He hated the influx of American influences. It was in the clothes kids wore nowadays; it had changed the pubs and restaurants he frequented; it was television’s primary language. He clenched his jaw when he looked down at the baseball bat. It even coloured his violence.
Whitby lived, after a fashion, on the sixth floor. There was a wife, a daughter, a son. A dog. A mistress for him on the fifth floor who scurried round to polish his knob whenever the wife was stretching pennies at the market. Cosy.
He strode into a poorly lit corridor, boots gritting on glass phials, dry vomit, stripped chicken bones. He caught an old man wanking himself off through his neighbour’s letterbox. A woman with a grubby, greenish bandage around her shin offered to fuck him in return for a quid. A child with diarrhoea had been locked out of his parents’ flat and was sitting in puddles of his own waste, crying silently, exhausted.
“All life is here, hey?” he said to the child as he walked past. “Such colour. Such spirit.”
He reached Whitby’s door and smoothed down his long hair and righted his shirt collars. He reached out a hand for the bell but never got as far as depressing it; he just wanted something to lean against, give him leverage while he kicked the flimsy thing in.
Whitby was in the hall between kitchen and living room, dressed only in a pair of beige Y-fronts. A jam sandwich in one hand, mug of tea in the other. “What the fuck? Who the fucking fuck? Fuck.”
It was all he managed before his sternum caved in under a massive blow from the baseball bat. Blood blackened his chest and piled into his face on his way down, as the internal trauma sought egress. A woman came clattering along the hall from the bathroom, holding a towel to her freshly showered body. Mistress or missus? She was squawking enough for both of them. “Leave him alone, leave him alone,” she crowed, an unpleasant, nasal voice. He lashed out and took her jaw off. She staggered away, clumsily trying to keep her face in place, her hands filling with red, towel dropping to reveal hubbie’s slap marks.
The dog was predictably big and nasty; a German Shepherd. He held out his arm, always padded on jobs like these, and waited until it had hold before slitting its throat with the knife.
“He isn’t here! You should just go away! I’ll give you money!” The daughter now, Honey (what a name for these parts, Jesus!), yelping at him, her big eyes flicking to her choking mother and her senseless father as she held out a blunt letter opener to defend herself. He decked her with a clip from the bat to the top of her head. “Keep your money,” he said.
He found the old man in a sleeping bag in a bedroom filled with cigarette ends and beer cans, soiled underwear, and towers of foil cartons.
“Excellent,” he said, noticing that the man hadn’t tried to make a noise. He regarded Sean calmly with the black, shark’s eyes they all possessed; even held out his arms when he was reached for. He had been waiting for this. Perhaps he had been wishing for it.
The old man didn’t cry when he saw his damaged family. As they left the flat he seemed to sigh with contentment.
“Too right,” growled Sean. “Anything you come to now is a blessing. Consider this a rescue.”
At the car he paused a while to search the horizon. No lights anywhere. Once this place had been a riot of colour and bright windows containing families watching television or eating supper, laughing or fighting, but always together. Now the population had thinned out. Those who had survived had run or tried to protect their dead. Those who were dead were directionless, without anchor. They wheeled around like seagulls playing on thermals, or like a confused compass. When Sean came to call, they pretended they were normal human beings leading normal lives. Normal people, with pieces of them dropping off while he chatted amiably with them in a doorway, the rope coiled around his shoulder burning with intent.
After the man was hanged and the shaved fibres from the rope deposited between his ash-grey lips, Sean dumped the body over a fence separating the rear gardens of a terraced house from a stream which dribbled along at the bottom of a deep gulley. Back in the car, he had barely started the engine before the next one came through to him.
It lives alone, Will said. It’s lost. It’s lonely. It’ll go without a struggle. It needs this. And it’s this way, Sean. Come on...
He powered the car too quickly for an hour and a half until he had reached the outskirts of a conurbation hanging on the edge of Birmingham like a wart on a scarred face.
Make a left here, Sean. Keep going. Just keep going...
There had been months of this. Closed doors, lonely motorways, miles and miles of self-doubt and nausea. He didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. He asked Will once, do the dead breed? and Will had laughed hard and for a long time without answering him.
...keep going...
He knocked at the door this time. He knew he didn’t need to break it down. He waited for an age, but that was okay. He didn’t mind waiting. It gave him something else to do. Something different. He clenched the rope in his fist as he heard footsteps approach the door.
She opened it wide. Late at night, all alone, but what did she have to be frightened of? He gazed at her for a long time.
“I wondered if it might ever happen,” she said.
“I have something I need to do,” he told her.
“I know. I know.”
She didn’t fight him, or plead with him. She even helped him to get the rope over a branch of the ash tree in the garden. He kissed her beforehand because she asked him to, and he would have backed out of it if she hadn’t coaxed him to carry the job through.
A proposal.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CONRAD A. WILLIAMS was born in Cheshire in 1969. He sold his first short story at the age of eighteen and has gone on to publish around eighty more to a variety of magazines and anthologies. He is the author of three novels, four novellas and a collection of his best short fiction. His book The Unblemished won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel. He is also a past recipient of the British Fantasy Award and the Littlewood Arc Prize.
Pilot Paul Roan is in command of a Boeing 777 involved in a near miss. Nerves shot, he opts for a new life running a B&B in a coastal village with his girlfriend, Tamara. Not long after they arrive, Paul is involved in a serious accident.
Emerging six months later from a coma, Paul discovers that Tamara is gone and a child killer is haunting the beaches. The villagers, appalled by Paul’s cheating of death, treat him as a sin-eater. They bring him items to dispose of, secrets far too awful to deal with themselves. At least he has local nurse, Ruth, to look after him. And Amy, a damaged soul with a special gift. She befriends Paul and together they unearth clues that might explain the shocking history of the village, and suggest the murders are anything but.
Meanwhile, Paul begins to suspect there is more to Tamara’s disappeareance than meets the eye...
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It knows where you live...
Imagine a place where all your nightmares become real. Dark urban streets where crime, debt and violence are not the only things to fear. Picture a housing project that is a gateway to somewhere else; a realm where ghosts and monsters stir hungrily in the shadows. Welcome to the Concrete Grove.
This deprived area is Hailey’s new home, but when an ancient entity notices her, it becomes something much more threatening. She is the only one who can help her mother as she joins in a dangerous dance with loanshark Monty Bright. Only Hailey can see the truth of Tom’s darkest desires as he tries to become part of their family. And only Hailey can lead them all to the heart of the estate where something older than this land stirs and begins to wake...
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Table of Contents
Title
Indicia and Dedication
Also by Conrad Williams
1992
Part One: Unreal City
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Part Two: Softstrip
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Part Three: Ultima Thule
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Part Four: The Sheriff's Picture Frame
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
About the Author
'Loss of Separation' by Conrad Williams
'The Concrete Grove' by Gary McMahon