NEWS FROM THE HOLLYWOOD HILLS

Studio bigwigs have finally done the right thing and, instead of reinventing the silk purse as a sow's ear, essayed a remake of a film which wasn't that hot the first time out. Prom Night stars nobody we've ever heard of and is slated for a 6th June UK release. Of course, there's no guarantee that it won't be worse than the original. Meanwhile, doing the rounds at Hollywood parties is the story of an unnamed Asian horror film, which studio chiefs are desperate to remake in the hope of snatching a quick buck at the box office, but everybody who takes out an option on the script ends up dying in mysterious circumstances. Actually, we made that last bit up, but still...

THE PUBLISHING OF THE THREE

Those chaps at Humdrumming have a book or three lined up that might be of interest to readers of Black Static. First out of the starting gate is Less Lonely Planet, a collection of linked stories by Welsh wizard Rhys Hughes, and that should be available to purchase right now. Hot on its heels is Rain Dogs, a novel by Gary McMahon which is reviewed in this very magazine, and depending on the date that one could also be available to purchase right now. It's got an introduction by Conrad Williams. Thirdly, there's a collection of tales by Simon Strantzas due out in September, and the title of that is Beneath the Surface. For more information go to www.humdrumming.co.uk

Copyright © 2008 Andy Cox

ROYLE AND RICHARDS

Gray Friar Press have two new books in the pipeline from authors who have a history with Black Static. First up is the 50,000 word novella ‘The Appetite’ by Nicholas Royle, available in paperback and signed limited edition hardback. Michael Marshall Smith will be writing the introduction. Shortly after that treat there'll be the paperback Passport to Purgatory, a new collection of fifteen short stories from Tony Richards, with introduction by John Pelan. For more info go tograyfriarpress.com.

AUGUST AT A MULTIPLEX NEAR YOU

The eighth month sees the release of two blockbuster sequels that may be of interest to Black Static readers. First up, slated for release on the 8th is The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, the third episode in this money spinning franchise. Brendan Fraser and John Hannah reprise their roles from the previous films, but Maria Bello takes the place of Rachel Weisz, and Rob Cohen is in the director's chair. Two weeks later sees the return of Ron Perlman as everyone's favourite monster fighter in the Guillermo del Toro helmed Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. With both franchises owned by the Universal stable, we wonder how long it'll be until we see a Hellboy/Mummy crossover.

MYTHS AND MONSTERS

A 23 foot long dragon and a 10 foot high yeti will be amongst the strange mythical beasts that will descend on Birmingham this summer as the City Council's Museum and Art Gallery stages the ‘Myths and Monsters’ exhibition from 24th May-31st August at the Gas Hall. ‘Myths and Monsters’ is a hugely popular touring exhibition from the Natural History Museum. The show brings together an entertaining, educational and dramatic mixture of animatronic creatures, with fascinating specimens and replicas from the Natural History Museum. Tickets are on sale from 1st May. Further information at bmag.org.co

NEW GAIMAN

Slated for an early November release from Bloomsbury is The Graveyard Book, with text by Neil Gaiman and illustrations by Dave McKean. It's the story of Bod, who as a baby escapes from a murderer by hiding out in a graveyard, where he is brought up by all the resident ghouls and ghosts. Check out the dedicated website at thegraveyard book.com

TIM LEBBON—BREAKING NEWS

Tim Lebbon continues his march to world domination. His novella ‘The Reach of Children’ will be released by Humdrumming in September, to coincide with the British Fantasycon. There's a ‘special edition’ for [British Pounds]25 and a ‘very special edition’ with bells and whistles for [British Pounds]120. But if you can't keep your hand on your wallet until September, August should see the release of a hardback edition of Fallen, the latest in Tim's Noreela fantasy sequence, from Allison & Busby. Far as we know, it's his first release from a mainstream UK publisher.

THE HAPPENING

After the appalling train wreck of a film that was Lady in the Water, it seems that somebody is still willing to trust M. Night Shyamalan behind the lens of a camera. The Happening, described on IMDb as ‘a paranoid thriller about a family on the run from a natural crisis that presents a large-scale threat to humanity’ and starring Mark Wahlberg, hits the multiplexes in the UK on the 13th of June. From the trailer, we thought it was something to do with bees.

SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK

Anybody remember James Miller? He had stories in early issues of The Third Alternative, our predecessor publication, and then went right off the radar. Well he's back and with a novel, no less. It's called Lost Boys and is out in paperback from Little, Brown in July. We're reliably informed that it's nothing to do with a certain vampire film and we expect to be reviewing the book next issue.

SPACE, TIME, MACHINE AND MONSTER...

...is the name for ‘A Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Day Conference’ being held as part of the new South Wales Valleys Literature Development Initiative, and in partnership with the Science Department at the University of Glamorgan. Attendees are promised a stimulating day of talks, workshops and discussions for adults and young people, with a wealth of talented authors, scriptwriters and creative artists from Wales on hand, including Jasper Fforde, Philip Gross, Tim Lebbon, Steve Lockley, Catherine Fisher, Terry Cooper, Black Static's own Steve Volk and others. The date to mark on your calendar is Saturday the 21st of June, and the place to be is the University of Glamorgan, Treforest, from 10.00am through till 5.00pm. Tickets [British Pounds]5/ [British Pounds]3 concessions, available on the door only. More information can be found at www.academi.org/home/i/132281

Compiled by Peter Tennant

Send your news to whitenoise@ttapress.demon.co.uk

Copyright © 2008 Peter Tennant

Norm is livid with his dad for spying on the boy in Harding Court.

"Go easy on your old man,” I say. “It could be worse. He could be looking at all the women in the building, in their underwear."

"Or all the boys."

"It has nothing to do with sex."

"Doesn't it?” Norm doesn't look at me when he speaks. He doesn't look at his dad much, either. Norm does his own Norm thing.

His dad, Malcolm Morgan, is a retired lawyer who wants for nothing, in the material world. He has the financial part of his retirement plan sewn up. The temporal part is where he has fallen. Hours stretching into an eternity. How deep, I wonder, is his loneliness? The only time I see him animated is at dusk, as lights pop on across the court. His face turns gleeful but private, like the face of Anthony Hopkins in his maniacal roles.

Malcolm has a slick pair of Bushnells with red lenses, in an eel skin case. He passes them to me whenever Norm and I visit. We bring T bones, which we eat ourselves, and we bring boxes to cart away old accounting books, ugly lamp bases, boxes of old tax files, and whatever else retired lawyers no longer need. You hear about old people railing against grown kids who waltz over and clear out their precious stuff, but you won't hear any complaint from Malcolm. Lamps? Books? Files? Malcolm is done, done, done with all that.

What's left is spare, functional, loveless.

"Here, Geoffrey, look.” He hands me the binoculars. “Here it is. The secret underlying all things. The hidden centre no one has noticed, obsessed as we all are with our vehicle registration, and our electronic doorbells.” I look through the binoculars politely. My practice is to act civilized with people, as long as it is not too much trouble. Malcolm is watching a boy break up small, cooked chickens.

"Cornish hens?” I guess. Malcolm laughs. The boy sits on a ratty couch. Harding Court is less expensive, by far, than Malcolm's high rise. The boy separates legs, wings, breasts, into a pot.

Malcolm used to walk his Pomeranian, Jackie, around his apartment block, with a bag and scoop. He poured his ownership into that dog. Not love. I know a woman who loves her dogs. She has five, and she feels what they feel. I wouldn't go that far myself, with an animal, not even a quality dog like an English Setter, or one of those tall dogs with thick hair cascading down their legs. I'm just pointing out the difference between loving your dog, and being its master. Malcolm was Jackie's master.

I get the impression, from Norm, that Malcolm was master of several domains no longer available to him. His wife Jean, for instance, who wanted to retire in their saltbox house in Rockport, Maine, with its perennial garden and her prize Venus of Grenoble lilies and handmade eighteenth century twig fence. But Malcolm wanted this condo, so the condo it was, and she came with him, but she slept in later every morning, until one spring day she did not bother to wake ever again.

Now, everything in Malcolm's condo has this generic blandness, except his hat, with its glossy feather that changes colour in a fantastic way depending on the light. Anything belonging to Jean; her clothes, her Indian cushions, her extra colanders and her Royal Albert Gentian dishes, he gave to the Diabetes Foundation. Norm's sister has asked him to send her the Sterling silverware, and Norm wants his books. Malcolm's books are leather bound sets. Books that match each other give me the creeps. Everything in his fridge is encased in plastic. Six-packs of apple juice, Heineken, takeout honey tubs. No food, though his kitchen garbage overflows with takeout bones.

I personally think Norm is not tuned in to the real concerns of his father. He urges his dad to keep walking even though Jackie the Pomeranian died of leukemia, and I find that insensitive. When Norm suggests his dad walk, Malcolm's face turns puzzled. An old man looking for his dog, then remembering. The dog is gone. I hate to see anyone look like that. Norm is not thinking about his dad's happiness. He's thinking about his own duty, about dispatching it and being able to leave. Leave his stupid dad and get on with his life. Coming here is a task for Norm. I see things Norm doesn't see. Like Jackie's yellow leash, still hanging on the doorknob. And I think that's why Malcolm talks to me more than he does to his own son. It's not that I care deeply. It's just that I listen, and I observe. While Norm throws out old pills, Malcolm informs me he does walk—twenty minutes down the west stairs, around Harding Court, then up the north stairs. I wonder if he takes his binoculars.

"Humour your father,” I whisper to Norm. “Look through his lenses at the boy. He's only making soup."

"Get serious,” Norm says. “My dad will get evicted if I don't watch out."

Part of me understands Malcolm's fascination. You frame a scene, and who knows what's next? I always liked Cinema Verité, and Malcolm is an intelligent man. He needs something his imagination can work on. Yes, I find his spying pathetic. He could go out on the street and people-watch without being so creepy.

"I guess you're not interested,” I tell Malcolm, “in the Golden Age Club that meets in Grange Park? Wind in the trees. I like the atmosphere in that park. I'm not trying to be condescending."

Malcolm laughs sadistically. I hate to think of him, all winter, drinking the juice that comes in those sealed containers. But can you change people's minds? I don't think so.

Norm moves around the condo, putting things in Norm order: tissue boxes, E-Z-Freez Beef Dinners, water glass on the night table—sticking to a routine that would keep Malcolm half alive, if it were all Malcolm had.

In November Norm goes to the Canary Islands. He gets a second cousin to check on his dad. “A relative will do it,” he tells me when I offer to look in, so I go about my own business. Which is a business I should get out of, but right now I can't see what else to do. I poke wires with miniature gourds and Indian corn on them into Wetpak foam, and make arrangements for birthdays and conventions and graveyards. Corporations pay hundreds for what you could make yourself, out of plants that infest ditches. My sister Karen is disgusted. She thinks I'm living far below my capacity, which I am. Karen is head of public relations for a major airline.

I finish my work by noon, then spend the afternoon meandering around park benches, flipping through postcards at the newsstand, checking out ad art in magazines I don't buy. I can do better layout and design than what's in those magazines, but is that my goal in life? Ron, this guy I went to design school with, told me he worked on one contract where he had to come up with images that would appeal to young girls who might buy light beer. Which is bad enough. But when he finished the job, he found out it wasn't really a light beer campaign at all. It was light cigarettes. He said he couldn't live with himself. But we all go right on ahead, living with ourselves. The friends I made at that college are spread all over, writing right wing speeches and keeping pharmaceutical companies out of trouble, but Norm stayed here.

Norm teaches human resources efficiency to managers. The reason we're friends is that we lived next door until we were eight. We played spotlight, and kick the can, and marbles, and softball down on the triangle of turf his uncle was going to build a new house on but never did. We ended up going away to school, then happened to end up here. Location is all we have in common, except that our hair is thinning in similar spots. Norm is ambitious, which I am not. But every couple of years he weeps in his beer, telling me he's afraid of losing his soul. He thinks I possess a soul, if nothing else. Maybe because I have no mortgage, no significant other, no kids. I live in my five hundred dollar a month bedsit on Carter Square near the market, and Norm thinks there's something enviable about that. He comes over with French wine, and I let him think I'm the one with a soul. On his Canary Island holiday I imagine he feels closer to freedom, away from the office. Closer to what he imagines my gypsy life to be, except his version takes place in a five star resort.

Two weeks into his absence, while I'm meandering, I see a moody looking boy walk past the Levin Street subway station with a sack of newspapers. I think I've seen him somewhere before, then I realize it's the kid Malcolm had me look at through the binoculars. I like people-watching, and I've already watched this particular person in a whole other setting, and I feel like following him. I know this is borderline. I haven't done it before, and I hope it's not the start of something. But I follow him to the old central bus station.

The old central is a portal for people coming to the city for blood tests and x-rays at St Michael's General. They have to wait hours, and the old central has chairs, and no one kicks them out for loitering. They bring bags of bread and jam and potted meat, and Thermoses of tea.

The boy walks through the arches with broken panes, and goes to the newspaper machine. He opens it and puts today's Telegrams in, and now his sack is empty. The place has a terrazzo floor, too expensive to install anywhere these days, but worn and cracked. What is the boy up to now? He bends over an old woman's picnic and mutters something. She gives him crusts. Another gives him pieces of tart shell. Everyone gives him their leftovers until his sack bulges, like the Bible story where Jesus collects the fragments left over from the loaves and fishes, and they build up and build up. The boy is not your ordinary thirteen-year-old. He's slow and luminous. An emaciated man makes two poodles in Mexican hats stand on their hind legs for an eternal minute, with pieces of cake on their noses, for money, and the boy passes by this without looking.

A kiosk has Time, Newsweek, The National Enquirer, and some bodybuilding magazines, crossword books and lotto tickets, chocolate and gum, and I buy myself a Cadbury fruit and nut bar. A winning combination, more than the sum of its parts. The cashier has frizzy dark hair. I find her pretty. The boy works the other side of the room now. People know him. Everyone is kind.

"You see him?” I ask the cashier.

"Who?"

"The boy."

"Tony."

"You know him?"

"He's my son.” Reserved. That is how I'd describe her. There's an actress who looks like her, but I can't remember her name. Rivka or something? Maybe I'm getting her mixed up with Rivka Golani, the viola player. She has that look too. The actress always plays a young single mother who turns out to be stronger than she looks. In one scene, she lifts eight grocery bags out of her trunk and carries them up four flights of stairs.

"Why are people giving him scraps?"

"Ssshh."

"Okay.” I'm whispering.

"He brings it home. Don't look.” A guard has left his office and squats to tighten radiator caps, and Tony walks, a normal newscarrier, away from the guard and away from the dirty windows and benches, out to the street.

"What's your name?” She looks Russian. She looks like she'd be right at home weeding turnips in a cold field that goes on forever. I don't feel attracted to many women. The women most guys like do nothing for me. I have to have mystery. I imagine sitting over cinnamon toast with this woman, talking about—I don't know—Orion. Doesn't anyone talk about that? The constellations are up there continually, and what do we talk about? Mary Steenburgen. That's who she looks like. I haven't seen her in a film in a long time. Maybe she's old now. Maybe they don't want her anymore. Hollywood.

I follow Tony Pye. A black and tan cat follows him too, and he throws it a sandwich end. He stops at a puddle near the sausage vendor whose canopy reads virginia woolf ate here, and splashes puddle water on dusty coltsfoot. The coltsfoot winks and sparkles. Tony sits on the courthouse steps, scrunches a stale roll, and feeds pigeons. One, pale brown and white, has roosted at the courthouse since I can remember. Maybe they all have, and the brown one is the only one I recognize. Tony heads home to Harding Court. As he turns by the corner lamp post, I decide to go see how Malcolm is doing. I can smell new carpet chemicals in the halls and a wave of loneliness attacks me. Malcolm, day on day, sitting in his sterile condo, dreading the second cousin.

"Have you heard from Norm?"

Malcolm waves his Scotch and gives a demented cackle. Norm asks how anyone can like Malcolm. I don't know why I like him. I also like Anthony Hopkins, especially now that he has announced he wasted his life acting. It's like Mohammed Ali saying he has wasted his life boxing, or Maurice Richard announcing the frivolity of hockey. But I do like Malcolm. Even though he has something truly nasty to say about everyone. Mrs Stanopoulis, for instance, is the caretaker for his block. She brings him hot, sugar-dusted doughnuts, and behind her back he calls her That Scabrous Rhode Island Red. So I'm sitting, drinking Scotch, which he tells me is a hundred years old, and this orphan thought pops into my head unbidden. If I had Tony Pye's phone number, I could call him. I could keep him on the phone with some grocery survey, and check out the background sound. I could hear his apartment, while looking at it through Malcolm's spyglass. I would never do a thing like this. I'm just saying, the thought comes to me.

"No,” Malcolm says. “I haven't. Ha."

"Have you been walking?"

"Do you mean, am I enjoying the stultifying oppression I inflict, merely by being an old man in a perfectly maintained, even embalmed, condominium?"

"I did not mean that. I could have meant it, I suppose, but I didn't."

"That's what I like about you, Mr Deveraux. You are not morbidly polite like most friends of my son. Where does my son get his friends?"

"I don't know."

"And where, for that matter, did I get my son? No, I have not been walking. I have been expanding on a few things."

"Would you like me to pick us up some pizza?"

"I would not. Thank you, Geoffrey, for your visit. Now you must excuse me while I begin an extensive and long overdue editing process on the family cutlery. People are on edge, waiting to see if I will remember to ship it. Geoffrey?"

"Yes, Mr Morgan?"

"Call me Malcolm, Geoffrey. I know you do anyway. You call me Malcolm when you talk to my son. Will you reach into the cupboard above the television, and bring me the small object you will find lying there?"

I give it to him. A brushed silver revolver. I'm not too happy about it.

"It's civilized of you to call,” he says, “but you don't need to worry about my being lonesome. When it gets too bad, I can place this between my eyes, like so,” he aims the gun at himself, “and bury the bullet in my brain. Don't be alarmed.” He puts the gun beside a wooden bowl Norm has filled with Bridge Mixture. “I'm not going to do it right now.” He fixes me with a look of satisfaction. “Have your lunch. Preferably with an attractive young woman with whom you can stroll the tree lined avenue to your own home. Go, and have the kind of evening a young man should have, in the dark, in November."

I check the rusty nameplates at the Harding Court entrance. There is an Elizabeth Pye. Where have I seen that name? Why can I envision it written in fourteen point palatino font? In dark green. As I turn onto Stafford I notice Malcolm walk out the door of his building in his black overcoat and the hat with the glossy feather. He bends into the wind. These apartment blocks create a cruel wind tunnel. I see him go into Harding Court. Not a place I'd think he would want to visit. Harding Court is a scummy little building, a step up from public housing. I hate to think of Tony Pye's pretty mom living there, to tell you the truth. And, right now, I hate to think of Malcolm spying on her, and walking in. Nothing can save a person in a building like that, if misfortune comes to knock.

There's disgraceful graffiti behind one of the fire escapes. She shouldn't have to read that. I'm hungry, and I hate that about myself. I should be thinking about how to make life easier for Elizabeth Pye, but now I'm thinking about that pizza, the one Malcolm didn't want me to order, and my thoughts move on from Venice Pizza, which has your basic all-dressed but no hot peppers or stuffed olives, to Napoli Pizza, a hole-in-the-wall near my place, where they have cannelloni stuffed with herbed ricotta, spinach and Italian sausage, and smothered with mozzarella they fly in from Napoli fresh and wet every Thursday. All for $11.98, and that's where I guess I'll go tonight. See what I mean about ambition? Focus? I have none. I'll bring a few bites home for breakfast, suck on a couple of cold Beck ales in bed watching On the Waterfront, read some Pablo Neruda, wonder what Elizabeth Pye looks like in her pyjamas, conk out for the night, another day older and closer to my grave. I bet her pyjamas are one hundred per cent cotton, with tiny wild flowers sprinkled all over them.

When I go back to the bus station, Elizabeth Pye is not working. An old black woman sorts the lotto tickets and packs of DuMaurier. I buy a Bic lighter from her, meaning to ask when Elizabeth Pye has her next shift, but this one is all business, and my ambition fails. That is a big thing I have wrong with me. I don't have get-up and go. I'm liable to let a golden opportunity for happiness slip past, out of lethargy. I can't rustle up the initiative. That's what my sister says anyway. Elizabeth Pye is not here, and I wonder if Malcolm has harmed her. But her son is here, so I sink back into my lethargy. They have sunlight simulation lamps at the pharmacy across my street, and I wonder if acquiring one might make me any livelier, but this is a passing thought. Security is not on the ball where young Tony Pye is concerned. They miss the fact that he scavenges pounds of food from poor old women waiting for their connections to Desperate Pond and Lesser Paradise. Tony is an excellent scavenger. I get into scavenger mode myself, watching him. He misses a corner of biscuit, and I think, Get it, Tony ... An acorn button drops off a coat. I imagine it in one of my arrangements, tucked with bulrushes and maidenhair fern, and that's when I recall seeing Elizabeth Pye's name. I see it, in its green palatino font, every month, in one of our order books at the shop, under an ad for dried Chinese lanterns.

I know a little about Andalusian mourning doves; their tailfeathers are a fad these days, woven into pseudo talismans. People hang them in doors of upscale subdivision eyesores, the way farmers used to hang brown paper bags to fend off wasps. Our business markets the feathers as some sort of welcome token. But they have an old use practiced in Spain, and in the Spanish colonies: they make them into corsages for the dead—I don't know why the dead would want to wear them. There's only so much esoteric knowledge I have time to read up on before I have to mix a batch of life-extender for Holiday Inn's reception desk's Birds of Paradise. The thing that excites me here is not the myths of Andalusia. The thing that excites me is that the pretty woman, Tony Pye's mother, is in the same field I am. I don't have to spy through her apartment window with Malcolm's binoculars, hoping for a glimpse. I can ring her bell, tell her I read her ad in our store catalogue, go up the stairs to her apartment, and talk to her as one designer to another.

She sits at a table tying feathers into shapes that look eerie and impossible. When you see them close up, instead of reading about them in trade journals, they have a twist, a magic to them, that is unnerving. I can imagine the dead wearing the one she twists now. It looks like a piece of death itself, a bit of wrought iron knocked off a graveyard railing, a raven watching you. There are bamboo cages of mourning doves, a stack of sequined linen, and lengths of gold horse tails tied with rope. The doves coo and purr. I have always thought birds and cats must surely have been the same animal at some point in the earth's history. I have not told anyone this. I have no one to tell.

Tony is out, but I see the couch where he sat with his pot in the far end of the room. I see the window.

"I know you were watching.” Something about this woman makes it all right to have watched, as long as I don't lie about it. A mortar and pestle stand on her table. Beside them is a steel bowl full of fragments I recognize.

"The food from the station is for your doves."

"The birds are navigators,” she says, “between the worlds of the living and the dead.” She plaits a sequined thread into a corsage. “They eat crumbs travellers drop. Are you a traveller?” The sequined thread is a tiny light in the rest of the corsage, which has no colour.

"I don't know."

Mourning is the right word for the doves. Their cooing is low and sad. I feel at home in it. I sit. The feathers catch light, lose it, then regain it. I've seen this happen elsewhere, but I can't recall the place.

"Everybody understands beauty.” She ties the feathers with apricot coloured thread. “The tailfeathers are all show. What people don't understand, is the smallfeathers.” She lifts the mortar, full of silver powder. I smell something acrid as coriander. “You have to kill the bird.” She throws a green cloth over the cages and talks so softly I have to lipread. “You plunge the live bird in boiling water. Scrape its feathers from the flesh with this,” she takes a flat bone out of her dress. “Then dry the feathers and grind them."

Her fingers are what mine should be when I work. Nimble, flashing, lively with purpose. Some people say that when you fall in love, you are falling in love with the undeveloped half of yourself—the half you wish was manifest, but is not. The part of yourself you have failed to find. They say that when you find it in the loved one it isn't really there. It is an illusion. The person is holding a mirror. The day they put the mirror down—and they will get tired one day, of holding it up—is the day love vanishes. The whole universe is bent on turning hearts to ash with this trick. Elizabeth Pye puts the tailfeathers down and picks up a pinch of dust from the mortar. She rubs it until it makes a paste with her skin's oil. She smears a thumbprint of it on my eyelids, and I see what she is making.

When I'm in my ordinary life—eating noodles in my bedsit, looking through my window at the street, at rain on glass, or a rung of my fire escape and the oak limb sticking out from the lot next door, beauty visits me. It points to a world that visits us all, but of course does not stay. I feel lonely then, but it's a good loneliness. The bad loneliness comes when there is no beauty, and I am alone in the cold, in darkness, when the day is ugly, as some days are. Am I a traveller? I suppose I am, of sorts. Aren't we all?

But this is not my ordinary life. This powder lets a person see the real source of fleeting beauty. I knew there was something irresistible about Elizabeth Pye the first time I saw her. I knew she had the key to my happiness. I have been living half awake. The powder lets me see. It lets anyone see all joy; light glowing through grass. Music. Longing. Hunger. It gives a traveller vision. Without this vision, there is no dream, no imagination, no visitation of any kind from beyond dead matter and dead flesh. I have been living this death and have not known how to escape.

Her door clicks. Malcolm strides in, sees the powder on my eyes, wraps his arm around the throat of Elizabeth Pye, flings her against the wall, grabs the mortar of silver powder, sticks his thumb in it and sucks the powder off that thumb, greedily. He hauls the chair from under me and sits on it himself. He perches the mortar and pestle on his stomach and grinds, licking his teeth, looking at me. Time and accusation hang in the room.

"Where is Tony?” he asks Elizabeth.

"They will have turned the fountain on at the courthouse square.” She stands, with dignity, against the wall. “He loves looking at the lights in the water.” Her son is everything. When she speaks his name, she invokes his innocence, all that is good in the world, and Malcolm and I are not part of it. I'm a complete coward. I should defend this woman from Malcolm. But do I? Am I a parasite? Have I ever loved a woman? Would I know love if love smacked me in the face?

Elizabeth looks at Malcolm and I see she has known him a long, long time. She hands him a bulging plastic bag, which he grabs. She opens her door, and with incredible strength, pushes us out. Her arms are pistons.

Malcolm and I stand in the desolate lot between buildings. Torn wrappers flap in leafless shrubs. A flagpole clanks. The wind is relentless. When Malcolm invites me in for a drink, he is no longer sadistic. He does not lick his teeth, and there is nothing frightening about him. He is a distasteful, lonely old man, who needs his hair washed.

"No.” I am nauseated and want to get home. He looks at me with hatred, both hands holding the bag Elizabeth gave him. He throws the bag at me, and warm, greasy things fall over my clothes. The bag is full of warm bird meat and bones. A ribcage falls out. Malcolm grabs it and gnaws at it, and skin and fat hang off it and jiggle as he shouts at me. Tenants come to their windows.

"I carry her carcasses away. I pick the bones. I wait for this to end.” He pats his head, his chest, his belly. He grabs his crotch. He waves the meat at me. I smell that it has begun to rot. “You,” he sputters, and fat and spittle hang on his chin, “have the luxury of youth.” He says the word youth as if he hates it. I want to tell him I've wasted my youth. That I have hardly enough left to fill a champagne glass. That I see it draining away. That I did not know what to do with youth when I had it. That my days are as empty as his. That I feel the claws of something grab the backs of my eyes.

He devours fat and skin, glaring at me. He is starved as the grave is for its corpse, as heaven is for faith. What do you tell an old man so greedy to die that he wears death on his hat, sticks his thumb in death and licks it, sits each night in his lonely room spying on death the way other men spy on sex, on nakedness and all other hopes of the flesh?

I run half a mile to the courthouse fountain, and Elizabeth is right. Her son, Tony, watches the lights. He stands, a youth in the city, entranced by blue, green, gold and violet light refracting in the fountain. His limbs and fingers quiver with energy and wonder. He doesn't know anyone watches him. Something in this fact feels like redemption. I let the soft sparkle, the hiss of the water, soothe me. I return to my bedsit and do not stray out of my routine for weeks.

When Norm, Malcolm's son, returns from the Canary Islands, nothing that has happened seems plausible to me. I do not tell Norm a thing about his father, about Elizabeth Pye or her son. I let Norm think his dad has been in the hands of the second cousin. I do not call Elizabeth Pye to invite her out. My geranium, the one that sits on the window over the fire escape, nearly dies, but I water it in time, and it hangs on but does not bloom. The stem grows thick, brown and scaly, with the effort of keeping one green shoot alive, and one tiny leaf. I sit with my coffee and watch it struggle. I do not go with Norm the next time he asks me if I want to check on Malcolm. I do go once, by myself, at Christmas.

A dark fruit cake sits on his table, wrapped in red cellophane no one will ever peel off. Norm has installed a four foot artificial Christmas tree that telescopes out of its box pre-decorated with two dozen sleds, bells, gingerbread houses, and a tiny, heartbreaking cathedral. Malcolm sits in silence and hands me his spy glasses. I glance at the faraway stars, then hand them back.

"Remember, Geoffrey,” he says, “you don't need to worry about my being lonesome.” He takes his revolver out from where he has been sitting on it, like a hen on her egg, and I see the other thing he has, wound round his wrist: his dog Jackie's yellow leash. It's a pretty yellow, light, like a yellow crayon. “When it gets too bad, I can always place this between my eyes, like so,” he aims the gun between his eyes, “and I think, Geoffrey, that now is the time,” and I'm surprised how silent the sound is, like my staple gun going off in a cube of Wetpak floral foam.

The kind of loneliness that kills a man like Malcolm is almost visible. You feel it creep behind you. A mouse leaves droppings under your toaster. A caterpillar eats silver roads in the oak leaves over your fire escape.

I am a man who takes a long time to act. By the time I try to call Elizabeth Pye and ask her to eat cannelloni with me, she no longer lives at Harding Court. But there are other women who look like Mary Steenburgen, who act like her, who give me the feeling that here is a woman I could talk to, over the toast crumbs. A woman like that might join a garden club, I think. A horticultural club that plans a community garden by the old tracks on the south end of Bowman Street. That grows kohlrabi and gives produce to food banks, and has coffee mornings on Saturdays, with members leaning on hoes and talking about how good the earth smells, and how the earthworms are starting to flourish. I might like that. I might be the only man in a sea of Mary Steenburgens. I might like placing seed packets on sticks, and driving the sticks into drills to mark where the beans are, and the sugar beets, and the sweet pea flowers, for which someone would need to construct a graceful trellis, and maybe I would volunteer to be that someone.

Copyright © 2008 Kathleen Winter

THE NEW GENRES

Every few years we undergo an alteration in how we see the world. Sometimes it creeps up on us, and we only recognise the changes with the hindsight of a decade or so. What, so far, have the noughties been about? Celebrity obsession, the breakdown of order, surveillance, global warming, all of the above? Well, we can start to get a clue by studying the new demographics of cinema.

Remember when films were divided into a handful of distinct genres? SF, westerns, war, musicals, horror, romance, adventure and cartoons pretty much covered it. But the market for movies is subdividing and splintering into ever more specific groups catering for a narrowing range of fans. So we now have adults watching cartoons and children's fantasies, while kids watch grisly horror films. Here are some of the other new genres:

The Euroscare Remake Genre

The diminishing returns from J-Horror remakes have forced Hollywood studios to look elsewhere for their—or rather someone else's—inspiration, so now we have The Strangers, a remake of the French Ils; Quarantine, a remake of the Spanish [Rec]; Funny Games, the remake of, er, Funny Games; and the upcoming remake of The Orphanage. The thinking here is that Americans can't handle subtitles and don't care about other versions, so why not simply refilm the whole damned thing and hide the original source?

The B-Superhero Genre

Now that the Supermans and Batmans are exhausted, riffs on not overly successful comics are showing that new franchises can be created from paper-thin brands with a built-in fanbase, so we have 30 Days of Night, Hancock, the admittedly superior but still very silly Hellboy, Iron Man and soon Submariner. Can The Atom or Metal Men be very far away?

The Maleness-In-Crisis Genre

From One Hour Photo and Falling Down to He Was A Quiet Man, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead and Lakeview Terrace, these films about the stressed-out modern male, with his weakening sperm, fading testosterone and loss of place in the world, often make for deliberately uncomfortable viewing.

The Nu-War Genre

War, Inc., The Lord of War, Three Kings and Charlie Wilson's War head up the satirical arm of the Nu-War movie, which also includes more played-straight tales like Stop-Loss, Redacted, Babel, In the Valley of Elah and Rendition, films aimed at massaging liberal, urban audiences without requiring them to think too much.

The Holy-wood Genre

An interesting new demographic that has sprung up from the oblong US states, where something called the Bible, a set of contradictory parables invented by shepherds in tents, is followed more closely than a computer manual. Whether the Good Book is actually referenced or merely features as a sub-text, such films guarantee a huge cash-rich audience. The Passion of The Christ, Mel Gibson's gore movie endorsed by the church, sparked off this genre, and it now includes What the Bleep Do We Know!?, Henry Poole is Here, Expelled (an anti-Darwinist documentary), the Narnia films and Evan Almighty. Even the Superman Returns trailer has some guff about His only son returning to save us, just in case Bibleheads missed the point.

The Brand Genre

Got a brand, any brand? If people can still remember it, we can make it into a hit movie! After a Christmas when some singing chipmunks made more money worldwide than almost any other film, you can guarantee we'll be seeing more stuff like Horton Hears A Who, Transformers, Scooby Doo and Josie and The Pussycats. Feasibly, brand-movies could embrace all products from chocolate bars and computer software to designer jeans. We've already had The Devil Wears Prada, and that's the tip of the iceberg.

The Gay Men and Teenaged Girls Genre

High School Musical 4 is coming, and Hannah Montana was a gigantic smash in the US. Musicals are relatively inexpensive to make, don't require A-list stars and have unusually long shelf-lives. They also offer huge ancillary benefits, from CDs and books to live shows and clothing accessories. Even though the wonderful Sweeney Todd proved too weird and gory for mainstream audiences, Mamma Mia! and Nine (a smart, tuneful version of Fellini's 8?) are on their way, with more to follow.

The good thing about all this is that the doomsayers are wrong; Hollywood is clearly capable of reinventing itself, even if it has to steal from the rest of the world to do so. But this was always the case. Before, the rest of the world came to work in Hollywood. Now, a film has to prove itself in the international marketplace before it gets invited to become a retread of itself.

IDENTITY CRISIS

Beneath these new genres a host of other previously unimaginable sub-genres have appeared, from comedy sports to wedding nostalgia. Coming next is the souped-up relaunch of the 3d movie, which has been developed specifically to fight the perceived threat of showing high-def films on television.

What's noticeable is that one entire strand of movies has completely disappeared: the real-life hero genre. When I was a kid we had everything from Lawrence of Arabia to Cromwell, tales of explorers, conquerors, political leaders, kings and captains, but now the subject has been confused by a fragmenting of perspective, so that one man's hero is another man's enemy. This means that, just as there can be no new statues to political leaders unless everyone is in agreement about their true status as role models, the only hero films we feel comfortable about viewing are ones where a man lifts burning rocks in tights. It seems that real life is too disturbing to put on film, unless you're from a country in turmoil, when it's suddenly acceptable in Western eyes for you to say what you truly feel.

Strangely, the reverse has happened in books, where the artist has become synonymous with the art. It seems that in the publisher's eye at least, if you haven't lived it, you can't write about it. There have been a number of high-profile cases of late wherein the author has been caught fabricating the details of his own life to fit what he has written.

The miserable-childhood sub-genre has been dominating the bestseller lists for some time now. Last year I met a famous author who wrote a bestselling tale of his dysfunctional family, and I gained the distinct impression that he had exaggerated the facts to tell a good story. There was nothing wrong with that, I felt—in fact I was glad he had done so, because it made for a far more colourful tale. However, during the Q&A after the reading, audience members only wanted to know how he got on with his mother, if he was finally speaking to his sister and so on, in the same way that women knit socks for babies on fictional shows like Coronation Street.

Television and books both encourage identification, but films do the opposite. No one is going to send Shia LaBeouf's parents roses because their flowerbeds got trampled by Decepticons in Transformers, or buy those teenagers in Cloverfield a new movie camera. Books have the power to blur the lines between fact and fantasy, and that reason alone would be enough reason to celebrate the continued power of the printed word.

Copyright © 2008 Christopher Fowler

I alighted the carriage beside a statue in Eidelbruck's town square just after nine o'clock, collected my baggage from the coachman, and trudged off through the boggy main street in search of a tavern. The rain was unrelenting, and all evening I had looked forward to a warm cosy tavern that served hot wurst and liquor. I had intended spending a short time drying at the fireside and asking for directions to my sister's house, but was now dismayed to see the town in utter darkness.

The buildings—with their gabled roofs, black decorative timbers and whitewashed walls—showed not a single crack of light around shutters and doors. The ornate iron street lanterns were unlit. From what I could discern, through the lashing rain, there was not a lamp or candle aglow in the entire town. The main thoroughfares, and the maze of alleyways that connected them, were devoid of life. It was as if the population and their livestock had evacuated en masse. Yet I sensed—whilst eyeing those bolted shutters and riveted iron and timber doors—that people were inside. There was no evidence to support this, however, other than instinct.

My sister's letters, written with a growing anxiety, though without divulging too many specifics, had alluded to the town's troubles. My reasons for travelling here were solely to oversee her safekeeping. But I had not expected this. Abandoning any idea of a tavern, I determined to seek out her home immediately. My two bags were manageable, but my boots sucked heavily through the sopping mud and ordure, which, despite the chill night air and rain, emitted a most pungent reek. I reached the end of the street, and was faced with three options: one road bearing left, another right, and a long narrow alley straight ahead.

I chose the alley as the ground appeared less trodden and muddy. The slimy walls either side were high and it was darker than the main street. I was halfway through when a black shape drifted across the far entrance before merging with the shadows. A fellow in a hooded cloak, I assumed, off somewhere quickly to avoid a drenching, which encouraged me because I did not hold much hope for finding my sister's house without enquiring of directions.

Then, from behind, came frantic, splashing footsteps.

There were two hunched figures in black cowls rushing in my direction, sprinting on the tips of their pointed boots, knees pumping high and outwards through the billowing black cloth.

I turned, ready to make my escape, but two more appeared up ahead—the snare tightening—descending on me like fiends. I dropped my bags, fumbled for my blade. But too late!

It was like being engulfed in a flapping black tent torn from its guy-ropes by a foul smelling gale, the sounds throaty grunts and hog snorts. I felt a needle-like agony deep inside my kidney. I screamed—a high, piercing sound that I had never known myself capable of uttering. Then a thudding blow to the side of my head cut short the scream, and a second later the ground was hurtling up at me, smashing tender flesh and bone, knocking all the air from my lungs. As my consciousness waned, I tasted putrid mud, and complementing that vile sour flavour was all the blackness and meanness of the night.

If only they had allowed me a moment longer to prepare, I would have given a good account of myself. My blade would have drawn blood, for sure! But they were upon me so fast...

"He's gone,” said a man's voice.

"Aye. Gone a few hours now,” said another. “Skin cold as stone."

"What did he expect? Only madmen venture out at night, madmen and the Würlich footpads."

"The Würlich footpads are madmen."

"Do I look like I'm arguing with you? Cease your nattering and check his pockets, man."

The muted grey light suggested it was not long past daybreak. I could not feel the fellow's hands sliding inside my coat and waistcoat, though I could see him from the peripheries of my vision. I was unable, however, to move my eyes to follow his progress. It was as though they were fixed straight ahead, aimed towards the high wall and the shiny wet rooftops and the bleak sky beyond, from where the rain had reduced to sleety drizzle now. A spot of moisture fell upon my unblinking eyeball, and for a moment the scene was viewed through a blurry pool.

"Anything?” asked the first man, whose voice was a baritone.

"No coin, as you'd expect with the Würlich devils,” said the second, whose voice was more of a tenor, “and nothing to identify him. But there's a letter...” I heard a rustle of paper. “Sent from a Mrs Katarina Weiss, address is here in Eidelbruck ... She says, ‘To my dearest brother, Johan—’”

"I know her,” interrupted a third voice. “Lives in my street. Widowed a year ago. A goodly young lady, kind and well meaning."

"You'd better go fetch her then."

I tried opening my lips to speak but I could not move them, not even a fraction. Paralysis! I felt a rush of panic, and prayed that the blow to my skull had not caused permanent damage to the brain or spinal cord.

Be calm, I told myself, clinging to hope, it is merely a rare but passing malady.

"'To my dearest brother, Johan,'” read the tenor voice once again. “'I pray that all is well with you. I was so pleased to hear that you secured a senior position with your firm. And you are only twenty-eight! Papa would have been so proud. Since we were children, I always knew you would be successful. One day, I am sure, you will fulfil your dream and design a great ship of the line ... ‘"

"Not much chance of that now,” added the baritone.

"'Alas,'” continued the tenor, “'I wish I could say that things are as well here in Eidelbruck. But since Jürgen died it is hard for me to remain hopeful. There is a sickness in the town. I do not mean a physical sickness, rather a sickness of the mind and spirit. Last night another person went missing, a milliner who lived just three doors away. But that is not all. There is something else, an evil that permeates every nook and cranny and corrupts even the hardiest and purest of souls. It is so dreadful I am reluctant to record the words on paper, for fear that by allowing it such permanence—’”

"Why is she telling strangers our business?” asked the baritone indignantly.

"He's no stranger. He's her brother."

"Outsiders then. What's it—"

He was interrupted by a pitiful wail. “No!"

And there was my sister Katarina's sweet face just inches from my own as she crumpled upon my stiff, motionless body. The same blonde ringlets that I had watched her brush as a child, the same pretty blue eyes moist with tears now, the pale soft skin of her face pinched with unimaginable grief.

Oh Katarina, my baby sister, do not weep. It saddens me so to see your distress...

"Oh Johan, Johan,” she cried, “I would have warned you not to arrive at night. Why didn't you tell me you were coming?"

I did. Didn't you receive my letter?

"He is not dead!” she blurted. “He lives. You are mistaken."

That's right, I live. A woman's intuition. She knows. Listen to her.

"There is no pulse,” said the baritone. He reached down and closed my eyelids with his fingertips; his spectacles, fleshy jowls and whiskers the last thing I saw. Then darkness.

Leave them open! I cannot see her face now.

"Madam,” said the baritone respectfully, “I'm a physician. He's gone. I'm sorry."

Katarina wept. I could not see her, I could not feel her, but I knew she was close still as I heard her cries and the brush of fingers on cloth as she clung to me.

Wait a moment. No pulse, he said? And the fellow is a physician, so he should know. Then it cannot be paralysis.

I remembered a story I once read about a man suffering from catalepsy who was terrified of being buried alive. That's it! A cataleptic state where it appears outwardly that one is deceased, yet in truth the body has shut down temporarily to recover its faculties. But it will recover. And there will be a pulse, except so faint it might appear imperceptible even to a professional eye.

"We should take the body to the pyre,” said the tenor grimly, “but first we should remove the head from the neck."

"No!” Katarina said. “Not that, sir, I beg you."

"It's for the best, my dear,” said the physician, “though personally I would not have put it so bluntly when you are clearly overcome with grief."

"I say what has to be said,” added the tenor. “The dead rise in this town. We all know that. And we all know what has to be done. I'll fetch my wood saw."

"Nah, a wood saw makes sloppy work,” a new voice said. “I got an axe. One or two blows should suffice."

"Don't, please,” begged Katarina.

"Imbeciles! Can't you see you're upsetting the lady's feelings?” the physician said. “We'll take him to the guardhouse, collect the priest to say a few words and then perform our duty."

Katarina sniffed, her voice changing to a tone of quiet determination. “All right. I understand. You are quite correct, gentlemen. The guardhouse, the axe and the pyre."

Terror gripped me. No, Katarina, do not let them do it! I am not dead. You must examine me more closely, please, I beg you.

"But first,” she said, “I want to take him home to clean him up, dress him in fresh clothes. I can't bear to see him like this in the stinking mud."

The physician's voice sounded doubtful. “I'm not sure..."

"Sir, my brother Johan's intention was to journey hundreds of miles to my house. He almost made it. At the very least, I would like to see him achieve that one small thing before he is laid to rest. He is my only family. I insist!"

"Very well, madam, but you must not leave it too long,” said the physician. “Pick him up here, men!"

There were silences, long silences, and occasionally quiet voices and sobbing in the background. I do not know how much time I spent there. Except to say that it seemed like an entire winter, an eternal winter in the deepest tunnels of hell, waiting agonisingly for whatever dreadful end fate had in store for me.

I heard somebody moving close by, and the snivelling sounds of a bout of tears that had almost run its course, for now. And then my eyelids were peeled back by a lady's fingers and Katarina's face was before me once again, blue eyes red-rimmed now.

"Johan, I don't know what to do. If only our parents were alive to guide me. Or my dear poor husband Jürgen. Johan ... you seem so ... I was going to say peaceful but that is not the correct word. Your eyes, so clear and unchanged, are open now but it is as if you are just asleep, not..."

That's it. You're on the right track.

"I know it is my duty as a citizen to ... I can't even bring myself to utter those dread words. And I certainly can't bring myself to allow those men to...” She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. “There's a place far down river, a valley, at the foot of the mountain. It's remote, cut off and inaccessible. Nobody goes there except ... There is a colony, of sorts, where there are more like ... like you. I know a man with a small rowboat. For a fee he will put you in the boat and send you downstream. The river is high after the rains. The current will take you there. I'm so sorry for what has happened, dearest Johan. You came to rescue me and now I'm all alone in the world. I don't think I can bear this."

She stood up straight and retreated a few feet.

Yes! Well done, sister. You're doing the correct thing. I shall recover, and return soon to confront the evil you spoke of. I will kill the Würlich footpads, if that is the source of the trouble, every last damned one of them. And I shall take you away from here to a place where you will be safe and happy.

But Katarina broke down again, this time in great dry heaving sobs, as though she were trying to vomit some hideous parasite from her stomach.

A strange and glorious thing happened when I was laid in the boat. My little toe twitched inside my boot. It started as a sort of involuntary reflex, but soon afterwards I was able to move it as normal. I strained hard to open my lips and shout with glee, but unfortunately the progress, for now, was limited to the tip of my foot.

Then, when Katarina leant over and kissed my cheek, I felt the touch of her lips. My face was numb still, but I discerned the tiniest of contacts, and the slightest caress of her breath. What joy!

"Goodbye Johan. May the angels walk with you, my wonderful brother."

I shall return soon, dear sister!

And then she was gone.

What she had said was correct: the river was high, ready to burst its banks, in fact. It was fast flowing, dirty brown and exceptionally noisy. In just minutes the view altered from riverbank townhouses to pine forests and lush green mountainsides as the little boat hurtled along bumpily. After what I imagined must have been half an hour of this, I was delighted to feel discomfort in my back, and cold river damp creeping inside my joints.

I spent a long period staring at the tall fir tops, jagged cliffs and grey sky racing past, whilst at the same time willing my body to awaken from its torpor. Soon I was able to move my fingers. Not a great deal, and it was a debilitating effort, draining what meagre energy I possessed, but it was enough to raise my spirits and impress upon me the need to continue persevering.

Over the sound of rushing water, I heard a thunderous roar, distant at first but gradually increasing in intensity. Suddenly my view flipped upside down as I flew off the rim of a great waterfall. The boat spun, free falling in a cataract of spume, oscillating images of sky and trees and rocks and frothing white rapids far below. Fortunately the boatman had possessed the foresight to lash me to the planks; otherwise my body would certainly have parted from the hull. The boat struck the water with an ear-crashing thud, and was then driven downwards by the tremendous pressure.

Underwater, through a veil of fizzing bubbles, I saw that the pointed bow was wedged between two rocks. If I could not dislodge it I would drown in a moment. I began moving my arms and legs, trying to twist my body from side to side, straining at the ties. But they held fast, and I was too feeble! My mouth opened. Instinctively, my lungs drew a watery breath and at the same time I pictured Katarina, vulnerable in the face of her unmentionable evil...

By some miracle my dubious rocking efforts had freed the boat and it shot to the surface, spinning and bobbing for a moment before being driven on by the current away from the waterfall, but upside down now. My view was of the surface of the river. Gravity caused my body to strain downwards against the ties. Fortunately there was a narrow air pocket between the babbling water and my mouth. Otherwise I would surely have perished.

Which proves it is not your fate to die in such an ignominious fashion. You are destined to save her.

I spluttered and coughed. Water dribbled from my mouth then I sucked oxygen greedily. At that point, the trauma of the past day and night suddenly caught up with me. I was overwhelmed by nausea. My exertions underwater had weakened me to such an extent that I succumbed to fading consciousness...

Somebody was turning the boat over. A view of shaded shingle swivelled to glaring white sky. I blinked, conscious of my fully functioning eye muscles. It was snowing now and very cold. I felt the fat wet flakes landing on my cheeks, and a sabre pressing against my throat.

"Are you tame?” she said, exerting pressure with the point.

"Tame? What do you mean?"

I can speak!

She was wearing tan breeches and riding boots. The end of a crudely sewn scar peeked above her frilled high collar and cravat. Her powdered face seemed young, but her hair, which fell straight down her back from beneath a Cossack-style bearskin, was as white as the virgin snow that had settled on the ground. If it were not for the almost black eyes, I might have thought she was albino.

"It is a straightforward question,” she said, “but you have already answered it.” A blur of steel as she slashed with the sabre, and then I tumbled out of the boat, the ties cut. “Come with me,” she said, sheathing the weapon.

My legs wavered as I stood. Yet I managed to place one foot in front of the other and follow her white-maned back across the snow.

"Can't you go any faster?” she asked.

"I'm still weak. Recovering from a most unfortunate episode actually, a bout of catalepsy after I was set upon by footpads..."

She laughed. “Catalepsy you say? I've not heard that one before."

"But I should be fine after I've eaten something. I'm ravenous."

She glared at me, her hand resting on the sword grip. “You must suppress it, learn to control it. Otherwise you will not last long here."

"What do you mean? I merely wish to eat some wurst, dumplings and sauerkraut, washed down with a tankard or two of ale. What's wrong with that?"

"It's just instinct, a craving from before. Beer and schnapps are digestible for some reason—the devil has a grim sense of humour—but if you eat those things you will vomit. What did you do before?"

"Before?"

"My, you're a dull one. What was your profession?"

"Shipwright. I work for a firm of shipbuilders on the Baltic coast. I've taken a leave of absence to assist my sister in Eidelbruck."

She nodded her powdered face and scrutinised me with those black eyes. “Excellent. What a favourable coincidence. Our boat builder had a fatal accident only yesterday. The post-mortem is this evening. So you might be useful to the Baron after all. It's a good job you're not a soldier. He might have taken your head for that. We've too many soldiers. What do we need them for? The Baron doesn't want a war."

"I am not in need of a position. Like I said, I already have one. And now that my faculties have returned, I shall be leaving for Eidelbruck, where I have a pressing matter to attend."

She laughed. “You have a curious sense of humour."

I stared, confused. If anything it was she who had the odd sense of humour. She was not like any lady I had met before. I wondered if she were one of those liberated revolutionary-types perhaps. “What is your name, madam?"

She flicked her long white hair proudly. “I am the Comtesse Eleanor Gruber von Effendorf. Or at least, I was."

Her habitual use of the past tense puzzled me. Still, I decided against pursuing the issue for now. I bowed and clicked my heels. “Johan Kluge. Delighted to make your acquaintance, Comtesse."

She sniffed haughtily. “Save the social etiquette. You won't need it here. Call me Eleanor."

We passed through a glade where the trees were frosted white, and then a small town appeared on the banks of a lake surrounded by forest and snow-topped mountains. The light had begun to fade as twilight set in, and the buildings’ latticed windows showed warm amber lamplight within. They were similar constructions to those in Eidelbruck, though in some cases the architecture did not appear to be standing true, the buildings leaning far enough to seem on the verge of collapse. A wooden dock had been built on the lakeshore, where a squat, half-finished craft sat on scaffold, resembling, to some degree, a Scandinavian longboat.

One thing that puzzled me, as we walked onto the main street, was the absence of animals. No birds or livestock, not even a dog to be seen, nor a bark to be heard. There was, however, a shout, and a ring of steel as two Uhlans in green double-breasted jackets tumbled into the street duelling with sabres, laughing like madmen. They were clearly drunk, and made rough work of it, no holds barred, slashing at each other's faces, cheeks ribboned with livid, open gashes.

"Aren't they taking the duelling scar tradition too far?” I asked, sickened.

"They have no need for handsome faces anymore,” said Eleanor. “Besides, soldiers get bored easily if there's no one to kill."

She led me into a large building that looked like an official residence. Once inside the hallway she passed through a door with narrow steps leading to a cellar. I did not like the look of it, and after the incident with the Würlich footpads my suspicions were aroused. “Where are you taking me?"

"To a post-mortem. The Baron likes to keep things all above board. He's a stickler for rules and regulations, correct paperwork, tribunals and trials. Personally I can't see the point of it all. Oh, and by the way, don't speak unless you are spoken to."

The cellar was dark and even colder than outside. We passed through another door, arched and low, and into a gloomy windowless chamber where several men stood over a corpse spread on a slab. The dead man was naked, barrel-chested and muscular.

An exceptionally tall fellow with a forked beard stooped and held a lantern close to the body so another, wearing a bloodstained surgeon's apron, could see clearer. The lantern leant a deceivingly healthy glow to the dead man's otherwise ash-grey pallor.

"Observe the manner in which the head lolls,” said the surgeon, cupping the back of the shaven head and allowing it to flop against the slab. “A clear indication of a snapped neck bone.” He caressed a part of the scalp where the skin colouring resembled an ageing cheese. “There is some cranial destruction beneath the skin here...” He probed and prodded. “Hmm ... feels like broken pottery. A portion of the brain is pulped. Neck or skull—either injury would have proved fatal."

"That's settled then,” said the tall man, hanging the lantern on a hook. As the lantern swung slightly, the cellar, with its stacked beer barrels, swayed between rusty light and shadow, like a ship's cabin. “For the purpose of this inquest,” the tall man announced, “it is determined that Günter Schemlik, a Hessian boat builder, tumbled to his death whilst working on scaffold. According to the testimony of five reliable witnesses, Schemlik fell twenty feet from the structure and landed headfirst on rocky ground. The official verdict, gentlemen, is accidental death. To clarify, this was Günter Schemlik's second death."

A plump reverend in a cassock halted mid-prayer. “The witnesses say it was suicide, Baron, or have you conveniently forgotten that? They say he just dropped off the scaffold as though diving into non-existent water. This man weakened. He knew he was failing the Lord's trial. Our community should be made aware of this to discourage others."

The tall man with the forked beard stared hard. “I believe you remind everyone often enough, sir, with regards to their trial."

The reverend puffed his chest out. “But not enough, Baron, it seems, for them to heed the message. Clearly I should be more vigilant with my scriptural instruction."

"I fail to see how you could be any more vigilant than you already are,” said the Baron.

"We are in a state of Purgatory,” the reverend said. “And in Purgatory we must endure a trial before the second death.” He opened his bible and quoted a verse. “Revelations twenty, ‘And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death!’”

The surgeon shook his head. “Most odd behaviour then considering he was already dead."

"Already what?” I said, feeling a surge of anger. “What is this constant talk of being dead I'm hearing? Are you all insane? Have I stumbled across some backwoods lunatic asylum?"

The conversation ceased for a moment as everyone turned to regard me.

"And who is this?” asked the Baron.

"Johan Kluge, the new boy,” said Eleanor smirking. “Obviously in a state of denial, you know, regarding his condition."

"Tame?"

"Of course, Baron. He would not be standing here intact if he were in the least bit frenzied."

"We are overpopulated,” said the Baron with a dismissive gesture. “Take him out to the block and separate his head from his body.” He addressed the group once more. “The real problem here, gentlemen, is that we no longer have a boat builder. The craft is unfinished, therefore..."

Eleanor cleared her throat. “Johan Kluge is a boat builder."

"A shipwright!” I said, furious still. “I build three-masters not that fisherman's tub outside."

The Baron appraised me with a different attitude. “Hmm ... what good fortune. And you believe you are alive, Johan Kluge?"

"Of course I am alive! Are you mad? I have a healthy body."

For some reason this assertion caused much mirth.

"Remove your clothing,” ordered the Baron, chuckling. “Let's examine him."

The surgeon's fingers massaged my scalp as I began unbuttoning. “You received a blow to the head. A lump like a goose egg, but nothing too serious.” Then after I took my shirt off, he said, “Aha! Here we have it. A neat puncture in the small of the back, and then another, puckered on the belly, which I gather is the exit hole. Run clean through by a long thin dagger, I would say. Vital organs skewered, and an unsustainable loss of blood. This is a mortal wound, Johan Kluge."

I remembered the agony in my kidney whilst attacked. “But ... how can this be possible?” I asked.

"Everyone has a theory,” said the Baron. “Including the reverend here. But nobody really knows why. However, the facts are these: in this province the dead rise up. It began several years ago with one or two isolated cases, but has since spread like a plague, to the point where the cemeteries now stand empty. The sooner you accept this grim state of affairs, the better."

There were lots of unused buildings in the town, which puzzled me, considering the Baron's remark about overpopulation. I was given a spacious room with a cot and blankets. The moment I was left alone I broke down and sobbed with despair for my ruined life, my career, my unfulfilled dreams.

Eventually I climbed beneath the covers and closed my eyes. My sleep, however, was tormented by nightmares and an increasing sense of failure regarding my sister. I rose early and went out to inspect the boat, hoping that a routine from my past life might prove a diversion from black thoughts, and the devastating information that I had received yesterday evening.

The vessel was constructed competently enough so far, and would probably take two weeks to complete, depending, of course, on the availability of skilled craftsmen. I was clambering over the skeletal hull when a familiar voice hailed me.

"Annoying, isn't it?” said Eleanor, looking up.

"What?"

"To be taken in your prime like that. The same thing happened to me. It wouldn't have been so bad if it were a disease, or an accident, circumstances beyond one's control, but in my case it was preventable, which makes it very difficult to bear."

"What happened?"

Her riding boots performed a dainty little shuffle in the snow. “Oh, silly really. After one too many ales I was followed home from the tavern by a group of ruffians. Ugly brutes that thought here was a maiden fair game for a gang rape, and doubtless a strangling afterwards. Ha! The Comtesse Eleanor Gruber von Effendorf, a soft target! What blind dullards! I'd fenced with my brothers since the age of six. We had the finest sabre master in Bavaria. So I skewered three but I was enjoying the sport too much and thought I'd linger a while with the fourth, playing like a cat with a rat. But in my drunken condition I stumbled on a tree root and failed to react in time when his knife flashed across my throat. Pretty roses blossomed in the snow as I bled to death, but not before finishing him. I was due to be married in a month, to my beloved, a Hapsburg prince, with a dowry that would sustain a nation."

"That's an unfortunate story,” I said, eyeing the crudely stitched line above her collar where white skin shrivelled lilac-grey.

"We all have them, do we not?"

"What does the Baron need the boat for?"

She pointed at the mountains. “There are two goat paths up there but both have been blocked with boulders. The locals don't want us escaping. The only other way out is across the lake. But we have a colony of twenty-nine. So we need a solid boat that can carry us all."

"And where does the Baron intend going?"

She smiled. “He has this dream to acquire a team of oxen and transport the boat across the Alps into Italy, then sail down the Adriatic Sea and find a deserted island somewhere."

"And live like pirates?"

She laughed. “Something like that."

We were interrupted by a bugle call and the sound of drums. “Ah,” she said. “Pay attention. Now you will see what it's like to be truly frenzied. A lesson in self-control, Johan Kluge."

A timber rostrum had been erected in the town square with a chopping block on top. All the colony inhabitants gathered as a man bound with chains was dragged towards it. There was something about that tortured expression that I recognised.

"Wait!” I cried.

As two mustachioed grenadiers in grubby frayed uniforms hauled him up the rostrum steps, I grabbed the chain and held it firm, preventing his progress to the block.

"What is the meaning of this?” asked the Baron.

"I know him, Baron,” I said. “It is my sister's husband, my brother-in-law, Jürgen."

"And you thought you could interfere with a legal procedure because of that?” said the furious Baron.

Jürgen was sprawled on the steps, his blond head turned away from me, as though ashamed at what he had become. I placed my hand on his shoulder. “Jürgen, it is I, Johan. Don't be afraid."

Then he turned, and it was clear to me in just a second that here was something bearing little resemblance to my former brother-in-law, and was, in fact, a slavering creature that had somehow slipped through the cracks of hell. A clink of chain as he lurched violently towards me; his fingers, impossibly strong, clamped my throat. I smelt rank meaty breath as his drooling maw closed around my ear and tore it off with a single bite.

I screamed.

And the crowd, including the Baron, laughed heartily.

The grenadiers yanked the chain and dragged him up the steps. In a state of shock, I pressed my hand to the side of my head where an ear had once been. Eleanor picked the ear off the ground, winked, and put it in her coat pocket. Jürgen was held down on the block, squirming and snarling. A muscular executioner in a leather mask stood over him with a giant crescent-bladed axe.

"Jürgen Weiss,” the Baron called out, “you stand accused of a failure to control your baser instincts. We at the colony have a reputation to consider. We do not need the militia paying us a visit. Your colleagues have noticed signs of frenzied behaviour lately. They consider that you are no longer tame. And, at the last dinner, you greedily ate more than your share. How plead you, Jürgen Weiss? Remember, an unintelligible grunt is considered an admission of guilt."

Jürgen grunted.

The drums rolled, the crescent-axe fell, and my brother-in-law's blond head bounced off the rostrum and dropped in the snow.

The surgeon sewed my ear back on, saying, however, that it was merely cosmetic, as the tissue would not re-grow. In a dejected mood, I returned to the boat with the designs that Günter Schemlik had drawn up.

Schemlik had clearly known his business, and I was quite happy to proceed with what he had left me. There was only one alteration that I suggested to the Baron. For some reason Schemlik had selected an old-fashioned oar-rudder positioned at the rear of the starboard side. I advised on a stern-centred rudder for greater manoeuvrability.

The Baron nodded. “Whatever you think is best. You're the expert."

I inspected my rag-tag team of boat builders: a carpenter with half his face missing, an apprentice cooper with no fingers on his left hand, a lumbering toy maker who used to whittle model boats, and four soldiers acting as labourers. The paucity of specialised skills meant I would have to get my hands grubby. But the truth was, the work was a welcome distraction.

A brazier of hot coals was kept permanently alight so we could shape the planks and heat the pitch. The planks were layered, fastened to the keel and ribs with iron rivets then caulked with the pine resin pitch. After a slow start, where I had to organise and make my instructions clear, we spent three days working flat out until all the planks were laid. The progress was obvious to the untrained observer, and the Baron in particular was noticeably pleased.

Eleanor clearly had nothing better to do with her time other than to laze around smoking her clay pipe asking pointless questions. During rest breaks I asked my own questions, about the colony, and what I perceived to be the bleak outlook for our future.

"Will we all turn frenzied eventually?” I asked.

"Everyone does to some degree,” she answered, “but in flashes, at first."

"Then there is no hope."

She shook her head. “It's about reeling yourself back in afterwards."

"Afterwards?"

"Look, Jürgen turned permanently frenzied. When that happens you're finished. It's about self-control. If you can learn to manage your appetite..."

"Appetite? I was going to ask you about that actually. I've been hungry ever since I arrived. At Jürgen's execution the Baron mentioned something about ‘dinner'. I would very much like to eat a good dinner. I'm providing the community with my expertise here. I'm certainly one of the most useful members. The least you could do is feed me."

"Dinner will be served at eight o'clock tonight,” she said grimly. “Don't worry, you'll get your share. But remember what I said, stay controlled."

"I'm perfectly in control, thank you. I can't wait. What's on the menu?"

"And if you're a good boy,” she said demurely, “you can escort me if you like."

The Baron insisted that we dress in our finest for the occasion. I found suitable evening wear inside the wardrobe in my room, doubtless left by the former occupant, whose fate I wondered about.

Eleanor looked splendid in gentlemen's clothing once again: a green frock-coat, white frilled shirt and breeches, pink silk cravat and highly polished cavalry boots, sabre slung across her shapely hip. She had applied more powder to her face and tied her white hair back with a pink bow.

We walked, arms linked, along the main street. Others were heading in the same direction towards the Baron's house, the former Bürgermeister's residence. The ladies wore gowns and jewellery; the soldiers escorting them were in parade uniform.

Somebody shouted. Everyone turned to look at the lake. Mountain shadows fell across the water, dark now except for a ripple of silver moonlight. I saw a black-masted sailing vessel, reflecting the light of the moon fleetingly, steering towards the dock.

Eleanor licked her crimson lips then pulled my arm. “Come,” she said. “It is unwise to linger."

We sat in the Baron's candlelit dining room at a long dark-wood table laid with silver cutlery, finest bone china and two enormous, empty silver platters. Ale and schnapps were served. We chatted informally. The drink loosened our tongues, yet I noticed a tacit edginess around me, an atmosphere of impatience among my companions. Some displayed this more than others. One of my boat builders, for example, the oafish toy maker, was trying to stop his jaw from twitching.

At the head of the table, the Baron stood. “I would like to thank you all for your patience. I know just one or two dinners a week never seems like enough. Unfortunately the supply does not match the demand. But it is also important we retain a level of restraint. We must stay in control, and try to remember what we used to be. For that reason, patience, and the social ritual of dining correctly, is essential for the healthy continuance of our community. Now, regarding tonight's menu. The bad news is our suppliers have only brought two meals..."

This prompted disgruntled groans from the diners. The toy maker, in particular, seemed disappointed.

Eleanor placed her hand on mine. “Don't worry,” she whispered. “They are criminals, condemned for execution. So don't feel any moral misgivings here. They would have died anyway."

"What do you mean?” I asked.

"Times are hard,” continued the Baron, “and we must tighten our belts. But the good news is they are plump and juicy.” He raised his glass and proposed a toast. “To fresh meat,” he said.

As everyone repeated this, I noticed a dramatic change. The sounds were dog snarls and grinding teeth now. Eyes bulged, open mouths dribbled onto napkins tucked in collars, and there were flashes of steel as blades were drawn. The door opened.

Soldiers dragged in two terrified, whimpering individuals, a man and a woman, bound and gagged. What happened next was an exhibition so sickening and depraved it falls beyond the powers of description. As the distraught victims were laid wriggling on the platters, and everybody tucked in with knives and teeth, I shut my eyes and placed my hands over my ears in a futile attempt to shut out the muffled screams and slobbery noises.

My human instinct was to flee, but something held me back. My mouth salivated, the hunger in my belly intensified. A hand, severed at the wrist, suddenly landed on my plate with a clatter. My mind was telling me to ignore it, but my body was not cooperating. Instead, I picked up the hand and brought it to my mouth. The flesh was sweet and succulent as I stripped it from the delicate fingers like a half-starved terrier. I belched, wiped blood from my lips, spat out a gold signet ring then continued with the tougher palm meat.

From the corner of my eye, I saw that the male victim's head was now on Eleanor's plate. The toy maker reached over and tried seizing it by the hair but she growled and fended him off with her knife. It was then, as the dead eyes stared at me, that recognition struck me like a blow, and once again I viewed the scene with the detachment and horror of a civilised human being. I know this person. The broken spectacles, the fleshy jowls and frizzy whiskers...

I banged the table with my fist. “Stop this!"

"What is the matter with you?” asked Eleanor, standing with hands on hips. “Your behaviour in there was an embarrassment."

I was sprawled in the snow, weeping with shame. She was calm now, no longer frenzied. Her clothes, like mine, were spattered with blood.

"I explained that they were criminals,” she said. “So what difference does it make?"

"They were not criminals!” I told her. “The man was a physician from Eidelbruck. He pronounced me dead. Are you telling me that in just a few days he committed a capital crime?"

She shrugged. “It's possible."

"No, it isn't. These matters take weeks to resolve, a court case, appearing in front of a judge, imprisonment. The truth is he was abducted from his home. The man was innocent, and we..."

She sighed. “We have to eat or else we'll starve, just like any other creature. A dead body, like a live one, needs sustenance. Human meat is all we can digest. Is that our fault? Was it my choice to wake from death? We have a right to exist, don't we?"

"You lied."

"Listen. Think of it this way. In some respects we are like the wolf or the bear. If wolves or bears eat somebody, folk consider it bad luck, accept it as fate, just one of the many hazards of living on this earth. People are just going to have to adapt to a new predator, that's all."

She squatted beside me, ran her fingers through my hair then kissed my cheek. The contact was pleasurable and produced a calming effect. Her lips brushed mine. We kissed, but then the taste of fresh blood caused me to recoil.

"Get away from me!"

From a professional point of view, the only consolation after that sickening display was that my team of boat builders seemed to work more efficiently. As a cold sun rose above the snowy mountain, and the lake appeared crisp and blue, the men were in good spirits. They chattered dreamily about sailing and finding an island home, of how the boat would set them free to raid at night along the coast for fresh meat and wine. At the mention of meat the toy maker grew agitated.

That was also the moment I realised the true purpose of the boat I was building, and I must say, it did not sit well with me. Though, after much deliberation, I could see no alternative. Eleanor was right: the colony was just striving to exist, like any other species in this cruel world. And much that I disliked the idea of raiding foreign shores, it was surely better than subjecting our own people to terror.

We spent the day cutting and honing timber from our pile of logs. Benches were crafted for everyone to sit on whilst aboard. We secured these the following day then began shaping a bowsprit. After four more days of non-stop work the boat was almost complete. All that remained was the mast, and the sail and rigging. None of the logs in the pile were a suitable length so I gathered the men and we trudged through the snow to the forest carrying axes and wood saws. Eleanor, bored as ever, joined us.

I found a tall birch that was appropriate. This was felled easily enough. The branches and foliage were pared off then we tied ropes to the trunk and dragged it along towards the dock. As we emerged from the trees, on the slope overlooking the town and the lake, I spotted the black-rigged sailboat cruising towards the dock. The men dropped the ropes and stared.

"It's early,” said the carpenter. “I hate it when they're early. It means waiting around for hours knowing the meat is there, fresh and juicy. Why doesn't the Baron just let us tuck in?"

The toy maker was making a groaning sound, salivating, licking quivering drool from lips and chin.

The carpenter laughed at him. “What's the matter—can't wait? Getting frenzied, are we?"

Twitching, the toy maker struggled to reply. “Course ... n-n-not. I ... c-can wait."

"Come on, let's get moving,” I said. “Pick it up here."

As we reached the dock, I saw the black vessel was moored at the end of the jetty now, though nobody seemed to be disembarking.

Eleanor nudged me. “We should get away from here. The Baron doesn't like us loitering nearby. Too much of a temptation."

"What are they waiting for?"

"The crew stay on board until the gold is left on the jetty and all of us have vacated the area. Then they offload the meat, collect the coin and sail away.” She laughed. “They don't trust us. Can't blame them really."

"Gold?"

"The Baron's gold. It's what keeps us fed."

"Four!” said the carpenter excitedly. “They've brought us four. What a feast!"

I stared at the black boat. Three men and a woman were huddled near the prow. The woman was fair and pretty...

No ... it can't be...

"Where is the Baron?” I asked urgently.

"Collecting the gold, I should think,” replied Eleanor. “He'll be here in a moment. We should go."

I ran from the dock and into the main street. The Baron was approaching with a satchel slung over his shoulder.

"Baron, I must speak with you. They have brought my sister, Katarina."

"And why should that be any concern of mine?"

"She's my family!"

"You have no family except us now."

"I insist you leave her aboard so she can be taken home."

The Baron chuckled. “You are in no position to insist. Remember, my boat is almost finished, just the mast and sail to attach. I don't need you any more. If you cause any trouble I'll take your head. Accept it. Your sister is dinner."

Eleanor and the boat builders were in the street now walking towards us. Eleanor gave me a warning look. But I disregarded this, and as she drew level I yanked her sabre from its scabbard then darted off towards the jetty.

"Call the grenadiers!” the Baron shouted.

The sight of the four crewmen in black cowls instilled both a memory of dread and a sense of rage. Here were the Würlich footpads, the madmen that had cut short my young life and condemned me to a wretched existence. And now they had abducted my sister and delivered her here to be eaten alive. Vengeance consumed me. As I approached the hull, one of them shouted a warning. A musket was raised, aimed at my face.

Ignoring it, I clambered onto the boat. A thunderous shot rang out. The ball smacked into my shoulder, shattering my collarbone and knocking me backwards a step. But I continued forward and, as he fumbled to reload, quickly opened his belly with a slash of the sabre. The others rushed me with their long stabbing daggers, but the weapons were not suited for what they intended—namely, my decapitation—and were no match for a sword either. I skewered one through the groin, another through the heart, and the third I sliced his neck so hard his head almost fell off. The captives, including Katarina, were making terrified muffled squeals through their gags, cowering at the sight of me. I cut their bonds, removed the gags, yet still they cringed and whimpered.

"Katarina, it is I, Johan, your brother. I will not let them harm you. I shall sail with you now. We can start a new life together. I know I have changed somewhat but ... we can find happiness, don't you think, dear sister?"

"Johan?” she cried, eyes wide with revulsion. “No. It can't be ... What have you become, a monster? And it's my fault. I should have let them burn you at the pyre. What have I done!"

As she spoke, I noticed how her voice sounded clear and pure and human, whereas mine was an unholy blend of animal grunts and the moaning vowels and slurring consonants of a rotting brain. Also, the repulsed manner in which she stared caused me to regard my appearance with honesty and detachment: the greenish, mildewed tint to my skin, the ruined ear, the awkward gait, and the lingering stench like a haunch of overripe venison. It was the same with all of us from the colony. We were indeed a nightmarish crew. But the full extent of my decline had eluded my attention until now.

"You're right,” I said. “I have lingered overlong and unnaturally. Goodbye, Katarina."

Eyes moist with tears, I stepped off the boat, untied the line from the cleat and pushed the hull from the jetty. It floated away gently. Then the wind caught the sail and it picked up speed and my Katarina was surely safe now. I rushed along the jetty until I reached the new boat. The Baron and several soldiers were marching briskly, almost upon me now.

There was a sizzling and a smell of roasting flesh as my hands gripped the edge of the burning brazier. I leant into it, and used all my strength to push it over. Hot coals spilled onto folded sailcloth, which ignited instantly. Part of the scaffold caught alight. The flames licked the struts rapidly, and as the soldiers gripped my arms and the butt of a musket hammered my jaw, the boat was entirely ablaze.

"Make the axe ready!” ordered the Baron, who seemed almost at the point of frenzy. The others were in a similarly agitated state now their meat had sailed away.

I was manhandled to the end of the street and hauled up the rostrum steps. My legs were kicked from under me and my neck forced upon the cold, bloodstained block. Planting his feet, the executioner rested the axe on his shoulder in readiness.

"You have committed a capital crime,” snarled the Baron. “Killed our traders, the only source of meat we have, and destroyed my boat, thereby condemning the colony to starvation. How plead you, Johan Kluge?"

"Guilty,” I said.

The Baron's rage subsided a moment as he fought hard to compose himself. “I will spare you, do you hear? The Baron is merciful. You can keep your head if you agree to build a new boat. If we all help with the construction, we might finish another in a week. We could be across the lake and feeding within eight days or so. What say you?"

There were encouraging, hopeful cheers from Eleanor and the crowd.

"As long as I live or die,” I said, “in death or in life, I will never build another boat. The colony is doomed. You shall join me in the second death. Now get on with it. Swing your axe."

As I said this, a wolf howled far away deep in the mountains. A beautiful haunting sound, and the first animal I had encountered since my death. And with it came the realisation that Eleanor was wrong. We were not like the wolf or the bear. They merely hunted as a response to instinct, whereas we had a choice to deny our instincts, and therefore refuse this vile existence. Smiling, I was about to shout my newfound wisdom to Eleanor but I felt the soft breeze of a falling axe and realised there was no time.

Copyright © 2008 Tim Casson

NOT IN FRONT OF THE GROWN-UPS

The pitch to BBC3 must have sounded good on paper. “Werewolf, vampire and ghost share a flat.” I even liked the title: Being Human. I envisaged slacker monsters, somewhere between Withnail and I and Skins. Neat. If it wasn't scary, I hoped it at least would be funny. How wrong can you be?

Like the execrable Jekyll the tone was all over the shop: serious as a cold bowl of sick and a good deal less amusing. What's more (and this was what really grated) it had a smugness that conveyed it thought it was reinventing the genre—when in actual fact it had nothing to say that hadn't been said before, better. A good (albeit sitcom) idea had somehow got duffed-up by head-slapping plot logic, and endless missed opportunities for wit.

My verdict is that it had been script-edited within an inch of its life. I simply can't believe a self-respecting writer could come up with such a dog's dinner left to his own devices.

Which brings me to this so-called renaissance of science fiction, paranormal and fantasy shows on British TV. Where exactly is it?

Doctor Who is admittedly an achievement, but is it heresy to state that it is after all, a remake? And, is it me or is it sometimes just a little bit rubbish? If he has another chirpy Cockney assistant it'll become EastEnders in Space. And if he solves yet another alien invasion by some piece of deus ex machina technobabble, I'll squeam.

My wife tells me to relax, it's a kid's show. I don't actually think that's an excuse. At all.

Life on Mars didn't do it for me either. One long paean to the glory days when fascistic police could beat up suspects with impunity ("Ah, them were the days, guv!"), for me it delivered no more than the sniggery fun of a lads’ mag and a few nods to Dennis Potter. And gosh, time travel! How daring and controversial!

Apparently ITV don't even like the term ‘Science Fiction’ and prefer such stuff to be called ‘Fantasy’ (which is like taking ‘Sport’ and calling it ‘Games'). Primeval is basically ‘monster of the week'—the characters are cartoon-thin or dress in ludicrous sub-Tomb Raider costumes, and sorry merchandising company, but the Disneyesque dino-pet is embarrassing.

But then it's only for kids. My question is, as far as genre TV goes—what isn't?

Please don't say Torchwood. The addition of American smarm and polymorphous sexual activity to a basic Who spin-off does not make it Jimmy McGovern.

What about science fiction for adults? That's my crusade at the moment. Always has been, actually.

When I was growing up I devoured Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Spinrad, William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard: this was a fiction of ideas, not focus-groups. Incendiary ideas about the world and our place in it—not rocket-operas, or adverts for Dalek bubble bath.

In the ‘70s some SF programmes were for adults, shining a hard light on contemporary issues through speculative fiction, as the genre was hand-built to do. Out of the Unknown took stories of Asimov, Simak and co and turned them into gripping one-hour dramas at 9pm alongside the Wednesday Play. What is it about SF now that makes commissioning editors think: Children Only (code for: leave your brain at the door)? OK, there was pulp, but there was also Orwell, Huxley, Wyndham, Wells.

In US television, by contrast, in the last few years there have been writer-led productions stratospheric in their ambition and imagination. But not in the genre.

David Chase's The Sopranos took a simple gag (gang boss goes to shrink) and turned it into an epic saga of Shakespearean proportions about the nature of evil, populated by (in the words of writer Terence Winter) “deeply flawed, uncommunicative, selfish, petty, stupid” characters with a realism that makes Goodfellas look like Huckleberry Hound. But this series also had moments of outrageous fantasy, like the speaking fish, and memorably one episode in which we were privy to an alternative reality inside Tony's head.

Far less a family saga set in a funeral home, much more his own personal musing on grief and relationships, Alan Ball's Six Feet Under similarly knew when to use fantasy to stunning effect: in conversations with the dead. When this series ended, I confess, I had tears in my eyes and felt a pang of loss that lasted for days.

Then we have the iconoclastic and addictive Deadwood. In the mud and filth of gold-panning in the old West, David Milch created an almost Biblical arena in which we watch a society being born (using the past as science fiction uses the future: to show today). Again, good and bad are hard to discern, but all the characters grasp towards a sense of grace, none more so than the aptly-named Swearingen played to devastating effect by Ian McShane.

These are monumental achievements by any standards, able to stand beside many a feature film, and soar above most.

My newest guilty pleasure, as an ex-copywriter, is Mad Men (created by Sopranos alumnus Matthew Weiner), a finely tuned and pin-sharp look at America in the early 60s via the dubious denizens of a New York ad agency. Like Californication and Nip/Tuck before it, Mad Men, from its Vertigo-like title sequence, presents a prism through which to view the effects of American values via characters desperately ill at ease in their skin, and as such captures contemporary life and twisted mores far more sharply than the supposed British high water-mark of Stephen Poliakoff's pompous ‘state of the nation’ BBC efforts.

And certainly more than Torchwood.

David Hare was on the radio the other day talking about the play he directed: The Year of Magical Thinking—Joan Didion's moving account of her grief process after her husband's death. He was asked what would he say to people who are staying away because they think the play will be depressing because it's about death and dying? Hare said: “Well I don't want to see Oliver!, and I don't want to see Oliver! with the same passion that people don't want to see my play about something dark and profound."

In a nutshell, I feel the same about TV. I don't want to watch Emmerdale or Hollyoaks with the same passion I crave more cutting-edge supernatural, horror, slipstream and science fiction on the box. My friends and I have a name for Sunday night drama exemplified by Monarch of the Glen: Gnasher TV. That is, television for the denture brigade, not meat eaters. Well, I want drama for carnivores. I don't want it mashed up and fed to me like baby food. I want nutrition.

Why can't we have genre works of the quality of Deadwood or Mad Men on the small screen? What are the commissioners frightened of, apart from their own shadows?

I suspect when it comes to so-called horror and science fiction (and there's an argument that the genre is rapidly becoming the only kind of fiction that truly reflects the real world, now) they have a snobby terror of the ‘ubergeek’ image of sunlight-starved skin and sweaty black T-shirts. But there are Jane Austen geeks too, I have to say—just as fanatical and blinkered as the kind you get in Forbidden Planet. I wish that, just as the execs can see the qualitative difference between Mills & Boon and Persuasion, they'd acknowledge it between the latest Tharg the Destroyer trilogy and the exquisitely intelligent work of Brian Aldiss, Ramsey Campbell, China Miéville, Graham Joyce or Conrad Williams, to name but a few.

Not until they get that will SF and horror be recognised as an honourable pursuit, and will the classic masterworks, and new writers, be liberated from the stale-smelling menagerie of kids’ TV, and gain respect on a par with Jane Austen, Paul Abbott or Andrew Davies.

Only then we will we have a true renaissance.

In the meantime, what do we have to look forward to? Sky One's newly announced remake of Blake's 7. God help us all.

Copyright © 2008 Stephen Volk

Shaddaton? He'd never been to it or even heard of it before, in all his long years as a salesman in the Midlands.

Eric Menway had to squint hard in the yellow glow of his car's courtesy light even to find it on his map. And when he did, he let out a soft, exasperated groan. It was half way back the direction he had already come, and then off to the east another thirty miles or so. And, this being late November, he was losing the light already.

He would never confess this to his young boss back in London but, in his mid-fifties now, his eyesight was not what it once had been, and his night vision particularly had suffered. And the thought of making it the whole way back down the motorway to London in the dark...

A little mist was touching on the slowly-moving air. He knew this area was prone to sudden fog. And that possibility settled it for him. He always kept a small overnight bag in his trunk for just such occasions. So he pulled his mobile phone out of his inner pocket, and dialled home.

"Margaret? Looks like I'm going to be stuck up here overnight. I'm not sure where I'll stay yet, probably just find a B&B."

She sounded faintly surprised, but not all that disappointed. Which was pretty much par for the course, the way their marriage had become these days. Becalmed, he believed the sailing term was. In the doldrums, for at least the past eight years. Nothing actually wrong, but nothing else much happening at all.

Did it ever occur to her he might be spending the night with some pick-up or even vice girl? It was not uncommon in his profession, after all.

He was forced to admit the harsh truth to himself. It was likely that she didn't even particularly care.

Menway let out another gentle, shapeless noise, and tucked his phone away again.

He was parked in a deserted lay-by on a two-lane section of the a50, bare trees rustling faintly nearby him and his trusty Vauxhall Vectra shuddering each time a big articulated truck went by. He gazed out through his windshield and—for a few moments—felt a strange sense of disorientation. What was he doing out here at all? Completely alone? So far from home?

Although alone and far from home—even when that word had really meant something—was how he had lived most of his adult life. If he hadn't got used to it by this stage then perhaps he never would.

Whatever. That was what the kids nowadays said, wasn't it? Whatever. Don't—what was it?—have a cow.

He started whistling a gentle tune to himself, to cut across the thrumming and the rustling around him more than any other reason. If there was such a thing as white noise, could there be grey noises too?

And then he turned the key in the ignition, powered up the lights. And in the next moment, he was swinging round in a wide U-turn and accelerating back along the road towards his next appointment.

His last of the day.

You had to hand it to the Vectra, its powerful v6 engine certainly ate up the miles. The landscape—increasingly dim—sped by him, most of it as flat as Holland, punctuated now and then by shapes that were factories or at least had been.

One time, this had been the throbbing heart of Britain's industrial revolution. Nowadays? The potteries were mostly gone. The textile mills had closed down, all their business shipped abroad. New technologies had moved in of course, digital ones or else he'd not be here. But not nearly to a large enough extent to fill the gap.

'Post-industrial’ was the term in this case. That being a euphemism for despondency, despair, decay.

It was almost completely dark by the time he reached Shaddaton's outskirts. He was in plenty of time for his appointment, though. It had been set up by his boss's small, young army of cold-callers, for five thirty. Glancing at his dashboard, he could see that it was only ten past five.

He drove past what he supposed was once a tannery. All the building's windows had been broken and the gates were padlocked with a heavy chain, but a familiar acrid smell still lingered on the air around it.

And then, he was forced to slow down as he reached the inner streets.

They were cobbled. Or at least, that had once been the intention. Half the stones were gone by this time, leaving just the sand and gravel underneath. The Vectra jounced around badly, its strong suspension working overtime. He dropped his speed to just ten miles an hour, and then gazed at his new surroundings as he continued on.

There was nobody about. No one in sight at all. He was going up a shallow hill, lurching all the way. And all that he could see around him was nondescript row upon row of narrow, cramped-looking Victorian terraced housing, all built out of what had once been russet-coloured brick. Except that it was mostly blackened, from the soot of the heavy industry which had once justified this place's whole existence.

He'd seen the same time after time in this stretch of the Midlands. Towns like this had grown up solely because of the factories round them. And then, once the factories had closed...?

What further use, a place like Shaddaton? What point did it have at all?

He passed no shops, although there had to be some. He passed no cinema, no bingo hall, none of the usual signs of urban life. Just the tightly-packed houses, the windows of which had rather too few lights on. As for the street lighting, half of that was broken. And the rest cast the thinnest of dull ochre glows, more a stain than an illumination.

Only two things broke up the awful monotony that seemed to be the trademark of the place. Half way towards the town centre, Menway passed a sign that announced football ground and had an arrow pointing to the right. Was there a soccer team here? Menway had once been a fan of the game, although he'd even let that drop in recent years.

And beside the door of one of the small houses was a placard which read sycamore hotel, quite incongruously to his mind. There was not so much as a blade of grass in sight here, let alone an entire tree. The boarding house looked no more comfortable, inviting, than its neighbours. But it was somewhere to stay the night, and that would be sufficient, he supposed.

After a while, he reached the High Street. This was where Zelatec had its offices, according to his notes. And at last, here were the shops. But none of the frontages was lit. And there were steel shutters drawn down across each of them.

And there was still no one around. That rattling noise—a bike?—was actually a can being blown along the gutter.

No cars parked here either, he took note. Had he seen a single car since he had rolled in past that tannery? In spite of which, there were double yellow lines along the whole length of both kerbs.

He supposed that he might risk a ticket. Except that Menway understood, from long experience, the habit traffic wardens had of just appearing out of nowhere. So he found the Zelatec building—oddly, it looked wholly dark as well. And then he found a side-street nearby, locked the Vectra and walked back.

It was a featureless, three-storey block which looked like it had gone up in the Sixties. And he'd been right first time, there were no lights showing in its windows. The front door was shut. He pushed at it, but no, it was locked too. And so he found the bell-push in the dimness, jabbed it with his thumb.

And then, when there was no response, he pressed on it more forcefully.

He must have been there ten full minutes and have rung a dozen times before he finally accepted that no one was going to answer. Nobody was home.

Menway stepped back from the door, almost to the kerb. He stared up bleakly at the building and its windows. Now that he inspected them more closely, he could see that they were pretty grimy. Beyond them, he could only get a faint impression of bare walls. Not a calendar, a clock, a desk lamp. Maybe his boss had given him the wrong information, because this place did not look as if it had been occupied in a good long time.

He glanced at his watch again. It was twenty to six.

Menway felt his temples crease. He had come all this way for nothing. How was he supposed to pass an evening in a town as dismal as this one?

Where was he even going to eat? This was the main street, and there was not even a café open.

Half way back to his car, something caught his eye that he had not noticed before. A poster, on an otherwise mossy section of wall. It was brand-new, the only brand-new thing that he had seen so far. And it read:

Which was tonight.

There was a stencil of a soccer ball beside the lettering. And he couldn't think how long it had last been since he had gone to a football match.

How could it be—he wondered, climbing into his car—that a town as small, as decrepit as this could maintain two whole football clubs?

Then he stared around again, and got his simple answer.

Maybe there was nothing else to do.

A small boy showed him to his room, announcing, “Me Da's not around."

He was only about seven years old, crop-headed, extremely skinny. And he had a Band-Aid stretched across one cheek. But he seemed perfectly bright and healthy otherwise, and comported himself as if he were fully used to running a hotel.

"I'll give you the double-room, seein’ as there's no one else stayin'."

It was sparsely-furnished, and looked like it had been decorated just after the War. And there was no TV, Menway noticed immediately. But the bed looked fairly comfortable, and besides, the sole alternative was sleeping in the car.

"Is there a café anywhere round here?” Menway asked. “A fast-food place, perhaps?"

The boy shrugged. “Not much call for eatin’ out round these parts. I can fry you somethin’ up, if you'd like?"

"That would be nice of you,” Menway answered gently, more than a little surprised.

Five minutes later, the child was back at his door, cutlery in one hand and a plate in the other on which stood two fried eggs, a thick chunk of fried bread, some mushrooms and a slice of sausage. These days, Menway ate far more lightly, keeping an eye on his cholesterol. But this was generous indeed from such a young child. Once again, it seemed he had no choice.

"Thank you."

He sat on the bed, propping the plate on his knees. The boy watched him closely.

"Alright, is it?"

Menway chewed. “It's fine."

"Good. I'll leave you be, then."

"Just a minute,” Menway said. “The football match tonight? Is it likely to be worth attending?"

The boy looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “Rangers and Athletic, like? Oh yeah, they're both terrific teams."

In which case, what were they doing here? And why'd he never heard of either?

"How far is the stadium?"

"About five minutes off by car,” the boy said. “Just follow the arrows."

Somehow—once he'd finished eating—he managed to doze off on the bedspread, fully-clothed. When he came awake again, it was with a sickeningly fast jerk. He rubbed his eyes, peered round at the unfamiliar room. Got that same sense of disorientation he had felt on the a50.

It was only when he checked his watch that he realised it was now 8.20. He would be late for the game.

The boy's word turned out to be quite reliable. It only took five minutes in the Vectra before the familiar outline of a small local sports stadium reared up into view. The car park, pot-holed in a dozen places, was completely empty, not a single vehicle in view. Which was extremely odd because, judging by the noise that emanated from the open roof, the place was full inside.

"Shaddaton!” the chant was going. “Shaddaton! Shaddaton!"

It was a slow insistent rumble as he got out, and it seemed to make the air around him pulse. But both teams were called ‘Shaddaton'. So ... which one was the crowd supporting?

When the chanting gave way to applause, he realised that the players had emerged onto the pitch.

The wind had changed direction and grown stronger and the temperature had dropped severely, a dense layer of cloud covering the sky. Menway pulled his collar up and thrust his hands into his pockets, and then hurried across to an opening marked entrance. Just inside it was a ticket booth, but it was darkened too, and had a blind pulled down across the window. Was he too late? The match sold out?

He peered along a concrete tunnel that seemed to emerge, at its far end, into the stands. There was no sign of any stewards. Nobody around to ask.

No turnstile either, he took note. It seemed that he could wander right in.

The chanting started up again. The same one as before.

And ... should he take advantage? A slight twinge of guilt brushed at him. Not even paying for a ticket felt to him like stealing. But it was hardly his fault that the ticket booth was shut.

Gingerly, he made his way into the tunnel, half-expecting a cross voice to snap at him and call him back. Nothing like that happened. And the tunnel, which he'd supposed from the rest of the town to be dank and dirty, was perfectly clean and litter-free.

He finally came up into a little but completely modern sports arena. Brightly-coloured plastic seats all gleaming in neat rows. Huge floodlights casting their glow down on a grass pitch like a billiard table. Menway gazed around, deeply surprised. Well, they seemed to take far better care of this place than of the areas they lived in!

The crowd—the place was almost full—had fallen silent again and was just watching the game. Menway's eye went to the players. One of the teams had on a white strip and the other team a black one. Which was Rangers, which Athletic? He had not a clue.

He went down several steps to where there were three empty seats directly by the aisle. Got himself settled into the end one.

And for the next ten minutes, his attention was grasped wholly by the match.

He was transfixed, in fact. Oblivious to his surroundings. Practically ... transported.

Because both teams were playing with equal skill, to a quite remarkable level. The thrill of watching a big London game came rushing back to him the more he watched.

In attack or defence, it made no difference at all. Dribbling, passing, heading, tackling, they were performed by all the players with a razor-sharp precision. Which was hardly what he'd have expected from a small-town, local team.

These players were all good enough, he registered with dull amazement, to be in the Premier League. To be in a Cup Final, in fact. In which case, what in the name of all that was holy were they doing in a place like this?

They were so evenly-matched, it turned out, that for the first half hour, although there were opportunities aplenty, no one scored an actual goal. And when a striker for the white team finally did so—slamming the ball into the back of the net from a distance of some thirty yards—the entire crowd rose to its feet, and the chanting started up again.

Menway finally looked around him.

There was not very much light to see by. Little of the bright glow of the floodlights reached back here. Most of the people round him were just silhouettes. And the faces that he could make out?

Were all—every one of them—partially hidden, by a flat cap pulled down hard across the brow, or a muffler or a sweatshirt hood. He got the absurd notion, for a moment, that everyone around him made their living robbing liquor stores. Was it just the coldness at this time of year, or did they always dress this way?

The partial features he could make out, though, ghost-grey from the lack of light ... he was not quite sure why, but they seemed rather unsettling to him. So slack and flat and bland. The eyes that he could see were extremely glassy. And the mouths, most unpleasant of all, were opening wide and shutting like the blow-hole in a whale.

They were chanting with stolid enthusiasm, and yet their expressions did not match their voices. To the last, they looked like they had all been caught in some strange dream.

"Shadda-ton!” they finished, giving that last syllable an extra emphasis. And then they all sat down again.

Oddly, Menway's unease did not last beyond that point. Because the game resumed, and within seconds he was caught up in its brilliance again. The faces he had seen were lost to his thoughts. What was happening on the brightly-lit green pitch was the only thing that mattered.

It must have been another half an hour before a player on the black team scored. Although he wasn't sure entirely. He'd been so engrossed that he had lost all track of time.

The crowd came to its feet again. “Shaddaton! Shaddaton!"

Menway took the opportunity to glance down at his watch.

9.35.

That couldn't be right. The first half of a soccer match lasted just forty-five minutes. Nothing could account for twenty minutes extra time.

He peered round, trying to see if there was a clock up on the walls somewhere, but there didn't seem to be.

His gaze went to the roof above the terraces. There were flagpoles up there, sporting the clubs’ pennants and even a Union Jack. None of them were stirring, so the wind must have died down.

The sky was still thick with cloud.

A whistle blew, out on the pitch.

He looked back at the match again.

When he finally found a moment to look at his watch again, it was gone ten o'clock. The entire game should have been over ... instead of which, they still seemed to be playing the first half.

Had he dozed off again, missed the break? No. This was wrong. This didn't seem to be a normal kind of football match.

Part of him just didn't care about that. Simply wanted to stare back at the two teams. Be enfolded in their brilliance all over again. Not doing so seemed to cause an ache inside him.

But he refused to give in, now. If he started watching again, would he ever look away?

Menway got carefully up, and studied the faces he had inspected before. They were exactly the same, no genuine excitement in them. But their glossed eyes were unblinking as they followed every last move of the game.

"When does this stop?” he tried to ask the man nearest him.

And got no response at all. Another goal had just gone in.

The man stood up with all the others, and his mouth came open wide.

"Shaddaton!"

And the chanting pursued Menway as he made his way back up the steps to the tunnel's mouth. He stopped there for a moment, glancing back. And realised something he had not noticed before. The clouds above the stadium were not even moving.

Trembling, he went quickly down the concrete tunnel, the same chant—"Shaddaton! Shaddaton!"—still snatching at his heels.

It made a little sense to him, since ... what else was there for them here? What else did they have to live for?

And what other reason did they have to call out loud their home-town's name?

The wind snatched at him hard as he emerged into the car park, almost bowling him over for a second. And then he was running for his Vectra, stamping on the gas, and heading off into the night.

The moon finally came out as he got clear of the town. It made no difference to Menway at all. He pressed his foot down harder on the pedal, hurtling across the dead flat landscape. His gaze was fixed beyond the windscreen, and he never once looked back.

He could still hear that chant, though, ringing through his head. Getting slightly louder all the time.

Was it possible that it would never stop?

Copyright © 2008 Tony Richards

SUBTLETY'S 4 SISSIES!

Eyes Without A Face (12th May, aka: Les Yeux sans visage) was made nearly five decades ago by Georges Franju, and it's one of the very select European horrors from that period which remains genuinely disturbing and haunting in equal measures today. It's an uncanny pulp fantasy that harks back to silent classics. Dr Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) is obsessed with restoring the disfigured face of his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob), locked away in the mad scientist's lab, where she wears a white mask. After getting suitably attractive flesh-donors by dastardly means, the skin-graft operations fail, regardless, driving the anguished Christiane back into hiding. Eventually, she becomes weary, afraid of her father's ruthlessness, and grows ashamed of watching others cruelly sacrificed for her transplant makeovers. Rejecting repeat surgery, Christiane turns against the unsuccessful project, and then she finally escapes into the world. Unforgettably disquieting imagery, from accomplished cinematographer and visual effects pioneer Eugen Schüfftan, is combined with outstanding music by composer Maurice Jarre, and Franju's masterly direction to produce a stunning, almost unique, visual poem, ultimately about the nature of beauty and madness, identity and medical ethics.

From the (undeniably!) sublime to the (faintly?) ridiculous, here comes The Sentinel (19th May) on DVD, directed by Michael Winner with chutzpah, his own brand of misplaced bravado, or something like aplomb. Cristina Raines portrays fashion model Alison, who thinks she's very lucky to be offered such a fine apartment in Brooklyn, despite its coterie of eccentric tenants, until she realises that all the creepy neighbours are long dead, and the building is thoroughly haunted. With a script adapted by Jeffrey Konvitz from his own novel, this is the old ‘house built on the gateway to hell’ story. A blind priest, living alone on the top floor, guards this cursed place. Living there makes poor Cristina gravely ill, mentally and physically. Not a New-York-minute too soon, plot-wise, she's driven to distraction or menaced by freaks. But, in a reassuringly Catholic twist, becomes a nun and replaces the suddenly deceased John Carradine. Oh, what a girl will do for a penthouse, eh? There are sundry grotesques, a few nightmarish scenes—borrowed from Polanski—yet the biggest shocks are reserved for celeb-spotting the supporting cast of veterans: Martin Balsam, José Ferrer, Ava Gardner (oh yes, really!), Arthur Kennedy, Burgess ("will you come to my cat's birthday party?") Meredith, Sylvia Miles, the great Eli Wallach, and several before-they-were-famous appearances or walk-ons: Chris Sarandon, Christopher Walken, Deborah Raffin, Jerry Orbach, Beverly D'Angelo, Jeff Goldblum, and look out for Tom Berenger and Nana Visitor right at the very end. Honestly, the only reason to catch this is to see all those slumming stars or then-novice actors.

Basically it's Near Dark meets Salem's Lot, but David Slade has turned Steve Niles’ comic book 30 Days Of Night (14th April) into an entertaining mess of vampiric horrors. It's an unfortunate mess due to its violent attacks seeming almost comical in the supposed—yet unconvincing—twilight of a month-long Alaskan nightfall, but mainly because of long waiting periods where narrative inertia drags on (like a bloated corpse that is delivered too late for its own funeral!) between dramatic bloodthirsty scenes. The sheriff (Josh Hartnett, Hollywood Homicide, Black Dahlia), and fire marshal (Melissa George, Alias, Turistas), of northernmost refinery town Barrow try their best to save the locals and keep neighbours from harm during the vampires’ hunting expedition, but friends or family ‘turned’ by bites need urgent dispatch, and a risky trek through a white-out blizzard to gather supplies and reach a safer house feels more like desperation than a survival plan. Forgiving the fact that Sunless days never look especially dark, and overlooking the peculiar vampire language (requiring English subtitles) and weirdly odd faces that makes them seem like ‘foreign devils', this snowbound chiller has enough grisly jolts (beheadings and/or dismemberments) to please many undemanding gore-hounds, despite its lack of true suspense (stolen phones, dogs slain, helicopter wrecked—all merely reported instead of being depicted), and yet such purely-technical merits only reveal how blatantly derivative the siege storyline actually is. This high-concept thriller with competent special make-up effects will pass an evening's viewing time agreeably enough, but vanish from memory by morning.

Since Buffy and Angel settled their scores with undead hazards aplenty, you'd think vampirism on TV was done and dusted. Blade: The Series (21st April) takes over from Wesley Snipes’ action-horror trilogy and sees Blade, played here by rap-star Kirk ‘Sticky Fingaz’ Jones, return to hometown Detroit, to find he's not alone in surviving the viral plague unleashed in Blade Trinity. Pilot movie, House Of Chthon, introduces ex-soldier turned vengeful neo-vamp Krista (Jill Wagner), who infiltrates the underworld elite of “homines nocturnae,” hoping to destroy the fanged night-breed, once and for all. With only thirteen episodes made before it was axed, David Goyer's spin-off show makes just a tiny splash, uncut on DVD. As expected, our vampire-slaying hero reckons he's menacing (scowling in shades), acts tough with assorted kung fu henchmen, plays it cool with the streetwise heroine, and yet lacks even a smidgen of the taciturn presence which Snipes brought to the role. As the fiendish gang-leader Marcus, Neil Jackson conforms to stereotype as British villain of the piece, a wannabe hybrid of the ‘turned’ in a power-play conflict with purebloods. Disagreements between twelve ‘houses’ resemble both a class struggle and ethnic cleansing, when the complacent upper caste seem likely to be overthrown by disrespectful lower orders, by means of a racially-targeted virus. A ‘flashback’ episode contradicts the established origin tale of orphaned Blade being saved by mentor Whistler, with a numbingly dull soapy anecdote showing a reunion of our hero Eric ‘Blade’ Brooks with his father (Richard Roundtree). Apart from Krista's intriguing double-agent character-arc, there's an overly-curious FBI guy (Larry Poindexter), a pre-teen matriarch vampire named Charlotte (Emily Hirst) who likes feasting on babies, and Blade travels on missions to Berlin and Paris for welcome changes of scenery.

Of course, none of this routine action stuff matches the memorably imaginative British TV series Ultraviolet, from which Blade borrows subplots—like IVF pregnancy/surrogate motherhood for impure vampires. Matters of mad science are somewhat awkwardly balanced with mystic afterlife visions, and memory transfer inherited via bloodlines, following Krista's sweat-lodge trips, but its hallucinatory sequences are undoubtedly this flawed show's most fascinating and vivid moments.

Based on a series of novels by Tanya Huff, Canadian TV series Blood Ties (28th January) was created by Peter Mohan, and concerns private eye Vicki Nelson (Christina Cox, the mercenary in Jane Doe), who meets vampire Henry (Kyle Schmid), while she's on the rebound from a relationship with Seattle cop, Mike (Dylan Neal), her ex-partner on the force. Dimple-chinned or square-jawed designer clotheshorses are the male leads, neither of which are good actors, while Vicki is portrayed by a former stuntwoman, ensuring action scenes—at least—have a convincing hands-on appeal. Every detective needs a helpmate, and Vicki finds that wide-eyed Goth babe Coreen (Gina Holden, Flash Gordon), can hold the fort, hit the books, and play it blasé on the reception desk for the benefit of new clients needing reassurance that they have come to the right place, and Nelson Investigations’ growing reputation for handling all manner of weird X-Files’ mysteries is well-founded. Every hero with a badge needs a reliable partner and/or a sidekick. Mike's workplace is ably staffed by Dave (rotund Keith Dallas), who knows where the doughnuts and satirical one-liners are stashed, and proficient Kate (Françoise Yip, Black Mask), who can do more than her fair share of legwork and phone calls. This being a cross-genre drama that's stocked to the rafters with bizarre or suspicious deaths, Vicki and Mike are both pleased to discover there's a sympathetic coroner (Nimet Kanji), to help make sense of generic monster-of-the-week plotlines. These are mainly concerned with the wicked machinations of Astaroth, a banished demon eager to rule the world in whatever guise via meat-puppetry is available. Vicky also confronts a voodoo zombie, is hired by a ghost, tracks down a man-eating were-woman, gets caught in a Groundhog Day style time-loop, and struggles to free a psychic wrongly convicted of murder. Unlike subgenre variant The Dresden Files (which traded on the lasting appeal of Martin Campbell's cult TV movie Cast A Deadly Spell, starring Fred Ward as the Lovecraftian detective), Mohan's potboiler scenario engages with assorted supernatural job lots but adopts a relatively serious tone, lacking in essential components like dry wit or character-based humour.

The strife-ridden downbeat finale has a bemusing combo of random brutality, demonic possession, and story-arc domino effects, as the heroine's personal hassles and professional dangers, all reach an unsurprising exorcism climax, and then she's abandoned (just as expected) by Mike and Henry, left alone in tears, to hack the emotional fallout of her solitary lifestyle and commitment hesitancy.

A steady build-up to lacklustre heights also features in Stephen King's Needful Things (21st April), directed by Fraser Clarke Heston (the late Charlton's son), coming to this project after directing his father's Sherlock Holmes and Long John Silver in a couple of best-forgotten TV productions. Given its first rate cast—Max von Sydow as wicked shopkeeper Leland Gaunt, and Ed Harris as the town's sheriff, ably supported by Bonnie Bedelia (Salem's Lot), Amanda Plummer (Static, Pulp Fiction), and J.T. Walsh—what could go wrong? Well, for starters, even quirkily talented screenwriter W.D. Richter cannot salvage any smart Faustian twists from King's tamed gothic melodrama. Dealing in heart's desires for a pittance and favours results in childish pranks, which escalate into full-blown blood feuds, bringing murder, street mayhem, vengeful madness, hellfire and damnation to Castle Rock. While devilishly underhanded scheming nearly destroys the largely amiable community, there are unsympathetic caricatures among the locals, and a dawdling pace to storytelling that undermines any moments of suspense, so this is a ‘satanic apocalypse’ where you might be rooting for the bad guy. Its focus on Americana and materialism reveal the basic stupidities of modern life, even if its triumphant closure with the heroic sheriff's passionate speech about “no more killing” champions human decency, but the final confrontation fails to convince as moral victory on any level but that of hollow absurdity. Incitement to violence motivated by impure spite, and hints of sordid erotica, spike the mischievous soul-taker's brainwashing seductions of both the innocent and the gullible. However, since The Exorcist unflinchingly established what's what for the corrupting influence of absolute malice, any mere suggestion of unconscionable evildoing now seems insufficient for truly compelling screen drama. What's really missing here is the killing-joke: the demise of clergy and children (seemingly warranted by events, yet scrupulously avoided), and a clear demonstration of just how far these ‘sinners’ are willing to fall to get what they covet.

There are no moral certainties in UK-USA production Waz (16th June). Far more than simply another exploitative torture-porn movie, this is a surprisingly intelligent, if mercilessly grim, crime-horror blend from writer Clive Bradley and director Tom Shankland, who both worked mainly in television drama until now. Melissa George, from 30 Days Of Night, stars opposite Stellan Skarsgård ('Bootstrap Bill’ in Pirates Of The Caribbean's sequels). They both play New York cops. Rookie detective Helen is sharp, eager, overcoming self-doubts. Eddie is a broken, haunted veteran, clinging to a threadbare humanity. Confronted with a case of apparently gang-related murders, they find that equation ‘w(triangle)z’ carved into victim's bodies has greater implications than straightforward street-war, and precinct-newcomer Helen discovers links back to a heinous gang-rape and murder case that Eddie and his former partner neglected to prosecute with professional diligence.

Drawing on the edgy style of David Fincher's influential Se7en, the talented Shankland's powerful character-study expertly pries open psychological wounds, to probe extremes of pain and truth in betrayal and forgiveness. The gay subplot turns around police-informant Daniel (Ashley Walters, Sugarhouse), but the main drama is centred on ruthless Jean Lerner (the brilliant Selma Blair, of Kill Me Later, Hellboy, The Fog remake). She expressively declares, “There is no love,” even while reluctantly, but determinedly, struggling to accept the tautology of Price's equation, strapping her tormentors’ loved ones to an electric chair, and then offering each vulnerably-guilty ‘test’ subject a murderously unbearable execution ‘deal', for release from their own continuing agony. There are only a couple of mainstream-cinema ‘safe’ moments here, but no sentimental excuses whatsoever. This movie is gritty, saddening, and mightily disturbing stuff.

Johannes Roberts, another upstart British director, is having none of that. When Evil Calls (16th June) is a TV mini-series of appallingly crass mischief, spewed forth in expanded form on DVD, focused on a charmless schoolgirl's craze for a fright-clown djinn, offering to grant wishes in exchange for spreading a viral curse via cell-phone text forwarding. Cheaply shot on video, this effortlessly wastes a professional cast. These include Sean Pertwee as the seedy janitor/ranting-narrator introducing (by drunken ramblings) twenty crude vignettes about magically fixing selfish teens’ wishful thinking and juvenile angst with predictably tragic comeuppances. Chris Barrie (Red Dwarf) plays the headmaster as a perfectly gormless berk. Dominique Pinon (from Roberts’ earlier Hellbreeder and DarkHunters, yet known for his roles in French art-house, and Alien: Resurrection) portrays detective Ringwald like the scoundrel-hybrid of Clouseau and Columbo. Extreme close-ups of Pertwee quickly become annoying. Lesbian smut, infantile puns and lame horror jokes with ridiculously obvious punch lines stand-in for a storyline. The J-Horror phenomenon Ringu is crossed with Wishmaster and Simon Spracking's Funny Man. There are so many unhappy accidents this school needs its own ambulance service, but knowingly corny humour is not much fun at all. Cheesy gag deliveries here would make even Basil Brush and Bernard Manning blush with shame.

Buried Alive (9th June) is a standard Evil Dead rip-off, complete with helpless young victims assembled for shocks, confusion, and hatchet-job murders in a remote isolation. Friends of college dropout Zane (Terence Jay), including his cousin Rene (Leah Rachel, in her film debut) and her sorority pledges, all stay at a haunted homestead, where Zane's great-grandpa was a prospector with a lost fortune in gold. Gramps’ squaw/wife was buried alive, according to a local legend, which is duly exploited by ranch-caretaker and prankster Lester (Tobin Bell, Saw), to annoy the youngsters and curtail night parties. But a desert witch pops up anyplace she's unwelcome, and the ghost hag does a mean mad axe-woman routine. Filching stalker motifs from Elm Street apparitions, writer Art Monterastelli (Total Recall 2070, Nowhere Man) and director Robert Kurtzman (Demolitionist, Wishmaster) blunder though sorry attempts at suspense, and display high-quality corpse make-ups of unlucky housemates after their predictable, unimpressive death scenes. As Lester's scar-faced hoax-freak is not much different to an otherwise ‘real’ undead pest, alleged terrors rapidly descend into tacky ‘hazing’ antics, and outright tedium.

Meanwhile, director Brett Piper (Bacterium, Shock-O-Rama, Nymphoid Barbarian In Dinosaur Hell) returns with a remastered version of Drainiac (24th June) to amuse fans of trash movies. Originally shot on 16mm, ten years ago, this benefits from digitally enhanced special effects, and has been cropped from standard 4:3 to widescreen 16:9 without compromising image quality. Troubled teen Julie (Georgia Hatzis) and friends are stranded at night in a rundown house where flesh-eating slime oozes from leaky pipes and bloody tentacles writhe up from creaky sink, bath and toilet. Cleverly mixing Evil Dead clichés with The Blob-style menaces, throwing in arresting Poltergeist borrowings, goofy Elm Street shenanigans, and closing with an unexpectedly quirky Amityville Horror demolition, this alternates realities between Julie's ghastly night-terrors and daydreams about a vampire beastie with disturbingly Freudian aspects, and less fleeting scare sequences where supporting-cast ‘victims’ are boiled alive, steamed to death, or drowned in flashy floods. Glaring continuity errors, cheapo multiple-exposure phantasms, and laughter in the face of adversity that adds to the generic fun but weakens dramatic impact, headline the low-budget film's many faults. But compensations include the heroine's gratuitous nudity, the poetic-justice mauling of a local wannabe bad-boy after his attempted rape of Julie's blonde pal, a severe rainstorm in the basement, some inspired reverse-photography for the watery attacks, and the third-act's full-moon arrival of ghost-buster Leon Plumber, leading a pentagram ceremony (like some leery pantomime rehearsal version of Terence Fisher's climax for The Devil Rides Out), to clean house, and exorcise those elemental forces haunting the property. A dizzying bedlam of images deliver us from the evil of stop-motion spiders, a weirdo toothy troll, and the seemingly inevitable vortex of ghosts, before this proverbial ‘old dark house’ becomes just a great hole in the ground. Much better than rubbishy Troma productions, Drainiac is actually pretty good, and was certainly worth the restoration job.

Written and directed by Michael Feifer, The Graveyard (30th June) is a basic slasher movie where teenagers’ kicks and dares wind up causing panic and a death. Five years later, the paroled prankster and his girlfriend attend the survivors’ reunion, near the rancid plains (sorry, Placid Pines) cemetery, and soon the horror, the horror, starts all over again ... This low-budget feature has exactly the kind of plotline that fans 25 years ago would have considered the weakest form of indie cinema hackwork. Derogatory comments might have been made about its leering voyeurism in a gratuitous shower scene, uninspired scene-thefts from Friday The 13th, tepid violence, feeble acting by a nominally attractive cast, and general lowest-common-denominator appeal. A previous generation of genre critics would have tagged it simpleminded video fodder and soon forgot about it ... Good thinking!

So long awaited by horror fans, we have probably all grown old and decrepit in the meantime, and forgotten why anyone ever wanted to see this in the first place, Dario Argento's Mother Of Tears (21st April, aka: La Terza Madre) follows the eerie Suspiria ('mother of sighs'/'whispers'), and genre classic Inferno ('mother of shadows'/'darkness'), forming the director's infamous Three Mothers trilogy of suspenseful shockers about witches. Although Tenebrae is often mistaken for the second movie, this sequel is the official finale (unless the filmmaker opts to continue, with a spin-off like ‘mother of doubt’ or a hellish reunion for coven leaders in ‘mother of all battles'). Anyway, topping the bill after the much earlier films’ distraught heroines (Jessica Harper and Irene Miracle) set a high bar, is Asia Argento, who's already proved in The Stendhal Syndrome (aka: La Sindrome di Stendhal), and Phantom Of The Opera (aka: Il Fantasma dell'opera) that no one plays the disturbed ingénue or does frantic run-around action for horror maestro Argento better than his daughter. Completing the family reunion, Asia's real mother Daria Nicolodi appears in ghostly form, as heroine Sarah's guardian angel. While crazy foreign women storm through the streets, haunted Sarah is advised to visit a padre (Udo Kier) for occult expertise. He grumbles about the coming threats of “chaos and human despair” and is butchered as soon as he's explained the plot.

A casket and urn are dug up outside a Roman cemetery. Three carvings and a dagger are found in the sealed box, and a museum curator who opened it is brutally disembowelled by hooded figures. Following a ceremony of ritual magic, the whole city is plagued by a senselessly violent crime wave (from thuggish vandalism to gang rape, weirdly-calm infanticide, and cop killings). Police baffled!

There's church burnings and cannibalism, plus eye-gouging, crotch-stabbing, and impalement, in a brace of cheap-tricky frights that are nonetheless effective, while frightened Sarah acquires psychic powers, which somehow include very useful invisibility to evil menace. Bewilderment and delirium are on screen, and also viewers’ likely reactions, when Mater Lachrymarum (Israeli model Moran Atias, going starkers for the climactic scenes) finally emerges from catacombs’ shadows to oversee a sideshow bloodbath of anguish, and the supernatural destruction of Rome. Can harassed moral champion Sarah survive the corpse-strewn cesspit of death, and prevent the ascendancy of black magic? Argento had a marked return to form with millennial flick Sleepless (aka: Non ho sonno), and even lesser chiller The Card Player (aka: Il Cartaio) boasted a few winningly outré moments but, despite a few graphic scenes of hardcore gore, it must be said this movie is an unsatisfactory follow-up, and it's terribly and tragically disappointing as a belated sequel to the abovementioned witchcraft shockers. Let's hope that forthcoming thriller Giallo has more to offer than just torture-porn or slasher mania.

While governments openly condone abduction and torture under the ‘legal’ guise of ‘extraordinary rendition', supposedly horrific American crime dramas like Matt Zettel's indie feature debut The Cellar Door (26th May) no longer seems to frighten or alarm. Weirdly, this is one instance where the serial killer's bloke-next-door ordinariness actually compromises the dramatic effectiveness of the film's kidnap scenario, while its blatant voyeurism and prolonged caged-female scenes become rather boring. Although its nightmare sequences deserve praise for upping levels of cynically grotesque imagery, and a sense of claustrophobia for the workshop ‘dungeon’ is enhanced by contrast with brighter atmosphere when the kidnapper visits his local supermarket, there's not really anything here about Pavlovian psychological conditioning or Stockholm syndrome ‘romance’ that wasn't explored to much better effect in Roland Joffe's Captivity.

Taking a different viewpoint on the why-are-we-watching theme, Gregory Hoblit's Untraceable (23rd June) pits FBI cyber-crime detective Jennifer (Diane Lane, Hollywoodland), against a young ‘genius’ hacker that gets his online jollies offering Internet users a chance to ‘participate’ in snuff-video murders. Uploading a Saw database module to William Malone's FeardotCom matrix, this is a competent, yet undistinguished, techno-chiller, eagerly focusing on attention to detail (jargon, hoaxes, security, and ideas) rather than just simplemindedly co-opting rightwing moral outrage at what unfettered freedoms and easy access to multimedia consumer-gadgets make permissible. There are grating lapses in logic and good sense, as the usually cautious heroine wanders stupidly into danger, but palpable horrors abound when a spate of kidnappings leads to deadly game web-casts viewed by millions of Americans. Genre fans might expect superior material from the director of Fallen and Frequency, and Untraceable is not lacking in production values, and casting a mature leading lady amongst its relatively nondescript supporting players (Billy Burke, Colin Hanks, Peter Lewis), means this admittedly ‘sensationalist’ plotline appears well-grounded in a convincing reality, without pointlessly-eccentric characters or incongruous Hollywood glamour to distract us from confronting the cold brutality of the torments and the initial helplessness of even tech-savvy cops to stop the killings. It's not half as entertaining as Jonathan Demme's great Silence Of The Lambs, or as much twisted fun as Jon Amiel's Copycat, but, as a meticulously unprejudiced social commentary upon the genuinely worrying rise of online transgressions, it certainly makes overblown fantasy-actioner Die Hard 4.0 look sillier than ever.

A student-film idea is given a blockbuster-sized budget in Cloverfield (9th June) by genre newcomer Matt Reeves. Although it's been highly acclaimed by some critics, this remix of Godzilla and The Blair Witch Project is just as insipidly stupid as it's extraordinarily well targeted for the handycam and iPhone generation. While youngsters are videoed at a Manhattan party, something gigantic runs amok in the night city. Death and disaster is everywhere, nobody is safe, and horrors lurk around the next corner, while a group of friends attempt to escape from New York. Instead of a standard disaster movie narrative we get one confused bystander's perspective from ground zero. Without genuinely interesting characters, except for Lizzy Kaplan's likeable yet doomed Marlena, this has nowhere to go except its obviously tragic conclusion and takes the desperately slow road towards that painfully irritating destination. Using no-frills amateur-video styled camerawork to record a citywide ‘catastrophe’ is hardly clever, and certainly not innovative, filmmaking—but Hollywood loves such one-trick pony rides, and fake-documentary framing devices have become fashionable again. Lacking a full cast of quirky stars to match that of the similarly anxious Miracle Mile, short of the frequent widescreen spectacle that made Spielberg's otherwise fairly pointless War Of The Worlds remake tolerably-bad nonsense, wanting of emotional responses but for recycled hysteria, devoid of anything more worthwhile than shallowest novelty value, it's a train-wreck apocalyptic thriller wearing a silly hat. It's not even commendable as absurdist farce. One to rent, not buy, as copies on disc might be next year's landfill.

Here's another one: Five Across The Eyes (5th May) is a zero budget, Z-grade thriller about five teenage girls driving into a night of hell after getting lost on the way home. Squabbling chitchat and giggles soon becomes crying in shame and squealing in terror when a gun-toting madwoman blocks the road, orders the girls out of their car, and starts abusing and then attacking them during a lengthy pursuit along back lanes. This road rage movie is never especially thrilling, or even blackly amusing, because its real-time dramas are filmed entirely from inside the girls’ vehicle. Yes, the camera never leaves the van, and photography is limited to grainy video shot using available light. This is a novice production that's irritating to begin with, and only becomes worse as it goes on. If you have already seen The Hills Have Eyes, or The Hitcher, or any of their numerous imitators, then guessing the outcome of ‘FATE’ will be easy and watching this is an unnecessary waste of your time. Perhaps it's supposed to be an allegory of something (with all laughing, cursing, bleeding, shitting, vomiting, confessing, raving, plotting, in one place)? Attempting to video a claustrophobic nightmare requires first-class skill with camera and lighting, not just a painfully obvious gimmick. Anyone interested in a well-used car? Despite its razor-sharp editing, there is nothing particularly new or appealing about this flick.

Black Water (16th June) is based on a true story. A trio of Australian holidaymakers take a backwaters’ tour of mangrove swamps until a crocodile ambushes the leisurely fishing trip, overturning the river-guide's boat, and forcing them into unsafe refuge in the trees. Eventually, two of the vacationers are killed, leaving the youngest to fight the killer-croc and escape alone. Easy to dismiss as either unsentimental tragedy or a Darwin awards’ contender—as unintentional black comedy, this solidly constructed, slightly arty, monster movie offers a starkly chilling warning to the unwary and the foolish. We like thinking humankind has long since conquered the natural world, but forget how much our dominance of environments depends entirely on circumstances. Existence in the wild is precarious at best. Survival becomes a ‘grudge match’ between luck and judgement. Crocodiles are remnants of the dinosaurs, of course, and this drama reminds us nobody's told them that we're in charge of this planet now. Unlike the oversized or sci-fi mutant creatures of Lake Placid, Blood Surf (aka: Krocodylus), Stewart Raffill's Croc, Greg Mclean's Rogue, or Tobe Hooper's underrated Crocodile (is it wise to plug such wholly derivative forthcoming flicks like Jurassic Croc, or effects’ wizard Kevin O'Neill's directing-debut, DinoCroc?), the directors of Black Water deploy very few obvious special effects, which adds to its dramatic veracity, and sets it apart from the burgeoning subgenre of man-eating crocodile movies.

Stacked against its merely cult-campy original, David Cronenberg's classic The Fly (19th May) is probably the greatest SF-horror remake ever. It's now available on blu-ray, complete with an excellent director's commentary. Although John Carpenter's 1982 masterpiece The Thing is deservedly unchallenged as the finest sci-fi shocker of them all, Crony's update expertly balances gruesome skits and pathos with affecting tragedy and grim humour, revealing a greater intellectual superiority over its earlier version than Carpenter's revisionist monster-showy chiller does, measured against acknowledged SF favourite The Thing From Another World (1951). Degrees of significant improvement between the 1958 Fly and its 1986 incarnation ensure this picture takes the lead from Carpenter's movie in the comparative remake stakes, but it's close run at the finishing line. Taking full advantage of the actual relationship between stars Jeff Goldbum and Geena Davis (both from parody Transylvania 6-5000), director Cronenberg spotlights a romantic triangle between scientist Seth, and journalist Veronica, and her sleazy—ultimately sympathetic—boss Stathis Borans (John Getz, Blood Simple), while also tackling medical ethics, refining the particulars of body-horror that readily identify this filmmaker's oeuvre, and examining the conflicted nature of Seth's idealistic ambitions and human frailties that prompt his grotesque, yet deeply poignant, fate. Despite roller-coaster ups and downs for the sophisticated principals’ emotional states, this was certainly not your standard three-hanky weepy even for the decade (of challenging dramas about modern love's jealousies or casual affairs) it was made in. Astute intelligence and skilful storytelling are trademarks of Cronenberg's work so, in retrospect, perhaps it's not really surprising that this remarkably compelling misadventure into experimental teleportation and inadvertent genetic-mutation, that results in wholly ambiguous yet nonetheless horrifying symptoms of ‘disease', ends with an ‘assisted-suicide’ by shotgun blast, after the operatic finale's confrontation between heroic Stathis and the broodingly obsessive Brundlefly.

Copyright © 2008 Tony Lee

DEATH IS THE STORY

We all think about death at one time or another. It would be unusual if the death of a relative or friend didn't prompt us to reflect on our own mortality. But for most of us, bar those for whom confronting the reality of death on a regular basis—doctors, nurses, the police and armed forces—to spend time contemplating death is perceived either as a sign of mental illness or as something unnatural. Yet for writers, thinking about death is, or should be, a crucial part of what we do. Particularly if what you write is horror since at the root of all horror fiction is the fear of death.

A few years back a friend asked me if I was afraid of dying. Though I responded glibly that I didn't really think about my own death at all, that I was too busy living, the question unsettled me. It seemed a peculiar thing to discuss between two friends in good health and in no immediate danger of dying. It turned out that she quite often thought about dying and she had no problem admitting this, or her fear of her future extinction. Maybe women find it easier than men to admit their fears but I was struck by the fact that despite being a practicing Christian, her faith seemed to give her little solace. That conversation made me realise that in relation to writing, any musings I'd had on death were purely abstract. How might I kill off a particular character? Should I go into detail? Will this death scare the reader? Will it leave them satisfied or disturbed? I had rarely thought about the reality of death, not just the effect on those left behind, but its randomness, its finality, its incomprehensibility.

Though I've tried to take a more honest approach to death in my stories since then, I don't think I've come really close to representing the emotional reality of the fear of dying. In the last three months two events have confirmed my belief that although it may be difficult, writers of horror should strive to get it right. The first involves a childhood friend I hadn't seen or spoken to in ten years or more. A mechanic, he was crushed to death when the cab of the truck on which he was working, collapsed on top of him. No warning, no time to prepare, no lingering after the event, just a sudden and immediate extinction of life. He was my own age, forty-eight, with a wife and two young kids. In the second, the wife of an acquaintance in the village where I grew up, an intelligent, sociable woman in her late thirties with three children, chose a particularly stormy day to walk into a lake just a mile from her home and drown herself. She had given no indication of suicidal tendencies, shown no sign of depression, nor did she leave any final note. Both, as the cliché goes, had everything to live for.

For those who knew these two people, their deaths were shocking. I've tried to get my mind round the awful stone cold suddenness of the first, tried to imagine what, if anything, he felt. Was there a split second, a half second, of awareness, of knowing that death was imminent? If so, what thoughts occupied that tiny fragment of time? Did he have time enough to be afraid? I guess the woman must have had more than enough time and yet it didn't stop her. What horrible pain could make her contemplate her own demise, think through the finality of death and still go through with it? How could a fear of life be strong enough to overwhelm the fear of death? I don't wish to cheapen the deaths of these two people by mentioning them here, or to aggravate the sufferings of their families. I can't feel their pain, nor would I want to, but as a writer I can't help being curious about the last thoughts and feelings of the deceased. Why? Because as a writer engaged in the business of evoking or conveying fear, I've always assumed that the most powerful fear must be the fear of death.

And yet death itself remains unknowable to us. Even horror writers have difficulty expressing or even understanding the nature of what it is people fear about death. The quote from Lovecraft is helpful here: though we can understand the idea of a life ending, we can't know what it is to experience that terminal moment. Perhaps it's death's inconceivability that terrifies us. Researchers who have studied our fear of death have divided it into four main types: fear of pain, fear of eternal punishment, fear of the unknown, and fear of non-existence. The first two are comprehensible. Nobody—masochists aside—enjoys the experience of pain, while for those with strong religious faith—like the friend I referred to earlier—the possibility of eternal damnation can be a very real fear. I would hazard a guess that most horror fiction exploits or explores aspects of these two fears. From vampires to tales of possession, from serial killers to ‘torture’ fiction as portrayed in the Saw movies, these are the most recognisable forms of horror. The supernatural in fiction comes much closer to conveying the idea of the inconceivable, and apart from Lovecraft himself, writers such as M.R. James, Shirley Jackson, Robert Aickman, Thomas Ligotti, Peter Straub and Stephen King have all written significant works which exploit our fear of the unknown.

But stories which attempt to engage with the final type of death fear—the fear of non-existence—are much rarer. Poe's ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ is an early example of a story in which there is an attempt to convey the absolute horror of non-existence, as reported to the living—albeit briefly—by Valdemar himself. In science fiction, Thomas Disch explored the psychological implications for his protagonist of foreknowledge of non-existence in Camp Concentration. Some of Philip Dick's best work dealt with questions about the perception of reality, and the paranoia that haunts such novels as Ubik and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch suggests, in a very real sense, a pervasive doubt over the certainty of one's own existence. Harlan Ellison's ‘Shatterday’ posits a scenario in which the protagonist becomes a witness to the theft not only of his identity but of his existence. Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves plays complex and disturbing games with the nature of reality and manages both to convey the protagonists’ growing sense of dread at the prospect of individual extinction and to provoke a powerful unease in the reader when forced to contemplate the prospect of non-existence. One final work which deals directly with the theme is Jeff VanderMeer's story ‘In the Hours After Death'. In a few short pages, VanderMeer paints a vividly imagined portrait of consciousness lingering helplessly after death, re-examining memories before they slip away to leave only the memory of lifelessness, of non-being. It's a powerful and unsettling story that shows what can be achieved when writers of horror set aside the genre's familiar tropes and grapple instead with the fears most of us dare not face.

Copyright © 2008 Mike O'Driscoll

The pressure started in August with a long-distance call.

"We'd all love to have you here, Amy. It would be great if you could come. Really great."

I didn't say anything, I never do. Not when my brother gets on to that topic. I just stay silent, when the pressure starts.

I listened to the hum of the phone line.

He didn't give up. He never does. “Sarah and me. And the girls. We'd all love to see you. I mean it."

I hung up the phone.

"Bad news?” said Tish, my flat-mate, from the couch.

"Christmas,” I said.

"Christmas is bad news,” she said. “When you're older than eight it always sucks."

She'd been my flat-mate for a whole two weeks and we still knew little about each other, but we both knew we were going to get on.

"Hey, want to do Christmas together?” she said. “Here? Just the two of us?"

"Tish, it's August. It's a bit early to be making plans."

"You think you're going to get a better offer? Think about it—Christmas here, no family, no forced smiles at crap presents, just drunkenness and back-to-back DVDs. What's not to like?"

"Who's going to cook?"

"The Indian down the road will be open. We'll get a takeaway. Curry for Christmas lunch, what could be better?"

It didn't take much thinking about. It was a prior engagement. It was a ready-made cast-iron excuse. “Done deal,” I said.

"Good,” she said. “Just don't buy me bloody candles."

In September my brother called again.

For once I had an answer. “Look I'm really sorry, but I've got plans already."

"You sure?"

"Yeah. It's firm. I'm sorry, but—"

"It's just..."

"I know,” I said.

We hung up awkwardly.

When he rang in October he gave me bad news, and a different kind of pressure.

I couldn't bear to go to the funeral. I hate funerals. I always have done, ever since I was a child.

My brother insisted I went to this one, but I pictured my favourite grandmother looking down from heaven and telling me: “You stick to your guns, girl. Don't take any rubbish from him.” She said things like that. It's why she was my favourite grandmother.

That and the fact that she'd said in her will that she wasn't fussed about a funeral but she definitely wanted a wake. My brother hated the idea. That added to the appeal.

So I skipped the funeral and drove instead to the designated pub.

Inside it was cosy and warm and already well-filled with saddened friends of the deceased. They were all in their 80s and 90s and couldn't possibly have made the church service, given that they could barely walk unassisted. But the pub, well that was entirely different. They gained new life when it came to the pub.

I got a drink and found a table with two familiar faces. The old man's eyes lit up at the sight of me. “It's the littl'un!"

"Hello, Mr Nash,” I said.

"Eva, she remembers my name! Come littl'un, sit down, sit down."

"Is there room?” I said.

"Room? Sure there is, sure there is. Move yourself over Eva, let the littl'un sit down next to me. Not often I get to sit next to such to a pretty young thing."

Eva, distant, moved over.

I hesitated, wondering how brave I was feeling, but I sat down between the two of them.

"Hello Mrs Nash,” I said to Eva.

Her hearing's not so good. Most times she doesn't hear you and stares into space, preoccupied.

She died five years ago, but she had gone through and beyond and retained her Eva-ness.

And she recognised me. “Oh my. The littl'un! How lovely."

"See!” said Mr Nash, to me. “See!"

We smiled at each other, me and Mr Nash, like the living do in the presence of ghosts.

"But—” said Tish.

I knew I was gabbling, but I couldn't help it. I just wanted to get it out in the open. After the funeral I had taken a risk and told her everything. The unabridged version.

Tish was under her duvet on the couch. Looking scared.

"Amy,” she said, “are you on anything?"

"No. This is real."

"You spoke to a dead woman."

"Lots of dead women. And men."

"But..."

There were further questions.

We talked some more.

Then another question.

"Is this like The Sixth Sense?” she said, brow furrowed. “Am I dead too?"

"No. You're not dead. I'm not dead. No one is. I mean, lots of people are, but none that you know."

"Right,” she said. “Okay,” she said. “So. You talk to dead people, that's all."

She tried to look alright with the idea.

"It's just good manners,” I said. “Like: speak when you're spoken to."

She nodded, slowly. Taking it in. “And those pills in the bathroom cabinet?"

"Thyroid,” I said. “Promise."

We talked some more.

Then another, worse, thought struck her and she pulled the duvet tight around her.

"What?” I asked her.

"Are they here? The dead?” She looked round, frantic. Thin air was suddenly a threat.

"No,” I said. “No dead here. No ghosts. None."

"Promise?"

To be honest, a home always has the dead in, but they're usually very faint. Far too faint to see. Just a sense of a whisper, here and there. I didn't tell her that, though.

"No, there's no ghosts here, at least none that I've seen,” I said, wording it carefully.

"Thank God,” said Tish. “So who knows about your sight?"

"My family. A few very close friends. You."

Then she looked at me a long time, making up her mind. “Okay. You have spiritualist tendencies. I've heard of it before, and I sort of believe in it and I can live with it just about, but don't do it anywhere near me, ever. I'm serious. No ghosts here, promise?"

I nodded. Sober and trustworthy.

"And you promise me we're all alive?"

"Totally alive,” I said.

"There's no twist at the end?"

"None,” I said, “I swear."

We survived it, Tish and I.

Useful, that.

Because in November it was back to the pressure from my brother.

"Why does it get to you so much?” said Tish, holding me as I wept after the call.

"Long story,” I said, when I could speak. “Long fucking story."

"One of those long fucking stories which has such a happy ending that it makes a girl cry for half an hour?"

"No,” I said. “Not one of those."

"Thought not,” she said, softly.

And I cried some more. Proper crying. Ugly snot and tears and despair crying. You'll know it if you've done it.

"Hush,” said Tish. “Hush."

I did my best to hush. My best wasn't very good.

"You want to tell me the story?” she asked, when I was quieter.

"You up for it?"

"Hey, I know everything else. I know that you're see-ghosts-girl. I know your target weight. I know what you shout when you come."

Our bedrooms were next to each other. I'd had some dubious one-night stands.

I wiped some snot from my upper lip. “No you don't. You know what I shout when I'm faking it."

"Just tell me the story,” she said.

And she held me real close then. Real close.

So I told her.

Her name was Alice. Alice-Jane.

She was five when she died.

I was seven, my brother was nine.

She was my little sister, and she died.

It was murder.

The story got a lot of coverage. There was a picture of me crying at the funeral. It made one of the national papers.

farewell to an angel said the headline.

But it wasn't farewell, not really.

The night after her murder, Alice-Jane came into my bedroom.

A few hours later they took me to hospital.

I stopped and blew my nose.

Tish carried on holding me.

I asked her where I'd got to in the story.

"They sent you to hospital."

"Yeah. And I was grateful. I didn't want to stay in the house, not after seeing her. I was sedated and when I woke up a shrink asked me some questions. He gave me a teddy bear."

I began to feel cold.

Tish turned up the heating.

"So what did you tell the shrink?"

"I told him my parents had killed Alice-Jane."

Tish put her hand to her mouth.

I carried on with the story.

I told her how the shrink's face went very still behind his smile and then he asked me some more questions. I asked him when my parents would come to visit me. He said he that they loved me but he didn't think they'd be able to come visit for a while.

He was right. They didn't come.

Instead there were a lot of whispered conversations in the corridors, and a lot more questions. Detectives came. There were more teddy bears. One day a social worker carefully asked me who I'd like to live with, if I had a choice. I said I wanted to live with my grandparents. So I went to live with my grandpa and grandma Robinson, may she rest in peace.

"She's the one whose funeral you went to?” said Tish.

"Yeah. It's why I was the star turn at the wake. All my grandma's friends and neighbours remembered me. I was the littl'un. Mr and Mrs Nash lived next door to my grandparents, and Mrs Nash used to babysit for me when my grandparents were out."

I stopped.

Tish stroked my hair.

I looked at my empty glass.

She poured me some more vodka.

And then, suddenly, I'd had enough of ancient history. I went to bed.

All night I heard Tish in the next room, unable to settle.

Early December was drab and flat. The shopping was hollow. The rooms at home were cold.

It's hard to be cheerful when I know what I know, and the other person knows it too. Or most of it.

Tish and I bought all the Keanu Reeves DVDs we could find. We spent too much money on each other, and told each other, so the other person knew.

Mid-December my brother rang.

"Hey,” said Tish, after the call. “Hey."

She couldn't say bland comforting things like it can't be that bad, because she still didn't really know how bad it was. We hadn't talked since that last conversation.

"I just want to make it past Christmas,” I said.

"Sure,” she said. “Sure."

On Christmas Day Tish and I watched back to back Keanu movies, one after the other.

His suit is nice in Johnny Mnemonic.

His everything is nice in Point Break.

But Speed was our favourite.

It's the T-shirt, and the body, and the way he rescues the heroine. It's nice to think there's someone out there who will always save the girl.

We ate curry on the couch, wrapped in duvets, wishing we were Sandra Bullock for a day.

That night, when we pressed eject on the final DVD Tish poured us more mulled wine, and we toasted a Christmas survived.

"A good plan of yours,” I said.

"I like to think so.” She smiled, and then, just casually, said: “How's it going, kid?"

"It doesn't get more relaxed than this,” I said. And it was true. Movies and drink and not cooking always do it for me.

"Good,” said Tish.

She was right, it was good. Except for the sudden sense of a whisper I had, the sense of words in the air around me. I looked round, wondering if I could see the speaker.

"What is it?” said Tish.

An image in the room then. A body, a face. Clearer and stronger than I'd seen in years.

"Can you hear someone at the door?” she said.

"Not exactly,” I said. “Look, Tish, you might want to go bed now. Or phone a friend, see if you can stay at their place."

"Why would I want to do that?"

"I need to have a conversation."

"Well, fire away, let's talk,” she said, uneasily.

"The conversation isn't going to be with you,” I said.

"Then who—"

I watched her face change as it hit her. “Oh God. Not here. Not with ... You promised."

"Just go to your room, it'll be fine."

She ran.

Little Alice-Jane appeared as the door slammed shut.

She'd come to wish me Happy Christmas.

After, I took Tish hot sweet tea. She was in shock and couldn't stop shaking, even though the heating was turned up high. I put a couple of blankets over the duvet. Still she shook. I climbed in beside her and held her and said hey, hey, hey, as she cried. As you do.

It didn't make much difference.

Never does.

She slept till long past noon and when she woke she tried to pretend that everything was okay, but she wasn't even fooling herself.

I waited till she'd had a shower, and coffee, and something to eat, and then I asked her, just casually, “How's it going, kid?"

"You never finished the story,” she said, not bothering to fake that she was alright. We have neighbouring bedrooms. She can't fake for shit, we both knew that. “You didn't say whether—"

She stopped.

"It's okay,” I said. “Ask me anything."

"Did your parents really kill your sister?"

"No, they didn't,” I said.

Tish shook her head, as if I were a sudden stranger. “But you told the shrink at the hospital that they did."

"Yes. And the police. And the social workers. And they all believed me. In fact, there was enough evidence for a conviction. My parents went to prison, and they committed suicide there. Not because they'd done it, but because they hadn't."

Tish stared at me. I watched her calmly, waiting for the inevitable next question.

It came out in a whisper.

"Amy, did you kill your sister?"

I shook my head. “No. I didn't kill my sister."

Tish breathed with relief. But then another question. There's always more.

"Then why? Why tell everyone your parents did it?"

I imagined my parents’ ghosts, there at my brother's Christmas dinner table, happy in the bosom of their family, even though the living could not see them. Would they be bitter at their lives cut short? No, they wouldn't, even though their deaths had been ugly.

"The dead are very forgiving,” I said. “There is a peace in heaven. They let bygones be bygones there."

"So who killed her?"

I sighed.

I hate that question.

It makes the world go blurry, like a night of vodka suddenly taking hold.

"Amy, who killed her?"

The question was like another double vodka on top of all you've had before. It was like late night and just wanting to sleep.

"Who killed who?” I said, trying to keep up.

All this talk of people killing each other. It had been the longest night. All I wanted was bed and eyes-shut and silence.

"Amy, look at me."

No, I didn't think I wanted to do that.

"Amy, it's Tish."

Do you know how much effort it takes, to keep everything going? Do you know how much hard work it takes?

And always, the pressure, the pressure. From everywhere.

"I used to like you,” I said. My voice sounded slurred, even to me.

"Do you need pills or something?” she said. “Amy, focus."

She was a long way away.

I was too far gone.

It's always the way.

As soon as the killing questions start, things begin to drift out of order, and I really can't be going round dragging them all back into place.

I let them just be whispers, mostly, the questions, the voices.

Somewhere someone was saying: “Amy, I'm calling an ambulance."

An ambulance?

Preposterous, I'm fine.

But the words no longer came out.

The police came, as they do on such occasions.

I felt sorry for Tish. I'd lied to her, long ago, when I had told her there wasn't a twist.

Of course there was.

Of course there was a fucking twist.

With ghosts, there always is.

But some girls are stronger than others.

Tish was a strong one. She came to see me in hospital, as soon as my doctor declared I was fit enough for visitors.

She brought a teddy bear. That made me smile. Gifts are always better when they're furry.

She sat on the edge of my bed, took my hand, smiled.

"How are you?” she said.

"Oh, you know. Clowns to the left of me.” I lowered my voice. “Doctors to the right."

She took a split-second to decide that I was joking, which I was, pretty much.

She kissed my forehead.

I readied myself for the undoing of it all.

"So,” I asked her, “have you talked to them?"

"Who?"

"Who do you think?"

"I think you mean your parents."

"I do. Have you talked to my parents, and Alice-Jane?"

"Yeah, I met them. They came round to the flat."

"What do you think?"

"Your parents seem, you know, pretty private. And your sister's...” She tried to think of a polite word.

"It's okay,” I said, “you can say it. She's a bitch. She was nicer when she was five. That's why she's always five years old, to me."

"Makes sense,” said Tish. She smiled.

"I like this bear,” I said, clutching him. “Thank you."

"You're welcome."

"Have you moved out yet?"

"Out of where?"

"The flat."

"No. Why? Do you want me out?"

"Of course not. I want you there. If you want to be there."

"I want to be there."

"That's good,” I said. “That's very good. One thing, though. We buy an answering machine. My brother rings me when the leaves start changing. Before, sometimes. Next year, I don't want to speak to him. Not in the run-up to Christmas. He's always the same. It drives me nuts. The pressure's—"

"We'll get an answering machine,” Tish said.

"That's good,” I said. “That's good. I hate that he rings me."

I held on to the bear.

"I know,” said Tish.

"That's good too,” I said.

She smiled, kissed my forehead again. “I should go, I'll come back tomorrow. Oh, I tell you someone else I met. I went to the pub. Mrs Nash is—"

"Alive and well, I know,” I said. “It's just this thing I have. I get mixed up. It's..."

"I know,” she said. “I know."

She stood up to go.

"Wait,” I said, “I have a present for you."

I opened the drawer in the bedside table.

"You do?” she said.

The drawer was empty.

"Well, no. Not at the moment. But when I get home, I'll buy you something. Lots of things. Not candles though."

"You don't have to buy anything,” she said. “Just look after the bear for me."

"Yes,” I said.

She turned to go.

"And Tish?"

"What?"

"I know it's strange, but if my brother rings, could you tell him what's happened to me?"

"He already has,” said Tish. “I spoke to him and told him everything's fine. He sends his love. He says to tell you the fishing's great."

She smiled.

She left.

I looked at the bear. The bear looked back at me, not up to speed.

I did my best.

"See,” I said to the bear, “my brother worries about me, especially at Christmas. So he phones. You understand?"

Silence. Bears are slow, sometimes. Perhaps they give him drugs. I sympathised. Been there, done that.

I carried on with the story. Slowly.

"My brother fell in the river, while he was fishing, when he was nine, and he didn't get out again. Actually, when I say he fell it was more like he was pushed. And guess who pushed him?"

Bear didn't care to guess, so I put my lips to his ear, and whispered it.

"It was little Alice-Jane that pushed him. But she was only five and she's forgotten. I saw it and I didn't forget, but I never told. I was seven, and I saved her from knowing what she did. But because of what she did she died in my mind, and because I couldn't tell my parents they died too. It got mixed up. But it doesn't matter. My brother's body is water under the bridge and everything's fine. Except, well, he phones sometimes. That's not so fine."

And then I fell quiet and thought about all the ghosts who weren't ghosts, not really, and I thought about the single ghost who was.

"My brother doesn't have the family I made for him. There's no Sarah or the girls, not really. It's just him."

I looked at the bear.

I'd never told anyone any of this stuff.

"When we go home again, you mustn't tell Tish about my brother. She wouldn't like that. She'd leave. Bad enough living with someone who talks to a dead person. She'd hate it if she knew that she talks to him as well."

The bear looked dubious.

"Believe me,” I said, “she'd hate it. Let's spare her that. She'd only leave."

And then I fell silent again, and thought about home, and how nice it would be when I got back. This time I'd be good and stay on the pills. I'd flushed them in July, before Tish moved in, and just stayed on the thyroid ones. This time, I'd be good, and Tish would help me take them.

"Everything is going to be fine,” I said to the bear, to see what the words sounded like.

But he stayed quiet and stared glass-eyed at the ceiling, a million miles away, and it reminded me of my brother.

I closed my eyes against the idea of our telephone ringing, and Tish answering again, and his voice coming all the way from his far and empty home, where there was no family, no company, no fishing, no anything, just confusion and worrying when the leaves began to change.

I thought of the lonely flat I would go home to, if my brother told Tish where he was, under the water.

And then it would be me and the telephone, forever, just me waiting for his voice and—

But no.

This was a time for getting well and positive thinking.

"Everything is going to be fine,” I whispered to the bear.

A phone rang, then. It made me jump, just for a second.

But then I realised it was the phone that rang far down the hospital corridor. It was not an omen or a sign.

People ring telephones all the time, in hospitals.

I opened my eyes again.

I shifted so I lay on my back.

The bear and I stared at the ceiling together.

"What do you see?” I said to the bear.

But the bear kept his counsel and we lay there in silence, waiting for tomorrow and for Tish to come again and everything to be fine, as it would be, surely.

The phone rang down the corridor, many times.

And though I jumped each time, it was okay. Bears stay quiet and telephones ring and girls get jumpy.

It's just the nature of things.

It's fine, it really is.

And pressure sometimes builds until you break.

We lay there, staring up at the white of the ceiling all afternoon, and we stared up at the grey as the room turned darker as evening approached.

As night fell we stared at the darkness, lying still, just thinking.

And when the phone rang again and footsteps came down the hall towards my room to give me a message, it wasn't from my brother.

Someone else entirely had sent the message. The nonsense one about fishing and leaves, and water under the bridge.

It wasn't my brother. Of course not.

But the nurse said it was, and left the message on my bedside table.

Bear and I stared at it for most of the night, wondering if the world had gone quite mad.

My flat-mate came to visit the next day.

I found out the most amazing thing: it's catching.

She, it seemed, saw ghosts now too. My parents, my sister—she saw them all.

Oh, the long conversations she'd had with them, face to face.

I told my doctor he should write it up. The second sight is a communicable disease. It would make his name.

We'd be famous. All of us.

She did her best, my flat-mate. But she smiled too much.

I offered her some vodka—she certainly looked like she needed it—but they must have taken my bottle away, because the drawer was empty.

Or I'd drunk it all.

"I feel like I've downed a whole bottle,” I said.

She smiled. Too much.

And then she said: “Your brother rang. He sends his love."

Whoever she was went away, then, and it was me and the bear and a nurse looking jolly and worried, and fuck them all, really, apart from the bear.

He just stays quiet, like people should.

None of this shit about messages. None of this sending of love, which really means: “You really must come and stay with us for Christmas."

But it sounds so cold and far away, where he lives.

So I'll try to hang on. I'll try not to go.

We'll try to hang on together, won't we bear?

But the furry brute's silent.

And the river is rising and Christmas is coming.

And I guess I really should go.

Copyright © 2008 Daniel Kaysen

This isn't the easiest of stories to tell. It happened in Fox Hollies, a district where nothing is particularly straight or clear. Before they knocked it down to build another Lidl, the Fox Hollies pub was the business office of a criminal family. More money changed hands in the car park than over the bar. Not far away was a spot—the exact location changed from week to week—where stolen cars were parked overnight. By morning there would be only a bare chassis, stripped inside and out. We had informers there, but it was hard to keep track of things. By the time you cracked open a secret, there was nothing inside and people had moved on.

The centre of the district is just a small cluster of shops between two long parallel roads. To the north, a fringe of trees and a few acres of overgrown park separate the main road from a scraggy housing estate. The local council had commissioned a sculpture partway between the shops and the estate: a pillar supporting a resin fox, its body framed by the outline of a holly leaf. There was something oddly pagan about the image. I used to think it was a shame the fox couldn't tell us what it had seen.

One January in the late nineties, our contacts began to pick up rumours of a homeless boy who was stalking local people, stealing food from the take-away shops, occasionally biting someone or tearing their clothes. The word ‘feral’ was used more than once. No one had contacted the police directly, but that was fairly normal for the district. I suspected it was an urban myth being used to explain the wounds of drunken fights or harsh outdoor sex. Still, we kept on the lookout for vagrants and stray dogs in the area. Nothing came to light.

Then an early morning patrol car spotted fresh bloodstains on the children's playground in the north-west corner of Fox Hollies Park. A cat had been torn apart on the concrete. The report suggested an incidence of urban fox-hunting: some local boneheads using a cat for bait, betting on their underfed pitbulls. But the pathologist in the Solihull station said the toothmarks on the stinking remains weren't those of a dog, or even a fox. They appeared to be human.

We found the boy two days later, in the woods near the Spring Road train station. The tracking dogs were reluctant to go near him, but they took us far enough for a torch beam to pick out a thin figure crouching between an oak tree and a factory wall. He tried to run, but we spread out and trapped him against the decaying wall. When the torchlight painted a white target on his face, he froze and shut his eyes. I came towards him with handcuffs, while two other officers backed me with a raised baton and a concealed gun.

The boy looked to be about sixteen, his pale face flecked with mud, his clothes torn and grimy. The torchlight caught his narrow cheekbones and bared teeth. Suddenly he opened his eyes, and I saw nothing in them but darkness—as if he was dreaming, his mind a long way away. He didn't move until I grabbed his arm and tried to snap a handcuff on it. Then his back twisted and he fell to his knees. As I knelt to keep hold of him, he leant forward. I could smell rotten meat on his breath, leaf-mould on his skin. I opened my mouth to speak, and he spat into it.

Fortunately, the local press didn't get wind of the story. The boy's identity wasn't hard to establish: a cracked bank card in his pocket was traceable to Mark Knowle, aged eighteen, at an address just south of the Fox Hollies estate. Mark's father, who shared the flat with his son and three dogs more articulate than he was, identified him from the police mugshot. He said Mark had disappeared nearly four weeks earlier, and he'd assumed the boy had just fucked off somewhere. I said he had. Just nowhere in particular.

I had an urgent Hepatitis B jab, but seemed to have no problems apart from a persistent metallic taste in my mouth. Mark crouched in a cell at the Acocks Green station for twelve hours without speaking or sitting down. We couldn't get a response out of him. Eventually our doctor gave him a shot of diazepam, and he relaxed a little. An hour later, he spoke without prompting. “She gave it to me,” he said. “It was her. The singer."

Gradually, in blurred fragments of recollection, he told us about a girl he'd met at the Lady Westminster. That was the estate's main pub, and its weekend karaoke and disco nights drew a crowd of wildly varying age. There'd been a few incidents there recently, but the staff were impressively quick to deal with trouble and the real hard cases tended to go to elsewhere. According to the boy, there was a girl who'd sung there a few times. Irena. “From some country in Europe. She'd come a long way. Don't know what for."

He'd wanted to buy her a drink, but she wasn't interested. Then he'd followed her out of the pub. “Couldn't get her voice out of my head. Wasn't going to ... Just wanted to talk to her. Something inside her that was different, in her eyes. Like the canal at night. She turned round, saw me. Just shrugged. Let me take her into the trees behind the estate. Let me have her.” His voice was slurring. He paused for a few minutes, then said: “Afterwards. Running. Hungry. Somewhere else. The snow.” He lapsed back into silence, grinding his teeth.

The Lady Westminster got Mike, their karaoke man, to come in and talk to me. He remembered Irena. “Red-haired wench, kind of pale. Strange voice. Not quite in tune. She did old stuff. The Walker Brothers, David Bowie. Bit miserable for my taste, but the kids liked her. She must have been from Russia or something. Don't know why she was here. Didn't want to know, to be honest."

I asked if she'd talked to anyone. He shook his head. “Only to buy a drink and ask me for a couple of turns on the karaoke. She kept to herself. Just wanted to sing. There was this young lad trying to chat her up, but she ignored him. She came here three or four times, then stopped. I don't know where she lives. If she's still around, that is."

Our enquiries found only that Irena (if that was her real name) couldn't be linked to anyone who was known to live here or had been reported missing. Of course, girls from Eastern Europe worked in strip clubs and brothels all over the city who weren't registered citizens or visitors. The description we had—a thin girl with pale skin and spiky red hair—drew no response from any of our contacts, legitimate or bent. Which was not unusual.

We also had no idea what, if anything, she might have given to Mark: blood tests and a medical check gave no evidence of any infection. Maybe some bad acid. We were less concerned about that than we were about the possibility that she hadn't consented to the sex, and that worse things had happened to her. But we couldn't get anything more out of Mark. After a week, we had him transferred to a secure unit in Rubery.

I saw the boy when four psychiatric nurses came to take him to the car. He was sedated again, and offered neither resistance nor co-operation. His thin face still had a lost expression, as if he'd come here from a distant place and recognised nothing. Outside, the air was freezing cold and they hadn't given him a jacket. But he didn't shiver. I watched flakes of sleet attach to his face like scars. There was blood on his lips; he must have bitten them.

A couple of days after the transfer, I woke up in the night with a raging thirst. Elaine was asleep beside me. I stumbled to the kitchen, surprised at how much light there seemed to be. My pupils must have been dilated. I filled a glass, but somehow couldn't drink from it; I had to bend my head over the sink and pour the water into my mouth. My throat was burning.

On the way back upstairs, I wondered if Elaine would mind being woken up for a fuck. I hadn't been this hard in weeks. It almost hurt to walk. I touched my erection, and immediately was staring into the boy's dark eyes and watching him lick the blood from his lips. I'd wanted to see him for days before the transfer, had resisted the temptation to pay him an informal visit in his cell. It wouldn't have been professional. Besides, I didn't know what he might do. Or what I might.

I slipped quietly into the bathroom, locked the door and pulled the flush to cover the sounds of my breathing as I brought myself off. My sperm in the toilet bowl reminded me of his spit. His flob, we'd have said in school. The cistern held his face. So did the window. So did the doorway. His cheekbones, his damaged lips, his eyes, the darkness behind them. Walking on tiptoe, I went back into the bedroom and picked up my clothes, then got dressed in the hallway.

Outside, the pavement was skinned with frost. The moon glowed faintly through a pale sheet of cloud. I was still aroused, but it wasn't lust that drove me through the colourless streets. It was some impulse I didn't recognise. I was walking, then running, just to be on the move. My throat ached as if I'd been shouting for hours. I ran past the train station, the canal, the building site, the trees that bordered the estate.

Then I saw it.

The fox was crouching on a rubbish bin outside one of the tower blocks. Its coat was reddish-brown, streaked with mud. As I approached, unable to keep my breathing quiet, it turned its black eyes on me for an instant. Then it was off, running on the grass at the side of the building. When it reached the gravel car park, it slipped and almost fell. Then it limped away, leaving a smear of blood on the ground. At least, it looked like blood. As I came closer, I could see it was a cluster of metallic flakes. I touched them and held up my fingers, smelt rust.

I chased the fox to the back of the estate and out into the maze of factories and warehouses between Tyseley and Hay Mills. Every now and then it slowed down, twisted in pain and fell, then got up and ran on. It left some of itself behind each time: a fragment of dark inorganic tissue. I had the feeling it was trying to recapitulate a much longer journey within this district, to tell me something. This wasn't about me and the boy any longer. We were just accessories. I thought of the Ted Hughes poem we'd puzzled over in school: the fox entering the mind.

Within sight of the traffic that raced along the Coventry Road, the fox paused on a bridge. Once again, it looked straight at me. I stopped, unable to move, as it leapt over the low wall. A few seconds later, I looked down at the canal. The ripples were still spreading on the black water. The streetlamp highlighted a few metallic flakes on the surface. Suddenly, my exhaustion caught up with me; I gripped the wall and retched several times. Nothing came up but a thin, colourless fluid.

When I got home, Elaine was awake. I told her I'd heard some noises outside the house and gone out to investigate, then chased a potential burglar as far as the Fox Hollies estate. She seemed to believe me; at any rate, she quickly went back to sleep. I lay awake, shivering with tension, until dawn.

The next day, my shift didn't start until twelve. Around nine, I drove out to the secure unit where they were keeping Mark. My head was full of irrational questions. Where did the fox come from? How many people had it travelled with? Where was it trying to get to? He was no more likely to know the answers than I was.

The traffic on the Bristol Road made the journey painfully slow. I wouldn't have much time to talk to Mark, if he was even talking. Lack of sleep narrowed my vision. Snowflakes were cutting through the air; I didn't think it would settle.

At the clinic, they made me wait in a kind of airlock while they checked my ID against their computer records. Then the clinical manager, Dr Fern, came down to ask why I hadn't made an appointment. I said I was in a hurry. She said “There's no need to hurry now,” and refused to explain until we reached Mark's room on the second floor.

It was the barest occupied room I'd ever seen. A bedroll on a narrow bunk; a table and chair. No possessions, no pictures. “Doesn't Mark have any stuff here?” I asked. Dr Fern shook her head. “So where is he?"

"He tried to break out during the night. The night staff locked him in his room. Another nurse was coming to give him a sedative, but she had several people to see. When she got here, Mark had suffered some kind of seizure. His mouth was full of blood. They took him to the clinic infirmary, and I think he's still there."

"Is he alive?"

"He was dead before he left this room. The cause of death was severe internal trauma. But according to the doctor who examined him, there were no bruises. The skin was unbroken. It was as if he'd been gnawed to death from the inside."

Weeks later, Mark's key worker let me see an exercise book the boy been given in OT to encourage him to communicate. Mark's handwriting was neat and blocky, like an imitation of print. He'd written his name, age and address, then left a few blank pages, then bitten his finger and drawn a crude sketch in smears of blood: a small dog or fox, running. On the facing page, he'd written:

out the city it never stops the trains the loading trucks the razor wire Tallinn to Helsinki the moon shows different faces but doesn't change running across land tracks in the frozen snow hiding under the skin Helsinki to Odense always cold always hungry like a dream just one step away from nothing Odense to Zagreb staying under cover stealing from bins kitchens restaurants dead gulls on the street Zagreb to Bonn sick all the time spoiled meat nowhere to go no shelter no hiding place am I the fox or the boy who stole it Bonn to Calais what the kiss meant the coat of rust the infected teeth always cold always hungry help me please

Copyright © 2008 Joel Lane

ON THE SIDE OF THE VICTIM: A JACK KETCHUM FEATURETTE

Stephen King said that he was probably the “scariest guy in America” (which suggests SK doesn't keep up with politics, but we digress), and for a long time Jack Ketchum has been one of the horror genre's best kept secrets. With three films based on his work in recent years and a slew of new titles and reissues, all that looks set to change.

Old title in spiffy new packaging is an apt description for the February reissue of 1995 novel Joyride (Cemetery Dance hardback, 300pp, $40), and the novel itself is typical of Ketchum's work, fast paced and violent, but never gratuitous and with an assured grasp of the psychology of the characters involved.

The plot has an elegant simplicity to it. Carol and lover Lee realise there is only one way they will ever get out from under the shadow of her abusive husband Howard. They lure him to an isolated spot in a nearby park and murder the guy: it's just their bad luck that somebody is watching and worse luck still that he is excited by the crime. Wayne thinks that Carol and Lee are his kind of people, and that they can be friends who will teach him stuff. But of course when Wayne makes contact things don't go down as he planned and events spiral out of control. The couple are taken hostage and dragged off on a killing spree, as Wayne gets in touch with his inner bad guy and wreaks bloody revenge on everyone he considers to have done him wrong.

In lesser hands this could so easily have devolved into schlocker movie of the week material, with a sensational storyline requiring maximum blood and minimum budget. However, Ketchum downplays the exploitive elements and instead concentrates on the people involved, cleverly interweaving the perspectives of the three leads with side trips into the lives of other characters. The reader is presented with a comprehensive overview of a horrific situation, one that has a ‘topical’ feel to it given that spree killings are now almost a natural occurrence in our media mapped landscape.

Policeman Rule, who investigated Howard's attack on Carol, which was the catalyst for his murder, is the one who represents the voice of reason, or whatever we are allowed of reason in Ketchum's world. Rule is the first one to work out what is happening and in on the kill when Wayne returns home and sets about paying off debts to his neighbours with a gun in his hand. He is not simply a stereotypical good cop, but a fully rounded individual, his story fleshed out by visits to a psychiatrist who is helping him deal with the aftershock of marital breakdown: in Carol he sees a reflection of his absent wife, and a chance to make amends for the mistakes of the past by rescuing her.

Wayne is Rule's polar opposite. As a kid he killed small animals and as an adult he is into bondage style sex games, though ideas like consent and safe words seem alien to his nature. A social misfit he keeps a list of everyone who has ever crossed him, no matter how slight their offence: needless to say, it is a very long list. Wayne is a sociopath who sees everything in terms of himself, who takes it as a personal insult when other people don't fall in with his plans, and his descent into madness is painstakingly mapped, with the violence all the more shocking when it comes thanks to the matter of fact telling. Ketchum doesn't dwell on the death scenes or drag them out for tension—everything is short and brutal, reminding me of nothing so much as the shootout at the end of Clint Eastwood film Unforgiven, a casualness to it all that unnerves far more than the standard stalk and slash.

If these two represent white and black, Carol is the grey on Ketchum's palette. Essentially a good person, she has been badly let down by the system and driven to do something terrible, a sin that comes back to haunt her in the worst possible way, but the woman's true character is shown in her willingness to take responsibility and sacrifice herself rather than lure other innocents into Wayne's clutches. While Wayne, like many a Ketchum villain, has a misogynistic streak to his makeup, strong, brave and honourable women are also a feature of the author's work, survivors who are prepared to do whatever it takes without compromising personal integrity, as witness the young woman Wayne rapes and leaves for dead, but who recovers from her ordeal to blow the whistle on his murder spree, or the character Sara Foster in Right to Life.

With a rapid fire prose style that more than empowers the reader to deliver on Stephen King's back cover blurb—"Don't open this book unless you intend to finish it in the same night"—Joyride is in some ways reminiscent of the kind of thing Richard Laymon did so well in his prime, but here with a psychological depth and underpinning in the real world that is quintessential Ketchum.

Reissued to coincide with the release of a film based on the book, The Lost (Leisure paperback, 394pp, $7.99) opens in the summer of 1965. Teenager Ray murders two young women camping out in the woods and, with the help of friends Tim and Jennifer, covers up evidence of the crime. The police have him as a suspect, but can prove nothing. Four years later Tim and Jennifer are hopelessly in thrall to Ray; she loves him while Tim is supposed to be his best friend, but Ray abuses them both. Assistant manager at his parents’ hotel, he considers himself a ‘big’ man about town, but his self-image is challenged by the arrival of city girl Kath, who at first eggs Ray on to ever more outrageous acts but then gets scared and tries to end their relationship when she registers the violence simmering away beneath his surface. Ray's ego is also dented when his passes are rejected by Sally, a young girl having an affair with ex-cop Ed, one of the detectives who investigated Ray. Detective Charlie Schilling, Ed's friend, decides to pressure Ray about what happened four years ago, but in doing so he lays the ground for the bloodbath that is to follow.

The Lost is a powerful book, with prose that is spare and emotionally charged, and characters who are all perfectly drawn, each one as if taken from life. There's a superficial similarity to the dramatis personae of Joyride in the main protagonists, as if Ketchum has identified certain personality types, the traits that make them monsters and madmen, cowards and victims, saints and sinners. Ray is a younger, cockier, more self-confident (at least outwardly) version of Wayne, the disintegration of his personality chillingly detailed and utterly convincing. Jennifer and Tim are the teenage equivalent of Carol and Lee, but without their moral backbone, so that they become complicit in what Ray does, but all the same are far more victims than the other couple, sounding boards for the sociopath's ego, existing only to validate him, and finding self-worth only when they attempt to break free from his control. In Ed and Charlie, the two cops, there are echoes of Rule, one's need for love and the other's longing for closure, to see justice done, but here doomed to disappointment, as all their efforts bring about is fresh killing and more heartbreak.

There's a slow burn feel and terrible sense of inevitability to what happens in The Lost, like being on a long, long road and knowing there's a ten car pile-up waiting at the end but helpless to turn the wheel, to take a different direction. The violence when it finally erupts in the closing scenes is all the more hard hitting for having been held in check so long, and the reader shares the pain as characters we have come to know and care about are brutalised and slaughtered. There's a bitter irony to it as well, with Charlie Schilling's probing the catalyst for Ray's outburst of berserker rage, the desire for justice leading to just more killing, and the only people to come out of it all relatively unscathed are Jennifer and Tim, both of whom must share the guilt for what happened and yet seem unmoved.

It's a sad and harsh story of wasted lives, but also a highly moral book and one that serves as an antidote to all the pointless teen slasher movies and bestsellers packed with bizarre for the sake of it serial killers.

Old Flames (Leisure paperback, 336pp, $7.99) is billed as ‘Ketchum's first original mass market paperback in seven years', but there's an element of half truth to that. The book consists of two novellas, with only the title work doing what it says on the tin. The second and longer work, Right to Life, has been previously published, but this is probably the first time it's been available, at least to UK readers, in such an economic format.

Dora, the protagonist of Old Flames, has a lot going for her—she has a successful career, is good looking, sexually adventurous. The only thing she doesn't have is a man, as so many of her relationships tend to crash and burn. Then she learns of Old Flames, a detective agency that tracks down the people from your past, and engages them to seek high school sweetheart Jim, now happily married to Karen and with two children. Dora sees the life she should have had, the life she still wants. She engineers an ‘accidental’ meeting, insinuates herself into Jim's new life, does whatever it takes to make herself indispensable to him, even when that entails violence.

So far, so The Hand That Rocks the Cradle or similar tale of a conniving femme fatale, but Ketchum is his own man and lurking beneath the surface of this short and deceptive story is a study of obsession taken to its limit, one that is as unique as it is unsettling. Rational at first, sympathetic even, it's hard to say at what point Dora tips over the edge, goes from wanting an idyllic life to believing reality can be shoehorned into her conception. She is a madwoman, pure and simple, and the tragedy is that other people don't realise. They treat her as one of themselves and are unable to cope when the truth is exposed, so far is it outside of their normal experience that they have no idea of how to react, no example to follow. Dora's insanity is rooted in the loneliness and desperation that undo the woman and drive her on, the selfishness that comes to motivate every action; it's hinted at in her response to the latest failed relationship, seen more obviously in her sexual encounter with Jim's friend Matthew, in the tricks she uses to get close to Jim and frustration at being unable to win over daughter Linda. Dora is, in a very real sense, an outsider, an alien, wanting to be like other people but not really knowing how, only able to mimic gestures and fake what others genuinely feel. The violence when it comes is sudden, like a jolt to the heart, and the final line of the story is chilling, not just for the lack of human connection stated but also the emotional desolation it conveys.

Right to Life is almost certainly the kind of tale those familiar with Ketchum's reputation but not his oeuvre will expect from him, an ostensibly sordid story ripe with sexual violence and extreme behaviour.

Sara Foster is abducted from outside a clinic where she was planning to have her child by married man Greg aborted, snatched off the street by a couple in a van. Stephen and Kath are right to lifers, who keep Sara a prisoner in their basement, or at least that is her first impression, but in reality the cause is just a pretext for them. They are perverts who want to torture and sexually abuse a helpless woman, and to coerce Sara, Stephen hints at membership of some secret organisation with the power to reach out and hurt her family. But as time passes Stephen grows increasingly frustrated, tormented by thoughts of a fulfilment that always seems out of reach, coming to realise that only killing Sara will satisfy him, and that if he does such a thing then he will need to do it again.

This is a story that is not for the squeamish, a terrible and no holds barred account of abuse, reminiscent of Ketchum's masterpiece The Girl Next Door in the way it meticulously catalogues the atrocities committed against Sara, but is never salacious or gratuitous. We sympathise entirely with the victim, cheer her on when the opportunity for bloody vengeance presents itself, and if Ketchum takes us inside the minds of his villains it's only so that we can despise them all the more. It's a story about how principles, no matter how fine, can be perverted to the worst ends. It's a story about how people can be brutalised and demoralised but still emerge triumphant. It is, like most of Ketchum's tales, a moral fable that doesn't moralise and the thing that we come away with is not the evil of the abusers, not the atrocities they commit, but Sara's indomitable spirit and that, regardless of how grim the story gets, gives it an ultimately upbeat ending.

Ketchum doesn't glamorise or make excuses for the violence he portrays. He is, in all of these books, firmly on the side of the victim, and in any final analysis that is where his authority lies, that is what elevates his works above the bloody excesses which they chronicle, and that is why we should read him, no matter how horrific the journey becomes or how hopeless the situation may seem.

Let's hear from Stephen King again (if I quote him enough we get to put his name on the cover and sell a few gazillion extra copies): “You may be shocked, even revolted, by Jack Ketchum's hellish vision of the world, but you won't be able to dismiss it or forget it."

Spot on.

SOME FACTS ABOUT JACK KETCHUM

Ketchum's birth name is Dallas William Mayr. He took his pen name from the Texan outlaw Thomas ‘Black Jack’ Ketchum (1863-1901). * He has worked as an actor, singer, soda jerk, lumber salesman, teacher and literary agent. In the latter capacity at Scott Meredith Inc he represented Henry Miller. * Jack's 1981 debut novel Off Season was loved by horror fans but hated by critics, with the Village Voice describing it as ‘violent pornography', despite the book's having been rewritten and ‘toned down’ at the behest of the publisher. A sequel, Offspring, saw print in 1991 and an unexpurgated version of the original finally appeared in 1999. * He has won four Stoker Awards: for best short story in 1994 with ‘The Box’ and again in 2000 with ‘Gone', while in 2003 Peaceable Kingdom got the nod for best collection and Closing Time for best long fiction. * Ketchum played a state trooper alongside fellow horror writer Edward Lee in the 2006 film Header, based on a story by Lee. * His website can be found at jackketchum.net

SOME QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Over the past couple of years three of your books have been made into films, The Lost, The Girl Next Door and Red. It's like the old cliché about taking umpteen years to become an overnight success, so do you have any thoughts on why your work has suddenly become such a ‘hot’ property and are there any more Ketchum projects in the pipeline?

I think that I've gradually received more and more visibility. When a publisher only throws 40,000 paperback copies out there to the entire United States it's unlikely that one will fall into the hands of a film maker who might want to option it. But a few things have happened since I was in that trap. First, small specialty presses caught onto me—and a lot of people in the film business, particularly young people, are horror fans. Then I started publishing with Leisure, who keep my books in print and in the stores—and in far greater number than I used to get. Last but not least, there's Stephen King, who's been my partisan for years now—blurbing the books, doing an intro for The Girl Next Door, praising my work at the National Book Awards and calling me “the scariest guy in America” in Entertainment Weekly for god's sake. When Steve talks, people listen. And they're apt to say, “hmmm, who is that guy?"

I notice from your IMDb profile, that you've had some one act plays produced, and now with the films out there I'm wondering if you have any interest in getting into the scriptwriting side of things?

I'm doing one now as a matter of fact. And I've done several over the years. Lucky McKee has an option of one of them—my script for The Passenger. Fingers crossed. I'd love to see him direct it.

Some of your most important books (The Girl Next Door and The Lost) are set during the late 50s and 60s, but the times they reflect seem to be the polar opposites of the popular media's Happy Days and Summer of Love portrayal. What's your take on those eras, and why do you return to them in your fiction?

They're two very different eras but each had its dark side. And you know me, I write kinda dark. In The Girl Next Door I was writing in part about the secretiveness of the time, the closed-door society, which could allow awful things to happen unnoticed. What we call the 70s was anything but secretive—unless you count Hoover and Nixon and FBI snooping. Everything else was out there, jarringly so. But in The Lost and Cover I was writing about the folks who fell through the cracks. In The Lost, the kids who neither went to college nor to war, who had no cause pro or con, who simply got ... well, lost, while this beast of a society writhed and moaned all around them. In Cover I was writing about the guys who came back from ‘Nam with mortally wounded psyches and who nobody seemed to care a damn about. I return to both these eras because I know them. I was there. I grew up in them.

There don't seem to be many religious characters in your work. Offhand, the only ones I can think of are the weirdoes in Right to Life, who use faith as a pretext to act shitty. Would you say there's a spiritual dimension to your work, or is it purely materialist and humanist?

There's also the demented bible-thumper in Weed Species. I'm with Sam Harris, who wrote The End of Faith. I think the world won't be a safe or even decent place to live in until every modern religion goes the way of Thor, Zeus, Venus and all the rest—good stories, possibly instructive metaphor but nothing else. Nothing with any power of unity or discord, which seem to go hand in hand. That's not to say I don't believe in the spirit and that there's nothing of the spiritual in my work. I put my money on the individual spirit, not the collective. And that goes for dogs and cats and polar bears as much as for us big-shot humans.

Your work is often misunderstood, always confrontational, and simmers with anger against the ills and injustices of society. Are you channelling some inner rage, or simply looking ‘through a glass, darkly’ at the society we live in?

Both. I often write directly about specific things that piss me off. Child abuse, animal abuse, rape, war, murder. But I think it's safe to say that I was a pissed-off kid and that hasn't changed much. There's certainly joy in my life but there's anger too. Read a newspaper. Look what ridiculous shit we indulge in every day.

You've received flak in the past for the violence in your books. When you write how conscious are you of an ‘audience’ and what they may or may not find acceptable? And do you ever allow such considerations to influence you?

I sure hope not. I got into writing to state how I felt about the world and my place in it, even as a kid. If I ever stop doing that, I'll hopefully have the good sense to hang up my spurs.

You have said of your writing, “what I'm trying to do, I find, is to point out how some people poison the world for the rest of us, who are only trying to live humanely and lovingly,” but it seems to me that you're going a bit further than that, that by being so firmly on the side of the victim you're offering readers a chance to empathise, to put ourselves in these people's shoes. Conversely, those portrayed as ‘villains’ in your work, always seem to be self-centred, incapable of seeing anything except in terms of their own needs. Do you regard selfishness as, if not the root of all evil, a major contributory factor?

Sure it's a major factor. Evil is exclusionist. Good embraces, includes. Consider your basic sociopath. Not only can't he give a damn about anybody's needs but his own, he can't even see them as worth considering. Donne was unfortunately wrong about no man being an island. There are plenty who are. And I'm not just talking about some serial rapist either. I'm talking about the guys who defraud the elderly of their savings, who deal stolen dogs to medical labs, who run phony foster homes for government cash. All these low-level shits who pretend to be just like us but seem to be missing the kindness gene. If all I care about is myself and maybe those who think just as I do, I'm probably not doing a whole lot of good in the world. And I think we're supposed to try to do a little good. We may not get far, but we're supposed to give it our best shot, aren't we.

Last question. I understand that you're reluctant to talk about whatever you're currently working on, but is there anything due for release in the near future that you can tell us about? In particular, any chance of a UK publisher for your work?

Unfortunately the UK continues to elude me. Damned if I know why. It's practically surrounded by people who publish me—in France, Germany, Spain—but I haven't had a book in the UK since Headline dropped me after Red tanked. Hey, anybody listening out there? Hell, you don't even have to translate me like they do! Over here things are better. Leisure are doing a mass-market paperback of a new longish novella called Old Flames, paired with Right to Life this summer. I've got a small book of memoirs called Book of Souls coming out in a hardcover limited from Bloodletting Press within the next month or so and though Overlook Connection Press are a bit late getting out Broken on the Wheel of Sex it shouldn't be too long now. And the film of Red is finished, so hopefully we'll be seeing that out soon as well.

Leisure: dorchesterpub.com * Cemetery Dance: cemeterydance.com

Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft (Gollancz hardback, 886pp, [British Pounds]20) is described as a ‘Commemorative Edition', though nobody actually pins down exactly what it is that's being commemorated. My cynical side opines that it's the 70th anniversary of HPL's death, post which his works have now all passed into the public domain, and my acquisitive nature forgets for a moment that reviewers get free copies and rubs its metaphorical hands in glee at the prospect of such a beautiful book with a ‘non-collector's item’ price tag.

Chances are anyone who has more than a passing familiarity with supernatural fiction will recognise the name H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) and know of his work. He was arguably the most important genre writer of the last century and, while some critics have mocked his occasionally verbose and unwieldy style, the man's influence on the genre and subsequent writers cannot be doubted. The back cover quote from Stephen King is apposite—"Lovecraft opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me.” Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Brian Lumley and Ramsey Campbell are just some of the main beneficiaries of Lovecraft's legacy.

Lovecraft's great contribution to supernatural horror lies in a shift away from a universe centred on the concerns of mankind, be they spiritual or materialistic, and to a cosmos in which we bipeds are creatures of little consequence. He was not a prolific writer of fiction, but in the dozen or so tales that make up the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ (a term coined by August Derleth) Lovecraft constructed a new template for the weird tale. Cthulhu was one of the Great Old Ones, fearsome creatures of monstrous size and unfathomable abilities, who ruled the Earth in a time before recorded history and were driven away by Elder Gods. But these creatures remain, biding their time and waiting for the moment of their return. Mankind means nothing to them, though some humans, scholars of arcane law who have learned too much for their own good or genetic throwbacks to an earlier time, serve the Great Old Ones or conspire to bring forward the date of their return. Written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, the Necronomicon from which this volume takes its name was a treatise on these Great Old Ones, an invention of Lovecraft's to add depth to his works’ back story, which has since been the subject of several literary hoaxes and taken by many to be genuine.

But enough of what everybody probably knows already and to the book at hand, which is certainly a handsome volume. It's leather-bound in an attempt to mimic the ancient tomes of which HPL was so fond, with a wealth of aptly weird and weirdly apt illustrations by talented artist Les Edwards to complement the text. The front and end pages have a street map of Arkham, the ghost haunted New England town which was so often the setting for HPL's stories. There are two ‘book end’ poems by HPL and a sample page of text in his own handwriting. Stephen Jones, who edited this volume, also contributes a 40+ page afterword, ‘A Gentleman of Providence', in which he discusses Lovecraft's life and career, both pre and post-mortem (largely unknown during his lifetime, HPL's literary reputation blossomed after his death, thanks in large part to the efforts of August Derleth), complete with quotes from a host of genre worthies acknowledging their debt to Lovecraft and plentiful photographs of the writer, publications in which his stories appeared etc. Jones’ role is to catalogue Lovecraft not to criticise him—there is little discussion of his shortcomings as a writer or attempt to address the racism that informed some of his work—but perhaps such comments don't belong in a ‘commemorative edition’ and for those interested there is a wealth of criticism available.

The bulk of this book consists of thirty four stories, some two thirds of Lovecraft's solo fictional output, though in practical terms the inclusion of longer works, such as ‘At the Mountains of Madness', ‘The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath’ and ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward', means that it represents much more of his oeuvre. All the important stories are there, including those attached to Lovecraft's mythos, beginning with ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and continuing on through ‘The Dunwich Horror', ‘The Whisperer in Darkness', ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ and ‘The Haunter of the Dark’ (in which Lovecraft's protagonist Robert Blake is named after Robert Bloch, with whom HPL corresponded). There are also earlier stories, such as Lovecraft's very first publishing credit, ‘Dagon', Dunsany influenced tales such as ‘The Doom That Came to Sarnath’ and my personal favourite from Lovecraft's oeuvre, his account of a hideous alien intrusion, ‘The Colour Out of Space'.

Lovecraft's work is a part of my personal history with the genre I love. I've read all of these stories at least twice over the years, sometimes more than that, and they are meant to be savoured, not gulped down wholesale by a reviewer with a deadline to meet. And besides, to essay an in-depth review of the fiction in this book, even if I had the time, is hardly necessary: Lovecraft's record speaks for itself as to the quality of his work, and regardless of how you feel about his place in the horror pantheon, any aficionado of supernatural fiction with a cosmic bent is going to want to have his work on their shelves. The chance to acquire the cream of his stories in a beautiful volume such as this, which provides limited edition quality at only a quarter of the price, is simply too good to be missed.

Edited by Peter Normanton, The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics (Robinson paperback, 544pp, [British Pounds]12.99) is both a history and a celebration of its eponymous subject matter (graphic novels, for the more po-faced). Normanton casts his net wide and hauls in a bumper catch, with forty eight stories (the cover blurb lays claim to “over 50", but that's a slight exaggeration), the earliest having seen print in 1944 and the very latest in 2004. He groups the material in three double decades for convenience (the 40s & 50s etc) and adds a final grouping for the new millennium, prefacing each section with a brief essay setting out important developments, both commercial and cultural, in the history of the horror comics. Similarly, each strip comes with a short note on the comic in which it appeared and the creator(s), making the book informative but with a chatty style. You never doubt that for Normanton this is very much a labour of love.

I have one complaint about this book, and that has to do with the size. While slightly larger than your standard trade paperback it doesn't have the surface area of the comics in which these strips originally appeared, and so the artwork is necessarily reduced from the scale at which it was intended to be seen. As a result, the illustrations occasionally look cramped and in a couple of places I had to reach for a magnifying glass to read the text. Still, my eyes are older than almost all of these comics and chances are most readers won't have any problem.

The list of contributors reads like a who's who of comic book artists, with such familiar names as Igor Studios, Jack Katz, Tom Sutton, Mike Ploog, Arthur Suydam, Michael T. Gilbert, Steve Niles and John Coulthart just the tip of an iceberg of talent. Most of the stories are written by the artists, though there are adaptations of classic work by the likes of Poe, Robert E. Howard and Lovecraft, and in the latter regard Coulthart's sumptuous rendition of ‘The Dunwich Horror’ is one of the undoubted highlights of this collection.

Given the book's size and scope it's possible to trace the development of the form, with early stories largely vengeance based or sting in the tail pieces, and more serious themes emerging later, as the creators become aware of the potential of this medium and stretch their muscles. Similarly the storytelling moves away from realistic drawings in carefully demarcated panels with complementary text boxes, and towards freer, looser formats, with illustrations and dialogue used more directly to tell the story. Another development takes place in the area of continuity, with a shift away from self-contained stories and on to greater narrative arcs, such as Gilbert's ‘Mr Monster’ series or zombie comic ‘Dead World', these changes going hand in glove with the rise of smaller companies and creator owned titles.

'The Monster of Dread End', a John Stanley strip from 1962, is a good example of what this book demonstrates so well. An urban community is devastated by the disappearance of its children one after the other. Families moves away leaving behind deserted buildings, and then one day a young boy returns and lures out the horrendous monster that lives in the sewers. He looks set to die, but out pop the police with heavy armaments to blast the monster; they have been lying in wait all this time. It's a gripping tale, and representative of its time, with the usual panels and text boxes, the carefully drawn and meticulously detailed illustrations. The tale was read by a young Pete Von Sholly, and it ‘scared the living daylights out of him', who as an adult in 2004 produced his own version of the story, ‘Dread End'. Von Sholly starts closer in to the action, with the boy walking the abandoned streets and back story filled in as we go. The rescue, when it comes, is by the military, not the police, and instead of the closure we got from Stanley's tale, there's a final scene which suggests even more horrors to come. Von Sholly sticks with panels for his artwork, but instead of drawings he tells the story by means of photo-montage, with minimum text superimposed on the art in lieu of the caption boxes, speech and thought bubbles of Stanley's day.

For me, one of the pleasures on offer from this book was to finally get to read some of the old E C Comics, a chance to see what all the fuss was about (they were regarded as shocking in their time and contributed to the introduction of the Comics Code). Alas, in the post video-nasty age these titles seem very tame indeed, which is not to denigrate their value as pure horror hokum, but in the main hokum is all they are, not the disgusting texts of legend.

This book was a great read, both entertaining and informative, with enough chills and thrills to guarantee that I will return to its pages many times in the years ahead. Besides, at only [British Pounds]12.99 it's a real bargain and, for those who wish to read rather than collect, a more economical way to sample the gory treats offered by the horror comics than tracking down the original titles.

Horror fiction has always had a ‘special relationship’ with the crime and thriller genres. Many critics regard horror maestro Poe as the creator of the private detective subgenre, while other old masters, such as Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins, have had a foot in both camps. In more modern times, with the emergence of the ‘forensics school’ of crime fiction, scenes that were once the preserve of Baron Frankenstein's laboratory have become mainstream entertainment courtesy of TV programmes like CSI and Silent Witness.

Simon Beckett's Written in Bone (Bantam paperback, 496pp, [British Pounds]6.99) is a good example of the forensics school. On the remote Hebridean island of Runa a woman's body, entirely consumed by fire except for the feet and one hand, has been discovered in an isolated crofter's cottage. The authorities would be happy to write this off as an accident, but forensic anthropologist David Hunter finds evidence of foul play and suspicion is cast on the island's population of two hundred souls. Before help can arrive from the mainland a storm cuts off the island, stranding Hunter in a hostile community with a ruthless killer on the loose and his only allies a drunken police sergeant, who is more hindrance than help, an inexperienced constable and a retired detective inspector. And that's only the start of his troubles, as Runa is torn apart by the fallout from the original crime.

Beckett gives us a book in which the technical aspects of forensics work never sound less than convincing, through the person of Hunter showing off his research. And by stranding his expert on an isolated island Beckett obliges Hunter to adopt a hands on, old style approach instead of the brand spanking new gadget of the week that has become the S.O.P. of the CSI franchise, and this makes the story more involving for the reader. Of course, you'd need a genuine forensic anthropologist to confirm the science is all kosher, but from this layman's perspective the wealth of detail is compelling.

Similarly, the picture of a small and inward looking community is well drawn, with some engaging character studies—'laird’ Strachan and his beautiful wife Grace, ambitious reporter Maggie, love struck teacher Cameron, the strikingly competent former cop Brody, to name just a few. Hunter, with his own tangled personal life and relentless digging for the truth, is just the loose cannon to stir things up and overturn the Runa applecart, and he does so with panache. Always a page turner, the book catches fire early on and that fire becomes a roaring blaze in the last fifty pages, as Beckett hits us with first one plot twist and then another, with Hunter's life on the line in a final throw of the dice. It's a tour de force finale to a book that never lost my interest and I look forward to reading more by Simon Beckett.

Moral: Scotland is nice this time of year, but you might want to stay away from the islands.

The psychologist as hero is another recent development in crime fiction, as witness the success of TV's Cracker, with the human psyche just another locked room mystery up for solving. In the mid-nineties Jay Hamilton, the protagonist of The Semantics of Murder (Serpent's Tail paperback, 250pp, [British Pounds]9.99) by Aifric Campbell, ‘toyed with the idea of creating what might amount to a new literary genre, the invention of a psychoanalyst to rival the crime sleuths'. Sorry Jay, but Jonathan Kellerman for one got there at least five years before you didn't, unless you want to split hairs about the difference between psychologists and psychoanalysts.

Hamilton has a very cosy life. An American now resident in London, he gets rich treating the psychological problems of wealthy patients and has a nice sideline in writing up their stories as fiction for the bestsellers he puts out under a pseudonym. Except lurking in the background is the memory of the murder of his brother Robert, a chaos mathematician of dazzling ability, who led a secret gay lifestyle, picking up anonymous men for sex. The crime was never solved. Jay, who was staying with him at the time, discovered the body and saw men driving away in a car. When writer Dana Flynn interviews Jay for a biography she is writing about Robert it stirs up memories he'd rather were left alone, of sibling rivalry and sexual misadventures. Simultaneous with this, one of Jay's patients abducts a child and goes on the run, her actions mirroring the role Jay assigned her in one of his stories: it appears that he is not just recording events, but through inaction allowing them to occur. Slowly Jay's perfect life starts to unravel.

Campbell took her initial inspiration from the still as yet unsolved murder of philosophy professor Richard Montague in 1971, a specialist in semantics, and the resultant novel is a clever book, one that keeps the reader guessing to the last minute as ever more evidence is laid out on the page. Campbell's writing is assured, the work of an author who knows when to show and when to tell for maximum effect, bringing her protagonist to life and then slowly altering our perception of him, with the revelation of the professional rivalry that soured relations with his brother, all the petty jealousies and inadequacies that are part of his make-up. Hamilton is not particularly likeable, with his attitudes to women and the way in which he uses his patients’ secrets to further his own career. It seems that he cannot invent things, has no imagination and therefore we should doubt his ability to genuinely empathise. His perfect life is shown to be a sham and beneath the surface he is simply maintaining control, needing only the one event to tip him over the edge.

Aifric Campbell's book is not so much a murder mystery as case study of a personality in meltdown, what happens when a mental health professional decides to play mind games and, if not as dramatic as the Hannibal Lecter variant, it is undeniably more convincing.

Moral: psychoanalyst, heal thyself.

The Final Days (William Heinemann hardback, 452pp, [British Pounds]10) by Alex Chance also has a psychologist as its main protagonist, but that's as far as the resemblance to Semantics goes. If you were to stand these books in a police line-up, then Days is the one an eye witness would be most likely to finger as the thriller in the pack.

Karen Wiley's life is in turmoil. She's given up her high paid job in television to practice as a psychologist/therapist in San Francisco. Her marriage has broken down, she is not quite sure where she stands with the ex, her eleven year old daughter is a troubled child, and back of all these problems is the guilt she feels at the murder of her sister by a killer when they were both children. Then Karen receives a mysterious note, written in a child's hand and calling on her for help. Similar notes follow and Karen contacts the police, who regard it all as a hoax, until a body part turns up in the mail. Meanwhile in Canaan, Utah, police chief Ella McCullers is heading up the hunt for a missing girl and as the plot unrolls it appears that the two events are related, and both stretch back more than thirty years to a local cult, The Church of the Final Days, and its tyrannical minister. Karen Wiley has become the target of a ruthless serial killer, one who likes to play games with his victims.

Reading this is like watching somebody assemble a jigsaw puzzle. At first it seems like a hopeless mess and the longer the story goes on the more convoluted things become, with such disparate elements as a phonebook obsessed psychopath, a gravestone with Karen's name on it, an internet stalker and thirty year old texts thrown up by the narrative. Then, when it seems things are going to completely unravel, Chance shows his hand and the pattern emerges, so that you're left thoroughly bemused and won over by his ingenious plotting.

The writing is fast paced and elegant, a pared down style that's ideal for a book you read primarily for the story rather than the prose. Chance's characters are vividly drawn and engaging, with the precocious daughter Jen an especial delight, and the up and down relationship between her parents adding a family frisson to the plot, while Karen's personal history of loss is yet another turn of the screw. The one exception is private investigator Blake, who didn't seem entirely credible to me, a bit too much of a good thing, like a detective off the TV, with all his foibles, chequered back story and the expertise at his fingertips. More like Magnum PI, when you were expecting Dirty Harry.

With this sort of book the bad guy is an essential component, and Chance creates a memorable one, a psychopath who is into playing games with his victims, an obsessive personality made all the more scary by the lengths he will go to in gratifying his desires, and on that score the book has plenty of moments that come with a ‘not for the squeamish or faint hearted’ label. The reasons for his being as he is are rooted in a childhood spent with The Church of the Final Days, and the section in which Chance sketches in this bit of the back story is one of the most chilling, a detailed dissection of tyranny masquerading as righteousness. It's the spinal column of a book that engages the attention completely and kept me turning the pages at a rate of knots, one of those fictions for which the phrase ‘edge of the seat’ was coined.

Moral: cults can screw up your life, even if you don't belong to them.

Will Lavender's Obedience (Macmillan hardback, 352pp, [British Pounds]12.99) is set on the campus of Winchester University, Indiana. Professor Williams comes with a somewhat dubious reputation, having been accused of plagiarism in the past, and his teaching methods for Logic and Reasoning are unorthodox to say the least. He tells the class that a young woman has been abducted and they must find her before the end of term using logical deduction or she will be killed, subsequently nudging them on with email infodumps and classroom discussions. The fictional case is based on a real life exemplar from a number of years back, and three students—Mary, Brian and Dennis—get drawn into the investigation to the point of obsession, with the line between fact and fiction becoming blurred. As more facts are revealed and strangers intervene to drive them in different directions, the students suspect that it is really the original crime they are being challenged to solve, and that Professor Williams is either the killer or knows who is.

It's hard to know what to say about Obedience. Karin Slaughter blurbs the book and avows that it ‘explores the dark side of academia, where classrooms are dangerous and paranoia abounds', which is true in as far as it goes, as is another claim that the book is about the abuse of authority (Winchester's Dean was an associate of Stanley Milgrom, famous for his obedience to authority experiments), but its execution is fatally flawed. Initially the set-up drew me in and for a long time it kept me intrigued, with fascinating twists and believable characters. But as I read on I began to feel increasingly uneasy about the direction it was taking, wondering how the author could tie up all these plot strands and make it in the least bit credible. The answer I'm afraid, is he couldn't. Frankly, the reveal when it comes is absurd.

But, of course, reviewers are not supposed to give away the ending, so let's just say it's the kind of twist that gives all those ‘I woke up and it was only a dream’ resolutions a modicum of respectability. Which, in a way, is a pity as serious themes are being dealt with here and they deserved a serious denouement, rather than one that simply doesn't ring true.

Moral: Milgrom might have been a genius, but that don't mean he was a nice guy.

Out of a Clear Sky (Macmillan hardback, 294pp, [British Pounds]12.99) by Sally Hinchcliffe opens with Manda Brooks looking down at the body of the man she has just pushed off a Scottish mountainside and waiting to see if two ravens will peck out his eyes. It's certainly an attention grabber, and in the wake of this scene we get all the events that led up to it.

Manda got into bird watching through boyfriend Gareth, but when he left her for somebody else Manda found herself isolated, not just from Gareth but from all their old friends. The exception was Tom, who still kept in touch and took her for the occasional day out, who appears to be attracted to her though Manda doesn't think she can return his feelings. Then there is David, a young bird watcher who keeps turning up at the same places as her and seems to think she should be interested. There are attacks on the website she maintains for the bird watcher group and Manda's career goes into meltdown as these distractions take their toll. Eventually she decides to walk out on her life and set off on a bird watching tour of the British Isles, only it seems that her troubles are not quite so easily shrugged off, and neither is the stalker intent on making her life a misery.

Hinchcliffe's first novel is a cleverly pitched psychological thriller in which you can never tell if the narrator is to be relied on or not. Manda has problems that go back to her teenage years, when she was alone with her ailing mother who ended up falling down a steep flight of steps, and Manda's father accused her of matricide. This understandably left Manda with a lot of unresolved issues, not least with her father, and a burden of guilt. There is the suggestion that she is repeating the behaviour of her youth, though actually she only shouted at her mother, or at least that is her recollection (but what really happened?). Events of the past and present inform each other, and we're never certain of Manda's culpability, whether she is the guilty party in all this or unwitting cat's paw of somebody else.

Enriching the story are the elements having to do with bird watching, a hobby that for most of the well drawn characters has become a borderline obsession. Sky fleshes this out with a wealth of incidental detail and insight into the insular world of twitchers, constructing a compelling portrait of this group and its mindset, their concerns and rivalries. And Hinchcliffe reinforces this by naming each chapter after a bird, then hinting at its characteristics in the text. The use of first person and almost detached style of the writing works very well, adds an up close and personal dimension that makes it easy to get drawn into Manda's life, to feel for her pain as all the things that mean so much to her are taken away. The end result is a compelling story, one that offers a new slant on familiar territory and delivers a gratifyingly ambiguous resolution. Recommended.

Moral: don't get romantically involved with people who twitch.

Steve Mosby is the only one of these writers with whose work I am familiar. Fourth novel Cry for Help (Orion paperback, 320pp, [British Pounds]9.99) lacks the invention and chutzpah of the previous book by him that I've read, The Third Person, but has distinctive merits of its own. However we're getting ahead of ourselves, delivering a judge's summation to the jury before the case has been heard.

A serial killer is breaking into young women's homes and tying them to their beds, then leaving his victims to die of dehydration while he keeps their friends and family in the loop through means of emails and text messages. Several of the victims are connected to Dave Lewis, a stage magician and scourge of fraudulent mediums. He has become, in police parlance, ‘a person of interest'. When his old girlfriend Tori Edmonds is abducted, the killer drags Dave into a weird mind game, one designed both to frame him for the crimes and bring home to Dave his personal shortcomings as a friend. The challenge for Dave is to save both Tori and himself, but then things get further complicated by a threat to his current girlfriend Sarah and the involvement of a career criminal with an agenda of his own.

Mosby's ingenuity here seems to be mostly focused on the plot. He keeps his eye on the main chance while throwing up a whole shoal of red herrings to distract the reader, such as having Dave's best friend in the frame for the murders and the way in which the police can't see a wrong tree without they bark up it. Dave is a likable protagonist, a good friend who nevertheless always feels that he is not doing enough and with a terrible tragedy in his past, while the other characters are just as finely drawn, especially police detective Sam Currie, whose personal circumstances lead him to get a little too invested in the case. Things such as Dave's interest in mediums and sleight of hand tricks add depth to both his character and the plot, while Mosby is excellent in depicting the relationship between Dave and Sarah, showing how love can grow in such a short time and doing so realistically.

It's with the bad guys that things get a little over complicated. The killer's modus operandi has echoes of the serial killer from the Saw film franchise in the way that his depredations are meant to teach people a lesson. The same technology that keeps us all constantly in touch enables him to get away with his crimes, and he wants to instruct us in how wrong we are to accept such ersatz communication in lieu of more genuine and personal forms of contact. It's a novel twist, but the reason given, the psychological grounding for the killer's behaviour seems rather tenuous. And Mosby achieves his effects by blindsiding the reader, keeping the true identity of two major characters carefully hidden, even when it comes to exposing their thoughts, a ploy that adds a touch of artificiality. Cry for Help has some valuable points to make about society's direction, all wrapped up in a tense story, and I enjoyed the book very much, but I'm not quite sure if I believed in it.

Moral: it's good to text, but better to visit.

LADIES WHO CUT

The forensics school seems to be dominated by female writers. Here are just some who have made their mark with a scalpel: Patricia Cornwell—chronicler of the adventures of Dr Kay Scarpetta, beginning with the novel Post Mortem * Kathy Reichs—a forensic anthropologist herself, Reichs has written ten novels featuring her heroine, Temperance ‘Bones’ Brennan * Karin Slaughter—author of the ‘Grant County’ series, which debuted in 2001 with Blindsighted and main character paediatrician/part-time coroner Sara Linton * Kathryn Fox—Australian author and general practitioner, the creator of Dr Anya Crichton * Tess Gerritsen—her medical examiner character Dr Maura Isles has appeared with homicide detective Jane Rizzoli in a series of bestselling novels

SWINGING BOTH WAYS

Writers who have dabbled in both the horror and the crime/thriller genres: Loren D. Estleman—creator of private eye Amos Walker, but also responsible for what may well be the archetypal genre crossover, Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula (1978) * Peter James—author of such horror classics as Possession, Twilight and Host, his latest books have chronicled the adventures of Brighton-based Detective Superintendent Roy Grace * Christopher Fowler—Black Static columnist whose sixth Bryant & May mystery is due out this month * Dan Simmons—Song of Kali author who has written in several genres; his Joe Kurtz novels were intended as a tribute to the Parker novels of Richard Stark * Joe R. Lansdale—Texas’ favourite son eludes categorisation, but his Hap and Leonard series of novels are crime fiction first and foremost * Stephen King—The Colorado Kid was a Hard Case Crime paperback before it was anything else

SERIAL KILLERS

The crime genre's answer to Michael, Jason and co: Dexter Morgan—forensics expert with a sideline in serial killing, character in a series of bestselling books by Jeff Lindsay and star of a popular TV show * Hannibal Lecter—arguably the world's most famous serial killer, a psychiatrist with a penchant for mind games and cannibalism, the creation of thriller writer Thomas Harris. Anthony Hopkins played him in Silence of the Lambs and got an Oscar * Temple Brooks Gault—killer who likes leaving behind unusual clues to confuse the police, has appeared in three of Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta novels * The Wolverine—not the superhero, but a vicious killer who wears a set of Wolverine teeth in The Big Nowhere, the second book in James Ellroy's LA Quartet * Patrick Bateman—Genesis loving protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis novel American Psycho

WATCHING THE DETECTIVES

Horror is about bad stuff happening, and so naturally the police and detectives get involved. Here's some horror films in which they've taken a notable role: Psycho (1960)—Sheriff Al Chambers (John McIntire) * Night of the Living Dead (1968)—Sheriff McClelland (George Kosana) * The Wicker Man (1973)—Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) * The Exorcist (1973)—Lieutenant Kinderman (Lee J. Cobb) * Halloween (1978)—Sheriff Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers) * An American Werewolf in London (1981)—Inspector Villiers (Don McKillop) and Sergeant McManus (Paul Kember) * A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)—Lt. Donald Thompson (John Saxon) * Angel Heart (1987)—PI Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) * The Prophecy (1995)—Detective Thomas Daggett (Elias Koteas) * Se7en (1995)—Detective David Mills (Brad Pitt) and Detective Lt. William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) * Scream (1996)—Deputy Dwight ‘Dewey’ Riley (David Arquette) * Saw (2004)—Detective David Tapp (Danny Glover) and Detective Steven Sing (Ken Leung) * Header (2006)—Two State Troopers (Jack Ketchum and Edward Lee)

RAIN DOGS by GARY McMAHON

Humdrumming hardback, 224pp, [British Pounds]20

Fate and circumstance bring Guy Renford and Rosie Crouch back to their Yorkshire hometown of Stonegrave. He has just been released from prison after serving a three year sentence for the ‘murder’ of seventeen year old Billy Crouch (Rosie's relative), who broke into his home. Estranged from his family—wife Bella was shocked by the violence and decided to break from him for the sake of their daughter Kay—Guy is a changed man and wants to put things right. As a child Rosie was ‘killed’ by Uncle Tommy, her mother's lover, who murdered seven other young girls, and since then she has been able to see dead people, and now, after many years in America, the girl victims seem to be encouraging her to leave her abusive husband and return to Stonegrave. But waiting for the returnees is an ancient evil: the rain falls constantly and prowling in the downpour are terrible creatures, the rain dogs of the title, who prey on humankind, and as the deluge continues they kill ever more freely and grow in strength.

This is the first novel by Gary McMahon, a young writer who is beginning to make a name for himself, and it delivers on the promise of his short stories and novellas, the plot rendered with an enviable skill. Guy and Rosie are two sides of the same coin; each is released from an institution at the start of the book, a prison for him and a hospital for her; a violent act of self-defence is pivotal in the life of each, the impetus for so much that follows, and each of them must return to Stonegrave. McMahon uses this ‘mirroring’ to reinforce the individual plot strands so that resonances are set up in anticipation of the moment when he brings them together for the first time.

McMahon gives weight to the supernatural elements of the tale by creating a convincing back story, fleshed out by local legends, one that stretches back to druidic times. The omnipresent drumming of the rain permeates every page of the book, a soundtrack to all the rest and providing a climate for the hideous creatures it contains, things at first seen only out of the corner of the eye, or hinted at in events, but gaining strength as the narrative progresses, while the writer deftly keeps his options open by laying in another plot strand with revenge on the agenda for the spirit of Billy Crouch and his somewhat more tangible family. The monsters, when they finally materialise, are chilling in their simple ‘otherness', the suggestion that they are only playing and its implications for our standing in the great cosmic scheme of things.

There are occasional slips, the odd phrase that comes over as slightly stilted, and moments when the writing seems a little flat, but overall McMahon's prose is lovingly crafted, with similes and metaphors that stand out for their quirkiness as well as aptness. He is equally adept at describing events in the real world and the interior lives of his characters, with the ‘action’ scenes as his monsters cut loose holding the attention and generating genuine tension, while incidents such as Rosie's flashback to her time with Uncle Tommy are written to repel but at the same elicit our sympathy for the child victim, this in turn undercut by a final revelation.

Characterisation is another strong point. Guy Renford comes across convincingly as a man who is just a little too prone to violence, but has learned this about himself and is painfully aware of what it has cost him. His love for his family, the feelings he has for Bella and Kay, seem totally genuine, heartfelt and real. Rosie is similarly well drawn, the runaway returning home, somebody who has allowed herself to be beaten down by others and must now make a stand. There are other memorable characters too, as for instance Bella, a woman who wants to do the right thing for everybody, but aware that she cannot put herself first; precocious daughter Kay, the innocent who has to be protected at all cost; the boy Kieran Crouch, a cat's paw for others; Helen Crouch, so desperate for the return of her dead son that she will do anything, the Renford family ensemble, mum and dad and brother, each of them with distinctive traits and insignia.

I do have some slight misgivings. I think the novel would have benefited from some more background to Guy's imprisonment—as is, it sounds rather like a case of perfectly justifiable self-defence. And the monsters, the suggestion of something even worse that could follow them through, have a certain familiarity about them (Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers comes to mind, as do certain episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), though McMahon makes them his own. All quibbles aside, this is a compelling first novel, a book that stands firmly rooted in the traditions of supernatural horror, but is also an original work written with skill and fuelled by anger at the shit life rains down on the undeserving. It bodes well for McMahon's future.

HUNTER'S MOON by DAVID DEVEREUX

Gollancz paperback, 256pp, [British Pounds]6.99

Author Devereux is described as ‘the UK's first celebrity exorcist', inviting jokes about how hard can it be to keep Paris Hilton off the spirits and speculation as to the identity of his ‘ghost’ writer. My guess would be Ian Fleming, as this reads like nothing so much as Bond with a wand, the hard edged Daniel Craig reboot.

Jack is a magician by profession and a bastard by disposition. He works for a top secret government agency that deals with threats to national security of an occult nature. His latest case involves a group of goddess worshippers called the Enlightened Sisterhood, who may be dabbling in the black arts, and shutting them down should be routine, but of course things are never that simple. There's a fly in Jack's ointment, an ex-CIA trained psychologist with a grudge against her former employers and an almost supernatural ability to bend others to her will. From which point on we run the usual gamut of small victories and terrible reversals of fortune, a succession of frying pans and fires, as Jack kills and tortures his way to a satisfactory resolution.

There's nothing subtle about any of this. It's a fast paced plot laced with dashes of kinky sex and ultra-violence, magic and mayhem, doing just enough to hold the attention but without engaging the intellect in any significant way. Jack is a man who doesn't bother too much about the means as long as they meet his end, in short a not particularly likable character, despite some self-justifying whining about what he has to do to keep all us ungrateful bastards safe in our beds at night, so that even when he ends up tortured it's hard to care, while a touch of humour at the end is entirely misplaced, undermining what passed for hard edged realism before. One could ask for a more reflective protagonist, someone who is more a thinker and less the man of action, so that the novel's grey areas could be better addressed, but that's not where Hunter's Moon is coming from (and, in fairness to Devereux, such a protagonist would probably get killed halfway through his first mission). It's entertaining enough taken on its own terms, and as long as you're not squeamish chances are you'll have a good time in Jack's company, but whether you'll remember anything much about it a few months’ later is doubtful.

I've already forgotten everything except the kinky sex. Now, where did I leave those handcuffs?

THE GRIN OF THE DARK by RAMSEY CAMPBELL

Virgin paperback, 341pp, [British Pounds]7.99

Tubby Thackeray was a star of the early silent films and a stage performer whose madcap antics were reputed to cause riots and craziness in the audience. His contract was cancelled and Tubby disappeared off the radar. Disgraced film student Simon Lester is contracted to write a book about the comedian and embarks on research, uncovering evidence that Thackeray was a professor of medieval history before he became a clown, and that his work may have led into some very unsavoury areas. He finds films and comics and newspaper reports all over the place—at a covered market, at a hardcore porn studio in LA, and so on. But the more he researches the more convoluted things become, and meanwhile he is dragged into a bizarre flame war with somebody who seems hell bent on discrediting everything that he does. The increasingly bizarre events that surround him endanger Simon's relationship with girlfriend Natalie, whose son Mark becomes disturbingly preoccupied with a reel of Tubby film. Simon realises that he is being played, but is not prepared for the revelation of who is using him and how.

This book is Ramsey Campbell at his best, the chronicle of one man's descent into madness, with a surreal quality that echoes the work of John Franklin Bardin and a final resolution that brings to mind the merging of technology and horror at the end of John Marks’ novel Fangland.

Simon's unravelling is painstakingly portrayed, with all the subtle atmosphere of menace—the things seen out of the corner of the eye, strange noises, cryptic remarks, distorted figures etc—that Campbell is so good at creating, the effects piling on top of each other until an almost unbearable sense of anticipation and dread is fostered in the reader. In the character of Tubby Thackeray, Campbell cleverly exploits our mixed feelings about the figure of the clown—the resemblance between his painted face and the rictus grin of death, the idea of laughter spiralling off into madness and hysteria—reminding us that in medieval times the court jester was more than just an entertainer. And back of it all is the suggestion of some great evil, an entity inimical to human life and intent on usurping the technology of the internet to undo us, a living meme in search of an ersatz corporeality.

There are marvellous set pieces, such as Simon's visit to a circus with Mark, which is reminiscent of Aickman's ‘The Swords’ in its sinister undertones, the clown figures redolent with menace, but never overtly so, leaving the reader's imagination to fill in the blanks. A similar highlight is Simon's trip to an old, abandoned variety theatre with his parents, where the sense of foreboding is almost overpowering for the reader as well as the characters, the agony of not knowing if those figures in the darkness move or not, whether that strange noise is a stray pigeon or something else entirely. Campbell gives us a tour de force of invention, marshalling all the effects in his armoury to push Simon and the reader to the wall.

For me, the only bum note in the book was struck by Natalie's parents, who come over as comic cut outs, more caricature than character, the stereotypical in-laws from hell who would be more at home in a sitcom than a horror novel. It's a matter of little importance though and doesn't detract from the overall feel and quality of this excellent chiller, which is a splendid addition to Campbell's oeuvre and welcome proof of the Virgin line's commitment to literary horror.

THE second BLACK BOOK OF HORROR

edited by CHARLES BLACK

Mortbury Press paperback, 200pp, [British Pounds]7

Substantially smaller than its predecessor but proportionally cheaper too, this second volume in a series dedicated to recapturing the glory days of yesteryear when Herbert Van Thal was the uncrowned king of the anthologists, presents the reader with a clichéd thirteen tales (though not tales that are clichéd) from writers new and old, experienced and not so.

Opening the proceedings is ‘Black Glass', a solid supernatural story from Gary McMahon, in which a businessman moves into a house where rock stars once lived, one of whom disappeared and the other died. He meets a strange girl, Henna, who beguiles him into unlocking the secret of the sinister glass window that disturbs him so. It's well done, with fully rounded characters and a plot in which each step follows logically on from the previous. McMahon pulls off the difficult trick of making us sympathise with the protagonist, even though he isn't particularly likable. From David Sutton we get the far ickier ‘Amygdala', a nasty little excursion in which a wannabe Frankenstein steals a brain from a hospital. Except the writer is selling the reader a dummy, setting us up for a final twist in which he pulls the rug out from under our feet in this blacker than black comedy. ‘Now and Forever More’ by David Riley is more familiar fare, the usual shenanigans involving rustic villagers with a hint of inbreeding who try to lure the outsiders into their nefarious schemes. Riley's story is competent in the telling, but he doesn't bring anything new to the plot and at just under thirty pages I felt the story was a bit too long for its own good.

Steve Goodwin's story in the first volume was one of my favourites, and that's also true of his offering in this book. ‘The Cold Harvest’ is a subtle piece in which the reader knows more than the protagonist, and the power of suggestion is deftly applied to put over the situation of a young boy who wonders where the meat comes from in his isolated village, the understated nature of the story's ending reinforcing the sense of unease we experience as we read. ‘All Under Hatches Stow'd’ by Mike Chinn has a gang of foresters in an isolated jungle under threat from a deadly virus and members of the party going crazy. It's a beautifully written story, the cabin fever of the characters and their loaded interactions put over well, but in the end it doesn't really go anywhere, this is all Chinn has to offer. With Craig Herbertson's ‘On the Couch’ we're once again on familiar territory; the story is set in an asylum where the patients are being haunted by terrifying dreams, as the evil spirit of a dead psychiatrist wreaks havoc. On the face of it this is a routine supernatural piece but it kept my interest to the end with some lurid imagery from dreams, intriguing characters and a winning final plot twist.

'The Crimson Picture’ by Daniel McGachey is the longest tale in the book but doesn't outstay its welcome. It's the tale of a talented artist who is hired by a mysterious benefactor to paint terrible portraits of his patron's friends and allies. With echoes of both Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray, this is a powerful story that is suggestive of far more than the words convey, with a clever plot and some subtly disturbing imagery. From longest story to shortest. ‘Squabble’ by D.F. Lewis is a simple account of a man killing a child to get back at a work colleague, but made far more sinister by Lewis’ command of language and the off kilter atmosphere he brings to the piece. In contrast, Eddy C. Bertin's ‘The Eye in the Mirror’ is a go nowhere story in which a man is imprisoned for the murder of his wife, but this is then revealed as an induced fantasy to test out what mistakes he might make when he actually does kill her, none of which impresses. The writing doesn't grip, there's nothing to make you care about the character and little real purpose to the ‘it was all a dream’ twist to the plot. Equally silly at first blush is ‘The Meal’ by Julia Lufford in which a couple go into the woods for sex games only to fall foul of a monster, with some dialogue that doesn't ring true for a moment and an almost Carry On sensibility to the sex side of things. I'll allow though that this could be deliberate on Lufford's part, as the slightly ludicrous set-up is retrieved by a neat twist at the end so that I could enjoy the story without really taking it seriously.

As ever, the duo of L.H. Maynard and M.P.N. Sims deliver the goods, this time by means of a chance encounter in a bar with a femme fatale whose secrets are unwrapped like an ‘Onion'. The story is one of the best in the collection, and all the better for the deft use of suggestion, with the reader cringing along with the protagonist as each fresh revelation comes to light. There's a whiff of old school craziness about ‘In Sickness And...’ by John Llewellyn Probert, the tale of a rogue marriage counsellor, who comes in and screws up everybody's lives, then goes home to her husband. It's an over the top exercise in madness that's both unbelievable and great fun. Last of all we have ‘The Pit’ by Roger Pile, another highlight of the collection, with a man murdering two children who attempt to blackmail him, but then undone by either his own guilt or supernatural intervention (Pile plays his cards close to his chest). The story is well paced and with credible characterisation, plus effective hints of the protagonist's world unravelling. It's a good end to a strong collection, and one that is sure to enhance the reputation of this series.

Copyright © 2008 Peter Tennant

The early Christmas decorations look like the detritus of some recent calamity—perhaps a flash flood or a minor earthquake. Limp strips of tinsel are draped like dead snakes over the necks of concrete lamp posts, stuttering party lights festoon lacklustre window displays showing bald-chinned saints and bags of sugar wrapped in swaddling clothes. Drizzle hangs in the air like strings of semen; the stench of brine is intolerable, even though the coast is miles away.

If they're going to usher in Christmas this early, Blane thinks, then why don't they at least throw away last year's stuff and put up something new?

A fat mechanised Santa with white padding spilling from a wound in his side nods rhythmically, as if in silent agreement.

Blane takes a seat on a bench outside Waterstone's and smokes his last cigarette down to the filter. Since the arrival of the smoking ban, he has felt like a criminal every time he lights up. Lately he almost enjoys the sense of being ostracised from the masses. Smoking has become one of the few token acts of rebellion in his safe, ordered little existence.

Glancing up towards the busy Headrow, Blane spots a bunch of youths running across the road in front of a white Transit. The van halts suddenly with a squealing of brakes, and the driver sticks his shaven head out of the window to yell at the kids. They barely even acknowledge him, just let loose with a chorus of habitual obscenities and continue on their way. Each one wears a baseball cap on his or her head, some with the hoods of sweatshirts pulled over the hats. The uniform is finished with tracksuits and cheap trainers that are market-stall copies of more expensive brands; the cuffs of their trousers are tucked into dirty white terry towelling socks.

Blane feels the familiar sinking feeling that plagues him whenever he sees such a group. His mouth dries out and his eyes begin to prickle. Danger is imminent, and his body responds by becoming lighter, trying to become unnoticeable by blending into the crowd.

He flicks the cigarette butt into a nearby planter and waits. If he moves, they might notice him, and the risk of confrontation will rear like a beast on the horizon. Better to stay put until the potential for trouble has passed. He doesn't know how to deal with these kids: they are alien to him, part of a new race that has appeared to fill in the gaps of society. Like mould in the cracks of an old wall.

Blane watches the five or six teens as they dance through the shoppers, clipping a shoulder here, tugging on a handbag there. Out for trouble. Making mischief. They split apart and then come back together, like bacteria swarming around cells under a microscope. And that is exactly what they are: a virus, albeit a social one.

They shout and jeer, their language made up from text-speak and TV soundbites. Blane can barely even understand what they are saying, and the songs they chant are like mud in his ears.

Bystanders move out of their way, anxious not to get caught up in the display. Men stare at their shoes; pensioners quake in fear; women go glassy-eyed.

Fuckers, he thinks. How dare they!

But dare they do, and they are allowed to get away with it. What's that saying, the one about evil triumphing when good men do nothing? Blane is right in the middle of an example of that very platitude.

But then something happens.

The youths break up into two separate groups, and then a single lad walks away from the gang. The others stand in silence, watching him go. The boy jogs back up towards the Headrow, pretending to look in shop windows, bending over to fiddle with his shoelace. Then, when he spots a petite woman of about thirty staggering under the weight of too many shopping bags, he straightens and performs a curious circular movement, going around her and falling into step at her back.

The other two small groups take out their mobile phones and point them at the woman. Cold smiles crack open their pimpled faces. One of the girls giggles, but a stern look from her friend silences her.

"Oh, no.” Blane hears his own voice yet does not recognise it. The timbre is all wrong, and it takes him a moment to register that what he hears is fear. He knows exactly what is about to happen.

Blane remembers reading a short article about the craze commonly known as Happy Slapping in the Yorkshire Post, and has even seen a report on the television news when the wife of a local MP fell foul of the activity. But he has not heard anything since, and assumed that the hideous fad had died out, like the ‘deely-boppers’ and ‘hacky-sacs’ of his own youth.

According to what little he has learned, the craze usually involves a bunch of kids using the video function of their mobile phones to record what amounts to an unprovoked assault. It goes like this: a lone member of a gang casually approaches a pedestrian, either slaps or punches the unsuspecting victim in the face, and then flees the scene. His friends remain there for a few moments to record the result of his actions, and then make their own jubilant getaway.

Blane stands slowly, feeling dread like lead weights attached to his clothing: it is a physical presence, a very real part of the experience unfolding around him.

The boy closes in on his chosen victim, smiling, one hand coming out of the pocket of his tracksuit bottoms to hang free at his side. Blane cannot make out his features: the boy has the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up around his face. Hoodys are a fashion, he knows, that emerged from the necessity of avoiding CCTV surveillance. These kids might be mindless, but they aren't stupid.

Blane runs across the pedestrianised quadrant, heading towards the in utero crime: his legs are slow and heavy; the world turns to a thick fog.

It all happens so quickly ... but it also happens in a hideous slow-motion.

The boy begins to overtake the woman, pulling abreast of her as she pauses to hitch one of the shopping bags further up onto her shoulder. Her eyes blink as she looks at him, a tentative smile hovering at the edges of her pretty mouth. A single strand of her nut-brown hair falls across her face, and she blows it out of the way in a gesture that breaks Blane's heart.

The boy pulls back his arm and slaps her across the left cheek, causing her to flinch and her feet to slip on the paving stones. The woman goes down heavily, shocked and taken utterly by surprise. Her bags go flying as she holds out her arms in a belated act of self-protection. The expression on her face is unreadable. Just as she hits the ground events return to normal speed. The boy is running away; his mates stand by, filming. They are laughing, too, an avid look in their eyes. They have ceased to be separate entities and become a pack, a single hostile entity.

Blane changes direction and heads for the boy, not even thinking about the repercussions. Let everyone else stand and stare or walk on by (the woman is still sitting on the ground, no one has stepped forward to offer her aid), Blane will punish the kid, he will make the bastard pay for what he has done.

Recalling the chain of events later, he will be amazed at how quickly it all happened. The pursuit ... the flashing dirty-white ovals of the bottom of the boy's shoes ... the sound of the other kids clapping and shouting for their comrade to run ... the bus coming out of nowhere, running a red light.

In that same weird contradictory slowing-down-speeding-up of time, Blane even has time to notice that the overweight driver is looking the other way, his eyes on some nubile young female on the other side of the road as she adjusts the hem of a skirt that is cut far too short for the season.

When the impact comes it is unremarkable. The boy sort of runs into the side of the bus, his head glancing against the bodywork before he slumps and rolls. His hands go up and around the front end of the vehicle, as if he is trying to embrace it, and his legs give out from under him. Perhaps the blow alone is not enough to kill him outright, but when his body is dragged beneath the wheels and his head falls into the path of the front nearside tyre, his life ends. The cap-and-hoody-encased skull bursts like a ripe melon, and Blane barely has time to look away before the screaming starts. People are reacting at last, and it has taken bloodshed to stir them from their apathy.

Blane will dream about the event much later, and in great detail, but in this moment all he feels is the last thing he expects to: a deep and unwholesome joy. Victory is his. Justice has been served. The little fucker got exactly what his behaviour warranted ... It is only afterwards that he feels guilty about his emotions, and even then the guilt is diluted. No matter what civilised society has taught him, he now knows the ugly truth that sometimes it feels good to watch someone perish.

The police detain him for hours, taking his statement and running over the same questions time and time again. Despite the corresponding evidence of the woman who was Happy-Slapped, the authorities have to be seen to be doing something, even if they are not.

As Blane collects his possessions before leaving the station, the officer on desk duty leans close and whispers in his ear. “Don't lose any sleep over it, mate."

Blane stares at the man, feeling tired and empty and as if everyone is speaking a language different to his own.

"The little bastard was into everything: car crime, house break-ins, street muggings. The lot. His family are scum. You did this city a favour."

Blane walks out into the grey streets. He feels weird and on edge, like his skin no longer fits his skeleton.

Winter is closing in fast: the air is brittle against his cheek and darkness arrives early. The sky is a mass of shadows and all Blane wants is to be home. He steps to the kerb and waits for a taxi to appear, pulling his collar up to his chin to block the chill. A bus rattles by, faces staring from behind the dirty windows. The narrowed eyes of every passenger are turned upon him, and he feels judged by their loaded glances.

Soon a taxi pulls up, and when he climbs into the back seat the driver refuses to set off until Blane shows him some money. “No offence,” says the squat man, “but you've obviously come from the cop shop and I ain't in no mood to be ripped off. Again."

Blane pays up front, just to keep the peace, then he watches the streets unfurl beyond the windows as the car speeds out of the centre and towards West Leeds. Revellers in party hats stumble into the road. Groups of eager drinkers are swallowed up by skinny pub doorways guarded by stocky men with shaved heads.

Halfway home, his mobile phone rings. The ringtone is a simple buzzer—not for him the silly tunes and joke voices that can be downloaded from the Internet for a couple of pounds. He detests having to own one of the damn things, but his boss pays for it so that Blane can be on call twenty-four hours a day.

There is no sound when he raises the handset to his ear, not even a dial tone that might inform him whoever called has now rung off. Just dead air. Empty space. Then ... a single sound, like hands clapping, but just the once, followed by more silence.

Blane turns off the phone and slides it into his pocket. If anyone from work wants to get in touch, he will speak to them in the morning. He is too exhausted and too afraid to communicate with anyone other than the surly man driving him home.

He makes a pot of tea once he's inside and locked the doors. Paranoia dogs him through the house, but from past experience he knows that a hot drink and an hour in front of the television will help relax him.

No one calls him on the landline, and no intruders try to enter the property. He is safe and sound now that he is on his own turf.

He thinks of the teenagers from earlier that day, and how they stared at him with naked hostility as they all waited for the ambulance to arrive. They did not seem perturbed by the death of their friend; instead, they radiated a kind of mute hatred that had little or nothing to do with the boy's messy demise. Even as they filmed the aftermath on their phones, the kids demonstrated no emotion, just a flicker of idle curiosity at the broken remains of their felled brother.

After a hot bath he retires to bed, putting some Bob Dylan on the stereo to lull him. Soon he is aware that his eyes are closing; then minutes or hours later a sound is waking him, and Dylan's voice has gone.

His mobile phone. It is ringing.

He reaches out and picks it up from its usual place on the bedside table, then presses it against his ear, barely able to register that the green digits in the corner of the otherwise blackened screen say it is 3:30am.

"Yssa?"

Sleep clings to him, dragging him down.

"Whaddya?"

There is nothing. The line is dead. He holds the handset in front of his face, feeling the warm battery glow from the small screen as it flares into life. Someone, it seems, has sent him a video message.

The tiny square of clear plastic shows a grainy transmission of an urban street. It is dark. The buildings along each side of the narrow alley look derelict, their windows either broken or boarded up. A lone figure stands at the end of the street, turned to the side. The figure is too far away for Blane to make out much more than a ragged silhouette, but behind it is only an expanse of dark grey sky.

Slowly the figure begins to turn, facing the screen and whoever has shot the jerky footage with their mobile phone. Before anything even approaching a face can be revealed, the image ends, the screen turning black.

Blane pushes the phone away from him and turns onto his side, allowing sleep to reclaim him. As he drifts off, a strange realisation enters his dimming mind: after turning off his phone in the taxi, he did not turn it back on before going to bed. The power button is located at the top of the small oblong box, so there is no way he could have thumbed it accidentally while answering this latest call.

Blane's boss is absent from the office the next day, so he has time to kill. There are a few urgent tasks that require his attention, but after that he is free to mess around to his heart's content—which usually means surfing the Net or listening to music with his mp3 player set to shuffle.

His final job of the day is to file some photographs of a building the development company he works for are interested in purchasing, an old block of city centre flats they are planning to renovate and sell on at a huge profit.

He opens each file, checks it for clarity, and then saves it as a jpeg in the pertinent sub folder for that project number. It is mind-numbing stuff, but someone has to do it, and he doesn't trust any of the younger secretaries to get it right: they are all too busy talking about last night's television or arranging their hectic alcoholic weekends.

Each photo consists of an interior shot of the building: dark, shadowy, ill-defined rooms with no purpose. Bare walls, rotten floors, damp ceilings. He barely takes in what he is seeing as he carries out the dull chore, so when one of the photographs snags his attention at first he is confused as to why. Then, focusing, he realises what he is looking at.

It is the same street from the video message he received the night before ... the message that is no longer on his phone, despite the settings being such that every incoming call or text message is saved automatically to the handset's memory.

The figure is there, right where it was last night, but this time it seems closer. And he can see that it is male, young, and wearing a hood over a peaked cap to hide a too long and dreadfully misshapen head. A baggy tracksuit is draped over a narrow frame.

The figure begins to turn its curiously shapeless head, slowly, like it is animated. The pixilation is blocky and beginning to break up, but there is no doubting the stuttering movement. The figure faces him, but thankfully its features are lost in darkness: all he can make out is the lumpen outline of the hood and the creased peak of the cap.

He collapses the image and jumps from his seat, scurrying across the office as if he has seen a rat under his desk. His co-workers stare at him, faces soft with mirth. One of the juniors starts to giggle, which triggers a ripple of laughter throughout the open plan space.

"Sorry,” he mutters. “Static electricity on the mouse ... gave me a nasty shock."

He takes an early lunch and rides downstairs in the glass elevator, looking out onto City Square as it rises to meet him. He watches the men in suits and Santa hats and women in smart skirts and glitzy jackets, all of them with a purpose, a mission, a place to be, somewhere they are going to or coming from.

When he lurches out of the building he feels suddenly cold and realises that he has left his jacket indoors, hanging over the back of his swivel chair. But he does not want to return to fetch it; he prefers to brave the cold, it might wake him up. He fumbles a cigarette from his trouser pocket and sparks it up from his ailing lighter, then paces the pavement outside the building, aware that someone up above on his floor is watching him through a window. To hell with them: he does not care what they think of him.

A group of teenagers stands on the opposite side of the road, near the fountains. They are lounging on the stainless steel benches and watching the water from one of the features as it fizzles through a defective outlet. He stares at them, wondering if they are the same ones as before, the Happy Slappers. They all have phones—he can see that clearly, each one clutches a handset in their fist as if it is a weapon they are unable to release—but doesn't everyone have them these days, even him?

One of the kids holds up a phone to his pale, disinterested face. He closes one eye, filming Blane through the tiny lens. Blane feels scoured, skinned, laid bare. The rest of the youths notice him, and one by one they hold up their own handsets, a series of renegade filmmakers capturing his every twitching move...

Blane runs, heading towards the train station. Car horns blare as he rushes into the road, but he does not pause in his escape.

The platform is full of kids in tracksuits, their faces hidden by hoods. Blane feels exposed; he wants to dig a hole and bury his fear. When he boards the train, it seems populated by passengers on mobile phones, talking loudly into tiny microphones, listening to miniscule speakers. By the time the train reaches his stop, he is ready to jump off anyway, just to be away from the threat of too much communication. His own phone vibrates in his pocket, and when he retrieves it the screen threatens to light up and show him another message—the same message, presenting the boy who stalks him through vague digital avenues.

He reaches home without further incident, staying out of the way of groups of teenagers who huddle on street corners and loiter outside an Asian newsagent.

After shrugging off his coat, Blane rings the office to tell them he has gone home sick. He uses the landline, and unplugs the cable from the wall when he has finished the call. He holds his mobile phone by his fingertips, as if afraid he might catch something from its dull plastic surface. It feels alive in his grip, and he cannot wait to be rid of it.

He hovers over the pedal bin in the kitchen, then thinks better of it and goes out into the back garden and opens the wheelybin. He smashes the handset against the garden wall before placing it inside the bin, smiling. That should be the end of it, he thinks. The connection is severed.

That night he sleeps well for the first time since the incident, and when he wakes the next morning, he feels peace enter his room with the wash of sunlight that pours between the bedroom curtains.

"You sure you're ready for this?"

Blane nods, angry at himself for forgetting what day it is.

"I'll take over for you, if you're busy.” The group secretary, Lisa, is eager to please; she has her sights set on Blane's job, although she would never admit it to his face.

"No. Thank you, but I'm fine."

The school kids wait in reception, bored and restless under the expensive Christmas tree, idle fingers interfering with baubles and stealing chocolate angels. They have come from the local comprehensive because the firm is having an open day, inviting children inside for a look around, with an aim to future recruitment. Blane's boss should have been tour guide for the day, but he is still suffering from whatever malady sent him to his bed yesterday.

"This way, please. Follow me through into the main office.” He raises his voice, hoping that he sounds authoritarian, but even the teachers look unimpressed. Blane fears it is going to be a long morning.

He leads them through from reception and into the main body of the building, past cluttered desks, blinking monitors, and bored members of staff who are trying to look busy and interested. He maintains a constant chatter throughout the short journey, but is unaware of what he is meant to be saying: the lines leave his lips by wrote, like a script he's been studying.

"And this is Acquisitions, where I work. That's my desk.” He points, turning to face his reluctant audience. “This is where the action takes place, the deals are done, the contracts agreed. Millions of pounds can be committed during just a ten-minute phone call."

One of the children—a young boy with ugly metal braces on his teeth—yawns; the girl next to him giggles and digs her elbow into his side. Someone's phone or iPod emits a loud bleep, and a wordless whisper passes through the group. More sounds follow—buzzes, belches, snippets of music—and one by one the children take out their mobile phones.

"If you could just turn off any phones while you're in here...” but no one is listening. They are all intrigued that everyone's phone seems to be ringing at once. Even the two chaperones consult their phones, puzzled expressions on their faces. “Please,” says Blane, but he is no longer even paying attention to himself. His phone—set to vibrate—is jigging in his pocket, although he clearly remembers disposing of it yesterday.

"What is it, a clip from a horror film?"

"That's weird."

"Are they all the same?"

The children are passing around handsets, staring in disbelief. The teachers are attempting to maintain order, but even they are caught up in the excitement.

"Is it some kind of virus, do you think?"

All the phones are showing the same video message; and Blane fears that he knows exactly what it is. He catches sight of one of the screens, and the figure is nearer than before. On each screen he glimpses, the features are gaining clarity, and the sorry excuse for a face nods ever closer to the waking world.

Blane backs away, retreating into a corner, but as he turns his head from side to side, wary of the gaze of his colleagues, he sees that the same image has appeared on PC terminals around the office ... the empty street, dark sky, advancing figure. On his own computer screen, the figure is standing directly before the unseen lens, but the face remains lost in darkness, contained within the folds and rents of something that could only loosely be termed as a head. It reaches up a slim hand from below the screen, and slaps its own ruined cheek. There is only a single blow, but when the hand leaves its target after contact is made, something else peels away with it.

The rest of the day is a blur. Blane watches the clock and is afraid to look at his screen; he allows the computer to remain in screen-save mode, preferring to be watched by the ransom geometrical patterns that apparently safeguard the privacy of his work.

At 5:30 he leaves the building. It is dark outside. People rush to meet their friends and lovers for a pre-Christmas drink, or to return home to their families. When he reaches the station, Blane finds that the line is faulty and all trains are suspended. While the other stranded passengers go outside to stand in line for a bus, Blane chooses to walk back to the office and call a taxi. He can put it on the work account, it won't cost him a penny. It's the least they can do.

Two boys in tracksuits are sitting on the office steps, passing a cigarette between them and drinking from a beer can. A girl stands nearby, as if on lookout. Are they waiting for him? He seems to recognise at least the girl; he is certain that she was present during the accident. All three are fondling their phones.

Blane turns quickly down an alley and comes out near one of the Victorian arcades. Late shoppers are pulled along by their gaudy packages, festive lights turn the pavements a sickly shade of green. Blane senses something shifting beneath the surface of this scene; a huge and festering darkness flickers into his perception, and then vanishes, as if it was never there at all.

All the buses are filled to bursting point and refusing to allow extra passengers onboard, and Blane is too afraid to turn on his mobile to call the taxi firm. He knows the address, so decides to travel there on foot. They know him well, he throws a lot of business their way. He is sure that once he identifies himself and tells them about the teenagers who seem to be following him, they will furnish him with a ride home.

With a renewed sense of purpose, he strides down the hill, past the train station and towards Boar Lane, noting that the crowds are thinning, the shops becoming less attractive, the pubs more rough-looking. He averts his eyes from several people sleeping in charity shop doorways, and when he passes one of the canals he sees something large and dark floating in the water.

He is not entirely sure where he is, but knows that the company operates out of an office somewhere down here, where the prostitutes hang around on street corners and used needles can often be found lying in the gutters.

He realises too late that he has made a huge mistake. Why didn't he wait for a bus, or simply huddle down with a coffee in the train station? His panic has led him here, and he knows the street that he suddenly finds himself on. Boarded windows, broken glass, a dusty grey horizon.

The figure waits for him up ahead, turned to the side so the damage to its skull is not quite visible. His mobile phone vibrates, despite the fact that he has already destroyed it. But that doesn't matter: there are greater powers at work here, ones that can travel across deep gaps in space and utilise any conduit they might choose.

Blane walks towards the distant figure, aware that he can never escape; he has tried that route, and it ended here, right where he is supposed to be. All he has done is delay the inevitable.

Glass shatters somewhere above him and off to the left. He looks up and sees bloodless acne-scarred faces emerge through the holes of windows that lacerate the sides of the buildings: pale masks lit by a greenish light from the mobile phones clasped in white claw-like hands.

Tears run down his face, but there is no way out of this. All exits are blocked. There is no other way but forward.

The figure has vanished from view, but still he senses its presence. It is moving alongside him, closing in to strike when he least expects it.

Blane wraps his fingers around his mobile phone and pulls it from his pocket. The screen glows, but the light it emits is cold, dead. The case is broken and the stuff that leaks from the cracks looks unsettlingly like freshly minced meat.

The handsets above and around him are all focused on his journey along the alley, filming him, recording what is about to happen. He hears footsteps scrabbling in the rubble to his left, and off to his right someone claps their hands.

The slap, when it comes, feels like a slab of ice raked across the side of his face, and his skin tears away like paper as the scream leaves his throat, turning his lips ragged.

Blane falls to the ground, covering his face with his hands, and holds his breath. The pain in his face is immense: it has become his face. As he waits for events to unfold, he wonders what great terror lies beyond the sound—and indeed the sensation—of a single hand slapping.

Copyright © 2008 Gary McMahon

There is in certain ancient things a trace

Of some dim essence—more than form or weight;

A tenuous aether, indeterminate,

Yet linked with all the laws of time and space.

H.P. Lovecraft, ‘Continuity'

Howard ... Howard ... Someone called to him.

The stars were quite amazing—the sky vast and dark as it could only be from the vantage point of space. He floated in that darkness and stared at unfamiliar constellations. He would need to modify his charts to account for them, maybe write something for the next edition of the Rhode Island Journal.

Howard...

"Mr Lovecraft."

He opened his eyes, and there was a woman—his mother—holding something out toward him. A glass? He waived her away. “I'm a grown man now, Mother. I don't want any milk."

"Mr Lovecraft, it's time for your medicine."

He forced his eyes to open wider, and the woman's face resolved itself from an obscuring haze. Not his mother. Of course it wasn't. His mother was dead. She'd died in a room like this ... A hospital; that's where he was. Like where they took father all those years ago. A place to go when there is nothing left to do but die. Like the solitude little Sam Perkins had sought out as all cats do when it's their time to expire. A shrub had been Sam's dying room—his death bower. Much better, that. Better than this cold, antiseptic place. He shivered.

"This'll make you feel better, Mr Lovecraft.” They kept telling him that, but it was an untruth. Even the damnable morphine did little to ease his pain and only seemed to addle his mind so that everything was just a bit confusing.

The sharp pain of an injected needle woke him fully; or rather, as fully as was possible in recent days. The kind young doctor was there with the nurse.

"What day is it, Dr Dziob? I have to make a printing deadline."

"Thursday, March the eleventh, Mr Lovecraft."

"1909?"

The nurse laughed. “I should say not, sir. 1937."

It was too late then. He had stopped printing the Rhode Island Journal long ago. No, it wasn't his astronomy journal he needed. What was it?

He reached for the diary on his bedside table and propped it up on his abdomen, which was distended to startling proportions so that it worked well as a sort of lap desk while he reclined against the raised hospital bed. The nurse and the doctor left, and he removed the pencil from where it marked the place for his next entry.

It took him several minutes to write the date, as the pencil kept slipping from his tired grip. Then he added: pain—dr jones take blood. So many different doctors were involved. He stopped for a moment to rest his hand, trying to remember what else he'd done earlier in the day, before continuing: bath—pain—elec. pad—aepg call. Yes, Annie E. Phillips Gamwell, his aunt, had left just before the nurse came in. He looked back at what he'd written and could barely read it, but he was unsure if that was because his handwriting had become so poor or because his eyesight seemed to be failing him.

"I don't think I shall manage any further writing,” he murmured. The pencil marks blurred into whorls of black on white, like an inverse of the condensed milk he took with his coffee dissolving into the hot liquid. He adjusted the electric heading pad around his abdomen, the book fell onto his chest, and he slept. The sound of the pencil rattling as it rolled off the bed and onto the tile floor followed him into the dream realms of Morpheus.

Darkness surrounded him—a murky, half-darkness in which his eyes could sense motion but very little of shape. These were living entities, though, of that he was certain. Entities that would have been too large for his eyes to encompass in their entirety even if the light had been sufficient to the task. Sounds of leathery flapping—a great cacophony of fleshy ripples—filled the air. He discerned the occasional glimpse of a tentacle undulating into and out of view. There must have been many of these great appendages, for they appeared and disappeared everywhere he looked.

Then, for a time, one of these tentacles hovered quite visibly above him. He stared at it, fascinated by the texture, mottled scales covering minutely beaded muscle mass beneath, like snakeskin stretched over a bag of marbles. The quivering limb was covered in a viscous brown sluice, and he watched—horrified but unable to move—as some fell on him, clinging to his shoulder, his arm. It contained little brown capsules, and he reached out and grabbed one between his fingers. It was soft—slippery—familiar. And then it came to him. Beans!

He popped the bean hungrily into his mouth but found to his dismay that it tasted like poison. He tried swallowing, simply to remove the vile flavor from his taste buds, and pain shot down his throat and into his stomach like liquid fire...

He lurched awake, crying out, and sat up. The rapid motion caused even further pain to erupt in his spine, and he doubled over his distended belly, gasping for breath.

And this time his mother was there, soothing him, putting her arms around him.

"Howard, dearest.” But no, not his mother's voice...

He extricated himself from her arms, sat back panting, and stared until recognition settled in. Aunt Annie. He tried a feeble hello but found himself gagging instead. She held a little metal basin out for him as he retched bile. When his body ceased its spasms, he slumped back, exhausted, sweat beading on his high forehead. His chin trembled slightly, and he clenched his jaw to stop it.

"I brought your pillow like you asked yesterday, Howard. The one from when you were a child ... The very one you've slept on every night except for when you were at Ms Greene's home in New York.” Annie lifted his upper body from the bed, and either she'd grown stronger or he had become light as a dandelion puff, for she seemed to exert almost no effort. Then she slid the stiff hospital pillow out from under him and replaced it with his own.

"The pest zone,” he breathed, and he wondered who was living now in the little room he'd found for himself at 169 Clinton after Sonia had gone off to Cincinnati and he'd moved out of her apartment. He'd had his pillow sent to him then in Brooklyn. And thankfully those burglars hadn't stolen it when they took his suits. It was just what he needed now.

He settled back into its familiar plushness, the goose down within releasing the accumulated aromas of his lifetime. Even after all these years he fancied he could smell 454 Angell Street in it—a mix of furniture polish, pipe smoke, and fresh country air—and it called memories into his mind of dear sweet Grandpa Whipple and of countless childhood hours spent immersed in the Arabian Nights and Grimm's Fairy Tales and the stories of Poe. He could smell too the faint, mingled aromas of kerosene and candle wax, remnants of the two sources of light he had taken with him time and again into the dark, windowless attic to hunt for treasures from the past.

He had his pillow with him again, and it was all he needed. His past. A thing of his past to guide him into the future that awaited. Past, present, future—all are one, he thought. Was it all not the same?

"No more of the pest zone, Howard; let's not speak of New York. I snuck the pillow in under my coat, you know. I wasn't sure the doctors would let me bring it in...” Annie's voice trailed off, echoing like dozens of tiny bells that became...

Lapping water. Party lanterns had been strung along the esplanade.

"Why do you want to go to that awful place?” Sonia asked, pointing toward the river. “Let's walk back into Magnolia—to the square.” She held his hand, and she tried now to pull him away from the water.

"No, no, Sonia. Let's just stay for a bit, shall we? Look how beautiful the starlight is on the water.” And it was beautiful, the surface sparkling like diamonds against black velvet, the entire scene softened by a pearl-gray mist that settled lazily onto the water.

A group of men—rough-and-tumble sailor types—stood below them and off to the right on the river bank, pulling together on a rope that was attached to a piling some distance out in the water. The rope was taut. The creaking sounds it made as its fibers stretched were audible in the still night.

And the men kept pulling. Something was not right.

He looked down at them and furrowed his brow. “I don't think they should do that."

Sonia laughed. “Oh, Howard! I'm sure every thing will work out just fine."

He wasn't convinced. He stared intently at the rope and at the piling, and perhaps the piling was moving—but away from the sailors rather than toward. “No, I don't think it will work out fine at all."

As if his words were the final lines of an invocation, the waters around the piling began to churn. A great froth erupted, splashing as high as the esplanade, and a beast emerged. It was a long, cylindrical thing, snakelike but huge and with no discernable head or mouth. Nothing in nature could resemble that long, wriggling cylinder! But there it was, writhing in the water, which now did not appear to be water at all but looked more like a bubbling, brown, soupy mix. The sharp, acrid scent of baked beans assailed his nostrils, and he stared in puzzled awe at the beans bubbling as far as could be seen, off into the horizon like a vast pool of primordial tar.

Without warning, the beast lunged toward them.

It wrapped itself around him, over and over again, quick as thought, before Howard could do anything to try to ward it off. It pressed tighter against his torso while pushing Sonia further away with its increasing bulk as it coiled about him. He tried slipping an arm between its coils to reach for Sonia's hand, but she was simply too far away. The beast was crushing him now. His abdomen felt like it must surely burst, and he cried out in agony.

"Hush now, Howard.” His aunt's voice intruded upon his consciousness, and the river faded. She was still fluffing his pillow beneath his head, but it was difficult to tell if mere moments had passed or if it was already the next day. Perhaps it had been two days. His stomach and back hurt horribly, as did his swollen ankles, with a persistent throb. He thought he had a fever.

Annie placed a damp cloth to his forehead, and the cool water felt about as soothing as anything he had ever experienced in his life. He sighed as little rivulets of water dripped down his temple and onto his pillow, which absorbed the water and the salts of his skin, leaching his essence into the cloth. And it was only right. The pillow was a part of him, and now he was a part of the pillow.

"I sent a letter to Mr Barlow,” Annie said as she sat down in a chair at his bedside.

He pulled distractedly at the tape holding a line of tubing in place where a needle was inserted into his arm. “Bobby?” he croaked. “Will he be here?” He smiled, but his face felt stiff, the muscles unwilling to cooperate fully. I'll have to take him to Maxfield's, he thought. The kid missed out on going the last time. But we did it—Mortonius and Wandrei and I ... all twenty-eight flavors of ice cream ... our framed certificate still hangs there! He laughed quietly, his body trembling with the exertion. A tear escaped the corner of his eye and trickled down his face, pooling in his ear for a moment before joining the water that had already soaked into the pillow.

Once again it was dark. And this time he was frightened almost immediately, because he was careening through space at a very great speed, propelled by a force that was all too familiar. They used to come to him often in his childhood but only very rarely any longer. Black, lean things with rubbery bodies and no faces. They swirled about him with their bat wings and barbed tails, goading him forward with detestable tridents.

He closed his eyes and felt like crying. The fear built up inside of him, threatening to erupt. The darkness behind his eyelids terrified him, but what he would see if he opened them terrified him even more!

Just as he felt sure he would lose his mind, a comforting voice sounded in his head. “Come now, Howard. That's no way for a bright young man to conduct himself.” It was grandpa. Grandpa Whipple! “That's right, Howard. Now it's only a bit of darkness. Nothing, really. Just walk through the dark room, and you'll see nothing bad will happen. Go ahead. I dare you."

And he did. He opened his eyes, ignoring the darkness and the shapes swirling about within it. In an instant, the shapes vanished, and all that remained was the darkness. He took a tentative step forward. Then another. And then he strode into the blackness until it too disappeared.

As the light grew, he was able to discern his friend Harry Brobst and Brobst's wife sitting alongside the bed where it seemed Aunt Annie had been only a moment before. But no, that had been yesterday. He nodded his head once in greeting.

"How are you feeling today, Howard?” Harry's voice sounded far away.

"Sometimes ... sometimes the pain is unbearable.” He said it quietly, matter-of-factly—not complaining, simply answering the question.

Harry's wife excused herself rather abruptly and walked out of the room. Harry reached out and took Howard's hand in his own. They sat like that for quite some time, although with sleep and wakefulness ever competing for his consciousness, it was again difficult to measure the passing of time with certainty.

At some point, Brobst gave his hand a firm squeeze and rose to his feet to take his leave. “Remember the ancient philosophers, Howard.” Howard smiled back as stoically as he could manage and watched his friend walk from the room. He paused for a moment in the doorway to turn and wave goodbye, but Howard lacked the strength to raise his arm and wave back.

Brobst departed then, leaving Howard to stare at the number on the hospital room door—232. The number was the same backward or forward. Just like 454 Angell. The same from either end.

Past to future. Future to past...

He slept again.

And he was in a dark, subterranean chamber, the pressure of miles of earth above him palpable like another presence. But he was quite alone. A solitary torch guttered in the distance, and he made his way toward it, slowly coming to discern an oblong object within the circle of the torchlight's reach. It was a sarcophagus of some sort—intricately carved with symbols and pictographs wholly alien to anything he'd ever seen. He tried to get closer to make out some of the smaller details, but something was in the way. It was his stomach—huge and swollen as if he were with child.

He pried the torch out of the ground and used its long shaft as a lever, working it under the sarcophagus's lid, shifting it inch by inch to reveal what lay within. But as the lid cleared a certain critical point, a gust of foetid air burst forth followed by a wriggling mass of delicate, green tubes. Several of these tubes latched themselves onto his belly and began to feed, their bodies undulating rhythmically as they drank from him. Howard stared down at them, mouth agape, until his vision was engulfed by expanding blackness.

When next he woke, he was all alone, and his room was exceedingly quiet. It was dark. He had vague recollections of experiencing some of the worst pain yet, but now the pressure on his abdomen felt diminished. The swelling actually seemed to have gone down significantly. He lay still, listening to the sounds of his own labored breathing, until he became aware of a faint glow spreading across the ceiling. His eyes followed it to its source. It was the first light of dawn making itself known through the single large window.

The sky was not truly light yet, but dawn had painted it a purplish hue, brighter closer to the horizon and darker further away where a scattering of stars was still visible. The colors were alive, and he struggled to prop himself up on his elbows to get a better view. He stared at the ever brightening firmament, and for an instant it seemed his vision escaped the Earth's atmosphere, penetrated the cosmos, an infinitely swirling vortex of light and dark and color. He fancied he heard the sawing notes of a viol, as though carried to him on the wind from a great distance. The fleeting melody caused his heartbeat to quicken, his breathing to come in short, exultant gasps.

The effort was soon too much for him. He settled back into the comforting embrace of his pillow and felt as though he were dissolving into it. His body was being reduced to a fine powder that could permeate the cloth and disperse itself among the downy shafts within. He'd leave the pillow. Maybe someone else would find it as comfortable as it had always been for him. He wouldn't need it any more. He understood that fully now.

In his mind's eye he envisioned the rooftops of Providence all around him, coalescing from the night's gloom to stand magnificent and awash with sunlight in the rising dawn. Providence would remain. And when the world itself ceased to be, something else would remain ... somewhere in the vast universe.

He looked once more toward the window—at the light now streaming through its arched upper panes. Finding the last whisper of his voice, he breathed, “In that strange light I feel I am not far, from the fixt mass whose sides the ages are..."

He smiled.

A final breath escaped his lips.

And it was over.

Copyright © 2008 Christopher M. Cevasco