led a quiet life in the house until she’d been moved to a care home. Douglas knew nothing else. His due diligence of the area and house had been thorough and revealed the neighbourhood and property to be entirely average.

And none of Sandra’s visions ever featured the rooms of their home.

The problem escalated when each of them was beset by compulsions to engage in irrational behaviour, beginning four weeks after the first of their false recollections.

Twice after Douglas came into the house and failed to raise Sandra with a call, he’d come across her outside, when he looked through the kitchen windows. She’d been standing at the foot of the garden, beside the shed, and staring at the houses beyond their fence. The second time it had been raining heavily and although Sandra wore a waterproof she’d failed to put the hood up. When she’d responded to Douglas’s call from the back door, she’d seemed dazed for a few seconds, and had then made her way back to the house, though unsteadily.

Seeing her so thin, wet and near enfeebled, as if from an onslaught of strong emotion, had made Doug think that Sandra was now old, and in that peculiar childlike way that transforms the elderly.

Sandra admitted she’d been overcome by an urgent need to be outside the house, before she’d submitted to a kind of ‘daydreamy feeling’ when in the open air. ‘But it isn’t what I wanted . . . it wasn’t right. That wasn’t right, just standing there thinking of another empty room. It was like I hadn’t gone far enough, or I should have been doing something with my hands . . . but I don’t know what, Doug.’

Doug wasn’t sure what Sandra had meant by that, but neither was she.

Douglas also veered off course. The sight of three distant hills that he was passing on an A road triggered an incident. He’d even released an involuntary gasp at the sight of the hills and an image had tried to form inside his mind, almost overpoweringly, but had dispelled just as rapidly and left him with no memory of anything but a patch of flattened grass and wet soil. He’d been driving to a hardware store that he’d never used before, to buy some decorating materials.

The hills had once been farmland but were undergoing a transformation and were becoming a new residential estate. Most of the hills displayed the vast, ugly red gouges of earthworks in progress. A multitude of narrow grey houses were being erected and packed together like hutches. Douglas pointlessly wondered how big the gardens were and how each house must overlook those at the front and back. He’d also suffered a wholly irrational feeling of guilt and remorse, as well as a terror of getting in trouble. Those hills meant something to a deep and indefinable part of his mind.

With the aid of the satnav, he found a road close to the hills. When the road became a broad, unsurfaced area rutted and split by heavy plant vehicles, he’d stopped the car and found himself at the rear of a deserted and silent construction site, bereft of the industrial processes that had thus far mutilated the hills. He proceeded on foot to the nearest slope and to the only hillside that had managed to retain a meagre copse of trees and some pasture.

He was certain that he’d never visited this place before. And yet, by the time he’d clumsily surmounted the remnants of a gate, ignoring the PRIVATE PROPERTY: EXCALIBUR CONSTRUCTION sign, and slipped his way up the slope to the first trees, he knew that something inside the tiny wood was a source of beguiling significance to him.

In the centre of the wood Douglas came across a place he recognised: the setting of the very first of his visions. A drinking trough for cattle, made from galvanised tin, was set in a rough circle of trampled grass, corralled by short, spindly trees and waist-high bracken. Two worn paths led in and out of the clearing upon which cattle or sheep must once have plodded to drink from the greening metal basin. As in his vision, the place was wet and the ground was covered by slippery leaves that had fallen from the messy circle of trees. The sun was obscured by dense, low clouds that created the air quality and the coloration of the foliage in his vision.

The very sight of the metal trough was a source of revulsion. But the lingering miasma of livestock and the dried algae on the metal basin were not responsible for the strength of Douglas’s reaction. He became dizzy and bent double, his vision speckling with motes of light like dust particles falling through sunshine. A great fatigue gripped his thighs and shoulders and the palms of his hands burned. He might have just defaced these hills alone with a pickaxe, and erected those grey houses with his own hands, rather than merely walked up an incline from the car.

The fatigue passed after a few minutes.

He experienced a baffling anger as he plunged into the thick undergrowth on the far side of the clearing. He wasn’t even vaguely aware of what he would find nearby but was certain that he was expected by something deeper inside that shrunken wood. He would recognise whatever it was when he came across it.

The undergrowth halted his progress. Blackberry vines tore his sopping trousers and scratched the skin of his calves. And he found nothing, but only because he wasn’t able to get far enough inside. Not far enough. Just like Sandra, what he sought was beyond his reach.

Refusing to be deterred, and assured that his unknown purpose was one of importance, Douglas burrowed into the old wood from another three angles. By the time he’d trampled down enough undergrowth to get deeper among the trees, he found what had drawn him up there: a cairn or miniature dolmen that had collapsed. The large grey stones might have been part of the rubble from a collapsed wall, or of a natural outcrop of indigenous rock, or something much older, transported here. How would he ever know?

By that time, his coat was bemired with moisture, wet bark and moss. His shoes were caked in mud and his trousers spattered and holed. But this was it. There was something hidden beneath these stones. Or maybe it was kept in place by them.

Bracing his thighs, his spine bent, he gripped the first rock and began to lever it loose.

During the two weeks that followed Doug’s discovery of the ancient suitcase near the construction site, his false recollections of waste ground lessened. This made him suspect that he had accomplished a task and that whatever was directing him had allowed him to stand down.

But Sandra had become more preoccupied and her self-involvement suggested to Douglas that her possession by the enigma had intensified. Only he didn’t know for sure because she’d become uncommunicative on the subject.

After the suitcase entered their home, Douglas was sidelined for the first time in their marriage and that upset him. Sandra stopped seeing him in the same way as she had done only a few weeks before. She avoided his company in the evenings, when they usually spent hours together, even if in a companionable silence. Her answers to his questions, and her responses to his attempts to begin conversations, were stiffened by what he interpreted as a patronising tone. Infuriating silences then commenced in which she would stare at the screen of her pad, or the pages of a book, with an amused smile playing on her face. He’d never seen that precise expression before in their decade together. All of his attempts to interact with Sandra were irritating her, perhaps profoundly.

‘Not right now.’

‘I’ve a few things to do.’

These became familiar expressions when he returned home from work and suggested they go out for dinner or see a film, or begin the boxset of a new television series. But he was not much in her thoughts.

At the same time, Douglas began to wake in the night, broken from his sleep by dreams that he couldn’t remember, before becoming beset by the sort of anxiety he felt when he was late for work. Whenever he awoke in this way he’d find Sandra’s side of the bed empty. Worried to the point of nausea, he’d scramble from the bedclothes and bump his way downstairs.

Sandra would always be sitting in the unlit living room, fully dressed and nursing a mug of hot milk. Not something he’d ever known her drink before. She never seemed pleased to see him and either claimed that she couldn’t sleep or would say, ‘I’m just dealing with this in my own way.’ She began to sleep late and would nap in the afternoons behind closed curtains.

This state of affairs continued for another two weeks.

Periodically, during working days, Douglas made a habit of calling the house from the workshop. Sandra never picked up. He questioned her on her whereabouts several times, but she always had an alibi that was plausible enough to make his concern appear unreasonable, even juvenile, as if he were an insecure and possessive teenage boyfriend.

Sandra also began to use more make-up and Douglas found her newly reddened mouth uncomfortably arousing. Had they not found a lipstick in the old suitcase? The paste in the tube had dried out and crumbled, but what stains were visible had indicated that the cosmetic had once been red.

She changed her hair too. Dyed it red and pulled it back tightly so that her expressions appeared more severe and eager. ‘Fancied a change’ was all she said. ‘Do you like it?’ But she clearly did not care whether he liked her hair or not.

Over the previous few years their sex life had not so much dwindled as settled into one long period of gentle intimacy that occurred each week, and usually on a Saturday evening a few hours after they had eaten. Douglas had never told Sandra, though he expected she knew, but he found the predictable arrangement just about right for his tastes and energy levels. He suspected that if they had ever tried to initiate a more active sex life, he would have stopped enjoying their weekly period of intimacy, and might even have begun to make excuses to avoid additional relations. Their rhythms, however, appeared to have always ticked over in synchronicity. If they missed a week due to illness it was never a problem for either of them.

There was a quality in Sandra’s new style and demeanour, though, that made Douglas want his wife with an urgency close to savagery. He worried that he should not be feeling like that at all, and he knew that his passion had been caused by his wife appearing to him like a new woman. The predictable and familiar had become strange and intoxicating. But her indifference to him made Douglas want her even more still, and in a way that confused him, though his excitement exceeded his bafflement. He liked the feeling a great deal.

Sandra consistently ignored his tentative advances during the evenings and mornings that were still some distance from their usual rendezvous on Saturday night. This game that she dominated made him irritable but soon increased her desirability to almost unbearable levels. Her sly, knowing smile was the most infuriating thing of all.

Sandra preferred to spend her time with the suitcase that Doug had brought home from the wood bordering the construction site. It was saturated with foul-smelling groundwater, the leather exterior almost decomposing with mildew and dripping with soil, so he had placed it upon a polythene sheet on the garage floor.

As Douglas had narrated his tale of how he’d found the case beside the cattle trough and construction site, Sandra’s first reaction had been shock. But this was followed by relief, as if she were acknowledging the completion of an unpleasant task in a necessary process. Later that night, as they’d climbed into bed, she’d whispered, ‘You saved it.’

Douglas had thought that an odd thing for his wife to say. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well . . . they would have dug it up, wouldn’t they? Or built houses over it.’ She referred to the case as if it were the equivalent of ancient treasure, like Saxon gold.

Douglas had no idea for how long the thing had been in the ground, but the style and making of the case he estimated as dating from the sixties. The locks were corroded on the outside but the inner mechanism still held fast, so he’d been forced to cut through the rotting outer material and lining with a Stanley knife. The sensation of slicing the hide had made him think of parting dead flesh.

‘Careful, Doug,’ Sandra had said, her fingers arranged in two fans before her face, as if she were watching her husband defuse unexploded ordnance from the Second World War in their garage. ‘Careful with it.’

‘You don’t even know what’s inside. And what about me finding it . . .’ For the remainder of the day after he’d found the damn thing compressed and concealed beneath those large stones, he’d felt cold and peculiar. ‘This isn’t natural, pet. Me finding it was intended. But why me? Why us? And how? Are you not worried any more? We should see somebody, another doctor.’

‘Get it open,’ Sandra had said with impatience.

‘I want to do everything differently. There’s more, you know,’ Sandra had said, after she’d finally offered herself to Douglas sexually.

This happened on a Sunday morning, three weeks after Doug had brought the case home. ‘When buggers sing hymns,’ she’d said after the sex and when they’d sheepishly been able to discuss the intense episode. And what she’d said about church had shocked Douglas. Sandra had never said anything remotely like that before. They were ambivalent about religion. The spiritual realm was something they’d never discussed. Funerals and weddings were the only times they’d ever attended church together.

Douglas didn’t demand an explanation for the same reason he didn’t query the changes in her appearance and attitude, because he didn’t want her to change back to what was familiar. Not yet anyway. He also doubted that he’d ever forget what happened in the kitchen.

Sandra had returned to the house from the garden shed. Earlier that week, Douglas had transported the case to the shabby little outbuilding, but Sandra would often ‘go for a mooch’ as if she were looking for some clue within the hideous trunk. She’d forbidden him to throw it away.

The previous evening, when they usually made love, Sandra had insisted on cataloguing the contents of the suitcase, again. She’d brought it back into the house and taken it upstairs. She’d then placed each artefact inside a transparent freezer bag until their bed was completely covered with the aged, browning, and stinking contents of the old suitcase. The packages had resembled evidence bags.

The following morning, Douglas had walked into the kitchen, intent on making coffee, but his wife had fixed him in place with the most licentious stare that he’d ever seen on a woman’s face. He’d not even suspected her capable of such an expression. Wearing a long waterproof coat that he’d never seen before, with her Wellington boots, and her face painted and bright red lips dripping with rain, and her hair wet, sleek and tightly shaped in a bun, she’d said, ‘Now. Take it.’

And in the very place in which they prepared food and washed their clothes, Doug had done as instructed and had taken his wife backwards and hurriedly. A position they’d not engaged in since they first courted, because of his knees. Sandra had guided his hands about her body and barked short commands like ‘Here!’ and ‘Like this, over me’ and ‘Don’t hold back.’

Doug had pushed the top half of her body over the kitchen counter, raised her sopping coat and her dry dress, then pulled down her flimsy underwear and tights to the middle of her thighs using one hand. But even in his fury and abandon, he stopped short of obeying the final command that Sandra issued right before a noisy climax.

‘Put your hands round my throat.’ At that point she’d also pressed her face into a loaf of bread and tore at it with her teeth, as if she was trying to find a leather strop inside the packaging.

Douglas had not even recognised the voice that had slipped from his wife’s mouth.

The following week, Douglas began to spy on Sandra.

He took two days off work and left the house at the usual time, in the usual way, like a man who had lost his job but was too afraid to tell his wife. He’d never spied on anyone before but it came to him naturally and felt oddly familiar. The whole procedure rewarded him with a curious giddy excitement. He sat in his car at the end of the street and made lists:

Riverbank.

Swampy turf near culvert and illegally dumped bin bags containing household waste.

Long grass beside corrugated concrete.

Three empty fields; rusted wire fence.

On the first day of his surveillance, Sandra left the house around noon and drove away in her car. She wore her new coat and Wellington boots and resembled a woman driving to the park to walk a dog. From a distance, when she’d been standing on the drive, she’d looked as if her eyes were half-closed as she spoke to someone on her phone.

Douglas called her mobile phone several times after she left the house, but Sandra never picked up his calls.

She returned after five hours. By then, Douglas had driven away and returned to the street four times and each time had noted that she hadn’t returned to the house. The fifth time he drove into their road, he spotted her car on the drive.

Sandra was asleep when he entered the house. That morning’s dishes remained unwashed. It had also gone dark but she’d left all of the curtains open downstairs and this made Douglas anxious.

Later that evening when she came downstairs, Douglas asked her nothing about her day and, as usual, Sandra failed to volunteer any details. He realised that she might have been going out for weeks, while he was at work, without telling him.

On a whim, he checked their joint account online and noticed that she’d withdrawn three hundred pounds from an ATM while she’d been out that day. He found fifty pounds in her purse wrapped around a receipt for what looked like gardening equipment, purchased from their local B&Q.

Secateurs, washing line, heavy duty gardening sacks, pliers, a cordless electric drill, electrician’s tape, spade.

The next day Doug followed Sandra’s car. And then he followed her on foot from a carpark to the High Street and to a café. In there, his wife met two people in a manner distinguished by more than conventional enthusiasm.

The couple must have been in their seventies. Douglas knew all of Sandra’s friends and these were new acquaintances, but they had seemed genuinely joyous to be in each other’s company. They clasped and clutched each other with what Douglas suspected was a combination of delight and relief.

After they took off their long coats and hats, Douglas saw that the elderly man and woman were dressed plainly and conservatively in ordinary clothes. The meeting that followed was long and animated, and at one point the elderly man presented Sandra with several sheets of paper that she signed. She kept one of them and folded it into her handbag. A packet of coloured pens was also produced from the elderly woman’s handbag, and the threesome appeared to draw or colour-in something that had been placed upon the table.

They eventually parted with hugs all round. Sandra’s hands were clasped and shaken. The man planted kisses upon Sandra’s cheeks, and the elderly woman upon her mouth, in a lingering fashion. Here, there was more than mere familiarity; there was a suggestion of a grotesque intimacy.

Doug was unsure who to follow after the meeting broke up. He chose to follow his wife, but she drove home and he immediately regretted not following the elderly couple to find out who they were. He couldn’t rid his mind of the image of his wife being kissed on the mouth by the elderly woman.

That evening he was unable to restrain himself from mentioning that he’d followed her, that he was terribly worried about her, that things were getting out of hand for each of them, that they were normalising what was unnatural and no longer even questioning it, that she had changed so as to be almost unrecognisable, that their sex life was a cause for concern, that she was meeting people whom he didn’t know, and that everything was just wrong . . . Douglas spoke at length and let all of his grievances flow. And finally he said, ‘We have to get rid of that bloody case. We have to. Don’t you see? We have to.’ He omitted to say ‘before it’s too late’, because that notion was unbearable.

As he spoke, Sandra’s contempt for him was evident. Silent assessments were made behind her elaborately painted eyes as she judged him for what he’d said. Yes, she was considering him, but not the situation that he spoke of. Douglas was sure of it. Sandra was already committed to something, that’s what his instincts screamed at him. But she was now judging his potential participation, or his worthiness as a participant in something that he dreaded but could not determine.

Eventually, she said, ‘If you ever follow me again I will leave you.’

‘Who were those people?’

Such warmth and excitement did their memory summon that Sandra’s glossy lips drew back to reveal all of her teeth.

‘Who?’ Douglas shouted.

‘They paid me a visit and explained everything.’

‘What, here? Who . . .’

‘They’ve been here before. They attend, every now and again.’

‘Who are they?’

‘I’m not sure how to describe them, and they wouldn’t like that anyway. A movement, I guess. You could call them a part of that.’ She said ‘movement’ lasciviously, as if relishing the memory of an obscenity. ‘But who they are is not important. It’s the places they know of that matter.’

‘Like here?’ he wanted to ask, but couldn’t bear to voice an idea that he’d already accepted. If he’d known it would come to this then he would have been stronger and resisted the visions and destroyed the case, he thought, but he wasn’t sure. And Douglas was no longer certain that Sandra was even Sandra any more.

He left the living room, his legs shaking from the maelstrom of his anger and fear and also from a desire for his wife that was making him wretched. He felt sick at the anticipation of what might happen next without knowing what that would be. But whatever they were being led into, if he went along with it, Sandra would reward him.

For the first time in weeks, he didn’t want to be inside the house with her. He wanted to walk to the closest pub.

Douglas went upstairs to change out of his work clothes and he saw what she had arranged upon their bed:

The red plastic handbag with the broken strap.

The rubber apron, brittle and stiff with age.

The old khaki raincoat with the labels removed.

The two masks made from sacking with childish faces drawn upon the front.

Four rusting knives, and two hooked implements that were probably agricultural tools.

A misshapen lump of lead at the end of a short length of rope.

A heavily stained nightdress of white cotton.

Eight unbroken glass jars containing human hair.

When Douglas returned to the house a few minutes before midnight, Sandra had gone. She had taken the case and its contents with her.

For the next three days, Douglas didn’t see his wife, nor could he reach her by phone. But her car was parked on the drive on the evening of the third day when he returned from work.

He found her in the bathroom. She was standing under the shower and her entire body was shaking as if she was frozen. Her face streamed with water and ran with eyeliner to produce long rivers of inky tears. She made Douglas think of a frightened child.

His wife had messily stuffed some of her clothing inside a rubber refuse sack, but then appeared to have given up on the endeavour. Her black raincoat was draped over the sink unit. A pair of spattered Wellington boots had been discarded beside the bathtub.

Douglas spoke to her softly. ‘Where have you been, Sandra? What have you done?’

‘Do you know what they’ll do to me?’ was all she offered by way of explanation. ‘She was so young . . . I can’t, Doug. I can’t go away. I’d rather die. You could do it now . . . with your hands.’

Douglas bowed his head and rested his weight against the sink, his hands gripping the porcelain. So this was it. ‘Where?’

‘In the kitchen. All of it. Under a sheet. And bits . . . in the dining room.’ Her voice then dropped to a whisper that he barely heard over the shower’s cascade. ‘I got carried away. They said I would. There’s so much . . . The first one was delivered.’

Doug turned to leave the room.

Sandra was almost screaming at him when she cried out, ‘What will you do?’

‘I know where to put it,’ Douglas said, over his shoulder. ‘I’ll be shown.’

He jogged down the stairs and turned on the kitchen lights, then bent over and vomited hard onto his trousers and shoes.

When he recovered enough to stand up straight, his hands took over and without thinking he began unpeeling the refuse sacks from the roll that Sandra had left beside the toaster.

The adjoining dining room was mostly in darkness, but enough light fell from the kitchen to illumine two of the three visitors that had come to their home that evening: the two still alive.

The elderly couple were naked save for their kitchen aprons, but their visible flesh was stained. They held each other upright and huddled against the far wall. They were shivering, or trembling from shock. And that was the first erection, beyond the pornography he’d looked at, that Douglas had ever seen between another man’s legs. It was long and thin and protruded through a jagged hole cut into the front of the old man’s floral-patterned apron.

The couple’s faces were concealed by the paper plates they wore like masks, and upon which were drawn crude childlike faces with big, oblong eyes.

‘It’s done,’ the old man said, his voice muffled by the circular plate. ‘The Maiden has lain down with the little black lamb. But before you get started on this lot, can you drop us home?’

Story Notes: About These Horrors

‘On All London Underground Lines’ was written after one of many hellish journeys that I endured while attempting to travel in London. Transport in our capital can thwart you to a stuttering psychosis; literally, it can bring you to a standstill, or to your knees. If a portion of the Tube malfunctioned (when did it not?), the buses filled up, the taxis were soon taken, while the roads became long queues of vehicles, churning out diesel fumes. In my twelve years in the city, I found that my feet were my best means of transport. I only needed to use public transport for work for two years out of twelve. For the other ten I made sure I lived within walking distance of my place of work; even walking three miles from Holland Park to Hammersmith was faster than using the Tube. So awful was the transport for long periods that I’d even been known to walk from Holland Park to Vauxhall Bridge Road.

The journey this tale is mainly based upon was a disastrous trip in 2009, as I tried to travel from Holland Park to Vauxhall Bridge Road. I left the house at 8 a.m. and reached my desk at 11.30. The Underground was insufferably hot, every platform crowded; at one point I couldn’t even get above ground because of the crush of bodies trying to ascend. Crazily, another crush of bodies at street level was attempting to descend through the gates of the same stations.

The second experience that added a particular flavour to this story occurred during a city-wide power-cut that took out the London Underground, which I think occurred in the winter of 2008. Save the lights from motor vehicles, London fell into an apocalyptic darkness. As I walked from Vauxhall Bridge Road to Holland Park, I remember circling the fence of Hyde Park and often being unable to see my feet on the pavement. To make this experience stranger, I was walking among tens of thousands of West Londoners making the same journey on foot in the darkness. What I found alarming was their absolute lack of conversation. A vast crowd walked in fearful silence through the darkness of the night. Here and there, against the railings, figures sat, exhausted. Who knows how far they had walked before giving up? Given these two incidents, is it any surprise that I wrote this story? In my own way I guess I tried to suggest what happens after the thin, invisible strands that hold great cities together break. And yet, out of routine, ritual, habit and disbelief, even the dead still attempt to get to work.

The busker with the tambourine, however, existed and haunted the horrid tiled subways that passed beneath Birmingham city centre in the eighties. People always stopped talking as they passed him.

What can I say? London has great PR. But if you’re neither rich nor young, it’ll take you out, drive you out or drive you mad. London has its own rules. Anything can happen there. For me it was the best of times and the worst of times. So when Jon Oliver asked me for a story for his themed anthology End of the Line, I had something ready for him.

‘The Angels of London’ is the second London story in this collection, and another macabre visit, via my imagination, to my domestic circumstances during the earliest period of my time in the city. I began life in London in a room on top of a pub that was falling apart, both inside and outside. Not only was I shocked at what I grew to tolerate, I was also astonished at what had become normal for others around me. Perhaps London had always been this way, with space and accommodation at such a premium. The city, from the micro-level to the epic, is a Petri dish for the unscrupulous and the opportunistic.

My nearest Tube station was Angel, and an Australian man I’d met told me that there was an actual angel in Islington from which the Tube station took its name: a stone sculpture that had been surrounded by private flats, and perhaps was once a religious icon. Bizarrely, as a child, Angel was also my favourite station on the Monopoly board (purely because I liked the name and colour). As an older man, down on his luck, the statue, the name of the station and the pub all became something else within my mind.

This is one of three stories I’ve written for Paul Finch’s Terror Tales series. At the time of the tale’s composition, I remember really being up against other deadlines and family duties. But when Paul invited me to write for the London theme, I felt that I had to. It was necessary. London gave me Apartment 16, and other parts of my novels; it often crops up, re-imagined, as a background, a context or a representation of a theme. London was a big part of my writing, and continues to be so after my life in the city. And what London endowed me with was the facility to imagine countless hideous creatures, as well as grotesque eventualities and fates for the individual in large cities. But in this regard my literary representations of London seem at odds with those of many other writers.

‘Always in Our Hearts’ was also written for Jonathan Oliver when the call came to write a story for his themed collection End of the Road. My little family unit had not long left London. My wife and I and our fifteen-month-old baby relocated to Birmingham, the second city, and the hometown that my wife and I share. To my horror, after twelve years without driving, I now needed to drive a car again. Only this time there would be a baby inside the vehicle too! Paroxysms of anxiety and terror ensued, most often as I tried to sleep. The brief soliloquy that the private hire driver Ray Larch shares at the story’s opening echoes the author’s own preoccupations. On my return to motoring, after over a decade away, I realised the roads were much busier, the cars faster, and the Highway Code seemed to have been reduced to, at best, mere guidance to the motorist.

The setting of this story owes much to Joel Lane and his vision of Birmingham. His fiction helped me see what was possible, imaginatively, in my home town. I’d admired and enjoyed Joel’s fiction for years, and, while I was back in Birmingham for two years, Joel passed away, leaving us at far too young an age. In my own way, I’d like to leave this story as a tribute to one of the finest British writers of the modern weird.

During this period in Birmingham, I also felt compelled to write at greater length about the city where I’ve spent nearly half of my life. So I wrote the novel No One Gets Out Alive, setting that tale in the north of Birmingham too.

‘Eumenides (The Benevolent Ladies)’ marks the first of four tribute stories in this collection. This tale was written in homage to Robert Aickman, and was intended for an anthology due for publication in 2014, to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of this great English writer of strange stories. Sadly, the Aickman tribute collection was never published. Titan Books and Mark Morris came to the story’s rescue, however, and published it in the first of what I hope is an annual horror collection, entitled New Fears.

I sometimes think that, in the new weird renaissance, mostly occurring within the small presses, Aickman’s influence almost matches that of Ligotti and Lovecraft. As my late friend James Marriott once said, Aickman is one of few writers who can change our perception. By that, I’ve always thought, James didn’t mean changes in our values, politics or judgements, but in the way our consciousness interacts with certain situations and places.

At the time of this story’s composition, I often took my infant daughter to Dudley Zoo – a fabulous zoological garden, built around a hill that you ascend and descend in order to view the animals. We were still living in North Birmingham at this time, while looking for a family home in Devon. And on successive visits to Dudley Zoo I imagined the place derelict and overgrown. I interspersed these thoughts with my memory of a trip to London Zoo, the worst zoo that I have ever visited: an old cement place, built by the Victorians, with enclosures far too small for the animals, and no hope of extension because of space restrictions in Central London. In fact twice during my visit I felt like weeping, once at the ticket prices, and then seeing the faces of the apes. I’ll never forget the gorilla’s expression. My heart broke.

I have visited some extraordinarily good zoos around Europe and the UK, my favourites being Berlin, Munich and our very own zoo in Paignton, Torbay, only a few miles from where I now live. But London Zoo seemed to reinforce the tragedy that has befallen the animal kingdom through the actions of mankind; your only chance of evading extinction through poaching and the invasion of your environment is by being in here.

So my experiences of these two zoos, Dudley and London, combined in my mind and began to create an Aickmanesque environment for a story. Though he is famous for his enigmatic approach to tales of the fantastic and the supernatural, I have noted the erotic undertones in Aickman’s stories – even a hint of what borders on erotic fetishism. I suspect he loved glamorous, intelligent women and what they wore. This facet makes his fiction richer and more interesting psychologically, and it was this impression of his narrators that also provided the inspiration for M. L. Hazzard, my cross-dressing, astral-travelling cult leader in Under A Watchful Eye.

Aickman’s stories often contain dry humour too, and a sardonic commentary on the state of the world and the people in it. I wanted a hint of these qualities to seep into my own story, and I also dared more of an authorial voice, but one that I hoped didn’t risk pastiche.

Also, in the spirit of Aickman, don’t expect an explanation of the mystery, though I probably give more away than he would. But the core mystery is: why did the Sisters of the White Cross (who are mentioned in an Aickman story and used here in tribute) murder the zoo’s animals? And what have they conjured to infect its ruins? I drop hints about their bizarre theology, which attributes great significance to the Garden of Eden, but thought it best to leave the revelation undisclosed. Enigma is vital to horror, but I never fail to be surprised at how many readers of horror find no value in this quality. Ten minutes of reading reviews on Amazon could leave a writer of enigmatic horror feeling unloved, unappreciated and lonely.

‘Eumenides (The Benevolent Ladies)’ is also the only story I’ve ever written on a train, and during a long train journey too. When I was a guest author at the Plymouth International Literary Festival, I began a first draft in the quiet carriage between Birmingham and Plymouth, and then finished it on the return journey.

‘The Days of Our Lives’ might be the oddest story in this collection. Officially, the story’s trigger and theme were to be based upon an item of missing post that had been returned to sender; but the mail had been returned to the wrong address and opened by the narrator of the story.

My own unique package and trigger were sent to me by the writer and editor Conrad Williams. He was putting together a collection entitled Dead Letters for Titan, and the authors who were invited to contribute a story on the theme were required to write about the actual item of missing post that they received from Conrad. Can you guess what I received?

It was a woman’s wristwatch: cheap, scuffed, faded, no longer working. In some ways it reminded me of horrors peculiar to my own country.

The tale was also informed by the research that I had undertaken for my novel No One Gets Out Alive. In that story I explored the domestic horrors of Great Britain, the ordinary horrors that arise from ordinary items and ordinary people. Eschewing the traditional spectres, tropes, the Gothic and the haunted historical settings, I wanted to try and refine and distil what I found to be grotesque, depressingly mundane and unintentionally macabre about my own country, but domestically. The story would involve regular people in unremarkable settings who experienced extraordinary things. This short story was a continuation of that aesthetic intention.

It is also the story of a dysfunctional relationship, in which two people who loathe each other are still held together by some strange, ineffable force. Domestic violence is a scourge in our times, but I wanted to reverse the usual roles and have the woman as the sadist, bully and aggressor, while the curiously reduced male figure became a kind of beleaguered valet. His sexuality had also been perverted into a fetish for female dominance.

Having been an editor of erotica for eleven years rendered me incapable of surprise at just how imaginative and perverse sexual fantasies can be. Oddly, much of the fiction (the best fiction) submitted to me by male writers involved a fixation with male debasement before female empowerment. Clearly, in this story, my former editorial role left a peculiar mark. It is another occasion too when I’ve explored the compressed drama and tension in a bad relationship that refuses to free either inmate. I’m sure we’ve all had them.

As in No One Gets Out Alive, there are also echoes of killer couples. Terrible collusions between partners with curious bonds, which result in the victimisation and destruction of vulnerable outsiders who are seduced into their domestic spheres. With Brady and Hindley, the Wests and others, we have a society that occasionally seems to produce a particular form of grotesque and loathsome human behaviour, which is committed in domestic situations and orchestrated by couples or even entire families. So the juxtaposition of the ordinary and depravity was the descriptive motif and theme of that novel, as well as this short story. A theme and idea that I find strangely affecting but horrifying. If there were fewer vampires, werewolves and their ilk in British horror, and more of these domestic horrors, I don’t think the field would suffer. A writer doesn’t have to look far to find material either.

This story also features for the first time, though it will not be the last, the mysterious Movement, a hideous occult organisation, camouflaged by the banal and the everyday. I find their members everywhere . . .

Ellen Datlow reprinted this story in her Best Horror of the Year: Volume Nine.

‘Hippocampus’ is another story with an unusual approach: it doesn’t contain any characters. I remember a poet on my creative writing course writing the opening of a story that was to be the pure description of a landscape and a place within it. I never read the end of the story, and am not sure he ever finished it. But I was intrigued by an idea of producing a horror story without characters: a relationship between the reader and an anonymous narrator, with the latter mimicking a roving camera.

This roving point-of-view was, in effect, showing the reader a form of found footage: footage of a place in which something terrible had happened. All that was left for the reader was the aftermath and the evidence: the horrors. The reader becomes a witness at a crime scene; the horrors occurred before the story even began. This creates a story that only the reader can piece together within their imagination. So instead of using characters as a vicarious medium, I would just show the reader the raw footage with no middle ground.

I found this form could not sustain a story much beyond two thousand words, and I chose for my subject a vast but derelict container ship. From our local shores and coastal paths, I watch these Leviathans cross the horizon all the time, on their way to Plymouth. Despite their size they have small crew complements. As a location for a horror story, and in my process of getting the sea and coast deeper within my imagination, a container ship was just the ticket. Ellen Datlow reprinted this story in her Best Horror of the Year: Volume Eight.

‘Call the Name’ is another short story that mirrored one of the novels written in more or less the same timeframe. Lost Girl probably involved my biggest research project to date. Most of the material that I covered for the world of that novel was reduced to informing the story. Much of it was never used. But that portion of the research was not all in vain; parts of my reading, and even one scene in which the Red Father watches the news on a television screen, I salvaged for this long story – the longest short story I have written.

This tale is the second of the four homage stories collected in Hasty for the Dark, which attests to just how popular these tribute anthologies have become in recent years. ‘Call the Name’ is my first overtly Lovecraftian story, and the first tale written for a Lovecraftian mythos anthology.

Even though this great author’s mark tends to manifest itself only in spirit, through my attempts to conjure a sense of cosmic dread and awe (as in The Ritual), or in the architecture of some of my fictional histories and publications (as in Apartment 16 and Last Days), I would always cite Lovecraft as a significant influence. As a teenager I devoured everything Lovecraftian that I could get my flabby claws on. So when Aaron J. French asked if I would like to write a mythos story for his Gods of H. P. Lovecraft anthology, I thought it was time to attempt a more direct interpretation of Lovecraft’s brand of cosmic horror.

I was offered a list of his deities to form the basis of my story. My first choice was Dagon, but he’d already been taken. As I live by the sea I wanted a deity of the water and, bizarrely, no one had yet reached for the most legendary of Lovecraft’s creations: Cthulhu. I thought there might have been a fight for him. But I took a deep breath and agreed to have a go.

One thing led to another, and, from an idea of attaching my preoccupation with climate change to the return of a Great Old One on Earth, this story grew far beyond my initial ambition. In the spirit of Lovecraft’s tendency to underwrite his tales with an array of scientific and scholarly knowledge, to enrich fiction with alternative histories whilst adding an authenticity to what he wanted the reader to accept, I found myself attempting the same thing through the natural sciences. So this tale became a story of science fiction and horror, something I have always enjoyed as a reader but never really tried to write until Lost Girl – though that novel is not Lovecraftian but futuristic and pre-apocalyptic.

Despite some hints of telepathy, most of the material supporting this short story has a scientific basis. In fact, I believe I attempt to tie Lovecraft’s premise of great and unfathomable alien creatures lying semi-dormant in our solar system to the natural history of the Earth – but all of it, through every age. This is possibly the most ambitious story that I’ve written in its scope and the most uncharacteristic in style and intent, and so probably the one I am the most undecided about.

It’s highly detailed, and requires much patience on behalf of the reader; it is not a dramatic story but an alternative history created out of testimony, dreams, faux scientific histories. What occurs in the story may only be something concocted in an elderly woman’s mind, a mind stricken with dementia.

The story took an age to write, and adopted a purer, more traditional form of tribute to Lovecraft than I thought I’d have been able to write. I surprised myself. But I hope ‘Call the Name’ finds some readers who appreciate it.

‘White Light, White Heat’ is the third story in this collection that was written in tribute to an existing writer: this time, Mark Samuels, a British writer of the weird. Justin Isis invited me to write a story inspired by Mark’s work, and since I had appreciated his writing for some years, particularly his first-class collections The White Hands and Glyphotech, I thought I’d like to have a go. I remember reading The White Hands during one of my own bleak London phases and, much like Ligotti, I thought Mark Samuels had a good line and angle on the horror of cities, organisations, corporations, institutions and systems, and their weird and catastrophic effects upon our minds.

This story also gave me an opportunity to vent about my own unfortunate episodes in publishing. I worked as an editor, senior commissioning editor or editorial director continuously for eleven years, and received the ‘white envelope’ from my corporate overlords no fewer than three times, including twice in one year during the aftermath of the financial crash. My final receipt of the white letter will truly be my last, as they’ll never have an opportunity to give it to me again. I quit. After receiving that last letter, I remember thinking that I’d rather pick up dog mess in a park for a living than ever go through that again. But, publishing aside, I wager than anyone who reads this story and has ever worked for a large company will be able to relate to some of my observations.

D. S. Lewis, one of the most perceptive and venerable critics and reviewers of the weird tale, gave the story his annual Dreamcatcher Award in 2016. A very proud moment for me as a writer.

‘Little Black Lamb’ has connections with the tale ‘Eumenides’. The first connection is that it is a tribute story to another legend of the British weird and horror story, Ramsey Campbell. It takes its title from the name attributed to a young woman in ‘Eumenides’. As these stories were written in homage to a pair of great writers who have written much of the best fiction in our field, they needed to remain enigmatic in approach and execution; the aesthetic aim was to leave the mystery lingering after the final sentence. The reader needed a sense of something undisclosed that endures vaguely but uneasily in a kind of half-understanding in their imagination. I think Aickman and Ramsey Campbell do this so often that it is probably their trademark.

Writing this kind of story successfully – and I make no claims to have done so – might result in the height of what weird fiction can achieve. A transportation of the reader’s mind, at some deep imaginative level, into glimpsing something sublime, divine or damned; the wonder, the awe (and the terror therein) of Machen and Lovecraft, who are significant guides and articulators of this very principle. Essentially, I think this type of story must try to emulate the effect of poetry.

So I found writing this story a challenge. One doesn’t want to mimic or defame a living writer, a master of language and of the weird tale. Tribute stories are exciting to write, but they are daunting too. Fools rush in.

I accepted the invitation to write a tale for Joe Pulver’s Darker Companions, the tribute to Ramsey Campbell, without having an idea of what I might write. In fact, my reticence and fear of messing this story up delayed my start. Although I have read Ramsey Campbell’s fiction for most of the time that I have been writing, and know the author personally, I struggled to think of a story. This perplexed me. Imitating other writers is strewn with many pitfalls: it’s too easy to slip into the trite, or even an insulting impression of the author’s aesthetic values and creative goals, or their voice.

I never knew Robert Aickman. And although I know Mark Samuels, when I wrote ‘White Light, White Heat’ I hadn’t seen him in years. So many have attempted Lovecraftian fiction that any new attempts almost raise a groan. Writing all of those tribute stories felt safer. They didn’t daunt me so much, despite how easy it is to cheat in an Aickman-style story, and how easy it is to fall into the Aickman trap of creating strangeness that is detached from a fully realised story (and I often come across those stories).

My Eureka moment for the Campbell came during an exhibition curated by the Museum of London and Scotland Yard. During a three-day trip to London, packed with meetings with publishers and a film company, I still found time to visit the exhibition ‘The Crime Museum Uncovered’ at the Museum of London. In fact, I spent an entire morning there. And an affecting experience it was too, one that made me feel an acute remorse and sadness for the near-forgotten victims of so many ghastly crimes. History often celebrates the villains far more than the victims, who become secondary – an imbalance I attempted to explore and reverse in No One Gets Out Alive. The exhibits also made me loathe the seedy banality of the criminals who’d perpetrated so many hideous, sordid crimes, from dissolving their victims in bathtubs filled with acid to carrying little fold-out, homemade ladders inside their trenchcoats, in order to gain entry to the homes of their victims.

The case studies within the exhibition, including the aged artefacts that had been buried in a police vault, for a century in some cases, overdosed my imagination with that peculiarly British domestic horror. As Ramsey is a peculiarly British writer too, one whose vast body of work often focuses on the ordinarily evil and strange, and the sinister in the domestic, this exhibition gave me my first lead.

I looked at a multitude of photographs of murder sites, and at the crude improvised implements of some of London’s notorious criminals, and began to muse on what it would be like to have such things appear in your mind. Images occurring like memories without any attachment to your own experiences or life, images of waste ground and the kind of places where bodies are often found, flashing into a character’s mind. These scenes are murder sites, projected from somewhere else by something unknown. Subsequently, one character in this story receives alien memories of dismal places where the innocent were murdered, or at least buried outdoors; the second character receives banal but oddly unpleasant interiors, sites connected to ritual murder. These are the memories of killers that Douglas and Sandra receive.

But there still wasn’t enough enigma for me, so I returned to the gradually forming personal mythos of the Movement, who are alluded to in no fewer than three of the stories in this collection. Is this an organisation, one surreal yet homicidal? Or is it a force with an almost indefinable source? I’ll let you know. There are movements afoot on that front.

This story required some quintessential Campbell paranoia, and black humour too. I hope I did justice to those special qualities without being overbearing. But finally, it feels good to have paid my respects, and these are genuine respects, to a few writers whom I admire and who have inspired my own writing.

Publication History

‘On All London Underground Lines’ originally appeared in End of the Line, edited by Jonathan Oliver (Solaris, 2010).

‘The Angels of London’ originally appeared in Terror Tales of London, edited by Paul Finch (Gray Friar, 2013).

‘Always in Our Hearts’ originally appeared in End of the Road, edited by Jonathan Oliver (Solaris, 2013).

‘Eumenides (The Benevolent Ladies)’ originally appeared in New Fears, edited by Mark Morris (Titan Books, 2017).

‘The Days of Our Lives’ originally appeared in Dead Letters, edited by Conrad Williams (Titan Books, 2016).

‘Hippocampus’ originally appeared in Terror Tales of the Sea, edited by Paul Finch (Gray Friar, 2015).

‘Call the Name’ originally appeared in The Gods of H. P. Lovecraft, edited by Aaron J. French (JournalStone, 2015).

‘White Light, White Heat’ originally appeared in Marked to Die, edited by Justin Isis (Snuggly Books, 2016).

‘Little Black Lamb’ originally appeared in Darker Companions, edited by Joe Pulver (PS Publishing, 2017).

Acknowledgements

A very special acknowledgement goes out to the editors and publishers who have prised these stories out of me, and who also supplied themes that I found inspirational: Jonathan Oliver, Paul Finch, Gary Fry, Johnny Mains, Mark Morris, Conrad Williams, Aaron J. French, Justin Isis and Joe Pulver. Heartfelt thanks to maestro Ellen Datlow, who reprinted two of these stories, ‘Hippocampus’ and ‘The Days of Our Lives’, in her excellent The Best Horror of the Year series. Thanks also to my father, Clive Nevill, who first read ghost stories to me and opened that door.

In order to better publicly appreciate the many people who created the hardback, I want to warmly acknowledge again the patience, expertise and wisdom of Brian Showers of Swan River Press, Dublin, who has been my mentor on producing the hardback editions and pretty much shone a light onto every aspect of independent publishing, from the printers to postage concerns and every detail in between. Couldn’t have done it without him and his considerable experience in producing collectable books. And thanks to CPI (hardback), IngramSpark (paperback) and Bluewave (eBook) for helping me turn these horrors into editions that aren’t horrible to hold, look at or read. I want to thank Christopher Payne and JournalStone for producing a fourth, unanticipated, bonus edition of Some Will Not Sleep as an audio book. And without Amazon, I probably wouldn’t be publishing this book at all in eBook or reaching so many new readers. Thank you, Amazon.

The endless creativity of my brother, the artist, designer and cartoonist Simon Nevill, is also much appreciated in designing the cover, jacket and endpapers of the various editions. Highly prized again are the text design skills of Peter Marsh of The Dead Good Design Company Limited; thank you for all of your time, expertise and patience, Pete.

Many thanks to the managing editorial team of Tony Russell and Robin Seavill, whom I have relied upon for many years during my professional life in traditional publishing, and now do so as an independent publisher too.

A very special mention must go to my clever wife Anne, who continues to assist me with the development of Ritual Limited into more than just a name on the files at my accountants. Could not have cantered into my second year without her help.

A clatter of my hooves and a snort from my nostrils go out to the reviewers who took such an interest in the first collection and wrote so intelligently and enthusiastically about those stories.

Finally, let me thank every reader who has decided to own and read any of the editions of this second collection of selected horrors, stories that have bellowed or just seeped out of me over the last eight years.

More Horror Fiction from Adam L. G. Nevill

Available in print and eBook at major book retailers.

SOME WILL NOT SLEEP

SELECTED HORRORS

A bestial face appears at windows in the night.

In the big white house on the hill angels are said to appear.

A forgotten tenant in an isolated building becomes addicted to milk.

A strange goddess is worshipped by a home-invading disciple.

The least remembered gods still haunt the oldest forests.

Cannibalism occurs in high society at the end of the world.

The sainted undead follow their prophet to the Great Dead Sea.

A confused and vengeful presence occupies the home of a first-time buyer . . .

In ghastly harmony with the nightmarish visions of the award-winning writer’s novels, these stories blend a lifelong appreciation of horror culture with the grotesque fascinations and childlike terrors that are the author’s own. Adam L. G. Nevill’s best early horror stories are collected here for the first time.

Limited edition signed hardback and the Ritual Limited Black Metal Tee are available from www.adamlgnevill.com - ISBN: 978-0-9954630-0-4

Novels

BANQUET FOR THE DAMNED

Few believed Professor Coldwell could commune with spirits. But in Scot-land’s oldest university town something has passed from darkness into light. Now, the young are being haunted by night terrors and those who are visited disappear. This is certainly not a place for outsiders, especially at night. So what chance do a rootless musician and burned-out explorer have of surviv-ing their entanglement with an ageless supernatural evil and the ruthless cult that worships it? A chilling occult thriller from award-winning author Adam Nevill, Banquet for the Damned is both a homage to the great age of British ghost stories and a pacey modern thriller.

ISBN: 978-1447240921

APARTMENT 16

Some doors are better left closed . . .

In Barrington House, an upmarket block in London, there is an empty apartment. No one goes in, no one comes out. And it has been that way for 50 years. Until the night-watchman hears a disturbance after midnight and investigates. What he experiences is enough to change his life for ever.

A young American woman, Apryl, arrives at Barrington House. She’s been left an apartment by her mysterious Great Aunt Lillian, who died in strange circumstances. Rumours claim Lillian was mad. But her diary sug-gests she was implicated in a horrific and inexplicable event decades before.

Determined to learn something of this eccentric woman, Apryl begins to unravel the hidden story of Barrington House. She discovers that a transforming force still inhabits the building. And the doorway to Apartment 16 is a gateway to something altogether more terrifying . . .

ISBN: 978-1447263395

THE RITUAL

When four old university friends set off into the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle, they aim to briefly escape the problems of their lives and reconnect with one another. But when Luke, the only man still single and living a precarious existence, finds he has little left in common with his well-heeled friends, tensions rise. With limited experience between them, a shortcut meant to ease their hike turns into a nightmare scenario that could cost them their lives. Lost, hungry and surrounded by forest untouched for millennia, Luke figures things couldn’t possibly get any worse. But then they stumble across an old habitation. Ancient artefacts decorate the walls and there are bones scattered upon the floors. The residue of old rites and pagan sacrifice for something that still exists in the forest. Something responsible for the bestial presence that follows their every step. And as the four friends stagger in the direction of salvation, they learn that death doesn’t come easy among these ancient trees . . .

Winner of the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel and voted Best in Category: Horror by R.U.S.A.

ISBN: 978-1447263418

LAST DAYS

Last Days is a Blair Witch style novel in which a documentary film-maker undertakes the investigation of a dangerous cult―with creepy consequences.

When guerrilla documentary maker Kyle Freeman is asked to shoot a film on the notorious cult known as the Temple of the Last Days, it appears his prayers have been answered. The cult became a worldwide phenomenon in 1975 when there was a massacre including the death of its infamous leader, Sister Katherine. Kyle’s brief is to explore the paranormal myths surrounding an organisation that became a testament to paranoia, murderous rage and occult rituals. The shoot’s locations take him to the cult’s first temple in London, an abandoned farm in France and a derelict copper mine in the Arizonan desert where the Temple of the Last Days met its bloody end. But when he interviews those involved in the case, those who haven’t broken silence in decades, a series of uncanny events plague the shoots. Troubling out-of-body experiences, nocturnal visitations, the sudden demise of their interviewees and the discovery of ghastly artefacts in their room make Kyle question what exactly it is the cult managed to awaken – and what is its interest in him?

Winner of the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel and voted Best in Category: Horror by R.U.S.A.

ISBN: 978-1447263401

HOUSE OF SMALL SHADOWS

Catherine’s last job ended badly. Corporate bullying at a top TV network saw her fired and forced to leave London, but she was determined to get her life back. A new job and a few therapists later, things look much brighter. Especially when a challenging new project presents itself – to catalogue the late M. H. Mason’s wildly eccentric cache of antique dolls and puppets. Rarest of all, she’ll get to examine his elaborate displays of posed, costumed and preserved animals, depicting bloody scenes from the Great War. Catherine can’t believe her luck when Mason’s elderly niece invites her to stay at Red House itself, where she maintains the collection until his niece exposes her to the dark message behind her uncle’s ‘art’. Catherine tries to concentrate on the job, but Mason’s damaged visions begin to raise dark shadows from her own past. Shadows she’d hoped therapy had finally erased. Soon the barriers between reality, sanity and memory start to merge and some truths seem too terrible to be real . . .

ISBN: 978-0330544245

NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE

Darkness lives within . . .

Cash-strapped, working for agencies and living in shared accommodation, Stephanie Booth feels she can fall no further. So when she takes a new room at the right price, she believes her luck has finally turned. But 82 Edgware Road is not what it appears to be.

It’s not only the eerie atmosphere of the vast, neglected house, or the disturbing attitude of her new landlord, Knacker McGuire, that makes her un-easy – it’s the whispers behind the fireplace, the scratching beneath floors, the footsteps in the dark and the young women weeping in neighbouring rooms. And when Knacker’s cousin Fergal arrives, the danger goes vertical. It’s clear that something very bad has happened in this house. And something even worse is happening now. Stephanie has to find a way out, before whatever’s going on in the house finds her first.

Winner of the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel.

ISBN: 978-1447240907

LOST GIRL

It’s 2053 and climate change has left billions homeless and starving – easy prey for the pandemics that sweep across the globe, scything through the refugee populations. Easy prey, too, for the violent gangs and people-smugglers who thrive in the crumbling world where ‘King Death’ reigns supreme.

The father’s world went to hell two years ago. His four-year-old daughter was snatched from his garden when he should have been watching. The moments before her disappearance play in a perpetual loop in his mind. But the police aren’t interested; amidst floods, hurricanes and global chaos, who cares about one more missing child? Now it’s all down to him to find her . . .

ISBN: 978-1447240914

UNDER A WATCHFUL EYE

Seb Logan is being watched. He just doesn’t know by whom.

When the sudden appearance of a dark figure shatters his idyllic coastal life, he soon realizes that the murky past he thought he’d left behind has far from forgotten him. What’s more unsettling is the strange atmosphere that engulfs him at every sighting, plunging his mind into a terrifying paranoia.

To be a victim without knowing the tormentor. To be despised without knowing the offence caused. To be seen by what nobody else can see. These are the thoughts which plague his every waking moment.

Imprisoned by despair, Seb fears his stalker is not working alone, but rather is involved in a wider conspiracy that threatens everything he has worked for. For there are doors in this world that open into unknown places with their own rules. Places used by the worse kind of people to achieve their own ends. And once his investigation leads him to stray across the line and into mortal danger he risks becoming another fatality in a long line of victims . . .

Author Biography

Adam L.G. Nevill was born in Birmingham, England, in 1969 and grew up in England and New Zealand. He is the author of the horror novels Banquet for the Damned, Apartment 16, The Ritual, Last Days, House of Small Shadows, No One Gets Out Alive, Lost Girl, and Under a Watchful Eye. He has two collections of short stories: Some Will Not Sleep and Hasty for the Dark.

His novels, The Ritual, Last Days and No One Gets Out Alive were the winners of The August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel. The Ritual and Last Days were also awarded Best in Category: Horror, by R.U.S.A. Several of his novels are currently in development for film and television, and in 2016 Imaginarium adapted The Ritual into a feature film.

Adam lives in Devon, England. More information about the author and his books is available at: www.adamlgnevill.com

Free Download

If you like horror stories, missing chapters from an award-winning author’s novels, advice for writing horror, articles on horror fiction and films, and much more, click the link and register on the next page to seize your next Free Book today.

Click here to summon Cries from the Crypt
adamlgnevill.com

Start reading Adam Nevill’s Horror Companion right away