THE GHOST IN LOVE

If you like Black Static, then chances are you also like Jonathan Carroll, and a new novel from him is welcome news. The Ghost in Love will be published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in hardback on September 30th. We've heard nothing about a UK edition as yet, but the lucky people of Poland got to see the book back in October 2007. It's the tale of a man who doesn't die when he is supposed to, and the ghost who is sent to watch over him, but falls in love instead.

CLARK RAISES THE BAR

Publishers and writers have come up with all sorts of gimmicks to make their limited editions extra special, but the people at Tasmaniac Publications have gone that little bit further with the release of UK author Simon Clark's novella Stone Cold Calling. The book, available in an edition of 300 softcovers, has an introduction by Kealan Patrick Burke and artwork, cover and internal, by Vince Natale, and if that was all there was to it then we'd be impressed enough, but there are also 26 lettered hardbacks, signed by the contributors, leather-bound and slipcased, and each will come with their own authentic piece of meteorite. Yep, that's right, meteorite. Simon says, ‘The owner can hold the sliver of star stuff in their hands and allow their imagination to resonate with images of what an amazing journey the meteor will have had through time and space before its fiery descent to Earth.’ Now that's an incentive that is out of this world.

BEST NEW HORROR

October is a busy month for the horror genre, as you'd expect. Not only does it see the release of Poe's Children but also the 19th volume of the Stephen Jones edited The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, reprising the best short fiction of 2007 and offering a valuable ‘state of the genre’ overview from one of the field's most experienced editors. Writers with a TTA connection who made the cut include Michael Marshall Smith, Joel Lane, Joe Hill and Gary McMahon.

BLACK STATIC UP FOR AN AWARD

You heard it here first, unless you already knew that is. Despite having produced only two issues in 2007, Black Static is on the shortlist for an International Horror Guild Award as Best Periodical. Old timers may remember that our predecessor, The Third Alternative, won this award in 2004, so let's hope for history repeating itself. And while we're on the subject, Black Static is also nominated for a British Fantasy Society Award for Best Small Press, as are a lot of other people, too many to mention.

KILLERS AT THE BFS CONVENTION

Nope, it's not the name of a band (well, it is, but that's beside the point) and we haven't received advance warning of an attack on the British Fantasy Society Convention by shock troops from another genre. Killers is the title of a cross-genre anthology to be launched at the aforesaid convention. Published by Swimming Kangaroo Books and edited by Colin Harvey, contributors with a TTA connection include Paul Meloy, Sarah Singleton, Gary Fry, Bruce Holland Rogers and Eugie Foster, while Stoker winners Jonathan Maberry and Lee Thomas have made the cut to confer even more lustre on the enterprise.

THE NEW HORROR

First we had the New Wave and then we had the New Weird and now we have the New Horror, which appears to be written by all the same people who were writing the old horror, but let's not quibble. October 14th (and just in time to give your loved one a Halloween treat—those marketing guys know a thing or two) sees the release of Poe's Children: The New Horror: An Anthology edited by Peter Straub and with a mouth watering line-up of fiction that includes work by Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem, Stephen King, Thomas Ligotti and Elizabeth Hand, among others. And, in related news, Peter Straub has just been named as 2008's International Horror Guild Living Legend.

MARVEL TAKE STAND

No, nothing to do with shorter working hours for super-heroes. Instead, we learn that the American comic book publishers have agreed terms with Stephen King to produce a limited series based on his 1978 post-Apocalyptic novel The Stand (The Complete & Uncut Edition, if anyone is keeping count). Adapted by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and illustrated by artist Mike Perkins, the premier issue will debut in September 2008. In further King news, we hear that he will be collaborating with Joe Hill on Throttle, a novella to be included in the Gauntlet Press Richard Matheson tribute anthology He Is Legend. The King/Hill collaboration is based on Duel. The book, edited by Christopher Conlon and with an introduction by Ramsey Campbell, is slated for a February 2009 release and other contributors include F. Paul Wilson, Joe Lansdale, Whitley Strieber, Richard Christian Matheson, William F. Nolan, Gary Braunbeck, Thomas Monteleone and John Shirley.

PROMETHEUS UNBOUND

Monsters come and monsters go, but 2008 is shaping up as the year of Frankenstein. August sees the release of an Oxford World's Classics edition of the 1818 text of Mary Shelley's seminal fiction and also Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor by Elizabeth Young, which looks at cultural aspects of this modern myth. In September kiddies get in on the act with Frankenstein Takes the Cake by Adam Rex and the educational Dr Frankenstein's Human Body Book from Dorling Kindersley. There are also a couple of graphic adaptations in the pipeline, one from the Classical Comics stable and the other, from Dark Horse, a reprise from 1983 of Bernie Wrightson's Frankenstein, combining Shelley's text with forty seven full page illustrations from the highly respected artist. Perhaps the most intriguing item though is September's The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd, much of whose previous work, while marketed as literary/mainstream, struck a chord with horror genre readers, especially Hawksmoor.

ON THE SLIPWAY

The 2008 British Fantasy Society Convention takes place 19-21 September at the Britannia Hotel in Nottingham. The Guests of Honour are Christopher Golden, James Barclay and Dave McKean, while Black Static's own Chris Fowler is the MC. The BFS Convention is traditionally an occasion when many canny publishers, enticed by the prospect of a captive and possibly inebriated audience, choose to launch new books. Those slated for this year include James Barclay's novella Vault of Deeds and the Mark Samuels story collection Glyphotech, both from PS Publishing, while Screaming Dreams will be debuting Allyson Bird's collection Bull Running for Girls and from Pendragon Press we can expect We Fade to Grey, a set of five novelettes. There's probably a lot of other stuff too, but we can only tell you so much.

IT'S THAT TIME OF THE YEAR

Another October, and the latest instalment of the Saw franchise rolls out in multiplexes across the land. Saw V will make its appearance on 24 October, just in time to save everyone the bother of thinking what to do for a Halloween night out. In related news, November should see the US release of Repo! The Genetic Opera, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, who helmed the previous three Saw outings. Compared to The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Blade Runner in advance publicity, this off the wall musical is set in the year 2056, when millions have been killed by an epidemic of organ failures and transplants are the best hope for a normal life, but if you don't keep up the payments then repossession is on the cards. The good news is that it stars Sarah Brightman. The bad news is that it also stars Paris Hilton. We are hoping that only the former gets to sing.

Compiled by Peter Tennant

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

Copyright © 2008 Peter Tennant

Chelsea had written eighteen letters to herself in as many years; a ritual before her birthday to record what it was of her life that did or didn't matter, and an enquiry into how the cycle was in some way corrupted. In them she picked at the roots of her dissatisfaction, as if at some point she would stumble upon the solution to her life. She freely admitted, at almost thirty-four years old, to being fascinated by her own navel gazing.

You can't force love from people, she had written. And even though I know that—of course I know that!—I never completely let go of the hope that I could. I keep trying, anyway.

There was a photograph of her inside the folds of this letter. In it she was standing somewhere beside a lake; the sky was heavy and grey, and her companion's gaze was fixed like granite on something out of view from the camera's gaze. He seemed much older than her then twenty-two years, more hardened. His paint-flecked T-shirt was tight over his biceps. His boots were from an army and navy store, unlaced and loose. His long blond hair was tied into a tight pony-tail; wisps of it were fluttering across his eyes. Chelsea smiled benignly up at him, an upraised palm pressed against his chest.

He was Garry. Ten years older than Chelsea. They'd married at a small Register Office in Liverpool, with strangers as witnesses. By way of a honeymoon, they'd stayed in a cottage beside the lake in the Peak District, while he'd attempted to write a script, commissioned by the BBC. Chelsea had at first been enamoured by him, by his intelligence, his dry wit and his changeable moods. He'd been raised in Poland, and had travelled across Europe for five years, had been in the TA for two. He'd really lived his life, Chelsea wrote, both jealous and in awe. It was all I could do not to hand my entire world over to him. He'd relate his stories to her in a flat, matter-of-fact way at the end of the day, while Chelsea rubbed at the thick, calloused skin of his thick fingers, or lie beside his heavily muscled frame in bed, letting his words lull her to sleep. Garry had made her feel safe for a short while. Running at marriage in order to run away from her life. It was clear from her letter that she'd initially forgiven him for his occasional outbursts, for the cuts and bruises he'd inflicted upon her when he closed his laptop after a day of toil with nothing to show for it. But she hadn't let the romance of it get the better of her, muse or not. One evening she had left on the bus with two hastily stuffed carrier bags, a bloodied nose and two loose teeth while Garry was off into town to buy them fish and chips. Chelsea half expected him to follow her, drag her home, once he'd discovered his young wife's absence. Part of her couldn't hide her disappointment when he didn't. She'd waited for a couple of hours at the bus station, just in case, and then left her wedding ring in a litter bin.

"Everyone's a bit fragile at times, aren't they?” she said the night that I brought her home from hospital. She was testing the water with me. Trying me on for size.

"People will say things that they don't mean, purely out of self-preservation. Even the well-intentioned ones. You have to look out for yourself. But then you miss out sometimes. You have to stop protecting yourself eventually, otherwise you'll feel nothing."

And Chelsea was a bit fragile. She had pale, unstriking eyes, but her smile was startlingly intense, as if by way of compensation. It made her thirty-odd years simply fall away. It was like the sun suddenly coming out on a shitty day. But there was nothing else. She was an empty woman. Every step she made was inevitably in the direction of another new face, just to keep the absence of life at bay.

We both worked in a factory on the outskirts of Birmingham's city centre. Before the night that she phoned me, we'd merely been work acquaintances, someone you talk to in the stockroom while packing up returns or serving customers at the store counter on the same shift. I had no idea how she'd acquired my number. She'd been quietly keeping tabs on me.

She said: “James, I'm ... well, I'm in hospital. Look, I haven't got much change..."

I heard her pushing more coins into the slot of the payphone, then her breath: short exasperated gasps as the change fell through the machinery and into the returned coins tray. She repeated the same procedure twice, until her voice grew high and panicked. “It's not taking the money, James. Why won't it take the fucking money? It was working a minute ago."

"Give me the number and I'll phone you back,” I said, muting the TV.

Chelsea was in a psychiatric ward. She told me this in a matter-of-fact way which seemed to imply that this was nothing new. When she asked if I could come to take her home as she had no close relations or friends, it seemed as if she'd seen right into me from the get-go. Here we were, living in Birmingham, working in the same place, moving in our own lonely circles. Both in our thirties and yet still somehow locked in the lives we'd made for ourselves when we were young.

"Of course I'll come,” I said after a moment of pained silence. “Of course I'll come, Chelsea.” I realised that I'd never said her name aloud before.

The hospital was less forbidding than I envisaged it being. It was hidden away amidst a warren of council houses and caged-up Asian corner stores in Walsall; an aging addition to the general hospital nearby. Inside, I got lost in the labyrinth of corridors and staircases. There were sun-faded Monet and Picasso prints on the landings, fresh flowers at the reception desk, aging flat-pack furniture. The patients seemed out of place in such surroundings, with their dressing gowns and slippers and drowsy, medicated faces. I felt uncharitable by thinking that they made the place look untidy.

Chelsea was waiting in the visitors’ room. She sat forward in her chair, full of a tension that she couldn't work out of her, even with the pills they'd given her to help her sleep. She was sitting beside an elderly Seikh man, who had emptied a box of Quality Street onto a coffee table. “I only like the coffee creams, you know,” he confided, first to Chelsea, then to me as I sat down opposite them.

Chelsea was wearing a bright raincoat that sounded like crisp wrappers whenever she moved, and had applied too much eyeliner to compensate for how short she'd cut her hair in a fit of temper two nights previous. Now it was gelled into angry spikes at the back, left limp over her forehead. She looked as if she was making her appearance seem younger so that the rest of her would follow suit. But the lines were deep in her skin already.

"I'm sorry,” she offered up to me. “You hardly know me..."

"I'm sweet like that,” I said lightly as I examined my car keys. “Damsels in distress and all that..."

She studied me puzzledly, as if trying to determine if I was indeed the man she'd imagined I'd be when she'd watched me at work. “I think you're very sweet,” she said, smiling, content to trust herself.

While we waited for her assigned doctor, we glanced uncomfortably at EastEnders on the small TV in the corner of the room, surrounded by a semi-circle of patients with impassive faces, unresponsive to the melodrama, which seemed flatter than ever in here. There seemed to be more activity in the smokers’ room, where they were listening to old Stones songs, the volume turned up loud. The country ache of ‘Wild Horses', followed by ‘Jumping Jack Flash'. I imagined the unseen inmates in their slippers, fags gripped between pursed lips, doing that peacock walk of Jagger's, and couldn't help smiling.

"I used to like the Rolling Stones,” Chelsea said, catching my eye. “Now I can't bloody stand them. They play it all hours of the day; it's no wonder they're all bleeding mental."

She reached across and touched my hand then, and I felt a sudden surge of feeling for her. It felt like lead filling my limbs. “I signed myself in here voluntarily,” she said. “My counsellor told me there was a possibility that they'd have me sectioned otherwise.” She sighed. Scratched at the indentations on the table while I glanced surreptitiously at the old cigarette burns that were still mottled across her hands and arms. Suddenly I was seeing the Chelsea that I knew at work, quietly pleasant, sipping at a mug of tea in the kitchen, alongside the unknown Chelsea who sat at home, burning her skin out of some unspecified, unguessable despair. I closed my hand over hers and tried to smile encouragingly. A grey-haired man in a donkey jacket sat down heavily beside me then, and produced a deck of cards.

"Pick a card,” he said to anyone who'd listen. “Any fucking card. It'll be the Ace of Spades, I fucking tell you..."

Chelsea had a ground floor flat in Aston. It was in the shadow of the Spaghetti Junction and was ridiculously small. Its only saving grace was the bay windows that opened out onto a little patch of garden that Chelsea had tended to, planting a bright profusion of flowers in the beds and in baskets. A little oasis in the middle of all that concrete. But inside, the walls were paper thin and you could hear the neighbours playing music, the neighbours arguing, the neighbours fucking.

"Don't say it, I know it's shit,” Chelsea said as she lit some candles while the kettle boiled. “But it's dead cheap and I have this garden..."

"No, it's nice,” I said from the corner of my eyes. “Petite and bijou, I think the estate agents call it."

"I've lived all over and believe me, this is not the worst by any stretch of the imagination,” she said, fussing with cups and milk. “Not when you've kipped down on park benches..."

When I stood at the bay windows and looked out, I could see for miles. But there wasn't much to see. Dual-carriageways seemed to entwine around the pockets of estates, like dead, stifling limbs. I could see the blurs of faces in car interiors as they flew past. Below the flyover, the lowrises were empty, sealed over to prevent squatters, but on a burnt expanse of grass between the flats, several gypsy caravans and cars had gathered. Small children played silently in the soft flickering lights from television sets in the windows.

When I turned around, the room had softened into shadows and warm light. Chelsea told me to have a look on her iPod, which was connected to some small speakers, and pick something to play. She emptied her bag of clothes and pills.

She had already begun her letter by this time. It was fanned out in six or seven hastily written pages on the sofa. She'd doodled childish smiley faces into the margins, somehow at odds with what she'd last written: I think people can smell the desperation at my age. I'm like a fucking dog, sniffing other dogs’ arses. I don't even think I necessarily want someone to love me any more. I think I just need some kind of looking after.

When she put her cracked lips onto mine, late in the evening, the kiss hardly felt real. I could hear Nick Cave starting up on a piano somewhere far away from me. I could hear a dog barking upstairs, hear its claws scraping at a door. “You know we don't need to do this. I don't expect it...” I began, but she nodded emphatically—yes we do—and delicately touched the side of my face, the back of my hair. Everything somehow felt inevitable, preordained. I discovered small seeds on my lips, beneath my tongue when Chelsea withdrew. She had left them there. I could taste them melting in the heat of my mouth. Like bitter fruit. I couldn't see her for long moments in the dim warm room, although my hands were already inside her dress, urgently pushing it up over her thighs. All at once I felt smothered with her heat. My mouth had gone dry. Outside, the traffic on the flyover seemed to slow to a long exposure of light, trailing softly across the lanes. I was transfixed, tripping on something as Chelsea dripped seeds over my shoulders, my chin.

Her eyes were heavy with shadows as she tugged down my jeans and shorts, releasing my erection into her mouth. The moment felt as brittle as sex with strangers should. I could hear my breath coming in short, hollow gasps. Her proximity was slowly intoxicating me. Her mouth was warm and desperate, as if she would swallow me whole. Something began to give inside of me then, and for a brief, mesmerising moment, it felt as if I'd been laid out in wet grass and fern, left to dry in some unseen sunlight. Transported away. I was protected by the shade of a wilting cherry tree, all the time being brushed with falling blossom. There were insects crawling between my toes, moist soil under my fingernails. The sky was a clear, perfect blue. I was there.

My eyes were open but I couldn't help thinking them closed. The light bled away from the candles. Chelsea's dress was open at the front, unbuttoned down to the waist. Out of it, there was nothing to her: a slight, pale woman, her small breasts beneath my palms. I could see the pulse throbbing in her throat like a captured bird. My limbs felt full of electricity, and every inch of her slight, scarred body earthed me slowly until the energy was gone; until all that remained were the two of us, ciphers for something else, something other.

Afterwards there were seeds on my lips again, and on my chest, my cock. They glowed softly in the dark for a while, then they dissolved and went out.

The first letter had been the longest, and in many ways the hardest. Nearing sixteen, she'd decided to leave Scarborough, where she'd been born and, knowing that the inexorable process of transformation of her life was about to occur, had set about explaining pieces of it in words; to give it a continuity and perhaps to understand what it all meant. She had no idea how or why she would change, but Chelsea knew, lost in the fields beyond her back garden, the valley letting sun melt through the trees, that something was allowing her in, or allowing itself in. When she lay down in the coarse clover, she dreamed of being set free on the breeze.

Chelsea was an only child, which meant that while her parents had doted on her, spoiled her rotten, she often found it difficult to integrate with other girls her age. She had her imagination, which felt like enough. But it was a dead end ultimately. Her bedroom felt stifling, and the front room was forever focused on the TV: dreary English sitcoms, Saturday Night at the Palladium, World in Action. She had no friends to speak of.

Consequently the prospect of school would make her physically sick at times. The children grew cruel as her absences increased. Each time away made it harder to return. They took the piss about her braces, picked her last when the teams were chosen for games.

On her thirteenth birthday Chelsea's dog Jack died. She wrote how he'd just keeled over on the beach one day as the tide was starting to drift in. She'd had a devil of a time trying to pick the animal up but once he was in her arms, his fur wet and matted with sand, Chelsea had carried him home, crying. By the time she'd reached the house she already knew the inevitable as she'd heard his heart slowing down next to her own as she hurried across the dunes.

The vet had rolled up his shirt sleeves to see to the dog. His grey hair, she remembered, was Brylcreamed to a shine. When he bent down to confide to her, the way adults do to much younger children, he'd smelled of cherry tobacco and throat lozenges. He'd said, “There isn't much we can do about the old boy, sweetheart. It's just his time. Perhaps he wanted to have one last look at the sea before he went."

Chelsea had wanted to sleep with the wet T-shirt she'd carried Jack home in but her mother wouldn't hear of it. She chucked it out the next day, when the sympathy had outlived its welcome. I'd been a child too long, Chelsea wrote. They wanted me to grow up a bit, I think.

So she did. A year later, Chelsea lost her virginity to an Asian lad who worked on the waltzers during the week at the nearby fairground. The girls would all come down after school to flirt with him. All short pleated skirts, their bras showing through transparent blouses, skinny thighs and lip gloss; fumbling with cigarettes and matches. He had a big cock, they said. He didn't care how old you were, they said. He would smile and flick back his long black hair, spinning the waltzers under the distorted blare of eighties pop music, making passes at them from a distance.

It had hurt the first time and she felt sick and cold inside. His cock did seem huge but she had no real grounds for comparison. He sat her astride him, he turned her around and entered her from behind. She felt like no more than one of those blow-up dolls she'd seen in the novelty shops on the front. The mattress in the back of his van had smelled damp and used with her face pressed into it. Afterwards, she ran home with her wet pants wadded into the bottom of her school bag, and sat soaking in the bath for an hour.

At least, she wrote, with a semblance of off-handedness, he put a johnny on. Small mercies.

I had become part of the ritual by now. Two weeks later, Chelsea asked me to take her home, back to Scarborough. She'd quit the job in the factory and, suddenly, going home was all she could think of. She lay awake at night with its sea rushing like a hollow shell over her ears. She felt like a girl again at the prospect.

The evening before we left, Chelsea carefully clipped the nails on her left hand and collected them into a sheet of kitchen roll. After washing her hair, she cut off a small lock of it and wrapped that up too.

I watched her from her little garden, a mug of coffee cooling in my hands. “So what's this in aid of?” I asked. “Are you a witch today? Is that what it is? Are you hiding a cauldron somewhere?"

Chelsea shook her head as if to dismiss me, then folded the kitchen roll into one of the bags she'd begun packing. When she smeared her fingers into the thick dust on the radiators, I realised what she was doing. I wondered if she hoped I could believe what she believed: some sad piece of myth she'd created for herself in her youth; a little ceremony for one.

It was a relief to leave Birmingham behind but Chelsea didn't enjoy the drive. We stopped at several service stations on the M1 once we were past Nottingham. I ordered coffee and sandwiches while she rushed off to the facilities to puke into the toilet. Then she would return, her skin flushed, and eat a Mars bar, drink two cans of Pepsi. Then suddenly, she'd be a hyperactive child. I'd already gotten used to going around after her, picking up chocolate wrappers that she'd leave screwed up, slowly unfurling on tables, down the side of cushions, in the car ashtray. I felt as if I was forcing this semblance of familiarity upon myself, as so far I'd only had glimpses of it from her: the sharing of a joke that only we understood; a hand in mine pulling me toward something in a shop window; a head rested on my shoulder or a hand in my flies at the cinema; the trace of her seeds, wedged in the back of a broken tooth...

It wasn't clear to me yet as to how to go about things. My friends had found her mildly diverting at the pub, thinking she was putting on an act; but they grew tired of her quickly once they realised she wasn't. Like waiting for a comedian to come offstage, but they never did. Always on. I was worried that she was mistaking our intimacy for something more than I was capable of.

She was still writing the letter but would only refer to it in the abstract at the time. “Do I look any different to you, James?” she would ask, and offer me her face or her naked back for examination, as if there were physical signs of some metamorphosis.

"Nothing yet,” I would say, playing along. “Nice arse though.” And she would tut impatiently.

She put her head out of the window when we reached Scarborough, and pointed at the seagulls twisting on air currents above the sea. I parked and we walked down to the front, leaving everything in the car. Chelsea made me roll up my jeans and dip my feet in the water, then she pulled me down into the sand to close her mouth around mine. Later we watched the fishing boats puttering slowly back into the harbour. The sun flared out past the rocky crags, and I suddenly felt at ease for the first time in what seemed like years. I tugged Chelsea closer and she squinted up into my face. “Give us a kiss, you."

She was feeling playful so we breezed through the arcades, wasting money quickly. I bought us ice creams and we walked along the front, eating quietly and happily. Chelsea seemed renewed by returning home. I felt it too; a contentedness that sometimes seemed like a stranger to me for no good reason. “All those school girls you hated wouldn't recognise you now,” I said, ruffling the spikes of hair that were quickly turning to curls. “You're a new woman."

"I hope they're all working in banks now,” she said, without humour. “Or stuck in council houses with thirteen kids. Serves them all fucking right."

The afternoon was a happy blur. We sat in a photobooth at the back of a Woolworths, Chelsea on my lap, and we made faces, incapable of acting our age. The cafes were full of children and their beleaguered parents. We ate an all-day breakfast at a table spattered with chip fat and pop. Afterwards we placed a bet on the horses, the 2.30 at Doncaster, and wasted a fiver. At the time it all seemed mindlessly trivial, but in retrospect, it was probably the best part of our time together. I just didn't recognise that at the time. You never do.

Chelsea's father had died in the spring of 1996. Her mother had posted her a terse letter that faltered halfway through. It contained all of the usual elements Chelsea had come to expect from her mother: You never had a chance to sort things out with your father, and ... a day never went by that he didn't think about you.

It wasn't the platitudes that had sent Chelsea home that year, but rather the sudden notion of her mother alone in that house, bereft; finally giving in, seating herself at the dining table beside the patio, and appealing to a daughter who'd all but abandoned her.

But despite her initial reservations, it had gone far better than she could have imagined. Her mother had by this time recognised her previous infelicities, and decided to treat Chelsea as a young woman. Suddenly they were neither mother and daughter, nor close enough to pretend to be friends. Chelsea had felt uncomfortable but was nonetheless touched enough by her mother's gesture to a least be civil. At night they played Blackjack, and watched Coronation Street together.

Chelsea had missed the funeral and had already decided that she didn't need to see her father's grave, but acquiesced to staying long enough to assist her mother in dividing up his possessions. They were difficult days. Going through his clothes, emptying the pockets of loose change and bus tickets and cough sweets, unthreaded all of the feelings she'd be careful to keep guarded, and she'd finally had to retreat to her old bedroom, feeling like an adolescent again. Hiding things.

The room had been emptied long ago, probably soon after Chelsea had left. The sheets were pristine and untouched, the shelves empty, the walls re-decorated. An indistinct wash of sunlight was working its way across the room in the shape of her window. It felt suddenly as if it were she who had died. She sat down in front of her old dressing table mirror to find that her reflection had gone. At first the disorientation panicked her. She waved her arms around as if the motion would restore the image, and then felt absurd.

Then slowly, it dawned on her. It felt as if I wasn't being, she wrote. And with that realisation came another which said that if I wasn't being, then I was free. It was like a glimpse of the secret.

Chelsea had felt a sudden heat close in, a fluttering abandon in her chest, wanting to work its way out. She quietly locked the door to her bedroom and masturbated on the bed, her dress unbuttoned and beneath her, until she grew hot and clammy, and full of unreleasable tension. When her reflection came back and she saw herself with three fingers lost to the second joint, she felt slightly disappointed, and put her dress back on.

Her father's clothes went to an Oxfam shop in Scarborough, his books to a private dealer, his pipes thrown away, his paintings sold.

You never expect things to change. But they do, she had written. I'm glad I went back. I'm also glad I don't live there any more. It just makes it easier to feel helpless in the end.

Chelsea's mother made us stay at the house on Saturday night. She lived inland from Scarborough, towards Pickering. When we drove out there, the afternoon light was ebbing, the clouds low, close to the hills and tumid with rain. Somehow that or the proximity to home seemed to taint Chelsea's mood; tangibly so. She began to snap at me for the first time in the weeks we'd been together. Then she restlessly fiddled with her iPod: one song was “too slow", another “too fucking chirpy"; then finally she stuck her head out of the window again, her eyes closed, her hair whipping. As if she was reverting back to the child that was expected of her. There were seeds flying out of her curls, spilling from the corners of her eyes. It felt as if she wanted to say something, or expected me to articulate what was wrong. I opted to remain quiet and drive rapidly down the empty B roads.

There was something in the light that simply depressed me; as if the day was not fading but being somehow compressed. That uncertain greyish tinge to the world before it rained that left you feeling brittle and expectant. It made me think of myself as a small boy, all scabby kneed and red-faced playing football against the corrugated fence behind the flats where we lived, aware of the light faltering, fading until we could no longer see the ball. I couldn't imagine what it made Chelsea think of.

Chelsea's mother had a thin, practical face, scrubbed clean of make-up, and offered a generous smile that seemed to be the only facet that had made its way down the gene pool.

Chelsea took my hand rigidly in hers, and we went inside.

All of the rooms seemed small and still, full of pale light and dust suspended in the air, like photographs waiting for subjects. The hallway floors were of dark, polished wood, but the front room, with its large bay windows was charming and welcoming: soft chairs with lemon throw rugs; vases full of fresh lilies; ornaments and clocks that seemed incredibly loud in the stillness. I studied a heavy sideboard that had arranged upon it a collection of framed photographs. The ubiquitous school portrait of Chelsea caught my attention. She was still perfectly innocent there, I was sure; wearing a blue pullover, her teeth in braces, her hair washed and combed, shining.

"You won't find anything there,” Chelsea said, sensing my thought process. She tugged me away. “They're just daft old pictures."

Considering the soil wedged beneath her mother's fingernails, and the way she kept her shirtsleeves rather boyishly rolled up, I assumed she spent much of her time in the conservatory beyond the bay windows. She left us there while she went to brew tea, and I stood awkwardly beside Chelsea amongst the ferns and ivies that snaked across the glass roof and then hung down the doors, the cane furniture.

The tray was unsteady in Chelsea's mother's hands. She had arthritis in her right arm. “It's creeping down into my fingers,” she confided quietly to me as I helped to set the tea down. And to Chelsea: “Just you mind you don't get it. I wouldn't wish this pain on anyone."

I half expected her to say not even you, but Chelsea was clearly only half listening anyway. I tried to make up for her disinterest by admiring the orchids beside me. Chelsea's mother shrugged and lit a cigarette. “Oh, those,” she said. “They're nothing but trouble, those. They're always sick and hard to please.” It almost felt as if she was referring to her daughter. Chelsea sipped at her tea, and watched us quietly, as though we were somehow conspiring against her. I gave her a look back and instantly regretted it.

Her mother set down her ashtray and said, “Oh, don't look like that, sweetheart. Did you get your chap to drive all the way from Birmingham so you could look disapproving at us? Petrol isn't bloody cheap, is it?"

Chelsea sighed through her nose and dug the heels of her boots into the rug beneath her.

I felt a bit guilty, a bit sorry for both of them. I made an excuse to retreat for a while, and leave them to it. At some point it had begun to rain. In the downstairs lavatory, I could hear it washing down on the garden outside the frosted window, and across the exposed countryside beyond. It made me feel suddenly very lonely. The sound had crept up around the house like the clocks in the front room, turning everything else achingly still. But it had broken the heat that had welled up in the air like tension, and I could smell a freshness to the atmosphere, as if I was suddenly learning of a new way to breathe. I fetched a pullover from the car and when I returned to the conservatory, either Chelsea or her mother had relented. Their bodies were pressed stiffly together, as if they were trying to work their way beneath each other's suddenly exposed defences. I watched quietly as several moths thudded on the glass above their heads.

"Go and get your bags, love,” Chelsea's mother said to me while Chelsea turned away to dab at her eyes with a crumpled tissue. “You're welcome to stay here tonight.” I paused for approval from Chelsea, but she had deliberately walked away to look at the rain.

Later, after a subdued dinner and a pointless hour spent in front of the television, Chelsea's mother retired to bed. She offered us the spare room but Chelsea wanted to sleep in the conservatory; it was something she had done as a child. Lacking friends, she'd been a solitary camper in there. Her mother seemed poised to object, but thought better of it and kissed us both goodnight.

"She does my head in,” Chelsea said once she was gone. “I know before you say it that she means well, but christ, it's so much effort. But I'm glad you're here.” She smiled and squeezed my hands.

It hadn't yet ceased raining. Before she turned on the light in the conservatory, Chelsea pointed delightedly out at the garden. “Look! Frogs! Fucking loads of them.” She pointed at one spot, then another, and her laughter melted away whatever remained of her earlier tensions as we watched the frogs leaping around in the grass. Beyond the garden, the landscape seemed huge, dark, formless. The conservatory's weak yellow light diminished it further still; all that remained was the sound of the downpour, curiously detached from us, drumming on the glass roof. Our reflections glared back at us, frighteningly bare: two faded individuals, drained of expression and colour. Chelsea turned away from hers, as if she could see more of herself than she desired. “All cheekbones and wrists, aren't I?” She went about pulling down the cushions from her mother's cane furniture, and the throw rugs from the front room. She was diverting herself with aimless chatter.

The long drive, coupled with the profusion of aromas from the plantlife in the conservatory had managed to initiate a migraine behind my eyes. When we lay down, Chelsea seemed out of focus. She'd stopped speaking, but I couldn't for the life of me remember what the last things she'd said was. It felt as if we were slowing down, readying ourselves to arrive at some predetermined point, becoming immobile as we reached her destination. And although it was too hot for sex, Chelsea persisted, rubbing lazily at my cock, her face pressed into my neck, making small licking motions across my skin. As soon as I was hard enough, she straddled me, lowered herself onto me. I felt helpless; helplessly aroused; helplessly redundant in this equation. A slow, soporific progression of mouths and hands. I could feel her, grinding against my cock, as if it were an act of shedding skin. Something had changed tangentially, turning into an act that was nothing to do with either of us. I could feel Chelsea's seeds, stuck to my face with sweat, caught in the webs between my fingers, enmeshed in my hair. I felt nauseous with the heat and the white pain of the migraine, and then, unexpectedly, there was a jolt in my heart, as if something had worked its way loose inside me. Chelsea came first, and when she tightened her fingers around my arms, I realised she was not about to relinquish me. I felt paralysed. Chelsea's face had grown still and tearful. The glasshouse felt like a flickering projection around me, unable to find a surface. Chelsea pulled me closer still as if she could draw me inside of her, or perhaps, I thought disturbingly for a fleeting moment, as if she could block something about to leave.

I pulled away, my head full of heat, unable to continue. There were seeds smeared across Chelsea's belly, her thighs, her mouth. An elegiac look settled into her face, and I couldn't resist when she stiffly pulled me back into her arms. I wiped her eyes with my fingers, and laid my head next to hers. “I love you,” I thought I said.

I dreamed that I was awake and woke gradually, feeling like a loose shard of my dream was waiting outside of sleep for me. Chelsea was pulling on a summer dress that hung loosely at her thighs. It was five in the morning; the sun was rising, making a silhouette of her. It felt as if all of the rain from the previous night had never happened. Birdsong collected and echoed around the conservatory. There was a faint breeze on my chest, and I could smell the grass, washed clean and warming, like the smell of recent sex on the skin: something familiar yet otherworldly.

"Where are you going?” But I noticed finally the squares of unfolded kitchen roll on the floor: nails, skin, hair.

Chelsea didn't reply but she knelt behind me then and slid out her earrings and closed them into my palms. The gesture seemed unbearably intimate, although I didn't understand why. There was a new colour to Chelsea's face that she seemed scarcely able to contain. I could feel my stomach clench. She brushed the sleep flattened hair from her forehead and then smiled wryly at me; the smile of an adult to a child.

"Chelsea,” I said, but she was gone, barefoot out of the conservatory, and into the garden. For a while I could only stare at the doorway where she had been, watching first as a flock of gulls from the coast passed over: splashes of brilliant white against the cloudless blue sky; and then at the sunlight as it worked its way across the conservatory. I watched, fascinated, until I could feel the studs of Chelsea's earrings, pricking at the flesh of my palms. I got up stiffly, and tugged on my jeans, my boots, suddenly full of nervous energy, and stumbled out in pursuit of her.

Chelsea was beyond the garden by this time, and out into the unbroken fields beyond. We were in a small valley, dotted with trees full of leaves gone transparent with rain and sunlight. A wild cherry blossom had flooded the hedges and an empty lane nearby, like damp confetti strewn underfoot. Chelsea was ankle deep in the wild grass, wet clover sticking to her ankles. The sun had grown warm quickly; its light caught on my eyelashes.

Inside the deep-etched shadows around me, I could see raindrops hovering tremulously on the tips of flower heads, then a flurry of starlings, bursting from branches in the languid summer stillness.

Chelsea was unbuttoning her dress, stepping slowly across a small brook held in the speckled shade of trees. The dress slipped slowly from her shoulders, and then fell entirely from her pale body, snagging in the gorse nearby. I couldn't catch up with her, but then I realised that I didn't want to. I was meant only to follow and collect, and try to see. With the dress folded over my arm, I watched as dragonflies hung trancelike, inches above the surface of the impossibly clear stream. I could see a hundred or more sticklebacks, darting through the pools of shade, and I suddenly thought of myself at eight, with my father in Wales, clutching a net that he'd bought for me from the campsite shop to catch the tiny fish with. There was a photograph of me somewhere at home in my parents’ photo-albums, squinting at the sun, half in this perfect shade beneath the ferns, missing a front row of milk teeth, wearing a short-sleeved shirt, brand new pumps. It felt as if I were breaking apart, torn between the rose-tinted past and the present. Chelsea had brought me here. It felt like part of the secret. But I couldn't unravel it, couldn't see how it made sense to me while I was travelling inside.

In the meadow beyond, amidst a wash of bright yellow rape seed flowers, Chelsea finally looked back and, as she did, a breeze caught her, dispersing her fragile body into the air. I almost looked away but held myself. I knew how ephemeral it was, that I was privy to something beyond my capacity to understand. I could only feel it, could only be held in its thrall until all of the seeds had been scattered, returned to the earth.

I stood staring for some time, squinting up at the hills around me, the stone cottages in their sides, as the smell of lavender, thick with heat, poured over me. The air hummed with insects. It took me a while to realise that the dress and the earrings were no longer with me.

Of course when I returned to the house alone, I found Chelsea lying on the bathroom floor with her wrists open. She was quivering beside the toilet bowl, her face impenetrable, the razor blades stuck to her fingertips with blood. She'd been sick more than once; over the bath, over herself. Absurdly she had managed to stay conscious enough to unravel some toilet roll in an attempt to wrap it around her wrists.

By the time I'd alerted her mother, who came awake with a cold and alarming clarity, Chelsea had grown unresponsive and brittle, as if she had turned into a papier-mâché impression of herself.

We bandaged her wrists tightly and then telephoned for an ambulance. Chelsea's mother kept kissing her daughter's forehead, pressing back her fringe so it stood up in limp spikes. I gathered up her belongings silently, my mind a sudden, forgiving blank. The sunlight in the conservatory no longer seemed so pure. The expectancy had gone from the trees, the sky; the vibrancy from the birdsong, the scent from the flowers. Whatever had been there earlier had gone, or was now hidden. It was now only the morning after.

I read Chelsea's letters that day, while we were at the hospital. There was a lot to get through. A letter a year from the age of sixteen, in readiness for some obscure ritual of death or rebirth, or something entirely beyond my grasp. I tried desperately to find its meaning in various passages that seemed in some way crucial, but could only see it as some process of remembering after her supposed metamorphosis. Chelsea pored over them later too, and I wondered if she thought the life there was new, open to possibility, despite the fact that she was sitting in a hospital in Scarborough.

Her mother seemed to see things with more clarity. There had apparently been at least three other suicide attempts. She had an inkling there might have been more still. Sometimes the social services had been involved and contacted her. Sometimes there were only long periods of non-communication. Apparently she had spent time in a psychiatric hospital before the one in Walsall. None of her letters gave any indication of this, but in retrospect, I can see why. Looking at Chelsea, her arms slack at her side, her face sallow and defeated, I wondered why she simply hadn't let the lie whitewash all of her letters.

"I'm not going to come running down to Birmingham every time I feel a bit worried about her,” her mother said, trying to sound resolute. We sat in the canteen, drinking coffee from plastic cups, and smoking Benson & Hedges, watching a couple of young girls outside, bundled up in dressing gowns, bending down to sniff at the clusters of roses near the car park. Both of them looked stricken, lost, barely out of their teens. Suddenly their fragility terrified me, made me want to leave, made me want to tear up all of Chelsea's letters and be done with it.

But I did neither. I drove her back to her mother's house the next day, glancing every now and again at her as she absently scratched at her nose, or stared at her bandaged wrists. She didn't say anything. There didn't seem to be anything more to say between us. I left for Birmingham in the afternoon, and promised to keep in touch. I haven't.

In slightly different words and contexts, she had written this in every one of the letters: It feels sometimes as if I'm being denied access to some better part of myself; the part of me that recognises joy, that knows how conversations ebb and flow, that can draw love in as much as send it out. I keep wondering if I've left something of myself behind somewhere, or if there's a part of my life that I've overlooked. I wish it didn't all feel so important, but people have such expectations.

I only have vague ideas as to what I followed into the fields beyond their house that morning. I do know however that it was something that I clearly didn't deserve; that it may well have been the fulfilment of all Chelsea's hopes and needs; something she had lost in the depths of childhood. No one could expect what she desperately wanted to give; not me, nor her husband, Garry, in a cottage in the Peak District, nor the Asian lad who worked the waltzers in Scarborough.

But perhaps Chelsea put it there every year for us, or perhaps someone else did; someone who hadn't yet recognised their own needs.

Perhaps this year it was me.

Copyright © 2008 Simon Avery

FUR VS IRON

I saw Robert Downey Jr on Jonathan Ross's TV chat show the other night and I heard this snippet of dialogue:

Ross: “Robert, why did you do Iron Man, after starring in so many small art-house films?” Downey: “To reach a few more people than saw my last film, Fur, about Diane Arbus.” Ross: “How many people saw that film?” Downey: “Oh, about none.” Sniggers. Ross: “How many in the audience saw Fur?” Silence. Ross: “How many in the audience have even heard of Fur?” Silence. Downey: “See what I mean?” Laughter.

I found this deeply depressing—not only because of the uncomfortable spectacle of an actor dissing his previous film in order to get a cheap laugh; it was sad because it occurred to me that this brief interchange said a lot about the forked path we stand at in Science Fiction/Horror/Fantasy cinema today.

One of my favourite Marvel heroes, Iron Man is a massive high octane superhero movie, a summer blockbuster from a big studio that arrived on the screen with all guns blazing. Fur on the other hand was a quirky, low-budget biopic by American auteur writer-director Steven Shainberg. Here's the question: which was the one I would rate most highly as a genre film? The answer might come as a bit of a surprise.

As a biopic of New York photographer Arbus, Fur is annoying to say the least. What is true, what is fantasy? You are never quite sure. The movie is frustrating, difficult and at times even boring. But it has the guts to be a non-naturalistic flight of imagination and, as such, tells you more about the film-maker's idea of Diane Arbus than any yawn-inducing by-the-numbers life story like Ray or the Johnny Cash story.

Downey Jr's performance as the circus-freak lion man who befriends Diane (Nicole Kidman) and represents her attraction to the abnormal is simply unforgettable. His laconic persona gives the Beast a confidence and nobility that would make any Beauty fall for him at the drop of a hat, and she does. Her hubby tries to grow a beard but frankly, no contest. Downey is downy all over.

Visually gorgeous and full of witty allusions to fairy tales such as Bluebeard's castle, the movie asks (as did Secretary, the director's previous work): “Who is normal?” Surely a question that puts it squarely in the territory of classic horror.

Downey's Lionel can be traced straight back to Tod Browning's Freaks, to Charles Laughton's Hunchback, to John Hurt's Elephant Man, to monsters and werewolves galore who evoke our pity, fear and trepidation. The question of normality and abnormality on a psychological level is further muddied in such vivid characters as Hannibal Lector, TV's Dexter, and Grenouille in Perfume: enticing and repellent in equal measure—but irresistible.

Similarly, Arbus in Fur is attracted to sexual deviants as well as physical outcasts—though whether to see them or to be them is open to conjecture. Certainly in Secretary, deviation is Shainberg's metaphor for liberation, and here Diane's compulsion to snap (you could say) “Odds and Sods” represents a sympathy for the “other” and a turning away from the cloying strait jacket of her middle-class life. Hers is a voyage of inner discovery, courtesy of long golden hair in the plumbing and assisted suicide.

By contrast let's take a look at Iron Man, a movie one critic on the radio dismissed as “obscene” for using, in what is basically a popcorn movie, the trappings of terrorism whereby, in reality, innocent people die every day. Is it acceptable at a time of war, she asked, to have the enemy depicted as alien while only the US soldiers are portrayed as human? Good question.

Iron Man does have a few moments where it takes a critical eye to the war effort and the role of arms trading, but as one blogger says: “the rest unfolds like a racist, sexist romp on the fast track to unimpressive pseudo-intellectualism about war and gender. The film is ultimately irresponsible and jingoistic in a time of huge losses and atrocities."

I know a lot of fans will cry “It's only a comic book!"—but that is exactly my point. 300 was only a graphic novel, but I've never seen such offensive war-mongering tosh in my life: a glossy recruitment ad addressed straight to American youth to come and lose their lives “with honour” in Iraq. I found it sick-making. I'm sorry but everything is political, whether you mean it to be or not.

Why didn't critics point this out about 300? The same reason they said nothing about Fur: most were too thick to get it. Or, more seriously, no critic who values his pay packet is going to lay a turd on a big summer movie. Newspapers and broadcasters depend on the studios. They don't want to piss them off. They want to go on the press junkets and get interviews with the megastars, they also don't want to lose those juicy full page advertising spends. It's capitalism, boys. Who gives a shit about a little movie like Fur?

Well, I give a shit, and so should you. Because films of genuine originality and innovation don't get seen any more, and the barbarians are jumping on the gate, and it's not even padlocked.

Special effects blockbusters dominate our multiplexes like some vast Croc-wearing, pretzel-choking invading force. It's no good going to the cinema between June and August because that's all there is. And they're beginning to conform to a glumly predictable format: star actor in surprise casting lights up the screen for thirty or forty minutes, only to be replaced by a CGI concoction zooming round flattening cities or hurling artillery. Spider-Man. Iron Man. The Incredible Hulk. Incredible.

Don't get me wrong. I adore comic books. Always have. I remember tracing whole pages and inventing my own superheroes, writing my own words in the bubbles of Spidey and the Green Goblin. Not surprisingly I took to Iron Man as a beefed-up Frankenstein riff. A lot more recently I've written a Hellboy short story and I loved it.

But there's a cynicism about this new fare that sticks in my craw. They get an actor like Edward Norton to give it a big opening weekend. Who cares if the audience leaves perplexed and vaguely disappointed? The actor's happy. He's upped his bottom line with a whopping box office hit, so his name can now raise the budget for that weeny independent film he's really interested in.

I get the niff of dishonesty from the whole thing. These soulless, numbing epics seem produced as extended ads for toy companies and games manufacturers, not for film-goers.

It all started with the monumentally ill-conceived Van Helsing. That is when horror and monsters lost their magic and became commodities that delivered whiz-bang action that evaporated in the brain just as popcorn evaporated in the mouth.

What the abnormal should reveal to us is humanity, whether in the shape of Christopher Lee or Boris Karloff or Lon Chaney Jr—let alone Lon Chaney Senior. And comic book characters need not be excluded from that: Tim Burton's Batman, Joker, and Penguin were traumatized monsters in the gothic horror mould—but deeply and memorably human, not computer-aided illustrations.

Fur is important not according to whether you like it or not, but because Fantasy/Horror shouldn't always be seen as just action shoot-'em-ups, dragon-operas or exploitation torture-fests at the reactionary end of the spectrum. The genre can also create acts of subversion, anarchic in nature and questioning the status quo, specifically raising issues about “normality” in a world ever more controlling, intolerant and insensitive to difference.

Ironically we now have wall-to-wall celebrity culture obsessed with ballooning body mass or skeletal dieting, medical freak shows on TV, a culture of voyeurism from Big Brother to CCTV, and yet a palpable lack of empathy and far more desensitization—all the things Diane Arbus was trying to act against.

The abnormal is scary, for sure—whether you were re-invented with super powers or born covered head to toe in hair—but by exploring it, with honesty and humanity, we send ourselves on a journey to the heart of who we are.

Copyright © 2008 Stephen Volk

There's a lump in my throat and I feel like crying. The air's moist with drizzle and it's making my hair stick to my face in spiders’ webs. Not even a good downpour to clear the sky; just this clammy drizzle that leaves a film on my bare arms. And all I can do is sit, right here on the tarmac by the empty parking spaces. I don't care much for cars.

It wasn't raining this morning though. It was so hot in the coach—boiling. I spent most of the journey glued to the window, watching signposts go by, waiting for the next stop. A faded whodunit that I found in a bargain bin on my lap. I couldn't concentrate with the sun glaring down on the pages like that. I was dreaming about the can of Coke that I was going to buy at the next shop we came to. I kept imagining the bubbles fizzing down my throat.

Instead here I am gulping down coffee to take away this metallic taste in my mouth. My second cup, I think. But the aftertaste from this machine coffee leaves an even worse taste in my mouth. The sugar has all stayed in the bottom as usual. It looks like being a long night, I might as well settle in. And dose myself up with caffeine while I wait.

Not that I have any mad compulsion to think about tonight. Stuck in some motorway service station with nowhere to go while I wait for morning. Not even a restaurant where I can while away an hour or two. Just the bare minimum: petrol pumps and a convenience store. I was in there just now. Just long enough to browse the shelves of junk food and fizzy drinks to the background hum of the percolators. Litter bins scattered around with empty sandwich wrappers, used cups. A few zombies queuing in front of the machines for fuel to stimulate their anaesthetised nerves. Kids staring wide-eyed at chocolate bars.

I left quickly, it's not a place to linger in. The crude neon lights from the refrigerators were hurting my eyes, like headlights shining right in my face.

Hopefully another coach for Strasbourg will come along. I'll explain what happened and they'll take me on board. They will take me. They have to, I can't stay here. Not with night coming on. Not with this metallic taste in my mouth and this grey as far as the eye can see. Under this clammy sky that makes the tarmac desert even duller, like molten lead sticking to your feet. I thought I saw petrol fumes rising like a ghost escaping from the tar. When I was a little girl I loved the smell of petrol. I would have spent hours in petrol stations just so I could get high on the fumes.

I don't know how the coach could have forgotten me. To leave like that without checking everyone was on board. Abandoning me here with this void, the empty space in the car park where it was standing just a while ago. I didn't go far. I wasn't gone long enough to miss the coach.

But they left me here. And no hotel where I can spend the night. Nothing but the coming and going of a succession of cars, one after another, passengers in transit, never the same face twice. I can't even see them now. I know what I'll do ... I'll wait for the next coach, and when I get to Strasbourg I'll put it right out of my mind.

There's a cat over there amusing itself chasing a chocolate wrapper blown around by the breeze. A big ball of fur with black and white markings. A perfectly round white patch over one eye. As he plays I catch glimpses of where his fur is missing in patches. He's standing on his back legs, lashing the air with his tail, trying to free his claws that are trapped in the paper. Maybe he's a traveller's companion, left out too long to stretch his paws? Amusing idea, but I can't imagine any stray cat hanging around this place. So close to the road and the traffic. So close to the headlights. It's not a place to linger.

When he passes in front of me, still fighting to free his paws from the paper, he gives me a wide berth. He looks at me with one of those looks that pets reserve for strangers when they've been used to being with just one person. But further along the kerb he doesn't try to avoid the caresses of the young girl who has sat down a few metres from me. The cat arches his back and lifts his tail; her touch is no doubt familiar to him. The punk girl strokes him unconsciously, by instinct.

I say punk, perhaps I should say wannabe punk. Torn leather, tartan kilt, ripped black tights. Dishevelled multicoloured hair; maybe once a wedge cut that's grown out. With just a thin strand plaited and tucked behind her left ear. And a whole string of metal objects pierced through her ears, from the cartilage to the lobe.

The toe of her worn Doc Martens hammers the tarmac along with the rhythm of the music blasting out of her Walkman. The headphone cables hang limply around her face and the end goes into a little holster fixed on her belt. I can hear the music blaring out; she must have it on loud enough to burst her ear drums. Rock music with guitar solos, quite old, maybe twenty five years.

The cat has taken refuge some way off, keeping the punk girl between him and me. I want to help him out with the paper that he's still struggling with. He's rolled over onto his back, pink skin showing through the white fur of his belly. As I turn away I notice the girl looking at me as we both watch the cat. Her face opens up into a broad smile that looks more like a grimace on her wide mouth. As a child she must have been very adult-like with those thick lips and full eyelashes.

Nodding towards the cat I ask, “Is he yours?"

She takes the headphones off and lets them hang around her neck, without turning the music off. “S'pose. He's always hanging around here, like me. We've had time to get to know each other."

"Does he belong to people around here? Maybe those who keep the shop?"

"I shouldn't think so. He doesn't belong to anyone particularly. He's just squatting. A stowaway, sort of. Actually his name's Cassiel. I chose it."

After a few moments’ silence another shrill electric sound bursts out of the headphones. The music unwinds like a ball of wool rolling down a hill.

"My name's Léo,” she goes on, “Well, Léonore really, but I don't like it very much. What's yours?"

"Anouk."

A nod of the head that means ‘pleased to meet you’ in her language. She adds nothing further, so I say, “I was on my way to Strasbourg actually. I was on a coach from Paris. I think they've gone without me. The thing is..."

What was the thing, that detail on the edge of my consciousness? I feel tears prick as soon as I start to put it into words. Crying is out of the question; I force myself to block the waterworks.

"It's just that I didn't see the coach leave. In fact, I can't even remember if I moved from this spot."

I watch her reaction from the corner of my eye. Léonore contents herself with stretching her legs out in front of her, but doesn't take her eyes off me. And she doesn't speak again.

"Shouldn't they have checked? Or noticed that my place was empty? It's absurd, I didn't even see it go. And there's absolutely nowhere to go around here."

"I've heard stranger stories,” Léonore comments, “but that's a really dirty trick. There'll be other coaches along, though. It's not that bad. Look, I know a place you can stay the night while you wait for the coach in the morning. But it depends if you've got the patience to wait until tonight."

I shrug my shoulders as if to say I've no alternative, what have I got to lose?

Léonore seals our agreement with another of her grimace smiles. “There are worse places to spend a few hours."

"You were saying you're often around here. Do you live nearby?"

"Sort of. Let's just say I spend most of my days here. You'll think I'm an idiot, but there's a lot of things to do at a motorway service station. Things you don't normally notice because you're in such a hurry to get to where you're going. When you're in a hurry, I swear, you act like a blind man. Keep your eyes open until tonight. I promise you, you won't be bored. And if Cassiel feels like it..."

The cat doesn't budge; too busy rubbing himself up against her tights, black like him.

"Then maybe you'll be one of us."

Did I learn anything in that short time, stuck there on the tarmac? How would I know? I probably found out more about Léonore than about the place, seeing her striding across the car park and through the shop like someone going into a café just to read the newspapers: totally laid back. I learned about her penchant for seventies heavy rock music with virtuoso guitar solos and lyrics screamed out loud like a manifesto. The headphones around her neck were never silent for a moment. Occasionally she added her own rather raucous voice, which blended in quite well with Patti Smith but ruined Television. Most of the groups were unknown to me. When she sat down next to me to carry on the conversation, she never turned the sound down, and she didn't seem aware that she was tapping out the beat on the tarmac with her worn boots.

All the time we sat there I never dared ask her what she saw in the place. I took her advice and kept my eyes open. I was hoping to find the answer myself.

I saw cars come and go, discharging their busy passengers. They too had no desire to linger. A transit place where no one ever stayed longer than they had to. A place you look at fleetingly because there's nothing to see or remember. You look for the checkout, the petrol pumps, the shelves of junk food. And you leave again without a second glance.

Without noticing that not every face just passes by. I notice because I've been here longer than an hour. There are some people who have arrived since I've been here and just blended in with the background. One couple remind me of Siamese twins joined at the fingers, they just keep circling around the petrol pumps as if they're looking for a lost coin. Or that woman with the dishevelled hair and dirty clothes who hasn't moved from the coffee machine and drinks one cup after another. A child of around seven or eight stands beside her, too quiet for my liking. Since when do children do anything but run around screaming like lunatics as soon as they're let out of the car?

In a dark alley or an underground station I'd have taken them for beggars. And there's something else. That lost look staring into space? No luggage, not even a handbag? The stubborn silence; they don't seem to have even registered each other's presence.

And so maybe Léonore's not the only one who lives around here, through habit if not through choice?

I've seen hedgehogs too, hugging the edge of the kerb or scuttling along by the shop wall. So furtive that you only notice them when you focus on a point in the background. To the casual observer, the dull brown of their prickles blends in with the tarmac. The hedgehogs are even more incongruous than Cassiel the cat. Just now I saw a rabbit hopping in and out of the lines of parked cars. It's like an abandoned Noah's Ark with no people, forgotten there in the middle of civilisation.

Everyone skirts around them and nobody notices them. Except Léonore, I'm certain. And maybe the Siamese couple and the disoriented mother, if only they were aware of what's around them. Those three give me goose pimples. And I've no idea why. There's something like a blue light exploding inside my head and it escapes me when I try to concentrate on it. A light that makes your heart stop.

Whilst waiting for Léonore to tell me where I'm sleeping tonight I have time to scrutinise the different shades of tarmac. The colour it takes on when the sun shines on it. The granular texture that you can see even with the naked eye. The uniform dirty grey it appears under the heavy storm clouds. And the shade, different again, when the light grows dim towards evening. I see the tarmac take on its night time hue. The colour of a pub crawl, of a boozy midnight stroll, a car journey in the dark. It's the tarmac of lighting up time—I hate car headlights. I wish it were morning. Or that Léonore would finally come and take me to the refuge. I don't want to see night fall over this place. Not here, lost under the open sky. So close to the cars.

Night sets in, a few wisps of twilight are still creeping towards the horizon, just a pale band in the distance. And Léonore comes to fetch me, carrying an army surplus backpack on her back like a tortoise's shell. She towers over me where I sit on the pavement; I haven't moved from the spot. She stands in front of me, shifting from one leg to the other, undecided.

"Look, Anouk, it's getting late and I've got something to finish. I won't forget my promise, okay, I'll show you where you can spend the night. Only I've got to finish something first. So do you fancy a little stroll? I'd rather you came with me than stay here."

I look her in the eye and she turns away slightly. A stroll at this time? In the middle of nowhere?

"Where to?"

"Oh, not far,” she says, “ten minutes’ walk at the most. Do as you like. I've got to go though."

To illustrate her intention she adjusts the straps on her backpack which are beginning to slip and makes sure I understand that she's leaving, right now, without giving me time to think it over.

Because she knows I'm trapped. That I have no option but to follow the one person who offers me a bed for the night for fear that she won't come back. She knows it, she knows I can't stay here on my own and that I've only got her to latch onto. No alternative. And the mother who hasn't moved a muscle, next to the coffee machine, gives me the shivers. I'm afraid it might be catching.

So I get up, like a puppet on strings. Léonore welcomes my decision with a lopsided grin. Cassiel lets out an irritated meow; he is irked by the sudden desertion.

"Don't be like that my big boy,” she says, “Léo's got a job to do."

Ten minutes’ walk? I'm losing all track of time. She's brought me down a bumpy road barely visible in the dark. Her firm grip on my forearm has kept me from stumbling. We negotiated a few obstacles in the dark, and when I finally saw light ahead it was because we were coming towards the motorway.

If I'd known how to get back on my own I'd have gone back straight away when I found out what she was up to. Léonore tried to reassure me: “Don't worry, we're facing the oncoming traffic. You'll see anything coming from along way off."

She was already off, so I had to follow her. And now here we are on the hard shoulder. Léonore walks in front of me with a confident step in familiar territory. With the assurance of a child balancing along the edge of the kerb, eyes closed, knowing that familiarity will protect her from falling. And I walk in her footsteps, hoping that her boldness will protect me too.

She's started singing again to the sound of the music blaring out of the headphones. Or perhaps music is too grand a word for it. Léonore sounds like a banshee who's had singing lessons from Robert Plant. In the darkness the music warms my insides like hot coffee. Anything's better than thinking about where I am. You set out cheerfully but you never know where you're going to end up.

Infinity scares me. When I was a little girl even the lines in my exercise books filled me with anxiety. I like enclosed spaces, geometric figures that have set boundaries. I'm in hostile territory here, a stretch of tarmac that disappears into the distance, inflexible, a tiny section of an ever-expanding network. With hardly a toll booth or a service station where you can take a breather and believe yourself back in civilisation. Before you get swallowed up again by the road.

The road stretches out into the distance as straight as an arrow. Away to my right there's the white line, a line of fragile stitching ready to burst apart and reveal the entrails of the world. A fracture that spreads out like a flame on a petrol spill.

So close and nothing to shield me from the traffic. I cling to the barrier as if it stands between me and the edge of a cliff. But Léonore is already getting ahead and I have to follow her up the hard shoulder. A narrow refuge on the edge of chaos. The traffic will be very close.

From way off headlights shine into your face like it's judgement day. Searchlights seeking and finding runaways and always bringing them back. Too late to escape. They pin me to the night like a mounted butterfly, flames from a dragon's mouth. Now I know why rabbits freeze when they're trapped in the glare.

The noise of the traffic gets mixed up with the sound of clashing metal. The blast throws me against the barrier. Léonore walks on, a brave little soldier on a mission. She's so used to it that she's become immune; she doesn't slow down at the approach of vehicles.

But for me, whenever a car whistles past my ears I look at the tarmac and imagine it tearing the skin off my arms and legs, my face, exposing bones. Breaking my limbs, smashing my skull, ripping off my scalp. And keeping the spilt blood for an offering to the god of our time. Mother Motorway, Father Tarmac, protect thy poor travellers. I feel panic rising bitter and coppery. A lava flow burning my throat. Take me back Léonore. The road is no place for unarmoured people.

"They must be close now,” says Léonore, looking back.

The gleam of a light sweeping the tarmac catches her face and makes the metal in her ears glitter. The thing on her eyebrow looks like a badly-healed war wound. Like flesh fused with metal.

And behind her, towards the horizon, another light flashes blue and red through the night. A beacon perched like a bird of ill omen on a dying man's roof. It reminds me of another blue light in my head, a taste of electricity, the muffled echo of panic.

A flashing light way off, haloed with drizzle. That shade of blue that means danger, pain, and worse. Smashing glass, wrenching metal, violated bodies. Broken bones, stomachs ripped open. And this gaudy blue light trying to blot out the dirty red that's spread all around. I can't make out the scene of the accident from here, but my imagination supplies the details. Cars wrecked, torn apart like cardboard boxes. Just useless carcasses now.

Now we're no longer alone on the hard shoulder. Three silhouettes are walking towards us in single file, somewhere between us and the scene of the crash. I can't see them clearly; the flashing light is blinding me.

"Come on!” says Léonore. “I'll just warn you, it feels strange the first time, but you get used to it."

I see her slip one strap of her backpack off and hold the bag against her stomach. She rummages in the contents and fishes out a cassette box. Several complicated manoeuvres follow where she inserts the cassette in the Walkman with one hand without letting go of the bag.

The three silhouettes are coming straight at us. We're going to collide unless someone gives way. I'm sure they haven't noticed us, and I can't see Léonore stepping aside, she's not the type.

They really haven't seen us...

...or can't see us.

Because the young man in front is spattered with dark stains, and that trough right in the middle of his chest where his T shirt is flapping is a little too much like the shape of a steering wheel.

Because the young girl behind him is smeared around the eyes and all over her body with something even the most confident optimist could not convince himself is red paint.

Because their companion has had to leave a good part of his scalp and most of his face stuck to the tarmac where the light is flashing.

I'd already noticed the stiffness in their walk; too mechanical, too chaotic. They approached without speaking a word to each other or making any gesture, they just pressed on. Trapped on a motorway hard shoulder like the last chance saloon. And I never thought for a moment...

...except, perhaps, for a distant echo in my memory, the image of the woman standing next to the percolator, the one drinking coffee after coffee. The same mechanical movement, the same vacant stare...

...I never considered that Léonore was leading me to a scene of carnage.

"We have to hold them,” she said calmly. “Anouk, can you get just behind the third one? The one with the melted body, there. You have to stop him walking."

No way could I go near them or touch them or think about what could have left them in that state. Smashing glass, wrenching metal, the blue light in my head, I refuse to think about them. Heart stopping, sky overhead. And she doesn't turn a hair?

"Go on then!” she insists. “Don't worry, they won't bite you."

And without waiting for a reply she turns on the Walkman. Or rather, it looks like a sort of dictaphone now. As soon as the headphones are unplugged the heavy beat of the music surrounds and envelops us. A change of era and style, I recognise the first few notes. A muted violin, just before the storm, I'm thinking of the next line in spite of myself. Léonore joins in with the lyrics:

Hello old lady ... I know your face well...

The three silhouettes have stopped. I could swear I saw the ghost of an expression on their faces, or what's left of them. A slight confusion as if those few notes were calling to them. Or rather, as if they were surprised that they could even be aware of it. Something awakening inside them. Three notes, the memory of a spark of life?

And it's true: right in the middle of the motorway, with three corpses for company, and flashing lights in the distance ... there's something soothing in that music. The memory of days gone by, or a token to cling to. There's me, the music, and Léonore to guide us. Léonore, signing for me to stop the walk like she told me to. I haven't the heart to refuse. Not when she's playing that music for me.

"Right folks, ready for a walk on Styx Road?” she shouts above the music.

Léonore is at the head, the music follows, and the three companions walk submissively behind. Following the music. A jumble of voices interlaced, overlapping in a never-ending cycle. A serpent chasing its own tail and wriggling frantically.

I know this music. I used to know it before, and the memory of it comes back to me as if across a barrier. I'm ready to let myself go. And I don't care, as long as it calms my nerves, freeing them one by one. Spreading over me like a shockwave. It creeps under my skin and my body recalls how it was swept away, captivated. And I remember how it used to talk to me.

And now it's a song of the road, an incantation. Léonore sings the tune at the top of her voice, skipping in time to the haunting melody. She takes on the passion of the violins, swelling like a storm, pure energy. A shield against the tarmac and the metal, against the headlights shining in our faces, against every night in the world. Léonore only breaks off to yell out something above the music, accompanied by grand arm waving. Then goes back to the song, unstoppable.

Now I remember the title. Jig of Life. How ironic.

And I see the three companions walking in front of me a little faster. Hesitant steps, following in Léonore's, to the beat of the song coming from her holster. They've forgotten for the moment that their bodies can no longer walk or dance. That their ears can no longer hear the notes. But they're hearing them anyway, with what's left of their flesh. They are no longer aware, but their bodies are. They still have their reflexes, and somewhere deep down, a spark.

Is it my eyes, or do their faces look a little cleaner now? It must be the drizzle gradually washing the blood from their bodies, mending bones, resculpting torn flesh. They seem more human, away from the flashing lights, in the sound of this heady music.

Dragging the world along in its wake. Léonore is not put off by breaks in the music. She's ready for them, she anticipates them, because she knows them so well. She skips and jumps to the beat, waving her arms and swinging her hips. A sort of jigging step for the instrumental part. Her worn Doc Martens tread the tarmac as if it's the softest of carpets.

The spirit of the road awoken by this never ending song. Like an incantation directed at the night around us, at the road that stretches out to infinity under our feet. Léonore is tracing the path for us, and the song is commanding my muscles now. There's just the road running off in a straight line, marked out by a white line, a railing at the side. To the rhythm of this insane violin that drills into my nerves and electrifies me, awakens all these fragments in my head. This blue metallic light, electric blue that explodes inside my head and makes my heart stop. The metallic taste in my throat, the sky above my head, the tarmac under my neck. It hurts and I've no time to understand, it's all black, except for this blue light, this taste of electricity. No way to make it go away.

Concentrate on the music.

It was hot in the coach. Boiling.

It wasn't raining this morning. And the coach didn't leave me behind, not really. I'm sure of that now.

Now the music's slowing down. Léonore is calling out again, her voice both raucous and gentle, she speaks these words that she knows by heart:

"I put this moment here. I put this moment ... here..."

And that's exactly what it is, the creation of a moment around us, in this air as thick as glue. Behind the curtain of rain that surrounds us and washes the blood from our faces. Because Léonore and the song are guiding us, and because in this moment I remember and I understand one thing. We are alive. Here, now, if only for brief moment. As long as the music keeps playing. As long as we're not plunged into silence. The violin is keeping us alive. And pushing us onward.

There's a movement at the edge of my field of vision. I take back control of my neck, just enough to look behind me. Two others are following us. A cat limping, holding one paw up, his sparse fur revealing a knot of muscles and tendons. But he keeps coming, and there's a hedgehog perched on his back, in rather a bad way. I think again about the people at the service station. I'll be seeing them again shortly, once we get back to the refuge. I could swear that even the cat is walking in time to the music. He stares straight ahead lost in himself, his reflexes keep him walking. He'll follow us all the way there.

Towards our refuge, away from the road and its mirages. Away from the traffic. In the footsteps of Léonore who is guiding us. A piper leading the rats to a new Hamelin. With this one song that she plays over and over, recorded ad infinitum on the cassette tape.

In a few minutes we're safely back.

"Captain Léo hopes you've had a pleasant journey."

She rummages in her backpack again and fishes out the headphones, then changes the cassette. Back to seventies guitar solos.

Back, above all, to the familiar surroundings. The shop lights draw us like moths to a light bulb. A break from the cold infinity of the motorway. Léonore has brought us safely back.

The group hang around, undecided, perhaps waiting further instructions. Cassiel comes up to greet us, surreptitiously observing the new cat that we picked up on the road. But it looks like the other cat hasn't seen him yet. The eye behind Cassiel's white patch seems to wonder if it would be proper to make an initial contact. But the other cat is stretching himself full length along the pavement. The hedgehog has climbed down.

Léonore disappears into the shop. The group splits up, hesitantly. The three companions look almost human again. The drizzle has washed the blood from their bewildered faces. Not enough to disguise certain anatomical defects, but that will come in good time. It's enough to fool the casual observer anyway. It's common practice to ignore other people in motorway service stations.

The young girl and the boy whose T shirt disguises a cavity, now less obvious, have settled near the shop. They flop down and remain in the same position, exhausted. The girl smooths down her skirt automatically. The third one is walking up and down the empty car park, probably wondering what spaceship dumped him in this place. But it seems to me that somewhere in the back of his mind he's remembering that violin music. The rest of it, the important stuff, will come to him later. He's probably just remembering his name now.

Léonore reappears from the shop carrying three steaming cups, delicately balanced. She puts them down before she burns her fingers. Then picks them up again one by one, holding them by the rim this time, and hands them out to the new arrivals. They take them through some reflex action rather than through any desire to drink. But at least they're showing some reaction.

Seeing their vacant expressions I remember similar ones that I saw a few hours ago. Now I understand what my brain was receiving and not interpreting, something wrong with the face of that silent woman. I must have taken it for a birthmark, some little defect too trivial to draw attention, so I only noticed her dead eyes. The result of her accident, no doubt. A few hours from now she'll start to remember too. Her own blue light, the taste of panic at the back of her throat. The memory of the bumper and the tyres.

Everyone here must have their own story. Even the cats and the hedgehogs.

"Léonore, can I ask you something?"

"I told you, I prefer Léo."

She sits down next to me like she did when we first met. By the way she fiddles nervously with her little plait, I guess she's having to psyche herself up for what's to come. Going over in her mind what she's going to tell me.

"How long have I been here?"

"About three days. Not that I keep any track of time, what good it is to me."

A pause, then she goes on, not looking at me.

"Do you want to know what happened?"

"You're going to tell me the coach didn't leave me behind, aren't you?"

"Not the way you mean. Actually ... well, a car knocked you down. Right here in the car park. It happened so fast you never knew what hit you. In some way that's better, isn't it?"

And I find that I totally understand what she's telling me. I was a little surprised—well very surprised. But everything started to fall into place.

"So why here?"

"Not just here,” Léonore tells me, “there are loads of places like this as I understand it. Probably every motorway service station is a refuge. A chance to recoup before going on."

Transit areas, in so many ways. Populated by travellers so busy they don't have time to notice there are some people there a little less alive than most. Waiting to continue their journey, but where to? I don't think even Léonore knows that. You only find out when you get there.

"It happened on the road for me, not far from here. And I suppose that bastard of a driver managed to survive seeing as I've never seen him around here. He was lucky because I would have given him what for, the swine."

The only time she stops twiddling her plait is to twirl the silver ring through her nose with nervous fingers. I suddenly notice that the headphones are silent. She's had the decency to turn the music off while she talks to me.

"Basile, the guy who brought me here, handed over to me a bit after. When his time came to move on, you know. Anyway, the important thing is that there's always someone to take care of that. Because, hell, when it comes to you what happened, you don't want to be on your own ... Well, it's not so bad if you're with someone."

Tomorrow, or a few days from now, the new ones will start to understand. Start to wonder how they ended up here, and the rest, of course. Léonore will explain everything, with the help of her music, with direct motorway assistance if required. I'll be there with her, maybe. I think she's about to ask me.

After all, I've nothing left to lose and I'm not just going to wait here ... a place as good as any other to start again from scratch. Waiting for my turn to take the road to somewhere else.

Copyright © 2008 Melanie Fazi

SECRET ORIGINS

The wonderful thing about writing for Black Static is that you're given carte blanche to say whatever you like. This, in many ways, is the definition of the magazine—the freedom to be honest is not a gift readily granted by today's media, as you'll know if you've watched BBC 24 and counted how many times they plug programmes masquerading as news items. But who am I to judge whether the season finale of Doctor Who is more important than the death of democracy in Rwanda?

I've often chosen to write about cinema, but to be honest I have absolutely nothing to say about films like Hancock and Kung Fu Panda, any more than I have an opinion about the kind of fries they serve in McDonald's. The product conforms to its definition, but beyond that it's difficult to recall anything at all, because it seems like a reproduction filtered through someone else's memory; it's what the makers think a chip, or a film, should be like. I showed my age when I saw the cinema listing for Hancock and instantly thought of East Cheam. Then I realised that Tony Hancock announcing “Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?” wouldn't get a laugh today because many people would think she did.

The ersatz manufacture of culture infests everything. Art exhibitions sell out all over town, even when they're as sloppy and lazily curated as the recent ‘Psycho Buildings’ show at the Hayward. You get some bin-ends from artists known for their whacky takes on modern society, throw in a bit of crowd-pleasing interactivity—in this case a pointless boating lake on the roof—and suddenly the families turn up, have a bit of a laugh and wander off to find another amusement.

At the Tate Modern, a woman next to me admitted she was there not to look at the art but to get laid, because “men who like art are likely to treat women properly.” Visiting art has clearly become some kind of barometer to your humanity, but do women really have to leap out from behind a Kandinsky just to get a date? Meanwhile, a colleague confided that he always picks up women in art galleries, and only looks for ones under thirty because there were so many uncomplaining Eastern European girls available. This is the reverse of your grandparents’ attitude to foreign men “coming over here and stealing our women."

Even shock-art has its own tidy demographic niche, and isn't very shocking anymore. Tracey Emin pops little things around Folkestone to democratise art, oldies scowl, everyone else giggles. Occasionally something moves you; I remember seeing the portrait of Myra Hindley made from children's painted hands and finding it unbearably touching. I felt very strongly that young people should see this piece; it certainly has more relevance than any number of gloomy 19th century oils filled with classical allusions.

Faux-product has invaded the bookshelves, too. Entering a bookstore you have to run the gauntlet past Jeremy Clarkson and Delia Smith, children's fantasy tomes, TV tie-ins and the Big Book of Socks. Have you looked at the Borders top ten lately? Publishers are aiming their stock at people who say “I'd love to read more, but I never get the time.” But of course, Jordan's biography is such a success that it finances the rest of us, so we're encouraged not to complain.

I'm currently reading Who's Buried Under Your Floor? A Guide to London's Forgotten Graveyards, Blackwater, a sextet of 70s gothic horror novels by Michael Beetlejuice McDowell, and The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. I'm not trying to be weird and interesting—the first is research, the second is nostalgia, the third is because I fancied it. Harkaway has been getting hateful reviews, perhaps because he's John Le Carre's son. His book is like an entire box of fireworks going off at once, a tale of rogue truckers and a pipeline across a post-apocalyptic world that's all over the place, but it's been a while since someone came along with such a maddening display of styles and influences jam-packed into a single SF novel. That's no longer enough for a first-time novelist, apparently. And I speak as a man who attempted to plough through Kate Mosse's Labyrinth. Ms Mosse is by all accounts a fantastic person who deliberately set out to write a potboiler, but that alone doesn't make her an interesting writer.

The truth is that few writers of imaginative fiction receive any mainstream recognition at all. I love what Russell T. Davies has done with Doctor Who, but he had the good sense to find a forum which eight million people would tune into each week. Many fiction authors write because they can't stop themselves. They're like serial killers, but on lower pay. Their strength—and their curse—is to keep moving on, and as fast as their readership catches up, they dance on ahead. The price of doing this is invisibility. Personally, I always enjoyed the anonymity of the printed page, because it gave me freedom to explore. People often ask how I ended up writing so much about London. My thinking went like this: I knew that the streets of ancient London followed the lines of hedgerows and underground rivers. The lowlands were poor areas largely because they were damp. Water and fog brought illness and early deaths created superstitions; that's why ghost stories were more associated with say, the poor East End than the prosperous North. The London of my early childhood was a city of ghosts.

I was fascinated by the city's underground rivers and lost theatres, its secret societies and newly formed tribes. A little digging produced massive results—everyone wanted to talk about their particular kingdoms. I found I'd stumbled on a goldmine for my fiction. I met the 80-year-old archivist of the Palace Theatre, who had lost the key to a room full of props used by the Marx Brothers and Fred Astaire when they performed there. The guardian of the Goldsmiths Hall showed me the throne of a Roman goddess and expressed surprise that anyone should be interested. I met a WPC whose beat took her through the site of a lost Pagan temple. A few weeks ago a barman took me down into the cells of Newgate Jail through his pub basement. You start with a vague idea, and end up with something original.

London's peculiarities are peppered through all my books, but not everyone's interested in this stuff. If you really want to be put off of breaking new ground, the BBC top one hundred booklist offers a depressing reflection of public taste. Despite all the new possibilities of fiction, we still drift into comfort reading that's conservative and often surreally dull. Although we branch out at Christmas and buy Jeremy Clarkson's Big Book of Vanishing Fossil Fuels.

But if you choose not to settle for the second-hand, it's easy to find original thinking in art, cinema and books, especially if you look overseas. Thanks to the internet, you can now locate great films on DVD, most of which come from Spain, France and Korea rather than Hollywood. Clearly, home entertainment will leave the theatrical experience behind very soon now. Recently I went to the Open Air Cinema in Monte Carlo, which felt as if it offered a grim glimpse of the future of film. A lousy thrash-and-bash superhero movie unfolded to an almost deserted auditorium, around which tottered a few elderly men supported by pneumatic hooker/nurses. In the sky above, bats swooped and dropped while the old men were lowered into their loungers to stare uncomprehendingly at tail-end Hollywood product, their pink hotpanted companions sipping champagne and playing with teddy bears. Perhaps, long after cinema is dead, we'll continue to congregate in such places, operating on a fading collective trace-memory, like zombies hanging around shopping malls.

It's in our nature to want comfort, though, because we like television. Noel Coward once said, rather snobbishly, “Television is not for watching, it's for appearing on,” and a great many people appear to have taken his words at face value. If I watch TV I'd like to be in the company of an expert storyteller or documentarian, not watching an amateur whose sole point of appeal is their level of desperation.

Let's take a collective step away from the ordinary, head for the edge, and encourage it in almost the only way that's possible in the 21st century—by shopping for it.

Copyright © 2008 Christopher Fowler

Cathy had been gone for just over two years when I went with a prostitute for the first time, gone being a euphemism for dead, finished, kaput, returned to the earth, and all the other words and phrases with a finality about them that I just couldn't deal with. People who were gone could maybe come back, but people who were dead didn't ever come back, no matter how badly you wanted it or whatever shit deals you were prepared to make with whatever powers that be in the second before midnight.

Twenty four months of being alone in a bed meant for two; of wanting, of needing somebody else. Twenty four months of coming awake in the shallows of the night and reaching out to touch a familiar form only to find nothing, an absence.

My friends and family had been supportive at first, giving me space when I wanted to be alone to grieve, and there to listen and respond if I needed to talk, or simply to provide a comforting hug in lieu of all the things that couldn't be put into words. Lately though I'd got the impression that the well of sympathy and understanding had run dry and people thought I should be over it, moving on with my life. Two years was the optimum period for grief, according to all the experts, and my allotment had run its course. Nothing was said, but at dinner parties and other social functions, where until recently my spare wheel status had been respected, now I was being introduced to single women.

Our world is geared to the couple, the unit of one plus one, and my friends needed me to be in a relationship and happy, if only to affirm the rightness of the choices they had made in their own lives and thus preserve the status quo. I had become an embarrassment, like Banquo's ghost at the feast, guilt tripping everybody else with the great wrong that had been done to me, a constant reminder of how easily the good things in life can just slip away from you or be torn up by the roots. It would have been better if I had been a divorcee, as at least then they could tell themselves that it was in part my own fault, nothing that they themselves would ever have to worry about.

I wasn't over it and I wasn't ready to move on with my life, so after a time I began to decline whatever social invitations came my way.

Sex had always been important to me; a big part of how I defined myself, who I was. Before meeting Cathy I'd been the sort of man described by those who knew him as a jack the lad, a regular Don Juan or Casanova. I genuinely liked women, enjoyed their company, and women would sense that and respond to it. I'd had no trouble meeting them, charming them into my bed.

With Cathy everything changed. She was the one, the person I was meant to spend the rest of my life with, no matter what, and it was exactly the same for her. We'd known that about each other from the very start. We weren't individuals as such, but complementary parts of some greater whole, needing each other to be complete.

But cruel circumstance had snatched her away from me and I felt the emptiness in my life like a gaping wound through which it was all trickling away, everything that was good and pure, everything that gave me a reason to get up in the morning. I suppose I thought sex would be a panacea, a band aid to plaster over the cracks.

Masturbation and its attendant fantasies were a comfort, but not enough. I wanted to feel a warm body next to mine. I wanted to hold someone in my arms and be held by them. I wanted it so badly. But I couldn't face the ordeal of climbing back on the merry go round of casual sex, all the rigmarole of meeting new people in single bars and supermarket aisles, the brittle smiles and inane chat-up lines needed to convince them that, however briefly, they wanted the same thing I did. I just couldn't do that sort of thing any more, having sampled something infinitely finer. And I wasn't ready for a new relationship, the emotional demands it would place on my fractured psyche. It seemed to me that, to feel anything for another woman, to attempt to make a genuine connection, would be a betrayal of Cathy, an admission that she wasn't irreplaceable, this person I had loved with all my heart and soul.

In my mind sex with a prostitute would be different, cold and clinical, requiring no real involvement on my part, physical comfort and release without the need for an emotional entanglement. It would be a form of therapy, sexual healing, and that might just be exactly what I needed.

My mind was made up, but I delayed translating intent into action until I was away from home on a business trip, in London attending one of those seemingly interminable and tedious conferences that have now become so much a part of our commercial life, regardless of the fact that nearly all of us know they serve no useful purpose. I had enough sense not to dirty my own nest. I didn't want the people I knew to be aware of what I was doing, to be transformed in their eyes into the sort of man in a shabby raincoat who was laughed at behind his back or, worse still, to see a look of pity on their faces.

It was the last day of the conference and while all the other delegates either went out drinking to celebrate some achievement or other, a last fling on the expense account junket, or made off early for home, back to familiarity and loved ones, I set about ordering up a prostitute in much the same way you'd send out for a takeaway meal.

On the corner of the road where my hotel was situated there was a public telephone box that I passed each day on my way to the tube, its back wall lined with cards advertising the services of prostitutes under the guise of remedial massage, modelling etc. I'd first become aware of this sales ploy on a previous visit to London, one time with Cathy, the two of us sitting at a table in an outside restaurant just off the Edgware Road, the whole afternoon passing in a daze as we talked and laughed and watched the world go by, simply happy to be sharing each other's company and wanting nothing more than that. At one point we'd amused ourselves by observing the men who used the telephone box on the other side of the road and guessing which of them were ringing prostitutes and why, what type of services they would be interested in and how much they'd be prepared to pay. It was a stupid game and at the time I'd been so blasé about it all, aloof, never thinking that one day I might be the man who made such a call.

Cathy's being gone had made me less judgemental about a good many things. And yet, playing at self-analysis, I suppose this could have been a part of its appeal, the element of punishment, that I was about to do something which I'd previously regarded as beneath me, pathetic even. By going with a prostitute I was saying that purchased intimacy was all somebody like me deserved.

I stood there with the receiver pressed to my ear, pretending to be talking to somebody on the other end of the line while I surreptitiously studied the cards on display. A man, someone I recognised from the conference, walked by and I hunched up trying to make myself inconspicuous, but he didn't pay me any attention, was too wrapped up in his own concerns.

The cards all seemed so tacky, hinting at a world I only knew through rumour and speculation, a reality in which busty blondes catered to the needs of discerning gentlemen, models were happy to pose for amateur photographers and mistresses could provide discretion and a firm hand. I felt repulsed by the hypocrisy of those euphemisms, the pretence that sex wasn't involved in any of this, and for a moment I came close to putting down the phone and walking away, giving the whole thing up as a bad idea, but then one card caught my eye.

It was tasteful compared to its more garish companions, a cream background with a border of vine leaves done in red the colour of fine claret, the whole laminated. In the centre were simply two words, special needs, and beneath that the name kat and a telephone number. Something about it, the low key approach perhaps, appealed to me. I waited until I was sure nobody was looking, then peeled the card off the wall and slipped it into my jacket pocket, leaving a smear of blu tak on the board.

Back up in my hotel room I vacillated. The words special needs, which only a few moments before had seemed to speak to me, of my own situation and nothing else, now sounded intimidating, conjuring up visions of some S&M ghastliness, a hatchet faced woman in high stilettos and a black PVC bustier, with a whip in her hand and a snarl in her voice. I couldn't face something like that. It wasn't what I needed, not even close, and I nearly didn't call. What finally decided me was the name.

Kat.

I'd always used the name Cat for Cathy, when we were alone together, a term of affection, no big deal in itself, but a thing shared, and part of the glue that holds a couple together. The similarity in the name seemed like a sign of some kind, as if my absent wife was putting the seal of approval on what I was about to do.

"Hello.” The phone was answered almost immediately, as if they'd been just sitting there, waiting for my call and nothing else. A woman's voice, for which I was grateful. To resort to a prostitute seemed like an admission of inadequacy of some kind and I didn't want another man, a pimp or a complacent husband/boyfriend, to know what I was reduced to.

"Could I speak to Kat please?"

"This is she."

"Hello. I'm ringing in connection with your ad. Special needs."

For a moment there was nothing, and with a feeling almost akin to relief I thought I'd got a wrong number or the whole thing was just a joke, but then she said, “My name is Katrina. I am twenty five years old, five foot six in my stockinged feet with long black hair and brown eyes, a thirty two B bust and shapely figure."

The voice was completely toneless, like listening to a recorded message, but I gasped with shock all the same. The woman she was describing sounded so much like my own Cat that they could have been twins.

"What exactly do you mean by special needs?"

"We all have special needs,” she said, enigmatically. “Desires that only a special someone can satisfy."

"This isn't S&M?"

She laughed, the sound so warm and genuine and like nothing I would have expected from a prostitute, in its way more comforting than anything she might have said to reassure me.

"No, nothing like that. I come to you and we make love, or just sit and talk. Whatever you want. Whatever you need."

"How much do you charge?” I said, feeling like an idiot for asking, but wanting it all cut and dried anyway.

"The price is negotiable. No more than you are prepared to pay."

Her answer made me feel slightly uneasy. This whole thing was so vague, not at all how I would have imagined engaging the services of a prostitute, but in a strange way that also made it more appealing, made it seem more like an assignation and less like the business transaction it actually was, an illusion compounded by her reference to making love rather than sex.

"Can I call you Cat?"

She said that I could, and so I gave her the name of my hotel and the room number. She told me that she'd be there in fifteen minutes and hung up before I could say anything else.

I sat for a moment, listening to the hum of static, and then put down the receiver. My hands were shaking as if I had a fever of some kind. I felt nervous.

This would be the first time I'd been with a woman since Cat, my Cat, had gone from my life and, absurdly, I wanted this person to think well of me, even though, realistically, I knew that she wouldn't care what I was like as long as I paid with no hassle, was in fact expecting the worst, else why would I be paying for what so many men got free? Even now she might be in a taxi heading across town to a rendezvous with some other man, a man who wasn't me but who was old and fat, who had bad breath and grey hair and took a dim view of personal hygiene.

I brushed my teeth and sprayed deodorant under my armpits, shaved off three o'clock shadow and dabbed on some aftershave. There wasn't time to shower, but I quickly wiped my armpits and crotch with a wet flannel, remembering to reapply the deodorant, then put on fresh clothes. I wanted to be presentable, somebody she couldn't dismiss as just another john, another sad middle-aged man paying for sex in the absence of other options.

A new thought occurred to me. I riffled through the notes in my wallet, checking that I'd got enough money. I'd taken two hundred out of the ATM that morning and I didn't think it would come to any more than that, though I'd no idea what the going rate was for this sort of thing. In my business I never did anything without making enquiries first and nailing down the price, but here I was throwing caution to the wind, marvelling at my own stupidity but also feeling liberated.

Twenty minutes had gone by and I was stretched out on the bed, staring up at the ceiling and trying to keep my mind a perfect blank, hands cupped behind my head in imitation of a nonchalance I didn't feel, convinced that she wasn't going to turn up, that it was all a misunderstanding of some kind, when there came a knock at the door, so light and hesitant that for a moment I thought it was only a figment of my imagination, but then a second time, louder and more confident, its reality impossible to refute.

I got to my feet and paused a moment, to wipe a thin film of sweat from my forehead with a handkerchief and look at myself one last time in the wardrobe mirror.

Then I opened the door.

Katrina was beautiful.

She was exactly as she had described herself on the phone, only words couldn't do justice to the reality of her, and yet she looked nothing at all like my Cat—it was funny how two people could sound so much alike and yet be in no way similar. Her slim figure was clothed in black jeans and white T-shirt, the garments radiating designer chic and cut so that they emphasised her perfect proportions, while black hair cascaded down to frame a face that had about it a certain delicacy and insouciance, brown eyes that twinkled with mischief, lips that were red and full and begging to be kissed.

Only she hadn't mentioned the wheelchair.

"Not quite what you expected,” she said, seeing the look of shock on my face, and smiled. It was a nice smile, the sort of look that would've made anyone happy to be on its receiving end and I smiled back at her, operating on pure reflex while my mind took in the implications of what I was seeing.

"May I come in?” she asked.

I didn't know what to do or say, and so I stepped out of her way and held the door wide open. She wheeled past me, swivelling her chair about so that she was facing me and the door, which I slammed shut before anyone went by in the corridor and noticed what was going on.

I couldn't take my eyes off the chair. It looked ancient, with a black rubber back rest, side panels and seat, silver spokes and black wheels, the metal frame painted fire engine red, blood red, so that it dominated my personal space and its brashness overwhelmed the tasteful pastels of the hotel room. It sat there at the centre of our shared environment, like a void into which all the life and vibrancy and colour of the place was sucked, the very air from my lungs.

"Look,” I said when speech returned to me, “I didn't realise you..."

"Were a cripple,” she completed for me.

I could feel myself colouring, face turning as red as that hideous chair. It was as if she knew what I was thinking. The word I'd been about to use had been disabled, but cripple was the one that had gone through my mind.

"I'm sorry. There's obviously been a misunderstanding. I'll be happy to pay your taxi fare."

She laughed, and the sound, the way in which her head tilted just so and caught the light streaming in through the window, the casual manner in which she brushed a strand of hair back from her face, all of it reminded me of Cat, my Cat, so that I felt my heart lurch in my chest and my throat contract with a sharp pain, as if a tiny sliver of glass had got lodged in my gullet.

"You wanted to make love with a good looking woman. Which bit of that did I misunderstand? Don't you think I'm good looking?"

"You're beautiful,” I said, the words just slipping out, but true all the same. “It's just that..."

"Yes?"

I hesitated, unnerved by the way she was staring at me, as if defying me to put into words what was going through my mind. Finally I did. “You're handicapped."

"So what,” she said and shrugged. “Is it a problem? I'm paralysed from the waist down, but everything's there that should be and it's all in working order."

I didn't know what to say. The hint of indignation in her voice, the expression in her eyes, made me feel like such an arsehole, but I knew that I couldn't go through with this. I just couldn't.

"Some men even prefer women like me."

I flinched, as if she'd hit me in the face. Those words and the implication behind them, the thought of men deliberately seeking out broken women like this to have sex with them, repulsed me. I didn't want to look in a mirror and have such a man stare back at me.

"How much do I owe you?” At that moment I would have given all of my money, everything that I owned, just to have this woman gone from my hotel room and out of my life.

"You don't owe me anything,” she said, and the pain I heard in her voice tore at my heart.

"You don't understand."

"I understand perfectly. You want a woman, not a cripple."

I thought she was going to burst into tears, but in her eyes there was no hint of self-pity or remorse, just a quiet indignation that made me feel ashamed of myself for rejecting her like this, of seeing the disability and not the person—that trite phrase, no doubt first coined by some advertising guru, had never seemed more true.

The nobility—there was no other word for it—in her face, in the way she held herself erect, reminded me of my own Cat. I remembered what the doctors had told me, that if she had come out of the coma the odds were good that she would've had to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. But I wouldn't have stopped loving her because of that. And I wouldn't have stopped making love to her either. She would still have been the same woman. And suddenly it was as if, by turning away this complete stranger, I was rejecting Cat too.

"Don't go,” I said, unsure what to say next but not wanting it to end like this. I put a hand on her shoulder as she gripped the arms of the wheelchair and started to turn. “Can we just talk?"

She looked into my eyes, as if trying to fathom what I really wanted from her, and the truth was that I didn't know what I wanted, only that we had to talk. Things could not be left like this. I had to put these events and my emotions into some sort of context that didn't leave me feeling like such a heel, as if I had pissed on everything I valued most.

I sat down on the bed and stared at her, looking to see if we could get past the disability thing and past the prostitute thing, until all that remained would be just a man and a woman; two people who needed to get to know each other better, to shake off all their preconceptions and connect on some level that was purely human. “Have you always been like this?” I asked and immediately regretted the question, amazed at my own insensitivity and sure that she'd be offended by such bluntness, but if so her face gave no sign.

"Two years,” she said, voice neutral. “An accident, sort of."

"Sort of?"

"A woman threw me down a flight of stairs. She found out I'd been having an affair with her husband."

It sounded like something out of a daytime soap opera or a bad sitcom, and I laughed at the absurdity of the image her words conjured up in my mind. Katrina smiled, letting me know that it was okay to make light of this, that long ago she had made her own peace with whatever had taken place. I envied her that much, and wished I could make peace with what had happened to me.

"The doctors can't find anything physically wrong with me. They say it's all psychosomatic, all inside my head. I've seen half a dozen shrinks in the last two years and none of them have done any good."

"What happened with the married man?"

A frown crossed her face briefly and for the first time a note of bitterness crept into her voice. “He stayed with his wife. Wasn't interested in damaged goods."

"That's rough,” I said, feeling ashamed, not just of the man but of my whole sex and its preoccupation with superficialities.

"You know what I think?"

"What?"

"I think she put a curse on me, and that's why I can't walk. Either that or I've cursed myself."

Unsure how to take this, I searched her face for a clue. She was still smiling, and so probably it was meant as a joke, a way of undercutting the seriousness of her situation. Some people use humour to cope with situations they would otherwise find intolerable. It's a means to get by.

I didn't know what to say, and so out came the words, “I killed my wife."

It was the first time I'd admitted this to anyone, even myself, though the thought was with me every hour of the day and, of course, the police had suspected as much. The officer in charge of the investigation had told me this, even though they wouldn't be pursuing it any further. His expression had let me know that he thought I'd been punished enough.

She looked at me speculatively. “Really?"

I nodded, wanting to talk about it now that the subject was out there, as if compelled by her honesty to respond in kind. “As a matter of fact I killed her twice."

"How'd you manage that?"

"The first time when I crashed the car in which we were driving home. The second time when I told the doctors to turn off the machine that was keeping her alive."

But I didn't tell her everything. I didn't tell her about the row we'd had at the Trowel and Hammer when Cathy told me she was leaving me. Most of the time I could delude myself into thinking that terrible scene had never taken place, even though every word we'd exchanged was indelibly branded on my memory. It was a false memory and that was all, a trick the mind plays on the soul. And I didn't tell her how I'd insisted on driving, despite the fact that I'd been drinking all evening. And finally, I didn't tell her that after the crash I'd been afraid of losing my licence and so had shifted Cathy into the driver's seat.

That was when I really killed her. At the time she was so still I'd thought she was dead and no harm would be done if I protected myself, but later it turned out that she'd only been unconscious, in a coma, and I was forced to confront the possibility that my action in moving her might have exacerbated the injuries that eventually caused her death.

"That's rough,” said Katrina, repeating my own words of a few minutes ago back at me, but with no hint of any mockery, and none of the pep talk that I constantly got from other people. She seemed to understand what I was going through even now, and how useless all the words of consolation are.

I didn't know what to say next. None of this was turning out how I had planned. Things kept changing.

"I'm not really a prostitute,” she said, and they changed again. “I just use the cards to meet men."

"Isn't that dangerous?"

She shrugged and slapped the arms of the wheelchair with the palms of her hands, as if to say what can happen that will be worse than this? “Mostly they just blow me off, but sometimes you get a guy who's really nice, who'll see that I'm not so different from other women, that all I want is to love someone and have them love me in return. Consolations of the flesh."

She was going to say more, but I reached out and put a finger to her lips in a gesture for silence. And then I leaned forward and kissed her, my mouth on hers, tongues darting and then embracing, just two people starved of affection and hungry for each other, desperate for an end to being alone, no matter how temporary.

When we broke off she looked into my eyes and said, “I'm not a prostitute, but there's still a price to be paid."

"I don't care,” I said, and gently placed one arm behind her back, placed the other beneath her legs and lifted. She felt as light as a feather, as precious and fragile as fine bone china, almost no weight to her at all, as if she didn't really exist on this plane. I raised her up out of that hideous chair and transferred her to the bed, laying her down so carefully, not wanting to damage her.

"Let's lift the curse,” she said and giggled, the sound soft and girlish, but with a quality of desperation to it as well, so that I realised how much this meant to her, that she was every bit as nervous and unsure of herself as I was. I wondered if, despite what she had said before, this was her first time with a man since the accident, and the thought pleased me.

We'd each lost so much; it was only right that for this moment we should find each other.

I took off her shoes and laid them at the foot of the bed. I undid the belt at her waist and supported her weight with one hand while I pulled the trousers down over her hips with the other, smiling with anticipation as I tugged them free of her legs to reveal skin as white as bone and so cool to the touch as I hesitantly stroked the flesh of her inner thigh.

Laughing she pulled the T-shirt off over her head to reveal full, rounded breasts topped with brown nubbins and then raised her hips for me to ease off the black silk panties covering her crotch. Completely naked she lay there on the bed, hands resting at her side, nothing to hide, exposing herself completely, and I stood and looked down at her, marvelling at her beauty, so like Cat, the same combination of wantonness and vulnerability, and yet at the same time completely different, an individual in the way that every truly beautiful woman is unique.

"You can touch me,” she said. “I'm not fragile. I won't break."

I grinned at her, unable to think what to say, certain that whatever words came to my lips would be the wrong words. There simply were no words for what I was feeling, and so I removed my clothes, folding them neatly and placing them across the back of a chair, until I stood naked before her and she could see for herself that I responded to her as a man responds to a woman.

"I need you to love me,” she said. “I need you to make me feel beautiful and wanted, to make me whole again. Hold me. Tell me that you love me."

"I love you,” I said, as I lay down next to her and placed my arms around her. “I love you Cat. I have always loved you."

And after that there were no more words that needed to be said. We lay next to each other, skin touching skin at so many points, and we explored each other's bodies with our hands and tongues and eyes and all our senses, revelling in this moment of shared intimacy.

Her legs were lifeless and there was no heat in the place between them, but she had condoms and a tube of lubrication in her handbag. I smoothed the fine gel over her labia and worked it inside until her vagina glistened; her hand caressed my erection and covered its length with the rubber prophylactic.

I slid into her, gently at first, afraid I would hurt her, and then with more force, plunging forward, as if I could penetrate to the very core of her being. She made no sound, but her breath was warm on the back of my neck while her arms coiled round my body and pulled tight as if she never wanted to let me go, and her nails dug into the flesh of my back as if she was trying to break the skin and strum arpeggios on my ribcage, sink her fingers into my heart itself.

I held her and told her that I loved her over and over again, voice choked with the emotion I was feeling, and as I watched through a sheen of sweat and desire her features seemed to shift and change, sliding into a new configuration, so that it was Cat I held in my arms and made love to and called out to.

I wanted to lose myself in the mystery of her existence, to obliterate my own being, and so thrust ever deeper inside of her until every fibre was stretched taut as a bowstring in the moment before the arrow is sent on its way; a shudder ran through my whole body and I climaxed with a small moan that was as much pain as it was pleasure, release. I pitched forwards, limbs turned to jelly and unable to support my weight, and my head buried itself in the hollow of her shoulder. I started to cry and she stroked my hair and the back of my neck and told me that it was okay, that everything would be all right.

Consolations of the flesh.

We lay there on the bed, the sweat cooling on our skin, two lonely people, each broken in their own separate way and trying to heal each other, or if not that to at least forget their wounds for a second or two, to drag a moment's respite from the teeth of pain.

And when the moment was over she pushed me aside like so much dead weight, got to her feet and reached inside her handbag for a tissue to wipe between her legs, started to dress as I looked on in amazement, unable to comprehend what I was seeing, the realisation crashing in.

It had all been a charade. She had deceived me. She wasn't handicapped. She had full use of her legs. She could walk just as well as I could. Everything she had told me had been lies. This whole experience, the way she had made me feel needed, had been a lie.

My disbelief faded in the face of what was happening and could not be denied, gave way to anger, but worse than that I felt ashamed that somehow she had recognised me as the kind of man who would respond to just those particular lies. She had known me for what I was even from the few words we had exchanged on the telephone.

I wanted to shout at her, to rage and scream accusations, to tower over her and make her feel as small as she had made me, and I made to get to my feet only there was no strength in my legs, no feeling except for the prickle of pins and needles, and even that faded as I tried to move, flopping back uselessly on the bed, thrashing from side to side like a fish pulled from the water and tossed in the bottom of a boat, sliding over the edge and crumpling to the floor, my anger and indignation giving way to a sense of alarm, fear.

There was no sensation at all in the lower half of my body. I was dead from the waist down. “What's happening to me?"

She paused in her dressing and looked down at me, the sadness and compassion in her eyes almost overwhelming. “I told you there'd be a price to pay,” she said. “But don't worry. It'll only last a few days. A week at most. I can't hang on to the illusion any longer than that. A week and you'll be whole again, while I'll be back in this bloody thing."

She grabbed the wheelchair and folded it up, slamming the two wing panels together with a barely contained anger that spoke of the resentment felt by the dependent for the objects on which they must rely.

I tried to say something, to beg her to help me, to explain more about what was happening, but my jaw wouldn't work and phlegm clogged my throat.

She looked at me one last time and said, “You need to forgive yourself."

And in that second more than ever, she looked and sounded like my absent wife, almost as if she was channelling Cat's spirit.

Then she walked out of the door and left me lying there by the side of the bed, helpless until a member of the hotel staff came by to see why I hadn't checked out on time.

That was over three years ago. The condition wore off after five days, just as Katrina had told me it would. The doctors had no real explanation for what had happened to me, soothing professional pride with a diagnosis of hysterical paralysis. I knew better, but they would never have believed me had I told them the truth about what had happened.

And besides, I had no proof. The card with her name and number on it disappeared from my room. Itemised on my bill from the hotel was the cost of a telephone call, but when I tried ringing that number I got the tone for disconnected.

I can't be angry with Katrina for what she did to me. She was desperate, and she did warn me that there would be a price to pay. It was like a fairy tale. She was suffering under a curse and I was the unwitting prince who could cure her, though it took far more than a kiss.

And I got something out of the exchange too. For a moment, in the heat of our shared passion, the burden of guilt that I carry was lifted from my shoulders and my heart soared free.

At nights and weekends I pore over the listings in contact magazines and at sites on the internet. Sometimes one will catch my eye and I make the call. Usually I end up with a hard eyed woman older than her years. Sometimes I have sex with them as a way to assuage the disappointment I feel and sometimes I just give them money and send them on their way, but I never lose heart.

I'm in London on business often now, and there's talk that the firm may move me there permanently. I always read the cards on display in telephone boxes and newsagents’ windows, the ads in Time Out and the personal columns in the tabloids, looking for a certain ad, one that's meant only for me.

I know she's out there. Not Katrina perhaps. After all, Katrina may have only been a figment of my imagination, a message from my subconscious. Not Katrina, but somebody like her. Somebody malleable, who can be changed and moulded to fit the emptiness at the centre of my life. A woman who needs me to care for her, to look after her, and by doing so atone for the sins and omissions of my past.

I know she's out there. And I know that I'll find her.

I've already bought the wheelchair.

Copyright © 2008 Peter Tennant

THE HAZARDS OF GENRE COMMENTARY

I was going to start this column by recommending a novel, a book so bursting with energy and humanity, not to mention an obsession with some of the more familiar touchstones of the fantastic, that it's among the best half dozen books I've read in the last five years. But I decided not to since you already have Peter Tennant in these pages and a bunch of other well-informed reviewers over at Interzone. And besides, the novel isn't fantasy or horror, though it deals in some depth with the consequences of the relationship between reader and the fantastic. And also, this is supposed to be a comment column rather than a review column, though I have been known to stray, particularly when some cultural artefact or idea grabs me by the throat and demands attention. But what to do when said artefact doesn't fit the brief, when it's sort of slippery and resistant to categorisation? When it doesn't fit the bill of those things you are meant to offer an opinion on?

A quick skim through the recent writings of my fellow columnists Stephen Volk and Christopher Fowler reveals a variety of comment, criticism and, yes, damning indictment on a range of genre ‘product', from Doctor Who spin-offs to American TV shows, from SF aimed at an adult audience, to the emasculated nature of the British Sunday night TV drama. Considered opinions are offered on the extent to which the dichotomy between religious faith and science is played out in genre fiction, and an ironic eye is cast over the fragmentation of familiar film genres. These opinions seem well-informed and are expressed in an entertaining manner, with no apparent reluctance to shy away from contentious subjects. And why should there be? After all, even within our field—call it SF, fantasy and horror, or perhaps the genre of the fantastic—there's an awful lot of stuff, and ideas, that need commenting on, and some poor bastard has to do it.

The problem for the commentator lies in deciding what he or she should comment on, and quite often that ends up being the idea or artefact that shouts the loudest. By which I mean either those products which have had the most economic weight thrown behind them—Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, or Pixar's Wall-E perhaps—or those topics and ideas which, through the energies and platforms of their various proponents, have already been widely disseminated and discussed. The debate over recent years which culminated in Interzone's ‘Mundane-SF’ issue, is a case in point. While much of the discussion has been of interest, and even entertaining, I had to resist the urge to offer my own thoughts on the subject. Why? Simply because pretty much everything that could be said either in favour or against the concept had already been said. I had no strong feelings either way, but having written SF, and having a platform to comment on genre matters, it seemed almost imperative that I offer some sort of opinion on an issue that had come to dominate discussion in SF circles to the extent that the BBC invited Geoff Ryman to give an interview explaining the Mundane-SF manifesto. Awkward word, ‘manifesto'. Collins English Dictionary defines it as ‘a public declaration of intent, policy, aims, etc, as issued by a political party, government, or movement'. Stupid of me then to think that writing was more an internalised, private, psychological process, the product of which, if you got lucky, ended up in the public domain.

The idea that a writer of fiction should publicly declare her intent to write according to some set of strictures or other strikes me as either foolish, or maybe genius. Perhaps I should call a press conference and in front of the world's media—Swansea's? Mumbles'?—declare my intention to write the first in a blockbusting trilogy about the alternative, hidden history of Wales. I feel confident the declaration of intent would in itself generate enough discussion to guarantee a few thousand in sales. Be interesting to see what impact the whole debate had on the sales of the Mundane-SF Interzone.

Enough already! See, despite my good intentions, I find myself being drawn into the debate. Just as happened a few years back when, in horror and fantasy, the ‘New Weird’ was the dog's bollocks. Again, acres of print and—how do you quantify space in cyberspace?—'vastages’ of the web were devoted to arguing the toss about the difference between traditional fantasy (a nebulous term) and the stuff that self-proclaimed New Weirdists and those press-ganged into their ranks, were writing. It allowed for a label to pinned on China Miéville's back, and a few others—Jeff VanderMeer, Justina Robson—got tagged, some more reluctantly than others. While much of what was produced under the New Weird label was exciting and new, the oppositional stance taken to genre conventions, the willingness to challenge, experiment and play—not just with thematic tropes, but with form—were, as Damien Walter suggested in an essay on the Guardian's Books blog, simply the latest manifestations of literary upheavals that had recurred at earlier periods in the genre's evolution. Walter cites the impact of Cyberpunk on the genre, and the radical shift in our perception of what SF was during the New Wave era of the 1960s. In fact he suggests that this process of upheaval and of the birth of a new kind of oppositional genre writing can be traced right back to Wells and Verne, while one of his respondents suggests Swift as an even earlier antecedent. Well who knows? Already the movement has been anthologised and we now live in a post New Weird World.

So, as I was saying, how to decide what to focus on in any one column? After all, the role of genre columnist demands that I not only have an opinion on the current hot topic within the field, but also a willingness to express it. To ignore the things that fuel debate within the genre, to remain silent, seems out of the question. But, to contradict myself, what about the stuff on the margins? The stuff that doesn't have its proclaimers or its manifestos? The books or movies or TV shows that fall through the gaps because they're not recognisable as SF or fantasy or horror? Or because it's merely the stuff you choose to read rather than something you are asked to review. I review for The Fix Online (thefix-online.com), like some of you no doubt. I enjoy the process most of the time, particularly when I come across a writer new to me, or a story so perfectly constructed that it takes my breath away. But much of the time it's a chore and I'm reading something just because I promised my editor a review and saying ‘this is shit, I can't do it,’ is not an option. And while I'm reading this tonnage of stuff I'm not reading other stuff that I want to read and which I rarely see anyone else in the genre talking about.

The only solution is to become less well-informed, to stand a little apart from the centre of the storm that is genre debate, to spend time outside. So now I'm spending less time reviewing and more time reading. That's how, after purchasing the damn thing almost a year ago, I finally got round to reading the book I was going to devote this column to, a book which is not SF or fantasy or horror, but which is imbued with and passionate about genre in much the same way as this column strives to be. The book is Junot Diaz's staggering, wise, funny and humane The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I heartily recommend it to anyone who's had to silence their inner nerd.

© O'Driscoll Enterprises

Copyright © 2008 Mike O'Driscoll

Her train was late getting into Paddington, and so she only just caught the last tube. Apart from the man in the seat opposite the carriage was empty. The man was wearing grey flannel trousers, heavy black brogues, a navy blazer with brass buttons. It was hot in the carriage and the collar of his shirt was wide open. A newspaper lay folded across his lap.

His eyes were deeply set under bushy brows. He stared at Lise openly, flagrantly, almost as if he knew her. Had there been other people in the carriage Lise would have found it easier to ignore him but as it was she found herself staring back at him, conniving at the game he seemed to be playing. She put him at fifty, perhaps a little older. He had fine hands: delicate wrists, and long supple fingers that might have belonged to a musician. Lise wondered what would happen if she approached him, if she left the train when he did and followed him home. She imagined standing outside his house, waiting silently in a dimly lit side street while he fumbled for his key and let her in. She wondered what she would do if he tried to kiss her. Lise shook her head to clear it, rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand.

The man got out at Hammersmith without as much as a backward glance. Her own stop was Stamford Brook. The station was deserted. She passed through the empty ticket hall and out onto the street. She took out her mobile and dialled Michaela's number. The phone was answered almost immediately. She heard Michaela's shallow breathing and somewhere in the background the sound of a child crying.

"I'm sorry,” said Lise. “I've woken Christa."

"She was awake anyway,” said Michaela. “I'm so glad you called."

"The train was delayed, that's all. I'll come over tomorrow. Is there anything you'd like me to bring?"

"We're fine.” She paused. “I'm just going to make some tea."

Lise said goodnight to Michaela and broke the connection. By the time she got back to her flat it was almost one. There had been no rain for over a week and yet the sheets on her bed felt damp, as after a storm. She had been dropping with tiredness on the Intercity but as soon as she switched out the light she felt wide awake. She found herself thinking of the man on the tube, his strange clothes, old-fashioned and too warm for the weather, like something a provincial headmaster might wear, or a retired army captain. She remembered the way he had looked at her, his deep-set eyes appraisingly quizzical and more than a little flirtatious. She imagined him lying in bed somewhere beneath starched white sheets and a paisley silk counterpane. She imagined him lying alone.

A gipsy fortune teller in Warsaw had once told her she would marry a Dutchman. The man she was engaged to at the time had been born in Sydenham, a customs inspector named Stephen Knowles. A year after Lise's meeting with the fortune teller Stephen Knowles had left her for an airline stewardess and Lise had wept for days, filled nonetheless with an unaccountable and momentous relief. The man on the tube had not looked like a Dutchman. She imagined the Dutch as small and neat and clean, although she supposed this was nothing but a racial stereotype.

As she finally began to drift off to sleep she imagined the man's hands, his graceful immaculate fingers exploring her thigh. She put her hands between her legs, gripping them tight with her knees. She wondered about Michaela, what she did when she thought about Dain.

When she arrived at the station the next morning both platforms were packed. There were Tannoy announcements every few minutes, saying that services had been delayed due to an incident on the line. Lise knew that an incident on the line meant suicide, that someone had thrown themselves in front of a train. Lise took out her mobile and called the studio. The receptionist, Felicity Savage, picked up the phone. Lise told her she would probably be late.

"Don't worry,” said Felicity Savage. “Rob's always late, even when he comes in a cab.” She laughed, thanked Lise for phoning and then rang off. Fifteen minutes later a train arrived. It was already jammed with passengers but everyone on the platform still squeezed themselves in. Lise wondered where the suicide had been and what had been left of the body. She supposed it would be impossible to throw yourself under a train unless you didn't quite believe it would kill you. It wasn't annihilation people looked for in suicide after all, but a change in circumstances.

It was her first meeting with Robinson Vanner. He was very tall, with long curly hair. He looked younger than she had expected. He had enormous spade-shaped hands and bitten nails.

"I thought it was a damned good script,” he said. He gripped her hand briefly and smiled. Lise started to remind him that it was not her script after all but Selma's, but Vanner's attention seemed already to be elsewhere. She looked where he was looking, to where William Mathers the producer sat talking to a small honey-coloured woman in a cropped T-shirt. She was skinny as a prepubescent girl. Felicity Savage had introduced her to Lise as the script editor but Lise found she had forgotten her name.

It had been nothing more than a courtesy, them asking her here. She had been commissioned to translate Selma Jannisdottir's script and this she had done. She would have no further influence on the film. Felicity Savage had told her that even the title would have to be changed.

"Rob can't call it Thorunnssaga,” she said. “Not unless he wants his picture to die a death on the arthouse circuit."

Lise had tried to tell her that Selma Jannisdottir had used the title ironically, that her screenplay was an attempt to confront the masculine bias of Icelandic saga by playing it out against a contemporary background. Just having a female lead went against the grain.

"But the general public won't know anything about Icelandic sagas,” said Felicity Savage. “Bill wants to market it as a thriller.” She said the film would probably be called The Suicide of Erwin Toch. The main character was named Thorunn Gulbranssen. Selma's cast directions said that Thorunn should be six feet tall and blonde but Lise noticed that the edited printout of her translation omitted this, as it omitted most of Selma's notes on the set and cast. Lise supposed that Thorunn would probably be played by someone resembling the honey-coloured script editor. Nordic women, with their heavy limbs and their pale skin, were no longer in fashion. Lise, whose own skin blistered whenever she travelled south of the Pyrenees, wondered why it was that even clever man like Robinson Vanner seemed uncomfortable in their presence.

"En saga!” Vanner said, and everyone laughed. It was obvious from some of the questions that not all of them had read the script. Most of the discussion was between Vanner and Bill Mathers, and was full of technical jargon that Lise didn't fully understand. No one asked her anything about the text. At two o'clock they went to the canteen for lunch, and Lise found herself sitting next to the honey-coloured script editor.

"Melanie Dryden,” she said. She was wearing a powerful scent. The air around her smelled musky and sweet.

"Lise Pilkington,” said Lise. “What did you think of the script?"

"It was hard to adapt,” said Melanie Dryden. “I had to make a lot of cuts.” She hovered over her food, making tiny inroads in the pasta with her fork.

"How well do you know the director?"

"Oh, Rob.” She rested her knife on the side of her plate, looping a stray wisp of hair behind her ear. “He comes over as a bit of a nerd but he's all right. What on earth got you into Norse?"

"It was different from Spanish or French,” said Lise. “I was good at languages. I don't really know."

"I know someone who studied Russian but I didn't know that Norse was still being taught."

"Most people have never even heard of it.” She had started learning Norse because of the sagas. She had first come across them in an abridged edition for children, drawn to the book by the cover illustration of Thor wielding his storm hammer. When she was fifteen she had discovered Magnus Magnusson's fully annotated translations and they had captivated her utterly. Sometimes she believed she had begun her university studies with nothing more in mind than to be able to read the sagas in their original language. As it turned out she was able to make a good living. There were not many native English speakers who were fluent in Icelandic and Norse. Lise didn't see the point in explaining any of this to the script editor. She was unlikely to see the woman ever again.

"It's all very dark though, isn't it?” said Melanie Dryden. “The screenplay, I mean. The bit when the child goes missing? I found that very difficult to take."

"The sagas are like that,” said Lise. “They're the most powerful stories I know."

She twisted a strand of spaghetti on the tines of her fork. She wondered how Robinson Vanner felt about Thorunnssaga, whether he had discussed his feelings with Melanie Dryden. She wondered what had drawn him to the script in the first place. For a moment she thought of the man on the tube, with his heavy grey eyebrows and gilded buttons. He had seemed so full of knowledge, to be harbouring a secret that went beyond any simple sorrow. She had never come across anyone like him except in the sagas. She found herself filled with the irrational certainty that he would understand everything.

Michaela Fallon had been her friend since college. She lived on the Isle of Dogs, on the fourth floor of a block called Wilberforce House. It stood alone in the midst of a wilderness of discount supermarkets, used car dealerships and stubbly yellow grass. In summer the river beneath its windows gave off an unpleasant briny odour. In winter it became a muddy torrent that seemed to exacerbate the freezing damp in all the rooms. The lift in Wilberforce House had broken down and whenever Michaela went out she had to strap Christa to her back and lug the buggy downstairs under her arm.

Even in the daytime Michaela kept the door on the chain.

"It's only me,” said Lise. Behind her in the flat Lise could hear radio voices raised in argument and the sound of Christa's crying.

"Hi,” said Michaela. She slipped the chain and opened the door. Once Lise was inside she closed it again, immediately setting the chain back on its hook. “Go through,” she said. “I'll just see to Christa."

From the hallway doors led off into the kitchen, the bathroom and the main living area. Beyond the kitchen there was a small inner hallway with doors leading to the main bedroom and the tiny windowless box room that had been made into a bedroom for Christa. In the living room twin picture windows overlooked the front of the building. Viewed from above the river looked almost motionless, a runnel of solidified fat. On the table by the window Michaela's old laptop lay surrounded by drifts of printed papers. The voices on the radio continued to discuss the war in the Middle East.

Michaela came into the room with Christa perched high on one shoulder. Christa was four years old and looked so like her mother she could have passed for her baby sister. They both had the same high cheekbones, the same wide, anxious blue eyes. As soon as she caught sight of Lise Christa held out both hands and made a burbling sound.

"I could take her for a walk if you like,” said Lise. “We wouldn't have to go very far."

"It looks like it's going to rain,” said Michaela. “We're better off staying inside."

Michaela had hardly been out of the flat in the last six months. In the beginning Lise had made strenuous efforts to get her outside but now she hardly bothered. Nothing she said or did seemed to make any difference. There were still days when Michaela would walk with her a little way along the river or down to the local supermarket but she no longer went on the tube and she had stopped letting Lise take Christa out by herself.

"Have you heard from Dain?” Lise said. She turned away before Michaela could say anything, not wanting to see the momentary flash of colour in her friend's pale cheeks. Talking about her husband still did that to her even though she hadn't seen him in over a year.

"Nothing since the postcard,” said Michaela. She spoke with a false brightness, as if the postcard from Istanbul had arrived only the previous week instead of eight months ago. It had been badly creased, and the date on the postmark had been illegible. It had been even longer since he'd sent a cheque. Michaela got by on the money she earned from proofreading scientific papers, work that she could do without leaving the flat. She also got Family Credit, although it was Lise who had to go and sign for it at the post office.

"How's work?” said Lise.

"There's some stuff here that's almost finished.” Michaela glanced at her laptop, at the rickety table spread with papers and periodicals. “I'll call you when it's ready to go."

"I don't mean that,” said Lise. “I was talking about the poems."

Michaela's work had been published in Montparnasse and Clare's. Laura St John, the editor of Clare's magazine, had called Michaela's work exceptional and asked her if she'd be interested in publishing a collection. Michaela had kept Laura St John's letter in the zip-up compartment of her handbag for almost a month before showing it to Lise. She lowered Christa into Lise's lap and clasped her hands together. The skin of her knuckles was so fine, so translucent, it barely seemed to cover the bones.

"Christa isn't sleeping well,” she said. “It makes it hard to keep awake during the day."

"Dain would want you to do this,” Lise said. “Imagine how pleased he'll be when you tell him.” Lise felt herself blushing, ashamed of what she'd just said. It seemed to do Dain a disservice, to go on talking about him as if he might still be alive, although until there was proof of his death she found herself unable to confront Michaela by forcing it on her. The child was warm in her arms and Lise wondered if she might not be feverish. Beyond the windows the sky was colourless, a blank mass of cloud.

In the beginning Lise had thought Christa would give Michaela the strength to contemplate a life without Dain. Now it seemed that the hope of seeing him again was the only thing that enabled her to carry on caring for Christa. Lise held the child close, stroking her fine yellow curls. Until she was two Christa's hair had been rust-red, like Dain's. More recently it had lightened to blonde. Christa opened her mouth in a soundless laugh then closed her eyes and snuggled into Lise's shoulder. In less than a minute she was sound asleep.

"How was the meeting?” said Michaela. “What was he like?"

"I hardly got a chance to talk to him,” said Lise. “I don't suppose I'll see him again.” She remembered the way Vanner had seemed to ignore her in favour of Melanie Dryden. She wondered if things would have been different had the script editor not been there.

"Why do you think Thorunn Gulbransen abandons her baby?” asked Michaela. “In the play, I mean.” She rested her chin on her hands. She looked scarcely any larger than a child.

"When Erwin kills himself she gives up hope,” Lise said. “She feels she has nothing left to live for, not even the child.” Erwin Toch had been a foreigner and an outcast. He had planned to kill Thorunn Gulbransen, but ended up killing himself instead. Christa made a mewing noise in her sleep. Her cheek seemed to burn against Lise's breast, even through the thickness of her clothes. “She's very hot, Mick. Do you think you ought to call the doctor?"

"It gets muggy in here, that's all. It's the double glazing.” She touched the window with her outspread fingers. “If you wrote a screenplay of your own, what would it be about?"

"A London girl, who falls in love with the Flying Dutchman and flees to the north,” she said. “Something like that.” They laughed. Shortly before Dain had left for Baghdad Lise had had dinner with the Fallons and told them she was thinking of writing a play about the Icelandic volcanologist Per Iansson. Michaela had been wildly enthusiastic about the idea, although she rarely chose to speak about it now.

The man's picture was all over the news stands. Lise bought a copy of the Standard then folded it in half to hide his face. It wasn't until she was on the train that she opened it again. The photograph was slightly blurred, but it was still his face, the same deep set eyes, the same thick eyebrows and aquiline nose. He seemed to gaze at her with the same expression as the night before, the flagrantly familiar stare of a man who knew her well. There was a line of text beneath the picture that gave his name. The headline said simply: despair.

His name had been Willem Kees, and he had been an officer with the Amsterdam police. He had murdered his girlfriend Leone Langerhoef in the stairwell of the apartment block where she had lived. The article said Leone had been held down and suffocated with her own anorak. On the inside page was a photograph showing a girl with a high white forehead and fair hair drawn back off her face in a black bandeau. She looked young enough to be Kees's daughter. Looking at it, Lise felt faint. It was like looking at a picture of herself.

The report described how Kees's suicide had brought the whole of the western District Line to a standstill, how his identity had been confirmed by two fellow Dutch officers who had been contacted by Scotland Yard within the hour.

The train was half way to Ealing before Lise realised she'd missed her stop. She got off at Acton Town and doubled back. As soon as she got home she rang Michaela. It took a long time for her to answer and Lise wondered if she might have gone out. When she eventually picked up the phone the line crackled with static and Lise could hear her own voice coming back at her along the wires.

"I think I might have seen a murderer,” she said. “Late last night, on the tube."

"What do you mean?” said Michaela. Her voice sounded slightly nasal, as if she had a cold or had been crying.

"His name was Willem Kees,” said Lise. “He was in the Dutch police force.” She wished Michaela wouldn't spend so much of her time listening to the news channels. The broadcasts told her nothing but they always reduced her to tears. She carried on with her story, telling Michaela what she'd read in the paper. “The girl he killed looked just like me,” she said. She remembered how Kees had looked at her, the tacit recognition in his eyes. Perhaps he'd thought he was seeing a ghost.

"But he's dead now, so what can it matter?” said Michaela. “You did just say he was dead?” Above the interference on the line her voice sounded panicky and strained.

"Have you got enough to eat, Mick?” Lise said suddenly. “Do you want me to bring something round?"

"There's stuff in the fridge,” said Michaela. “Lasagne. Why did he kill her anyway? Did it say?"

"There was an argument. He lost control.” She paused. “He smothered her with her own coat.” She thought of his hands, the elegant, graceful fingers, the well-kept nails. She wondered how he had felt when it was over. She imagined him going back to his own apartment and phoning Leone's number, just to see if what had happened was real.

"Perhaps there was someone else and he found out."

"Yes, that was probably it.” It came to Lise that murder, like suicide, was little more than a final desperate attempt to outrun a situation that had become intolerable. She knew it had been a mistake telling Michaela. It was exactly this kind of story that made her afraid to go out. “Don't worry about it,” she said. “The man I saw was probably someone else.” She said goodbye to Michaela and put down the phone, then took off her shoes and went through to the kitchen. She laid the newspaper face down on the counter and ran water into the kettle. The flat seemed unusually quiet. She realised that during the whole of her conversation with Michaela she hadn't heard a sound from Christa. She felt herself begin to fill up with a nameless deep-seated panic then remembered what Michaela had said about the child not sleeping at night. She had probably been taking a nap when she called.

She switched on the radio. Two opposing politicians fought over the continuing bombardment of Iraq's major cities. Lise poured boiling water over a teabag and turned once more to the newspaper. She found it hard to believe that at the same time the evening before Willem Kees had still been alive.

"There are going to be civilian casualties,” said one of the politicians. “Whichever way you look at it, people are going to die."

Lise read that Kees had been in London for over a month before killing himself, that he had lived in a rented flat above a betting shop in Hammersmith. She wondered what he had done with himself in all that time, what he had been looking for, alone in a city that could only have been foreign to him.

Hammersmith station was open again. On the news stands the picture of Willem Kees had been replaced with a new headline about the execution of captured British soldiers in Baghdad. She found it mildly curious that Kees had been living less than five minutes’ walk from a police station. She stood outside the betting shop, looking up at the windows of the flat above. She could see the curtains, rust-coloured and grubby-looking, but that was all. The outside door to the flat was dark blue and looked as if it had been recently painted. Lise realised that in all likelihood Willem Kees would have tried to kill her if she'd followed him home. Not just because she looked like Leone, but because once you'd killed the first time it was easy to do it again. That was what people said, anyway.

She pulled her jacket more tightly around her. The time she moved in seemed borrowed, as if she had somehow bypassed the moment she'd been destined to die.

"Hello,” said a woman's voice. “Fancy our chances?"

Lise started violently. It was a voice she recognised, and when she turned she saw Melanie Dryden, smiling at her and holding something wrapped in newspaper from the Asian supermarket. She looked at her blankly, wondering what she was talking about.

"Bill Hill's,” said Melanie Dryden, nodding at the bookie's window. “It's the England game next week."

Lise glanced at the window. Behind the green silhouettes of galloping horses dark shadows parted and met.

"No,” said Lise. “I don't like to gamble. Not on things like that, anyway."

"I didn't know you lived round here.” She was dressed in a white knitted suit. The narrow skirt clung tightly to her buttocks and hips.

"I don't,” said Lise. “I wanted to visit a friend but he was out."

"Rob was asking after you,” said Melanie Dryden. “He wants you to meet up with him and discuss Icelandic pronunciation, or something.” She fumbled in her handbag, shifting the paper parcel to the crook of her arm. “Here's his number. He asked Flick Savage to text you but I may as well give it to you now.” She handed her a scrap of paper torn from a spiral-bound notebook. “That's his landline. His mobile's on the blink or else he's lost it, I don't know which."

Lise thanked her and walked away. Strangers passed her by without a glance. Close to the station she stopped, her eye caught by something glinting in the gutter. She thought it was a coin but when she bent to pick it up she found it was a brass button. It was slightly tarnished, and had a crest embossed on it that looked vaguely military. Part of the design was already obscured by dirt.

She slipped the button into the pocket of her jeans. She opened her phone and dialled Michaela's number. She counted the rings, willing Michaela to answer. The phone rang thirty times then the line went dead. She dialled the number again. There was no reply.

The first time she saw it she thought it was a child. It had been at King's Cross Station hanging around the ticket barriers, attaching itself to one passenger and then another, the hood of its zip-up sweatshirt hiding its face. At first she had thought it was lost. Then it turned and looked at her and she had seen it for what it was, the pinched features and haunted eyes of the angel of death.

It had sidled away then, cheating the ticket barrier by tagging onto the coat tails of a large German businessman in an Armani suit. Since then she had seen it often: wandering the aisles of the larger department stores, kicking its heels on the swings in Millwall Park. It had never once tried to approach her. Perhaps the fact she could see it made her immune.

She knew if she wanted to capture it on film she would have to get the angle just right. It wasn't just a question of seeing. It was more a matter of catching it off guard.

The streets were empty, as in the aftermath of some disaster. She watched it sniffing the gateposts of the larger houses, smearing its spidery hands over the downstairs windows, over the locked front doors with their holly wreaths and flashing fairy lights. A hazy orange glow came through the curtains, lighting up its narrow-lipped face. She crossed the road, trying to hide her camera. The thing pulled up its hood and scuttled away.

Christa took three photographs in quick succession: a hubcap at the roadside, a newspaper kiosk showing a headline from two days ago, a row of glasses on the pavement outside a pub. She went further down the street to where a travel agent's faced an empty shop front, angling the shot so that a poster in the travel agent's window was reflected in the blank glass of the unit opposite, filling the window with a town in some southern country: the dusty streets, the crumbling pastel tenements, the azure sea lapping at its outer edge.

It was a cheap shot but she knew she could sell it. People liked these trick shots, pictures that misled the eye. You could do the same thing more convincingly on a computer but that had further enhanced the value of the real thing.

Old photographs with a provenance were even more sought after, ghost photographs especially. She snapped the windows in the High Street, quickly, carelessly, without bothering to focus. She was often surprised by the things that such snapshots revealed. In any case she could manipulate the negatives to show whatever she wanted to: monsters or angels or distorted faces. A century ago she could have claimed they were the faces of the dead.

At an exhibition the year before she had seen a series of photographs showing a young man standing beside a bench in Waterlow Park. A girl sat at his feet with her back to the camera. The girl was out of focus and partly invisible, as if she were a trick of the light. The series was dedicated to the memory of the photographer's fiancée, who had been killed in a car crash in Spain.

The exhibition reminded Christa of the fake fairy photographs that had famously made a fool of Conan Doyle.

Her fiancé Tom had once said to her that there was no need to go out and hunt for a story, that it was more exciting to discover the stories that were right there in front of you.

"That's why I love your work,” he said. “You have this way of getting people to look at what's under their noses."

The structural problems with Wilberforce House were supposed to have been cured years ago. Every five years a team of decorators came in to redo the paintwork and a gardener turned up each month to tidy the lawn. There was still nothing that could be done about the stench of the river.

Michaela Fallon suffered from rheumatism. She sometimes found the stairs difficult but had always refused to move from her fourth floor flat. Whenever anyone tried talking to her about it she insisted she'd never give up her view of the river. From the windows of Wilberforce House the Thames was always the colour of mud, even at the height of summer. From the waterside walkway you could smell the sour-sweet odour of stagnant water butts.

Dain Fallon had never even lived in the flat. He had been kidnapped by militant extremists and shot as a spy. He and Michaela had chosen the flat because it was what they could afford at the time. It was convenient for Dain because it had easy connections to Gatwick.

Christa had been four when her father died. She had no memory of him but she knew all his work by heart. Dain Fallon had photographed army encampments and wounded soldiers, towns on fire, street children brandishing guns. It was the kind of work you had to be prepared to die for, and Christa was wary of becoming too in awe of it. If she felt she had nothing to contribute she might not be able to work at all.

Her mother never seemed to get the hang of Christmas. Her preparations were scanty or nonexistent; the day itself often seemed to pas her by. When Christa let herself into the flat she found a couple of strips of gold tinsel crisscrossing the ceiling in the living room and a string of ancient fairy lights above the window. There was no tree. The cards that people had sent lay face down on the coffee table. Christa sat on the brown cord sofa and looked down at the muddy river. A bald yellow sun was trying to see its reflection in the intransigent water. The sky was an indigent mauve.

The sun burned. Christa breathed, feeling the silence tremble in the empty room.

When she put on the radio she found it was tuned to a news station. Christa hardly ever listened to the news. She didn't remember her father but she remembered the endless news broadcasts. She could still hum the signature tunes from all the old radio programmes, tunes that people always remembered when they heard them but never thought about otherwise.

Her mother always waiting for news no matter how bad.

Tom disliked the broadcast news. He said it was only interested in delivering the headlines. His own work always appeared towards the back of the newspapers he wrote for, somewhere between the travel features and the book reviews. The stories he filed were described by his critics as obscure and by his fans as iconoclastic or offbeat.

When Tom disappeared he became a headline in his own right. Christa found the worst thing about that was hearing complete strangers discussing him as if they knew him, seeing his face on the front page of every newspaper, common property, like the sanitised image of some politician or film star.

They replayed all the old execution videos and re-interviewed the lovers and friends of the people who had died in them.

Christa couldn't stand it. At the end of a fortnight she had packed her things together and took the first available flight to Istanbul. She booked in at the Palmyra, the ramshackle hotel close by the central station where Tom had been staying when he had last called her. She took photographs of the street cafes and the carpet sellers, all the usual things, shots she'd be able to sell once she got home. The rest of the time she spent in her room, making tea in the cheap aluminium teapot and watching German game shows on the satellite channel with the sound turned down. All the time she was there she felt Tom was trying to tell her something, that if she stayed long enough she would discover a clue that everyone else had missed. But by the third week in December she was almost out of money. She had no choice but to return to London, at least temporarily.

She switched to a music station and heard a jazz quartet playing ‘Lush Life’ and then the charcoaled amber voice of Sarah Vaughan. She wondered where her mother was. There had been a time in Christa's childhood when Michaela had been afraid to leave the flat. Her friend Lise had done most of her shopping, and a woman called Charlotte Weir had taken Christa back and forth to school. Michaela had worked from home then, proofreading scientific papers. She had stopped producing work of her own for almost ten years.

Now she went out every day in spite of the rheumatism, taking long walks around Canary Wharf and across the river into Limehouse and Stepney. Sometimes she was gone for hours.

Christa slept. She was woken by the sound of the front door opening and then closing again.

"It's dark in here,” said Michaela. “I found this out in the hall."

She turned on the lamp behind the sofa and flicked down the switch that controlled the fairy lights. A chain of stars unravelled across black glass. Her hair looked damp and dishevelled. Christa supposed the weather had changed while she had slept.

"Has it been raining?” she said. “It was quite sunny earlier."

"A bit,” said Michaela. “This is addressed to you."

It was a small padded envelope sealed with brown parcel tape. It had originally been sent to the Palmyra but someone had scribbled over the name of the hotel with a red marker pen and crammed the London address into the space that was left over. In neither case did she recognise the handwriting.

Inside the jiffy bag was the bronze medallion that Tom always carried in his pocket. It was an icon of St Thomas, cast in old bell-metal. He had been given it by one of the medical students he had come to know in Warsaw. A lot of Poles still wore holy medallions, as a protection against evil.

There was also a folded sheet of paper with a picture on it, a grainy photocopy of a blurred snapshot. The photograph showed the grubby cobbled street that led from the Palmyra to what passed for its local shopping facilities: a couple of tawdry bazaars and a one-pump petrol station. A man was walking away from the hotel, his back to the camera. There was a child running after him, an oversized hooded sweatshirt hiding its face. The man had Tom's height, his wiry build, his slightly stooping shoulders, but it was impossible to tell for sure if it was him.

Christa shivered, folding her fingers around the medallion. Its chain was missing. She found herself wondering if the chain might still offer protection by itself.

"What is it?” asked Michaela. “Anything interesting?"

"Just some stuff I left behind at the hotel,” Christa said. “Nothing important."

Later, after Michaela had gone to bed, Christa pulled the jiffy bag to pieces in the hope that she might discover a note of some kind hidden in the lining. All she found was a messy grey fluff, a cross between dust and wool.

Copyright © 2008 Nina Allan

SOME FACTS ABOUT SCOTT SIGLER

Scott inherited his love of monster movies from his father and describes seeing the 1976 King Kong as “the moment I knew I wanted to tell monster stories” * His first story was ‘Tentacles', written at the age of eight * Time Warner planned to publish Scott's novel Earthcore but it fell by the wayside in the post-9/11 economic slump * To promote Infected Scott had T-shirts printed with the caption ‘Save Perry's balls’ * He was a runner up in both the 2006 and 2007 Parsec Awards for SF podcasting * A Michigan native and Newcastle United fan, Scott now lives in San Francisco with his wife and their two dogs * Scott Sigler's website can be found at scottsigler.com

BEACHHEAD: A SCOTT SIGLER FEATURETTE

Infected (Hodder paperback, 450pp, [British pounds] 6.99) opens with people dying of an unknown virus that first causes them to attack either themselves or others, with insane levels of violence, and then sees their bodies decomposing at an advanced rate. In government circles the fear is that a new terror weapon has been unleashed and there is a news embargo concerning the virus. The CIA has set up a covert task force, with scientist Margaret Montoya and agent Dew Philips doing the necessary to contain things. For Montoya the challenge is to find a victim before their bodies turn to biological soup so that she can experiment with a view to finding the cure, but the more Montoya learns the more convinced she is that the virus is of extra-terrestrial origin. Perry Dawsey, a former football star whose career was cut short by injury, discovers strange marks on his body and starts to feel ill. As the infection spreads, Dawsey fights it in his own way, even mutilating his own body to hold contagion at bay, but there seems to be an intelligence at work behind the virus and voices speak to him inside of his head, revealing a terrible purpose.

Sigler made his name by being the first person to podcast a novel, and in doing so he caught the attention of old fashioned print publishers, with Infected the first of his stories to appear in the UK as a mass market paperback. It's a fast paced and engaging book, science fiction as much as horror, with a convincing amount of technical detail (though you'd need a biologist to tell you how accurate any of this is, which I'm not) and copious lashings of gore, the latter bringing to mind such genre staples as zombie movies and Cronenbergian body horror. There are also echoes of Dreamcatcher in both the central conceit of an alien invasion by means of a virus and in Dawsey's interaction with that virus, which mimics Jonesy's dialogue with Mr Grey in the King book, though Sigler brings his own unique touch to the management of this material and the plot developments that arise out of it.

Characterisation is key, with Montoya a scientist on the rise who realises that what she had seized on as a chance to move up the career ladder could well be the end of the human race, while Philips is a ‘hard man’ coming to terms with what he has done over the years and questioning his own raison d'être. Overshadowing both of these though is Perry Dawsey, who owns the book. Dawsey is a jock now consigned to desk jockey status, and a man with serious anger management issues, courtesy of failures in his past and a tyrannical, bullying father who both repelled Perry and at the same time shaped his ideas of manhood. He is not the sort of person I could ever relate to or find sympathetic, but at the same time he is a thoroughly credible creation, and I can see how he got to be the way he is and how that is necessary for the role he has in this book, the cast iron determination to resist the alien invaders whatever the cost. Sigler also does something interesting with the interaction between Dawsey and the virus, placing the latter's speech in a different type to the rest and leaving the reader room to interpret this as either genuine communication or merely a symptom of Dawsey's mental state.

Infected is a compelling read and an exciting story well told, with hints in the text that suggest it won't be the last we hear of either these characters or Scott Sigler.

Q&A

You've said that you intend podcasting all of your future novels. How does this decision impinge on your working methods? Do you complete the novels first, or do you podcast each episode as you write? And if the former how conscious are you of the need to give the narrative an episodic structure, distinct character voices and other requirements for podcasting?

At this point, I'm going to start podcasting the novels at the same time they come out in print. I go through the editing process with my editors at Crown to make the book as strong as it can be. Some works I write for podcast, so they have a definitive ‘something exciting must happen in each episode’ structure. If I'm writing a book for print, you can have slightly longer spaces between the action, as reading speed varies from person to person.

Are all good novels suitable for podcasting? What qualities in a work of literature do you think make for a good podcast?

I think any work is suitable. Basically, it's just a book on tape broken down into episodes. What makes it ‘good’ or not is entirely up to the tastes of the listener. If you like to read Tolstoy, you'll probably like to listen to it as well.

With a print book much of its success hinges on the relationship between writer and reader, but it seems to me the podcaster is a kind of middle man or interpreter, and his or her abilities could effect how the book is received. How important do you feel the podcaster's role is?

I would disagree with you here. If the author is podcasting his or her work, it establishes an immense connection between the author and the audience. There is nothing like it in print. The audience hears the author's voice, the author's passion and intensity for the work, and in addition gets to hear about the author's life. The author becomes a real person. Most podcast listeners think of me as a friend that writes cool stories, even though they've never met me. If someone else podcasts your work, the connection is just not the same—then it's just a voice actor reading someone else's work. That's still entertaining to listen to, but it's not a personal connection.

What is the particular appeal of podcasting for the consumer? Is it simply a matter of time management? Is the performance element significant?

Time management is a major factor. The fact that people can consume books while commuting, working out or running errands lets them add entertainment time to these tasks. People get to ‘read’ a book while going about their daily lives, and they love it. Performance is a huge factor. If an author puts in the work to make the delivery as clean, strong and intense as possible, it adds to the work and can make a story even more exciting.

Elsewhere you've talked about the influence of Stephen King on your work, though placing yourself in the scientific/realist camp alongside people like Michael Crichton rather than the supernatural. What is your feeling about the supernatural in fiction and why do your prefer a more rational approach?

My problem with supernatural fiction is there's always a cop-out. You can make stuff up as you go along, and if you write yourself into a plot corner, you just whip up a spell or a new power and move on. When I write, I work hard to set up the ‘rules’ of the story. The reader should be able to guess what's coming based on what he has already read. That's part of the fun of a book—trying to figure out what the characters will do next. Sometimes readers get it right, and that's rewarding, and sometimes they get it wrong, and that's exciting, but that only really works if they can flip back in the book and see where things were set up. I'm a massive fan of King, for example, but in Needful Things where he takes a normal can of joke peanut brittle that has showed no magical properties and suddenly it's this magic-nuke that kills the bad guy, it ruined the whole book because there was no way in hell anyone could have seen it coming. It shows the hand of the author. With science-based writing, you're coming to the table with a pretty extensive set of existing rules that people already know. They understand the parameters in which the plot will unfold. I think the author has to work much, much harder to create a story that behaves within that rule set, so the reader has a chance to guess what's coming. This is not to say science-based fiction is accurate, authors make stuff up as well, but if done right it puts the reader in a frame of mind where they say ‘I could see this actually happening'. They know it can't happen, but it's based on things they know can happen. The people who read my work love that part of the experience.

Are you happy to be tagged as a horror writer, or do you feel the label is reductive?

By and large I don't care what the tag is, as long as people can find my books on the shelves. It is somewhat of a problem, because the vast majority of horror is vampires, werewolves, ghosts and other supernatural things. Some readers have turned away from these supernatural elements, so when they hear my work is ‘horror’ they assume its more of the same. For plot structure and pacing, my work seems to fit more in the thriller category.

There seems to be a vogue for ‘pandemic fiction’ at the moment, as with Sarah Langan's ‘Virus’ and various zombie novels and films we have seen. Why do you think this is and were you conscious of it when writing ‘Infected'?

I'm not a fan of most zombie fiction, but I haven't read a lot, either. David Wellington is the best in the world at it, in my opinion (if you haven't read Monster Island, go get it). I completed the first draft of Infected over ten years ago. The funny thing is, it's not meant to be a zombie novel or a pandemic novel, I wrote it as an alien invasion novel. There are so many invasion books written from the global perspective, I wanted to write about one man at the beginning of such an invasion, dealing with the disease before anyone knew what was happening on the global scale. M. Night Shyamalan took a similar approach with Signs, trying to see an invasion from the perspective of one family.

There's a wealth of scientific underpinning to ‘Infected.’ How important is research to you and does your research simply involve plot bolstering or do you find that it generates new ideas and possibilities?

Research is extremely important to me. Some readers want to go beyond the novel, they want to look up the ideas in the novel and see what's real. If my readers do that, they find that everything is real—not to the extent that I show it, but they can see that everything in one of my novels is technically possible. I tend to use high-level research to write a first draft. Is concept A realistic? If so, I go with it. When I move to second and third drafts, I put more detail into the research. Frequently this causes changes in the book when I find things that are just so damn cool I can't possibly leave them out of the story. So I'd say it's 50/50 for plot bolstering and generating new ideas.

One of the things that impressed me the most about Infected was the character of Perry Dawsey. I thoroughly disliked the guy, but at the same time I believed in him absolutely and could see how it was necessary for him to be the way he was. Which comes first for you, character or plot? Does the plot dictate the type of character you need or is it the other way around?

Concept comes first, then plot, then outline, then the characters come along and muck up the works. They always start doing things I didn't plan on them doing. This is frustrating, but also exciting—when a character basically looks back at me from the page and says, “Dude, are you crazy? There's no way I'd go into that dark room!” then I know the character is coming to life, starting to act like a real person. At that point, you have to let them run around with a crowbar and beat the shit out of your plot. Then you pick up the pieces and start putting things back together again. Usually by draft ten or eleven, everyone is cooperating nicely.

As for character, I basically approach all characters with one thought in mind—almost no one sits down and thinks “I'm going to be evil today.” No matter what you or the people around you do, everyone thinks they are justified in their actions. Everyone thinks they are the good guy. The challenge to me is to set up real people in cool concepts, and let them do what they think is the right thing to do. As the world around us shows, your right thing may be directly opposite my right thing, and conflict ensues.

People have commented that your work is very cinematic in feel, and I understand ‘Infected’ has been optioned. What's the score on that? And in an ideal world who would you want to play the parts of Perry Dawsey, Dew Phillips and Margaret Montoya?

Infected has been optioned by Rogue Pictures in conjunction with Random House Films. The writers’ strike really put a dent in the movie. Rogue was moving along, working on finding a writer/director, then everything shut down for several months. It seems momentum is a big thing in Hollywood, and that strike hit right when my momentum was high. Now Peter Gethers from Random House Films is working on finding a writer to produce a script. Once that's done, they'll hopefully get it back on track.

If I could cast the film, I'd put Terry O'Quinn (Lost) in the role of Dew Phillips. He's absolutely perfect for the role. After seeing Jeff Bridges in Iron Man, I think he would tear it up as well.

Margaret could be Salma Hayek. You wouldn't hear me complain about that.

As for Perry, I spend a lot of time wondering who could pull this off. It would be an amazing role, an actor taking the character from sullen ex-jock to slobbering psychopath in the span of 90 minutes. Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is the ideal size, but Perry is meant to be in his mid-twenties and Dwayne might be a little old for the part. Will Smith would nail it, although he's also a bit old for it (however, Will, Dwayne, if you're reading this, we'll re-write the part, just call me).

I think Jamie Foxx and Josh Hartnett have the size and the athleticism to make the part rock. Jamie is probably out of the budget of Infected, however, so my best bet is Hartnett.

I believe a sequel to ‘Infected’ is planned. Can you tell us anything about that and what other work do you have in the pipeline?

The book is called Contagious and will be out December 30, 2008. I'm almost finished with it and heading into the editing phase with Crown. All the survivors of Infected are back. Where in the original the disease focused on the trial of one parasite victim, Contagious looks at the bigger picture. If you think of Infected as one man's story, the third book Pandemic as the classic world-wide disease story, Contagious is right in the middle.

WATCHING THE DETECTIVES

Christopher Fowler is a writer with many strings to his bow. Black Static readers will know him from his Interference column, but that's just the start. There are the short stories, ten volumes of them by now, beginning with 1984's The Bureau of Lost Souls and ending with last year's Stoker nominated Old Devil Moon, and there are the novels—Roofworld, Spanky, Calabash and Breathe, to name just a few.

More recently with the Bryant & May Investigate series of novels Fowler has dipped a toe in the murky waters of the detective/mystery genre, though anyone who comes to these books expecting police procedural, cosy or hardboiled fare, simply doesn't know Fowler. He is his own man and the spin he puts on these mystery novels is uniquely off the wall, as witness Full Dark House (2003), the first volume in the series, winning the British Fantasy Society's August Derleth Award for Best Novel, while its successor, The Water Room, was nominated for the, possibly more apposite, Crime Writers’ Association People's Choice Dagger Award. Fowler is a writer whose work confounds expectation and defies categorisation, and in the world of niche marketing he is probably a PR man's worst nightmare.

Bryant & May Investigate concern the doings of London's Peculiar Crimes Unit, a little known division of the police force that operates out of premises in Mornington Crescent and concerns itself with crimes that are simply too outré for the regular police to deal with, while at the same time fighting off attempts by the higher ups to shut their operation down. And if anybody is thinking The X-Files then it's a fair cop, but written with a distinctly British sensibility, the spirit of Doyle's great detective wafting through the narrative and a humour rooted in character that puts me in mind of Wodehouse. In lieu of the sexy Mulder and Scully we get the doggedly unsexy Arthur Bryant and John May, octogenarian detectives who know where all the bodies are buried and are simply too good at their jobs to be put out to graze just yet, one of them a ‘true believer’ of sorts and the other a sceptic who is coming around to the ‘more things in heaven and earth’ viewpoint.

We move from the general to the particular. The White Corridor (Bantam paperback, 366pp, [British pounds] 7.99) is the fifth book in the series, and it starts with Bryant persuading May to accompany him in a van to a Spiritualists’ Convention, only for the two of them to get stranded somewhere on Dartmoor when blizzards hit. Back at the PCU medical examiner Oswald Finch is found dead in his own morgue, and as the room was locked from the inside only somebody with access could have committed the crime, which means all PCU staff are suspects. With a royal visit imminent, Detective Sergeant Janice Longbright heads up the investigation, getting telephonic help from Bryant and May, who have problems of their own to cope with. A young woman and her son are being stalked by a serial killer who has trailed them all the way from France, and stuck in a vehicle amid the snowdrifts the pair are sitting ducks, with only Bryant and May on hand to save them. Only nothing here is quite what it seems.

In The Victoria Vanishes (Doubleday hardback, 333pp, [British pounds] 14.99) Bryant is walking home one night when he sees a woman enter an olde worlde style pub, and the next morning her dead body is found, but The Victoria Cross has vanished, much to Bryant's dismay. On further investigation the detectives discover that several other women have died in mysterious circumstances after visiting public houses (though these establishments did not vanish). It appears a serial killer is preying on women in public houses, and thus striking a blow at the very heart of the British way of life. The detectives must catch the culprit before news gets out and panic grips the nation. But of course, there is a lot more to it than that.

From a plot point of view, these books are so delightfully convoluted that they remind me of another cherished British institution, The Avengers. There's the same madcap, anything goes invention about them, with Fowler's tongue firmly in his cheek, though he stops short of the wilder excesses of that much missed programme. At times verisimilitude begins to slip, but you carry on because you trust that Fowler is clever enough to make the most preposterous of plot twists seem thoroughly convincing in retrospect and tie up all the loose ends satisfactorily. He has a keen awareness of how much the reader will swallow, and often gives his stories a solid foundation in topical events, as with The Victoria Vanishes, whose resolution echoes a political scandal of a few years back. It's almost as if Fowler is invoking the fact is stranger than fiction defence in advance of any criticism, and by doing so tapping into our love of conspiracy theories and fear of government culpability.

While I wouldn't describe these books as primarily character driven they are certainly character enriched. There is in the interaction of Bryant and May a sense of genuine warmth and affection that stops short of sentimentality, an awareness of personal foibles and shortcomings, but laced with tolerance. Bryant is multi-faceted, a pagan, polymath and fount of esoteric wisdom, something of the anachronism about him, and also a bit overbearing at times, one might even say a bully, albeit of the most charming variety and always with his ‘victim's’ benefit in mind, and at the heart of the man is a personal code of honour and integrity. May shares his partner's code, but is the more pragmatic of the two, in some senses the sounding board for the other man, Watson to his Holmes, but never the mere sidekick such a comparison might imply. These two have worked together for a long time and it shows; they complement each other perfectly, in a relationship that is a marriage in all but name, as comfortable as old slippers, but each man with his secrets and private spaces, so that the relationship can go on growing.

Then there are the supporting cast, the members of the PCU, an assortment of square pegs who, after trying many a round hole, have finally washed up in a place where they belong and where their unique talents will be put to good use. There's Raymond Land, ostensibly the chief of the unit but in reality only a figurehead for Bryant, a bureaucrat whose career aspirations have floundered on the rock of the PCU but slowly coming to realise his consolation prize is the real deal. There's Janice Longbright, a sexy woman with a lot to prove, both to her colleagues and herself, and there's cantankerous medical examiner Oswald Finch and his replacement, young Giles Kershaw, who needs to use his intuition more and proves himself by throwing out the rulebook. There's Detective Constable Colin Bimsley, who has a thing for Detective Constable Meera Mangeshkar, and she is completely indifferent to him, and so you just know that given time not only are they going to get together, but it will probably end badly. There are all of these and others beside, each one of them a bird with broken or clipped wings, and being slowly but surely transformed by the paternal Bryant and May into soaring eagles.

Each book opens with a mocked up duty roster and, in the case of The Victoria Vanishes, a set of staff bulletins, a neat touch which enables Fowler to introduce his dramatis personae and at the same time set the gentle, comedic tone for much of what follows. In similar grace notes Fowler demonstrates his love for and knowledge of the city of London, with the oracular Bryant holding forth about its lesser known byways and history, and he also shows off his esoteric learning, with a miscellany of obscure occult and mythological information that takes us down intriguing backwaters. But of course the ‘facts’ he slots into the narrative as erudite window dressing could simply be incidental invention, and perhaps the real value for the reader is in not knowing, of allowing the conjuror the secrets of his trade.

A subplot of each book involves an attempt by those in power to shut down the PCU, and though I haven't read them I get the impression this also happened in previous volumes, introducing an element of the formulaic into the mix, but if so Fowler remains unpredictable to the end. As The Victoria Vanishes shuffles offstage the PCU seems to have suffered a fait accompli, and though you know and hope that they can come back from this blow, there's also the possibility that Fowler may have decided it's time to move on and so nothing can be taken for granted. Underlying both books is a feeling of nostalgia tainted with fatalism, a sense that the times they are a changing and all the babies are being thrown out with the bathwater, that the precious things, the virtues we hold dear, are constantly under threat, and the perilous existence of the PCU is a metaphor for that process of erosion.

So get these books now while you can, treasure them for their whimsicality and originality and invention, because just as there is a bureaucrat with a hard on for the residents of Mornington Crescent you can bet that somewhere out there is a marketing apparatchik with a business degree doing profit and loss studies on Bryant & May Investigate.

TOMES OF THE DEAD IN CLOSE-UP

The latest release in this ongoing series, I, Zombie (Abaddon paperback, 304pp, [British pounds] 6.99) by Al Ewing, picks up on a central conceit in the much reviled (but so bad, it's good, or at least qualifies for cult status) film Plan 9 From Outer Space and has the audacity to develop it seriously.

John Doe is a zombie. He has super strength, is virtually indestructible and can manipulate the passage of time, but has no memory of his past. John makes a living as an ‘under the radar’ private eye, taking on jobs that are too tough for ordinary humans, and tries his best to fit in with everybody else, only every so often he has to indulge his appetite for brains.

John is captured by a secret organisation with its headquarters beneath the Tower of London, one that has been set up to eliminate zombies, who they believe are the advance guard for some kind of alien invasion, and with specially bred werewolves for the task. John is the last known zombie, but while the pugilistic Morse wants to kill him, evolved brain Mr Smith feels some experimentation might be in order, which is when the shit really hits the fan.

There's so much that seems familiar about this book, as if Ewing rooted around in some genre fiction supermarket come Palace of Memory and filled his shopping basket with all the creatures, scenes and tropes he could carry. Zombies and werewolves. Mutants with elongated skulls and psycho-kinetic powers. The alien invaders of The Insect Nation. The monstrous queen at the centre of her hive, waiting to spew eggs in their millions. A frantic chase through the tube system, with creepy crawlies on every side. A monster who has lived among us for so long that he has gained something of humanity. There's even a knowing nod in the direction of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman, with John trying to convince himself how he's like everybody else by obsessing over his CD and DVD collections, though he stops short of extolling the virtues of Genesis. And in another nice touch the chapter titles are pilfered from the annals of detective fiction (the work of Chandler, Spillane etc).

And if any of that is seen as suggesting Ewing's work is derivative, then it's no more so than most other books. What matters is how the writer stage manages this wealth of material, and on that score Ewing shows enough chutzpah in his mixing and his matching to appease all but the most dogmatic of genre purists. He gives us a fast paced and exciting story, one in which the action seldom lets up as John ploughs his way through an assortment of vicious adversaries, for the final showdown with the monster at the heart of the maze. The characters are larger life, especially John himself, who fights constantly to maintain his humanity and cling to his self-image as a decent person trying to do the best, and his human counterpart, the bully boy with a conscience Morse, who has an ‘ends justifying means’ philosophy, as a result in his own way becoming every bit as much of a monster as John. The aliens, if owing much to films like Aliens and the Spielberg War of the Worlds, are nonetheless credible in their motivation and have a truly horrifying quality to them. And, by way of an extra fillip, the book has a novel explanation for the zombie phenomenon, even down to the thing about eating brains.

Okay, there's nothing here that will shake the horror genre to its foundations, but after a lacklustre last volume, the Tomes of the Dead series is back at the top of its game with a thoroughly enjoyable romp in which those brain munching zombies we have come to love take centre stage.

Q&A

In I, Zombie John is asked some questions under duress by Morse (a euphemism for torture). While he baulked at the use of thumb screws and the like, Abaddon editor Jon Oliver was happy to answer some questions for us.

How would you describe the ethos of the ‘Tomes of the Dead’ series?

I don't know whether we really have an ethos as such. Basically we want to publish zombie stories that are original and exciting. We've had zombie historicals, zombie gangers, zombies and aliens and we've got zombie gladiators on the way. We'll keep doing them as long as they're fun and not formulaic. Besides, which genre fan doesn't love a zombie? They're almost the most simplistic of monsters but because they are, at their rotten core, us then they can also be complex and more human than you think.

What do you feel is the reason for the appeal of the zombie archetype?

I think it's because the monster in this case is more recognisably ourselves, as opposed to say a werewolf. Zombie stories appeal to our fascination with what happens to our bodies after death. Also, there's just something cool about zombies. Witness the amount of zombie events that are held around the world every year. For some reason the idea of being a zombie can be as appealing as being a vampire. It's the inner ghoul in all of us, it needs feeding occasionally.

Abaddon titles aside, what is your favourite zombie novel/short story and why?

That's actually quite tough because I wasn't really that aware of a big market in zombie fiction before I joined Abaddon. I can now see that there are more zombie books out there besides our own. Fiction-wise, probably something by H.P. Lovecraft—Cool Air maybe, or Herbert West—Re-Animator.

Same question, but favourite film?

I adore Night of The Living Dead and most of the Romero films. You also can't beat Peter Jackson's Brain Dead. The scene where he attacks the zombies with a fly-mo is an all-time classic. Plus the actors could hardly stand up there was so much blood on set.

What can we expect from the ‘Tomes’ series in the future?

The next book on the way is Tomes of The Dead: Anno Mortis by Rebecca Levene. A zombie novel set in ancient Rome with zombie gladiators, supernatural entities and the Roman underworld. It promises to be a corker. Look out for that in November.

Do Abaddon have plans for any further ‘horror’ slanted series?

Not at the moment but we may well in the future. We're a relatively young publisher so there's a good chance we'll be exploring more world of horror in the future.

THE SERPENT SWALLOWS ITS TAIL

Now in its twenty second year of existence, Serpent's Tail is an independent publisher with a commitment to publishing voices neglected by the mainstream and, while it would certainly be inaccurate to bestow on them a horror genre tag, there are areas in which their literary sensibilities overlap with those of Black Static, and the product of one should appeal to consumers of the other.

The Empty Page (Serpent's Tail paperback, 229pp, [British pounds] 8.99), edited by Peter Wild and with an introduction by Lee Ranaldo, is an anthology of fiction inspired by the music of the band Sonic Youth, with each story taking its title from a track, and as far as that goes I have nothing to say (give me Bruce Springsteen and I'm there, but Sonic Youth are just a name to me). It consists of twenty one stories, ranging from the overtly horrific to the darkly comedic, from the surreal and experimental writing through gritty, urban realism and touching on all points in-between. Eclectic is the word we're looking for, and chances are there's stuff here that won't appeal to everyone though the barometer is pointing in the direction of quality.

Opening track, ‘death to our friends’ by J. Robert Lennon is a quiet, elegant but ultimately despairing tale of ghosts and the purpose they have in recruiting others to join them. It deftly picks up on one of the familiar tropes of the horror genre, that of spirits driving others to suicide, but disregards all the usual sound and fury, the acts of spectral malevolence, instead providing something that is sad, wistful even, and all the more disturbing. Similarly Matt Thorne's ‘disappear’ presents us with a man at a restaurant who is lured upstairs by a woman as a prelude to his oblivion. It's a strange and compelling story, with the suggestion that the emptiness of the character's life has brought this fate upon him, is only a seal on what is already accomplished fact. There are echoes of Lynch's Blue Velvet in ‘that's all I know (right now)', but author Katherine Dunn puts a different slant on the discovery of a severed human hand. Instead of the catalyst for an unravelling mystery it becomes a talking point for the local community, with the terrible reduced to just another excuse for gossip, diluted to the point of being mundane.

Leading with its wonderfully ironic title, ‘bull in the heather’ by Scott Mebus is the first humorous offering, albeit with a more serious subtext. Very much tongue in cheek it catalogues the ordeal of Sue as she shops for a sex toy to use with her partner Heather, the mix of embarrassment and defiance as she explains her requirements to a male salesperson. Emily Maguire is also in comedic mode with the delightfully wry ‘brother james', in which the lesser known son of a young couple out of Bethlehem puts the record straight about a few things. In the satirical ‘rain on tin’ Jess Walter takes pot shots at the world of academia and creative writing classes by having his student narrator explain to his professor why he is going to write a good, old fashioned story and not the sloppy porn required by the curriculum, along the way neatly parodying all the virtues he claims to admire.

As if to underline the point Walter may or may not be making, the most ‘experimental’ pieces here are also the weakest. Case in point, Shelley Jackson's ‘my friend goo', which with its surreal plotline, endless word play and structural experimentation was all very clever, but didn't give me a reason to care about any of it. I didn't get much out of ‘wish fulfilment’ by Mary Gaitskill either, an unsatisfying combination of dream and memory, or Eileen Myles’ ‘protect me you', which comes over as little more than a stream of consciousness wannabe. Similarly, ‘kool thing; or why I want to fuck patty hearst’ by Tom McCarthy was a rambling and self-conscious attempt at controversy, the narrator stating why he thinks Patty H is iconic, or something like that.

Such stories are only blips though, the odd blurt of static to remind us how good the rest is. Dialogue is important in both ‘flower’ by Steven Sherrill and ‘sunday’ by Hiag Akmakjian. The former presents a chance encounter between a religiously inclined older lady and a rebel girl with a fondness for ‘bad’ language, two characters who should rub each other up the wrong way (and, indeed, for the most part do) but are yet able to reach a strange accommodation. The latter captures perfectly the picture of an idyllic Italian family lunch, a young man the guest of an elderly couple, who tell tales of his parents, revealing more than they intend, with the real story taking place in the spaces between the words. Samuel Ligon's ‘dirty boots’ is told from the perspective of a sexually precocious young woman at a repressive boarding school, her shame at being discovered while fucking one of the boy students transmuted into defiance when faced with his complete capitulation to authority, a story that, right or wrong, encourages us not to leave our actions in the lurch. There's another teen rebel in ‘snare, girl’ by Catherine O'Flynn, the female protagonist deciding to get back at a teacher she doesn't like by faking her own kidnapping and hiding in the man's car boot, the story presenting a nasty look inside the head of an adolescent girl, and completely dispelling the whole sugar and spice thing.

The last story wouldn't look out of place in our sister publication Crimewave and neither would ‘unmade bed’ by Christopher Coake, in which a young man takes issue with the abusive partner of a woman he is interested in, but as the story progresses a fuller picture emerges, one in which the moral high ground steadily shifts until the reader is no longer sure where his or her sympathies should lie, other than with the abused woman of course. Editor Wild's ‘radical adults lick god-head style’ is not as successful. It's set in 60s America and against the backdrop of Vietnam protest, with an intelligence operative aligned against the protesters coming to question his role. The story reads a bit too much like somebody trying to be James Ellroy for my liking, but it did sign off with a striking end note. One of the best stories in the collection, ‘swimsuit issue’ by Kevin Sampsell examines our ideas of physical desirability, through the medium of a female protagonist who agrees to successive cosmetic surgeries to gratify her older boyfriend, who needless to say is as ugly as sin. There's a sinister subtext to what goes down, showing the double standard in operation and how the glamour industry is used to manipulate people, giving them impossible ideals to conform to.

The Isle of Dogs (Serpent's Tail paperback, 186pp, [British pounds] 9.99) by Daniel Davies and The Gospel According to Luke (Serpent's Tail paperback, 316pp, [British pounds] 7.99) by Emily Maguire are two very different novels, but sexuality is central to both and they share a common theme of intolerance.

Thirty nine year old Jeremy Shepherd, the central character in The Isle of Dogs has dropped out of the rat race, giving up a high paid job in the glamorous world of magazine publishing and going back to his home town, where he lives with his parents and works as a low level civil servant. Jeremy finds personal fulfilment through his involvement in the dogging community, and for those not in the know dogging is a predominantly British pursuit in which couples drive to remote spots and perform sex while others watch, or on occasion are invited to participate, a mutually beneficial accommodation of voyeurs and exhibitionists. Jeremy is firmly wired into the network, with connections and friends in the community. He knows all the tricks, how to avoid police patrols and what steps to take to protect himself from unreliable strangers. Only of late the scene has turned sour, with increasing police activity and vigilantism from the ‘straight’ world, and ‘outing’ of people involved, with subsequent damage in their personal lives. Jeremy himself is lured to a rendezvous and then beaten unconscious by thugs who object to what he is doing. Undeterred, he recovers in hospital and plans for a car park dogging session with all his favourite people, only for the book to deliver a final, grim twist.

Toby Litt compares Daniel Davies to J.G. Ballard in the cover blurb, and given the commonality of cars and sex Crash is an obvious point of reference, but there the similarity ends. Dogging is a widespread practice, but as far as I'm aware orgasmic automobile accidents are not; while Crash was a study of a peculiar and highly individual psychology, The Isle of Dogs seems more concerned with proselytising an alternate lifestyle. Jeremy has a personal philosophy which he expounds on at entertaining length, embracing ideas of the pursuit of happiness and the democratisation of sex through pornography and practices such as dogging, whereas for the Ballard of Crash sexuality seems almost solipsist in nature, with happiness never an issue. While The Isle of Dogs does end badly, with a plot twist that I saw coming and which I imagine Ballard would regard as a cheap shot, there is plenty of humour instead of the grim tone of Crash.

So what does the book have to offer? It's a fast paced read with an engaging and believable cast of characters, and there is a lot of sex though not written in a way that is going to provide the prurient with wank fodder. At its heart the book is about alternative lifestyles, providing an insight into practices most of us will only connect to through the medium of fiction, with Jeremy's thoughts on happiness and related matters adding a hint of social SF in the same vein as Rhinehart's The Dice Man. It's also a book about intolerance and the persecution of those who step outside the boundaries of what society regards as acceptable. Jeremy and the other characters suffer for their life choices, be it with physical punishment or exposure in the tabloid press (one need only think of the Max Mosley affair to realise how topical and relevant this is), and regardless of how we feel about dogging itself larger issues about individual freedom are involved.

Maguire's The Gospel According to Luke is even more pertinent when it comes to such matters as the individual's right to choose.

Luke Butler is a poster boy for the Christian Revolution and at just under thirty the head of the Northwestern Christian Youth Centre. On the opposite side of the street are the offices of the Sexual Health Advisory Service, which Luke is determined to shut down, until he meets lank, ungainly Aggie Grey, who works at the SHAS. There is an instant physical attraction between the two and Luke decides that she is the woman he is destined to be with; only first he must open Aggie's eyes to God's message, as he can't possibly marry a non-believer.

Maguire gives us attraction of opposites taken to the extreme in the unlikely romance between these two damaged souls. Luke was an orphan and never knew who his parents were, instead finding a family in the Church and a purpose to his life preaching God's word. Aggie's father committed suicide and she is the survivor of several bad relationships. Her mother and her best friend are both gay, while Luke believes that gays go to hell, along with suicides and abortionists. He cannot deny his desire for Aggie, but neither can he jettison his beliefs, and the inner conflict is tearing Luke apart, while his career is jeopardised as their relationship grows.

As the backdrop to this story Maguire gives us a society in which an increasingly violent brand of fundamentalism is cracking down on abortion and turning against those seen as facilitating the procedure. Right wingers daub graffiti on the walls and break windows at the SHAS, and take name and shame pictures of the young women who come to Aggie for advice. One such is pregnant Honey, who Luke determines to save, and thus the ideological conflict between the two would be lovers is given a very human face, that of a frightened girl who nonetheless knows how to manipulate them both for her own advantage. And as the campaign against the SHAS grows ever more nasty a terrible tragedy ensues.

Comparisons with Romeo and Juliet are apposite, in that you have a couple who are meant to be together but separated by issues of faith and ideology every bit as divisive as the family feuds of Renaissance Italy, and not so easily resolved. Maguire writes beautifully and really gets inside the heads of the characters, bringing them alive and making this ideological conflict both vital and heartrendingly painful. The desires and doubts that tear Luke apart are convincingly portrayed, so that we can't help but feel for him in his torment, loving a woman who represents so much that his fundamentalism requires him to reject. The question is posed, can you respect someone, love them even, when they have different values to you? In those circumstances something has to give, and if I have one tiny reservation about the book it's that Luke never gets to state his beliefs in a way that might possibly win Aggie over. She is screamingly articulate in protesting the unfairness of a God who gives people desires they are then punished for having, but Luke's counter argument never seems to amount to much more than ‘it says in The Bible', and that somewhat diminishes the character. In his arguments with Aggie he is always handicapped, and the neutral reader will invariably side with her and see Luke as unreasonable and irrational, but perhaps that is the very point Maguire wants to put over, that there is no argument to support his beliefs, only blind faith.

If Luke's arguments do not convince, the actions of the other Christians repel, be it the condemnations of the elders in Luke's church or the outrages committed by the fundamentalist group opposed to SHAS. There is a terrible intolerance at work here, seen in a hate campaign directed at those who are ill equipped to defend themselves from the holier than thou brigade. As Bertrand Russell once said, the thing with nice people is that they have such nasty minds, and Maguire certainly gives us some nice people here. The book's message about the dangers of extremism is especially apposite in today's climate and gives the book a significance beyond its actual subject matter. For all of that though, and regardless of the horribly inevitable tragedy that occurs at the end, Maguire seems to feel that there is hope for us, that things like love and mutual respect and simple human caring will triumph over dogmatism, that there will always be signs of new growth.

I've only touched on the good things about this book, but hopefully it's enough to make you consider buying it. Maguire is an interesting writer with important things to tell us and the ability to say them well, to engage with the reader intellectually and emotionally. The Gospel According to Luke delivers on the promise of her first book, Taming the Beast, and I look forward to seeing what she produces next.

SOME FACTS ABOUT SERPENT'S TAIL

Serpent's Tail was established by Peter Ayrton in 1986, in 2007 becoming an imprint of Profile Books Ltd * Since its founding, Serpent's Tail has consistently published foreign work in translation. In recognition of his contribution to French culture, Ayrton was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres earlier this year * Serpent's Tail authors with a TTA connection include Nicholas Royle, Christopher Fowler and Charlie Williams * Fowler's Serpent's Tail short story collection Old Devil Moon was shortlisted for the prestigious Edge Hill prize in 2008, as was Royle's Mortality in 2007 * The company's logo is an ouroboros, a serpent swallowing its tail. The symbol represents the two fundamental attributes of time—imminent annihilation and rising hope, which follow each other over and over again in an infinite cycle * The company's website is at serpentstail.co.uk

MORE REVIEWS

Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

Fifty something former rock star Judas Coyne is a self-obsessed hedonist who has the money to indulge his every whim, be it fast cars or sexy women, with each new girlfriend named after a state of the union, so he doesn't have to keep them straight in his mind or become too attached. Another peccadillo of his and part of Jude's rock star image is the collecting of macabre objects—a hangman's noose, a human skull, a witch's confession, a snuff film—so when the chance to purchase a ghost comes up in an online auction he can't resist. The seller sends him a heart-shaped box containing an old suit, supposedly that of her deceased stepfather, Craddock McDermott, and Jude soon discovers that this time he may have bitten off more than he can chew. The outré phenomena begin almost immediately after the suit's arrival—mysterious drops in temperature, the vision of an old man in a chair who may be Craddock, a voice inside his head that urges Jude to kill current squeeze Georgia and then himself. Somebody has Jude in their sights, and it all leads back to the suicide of former girlfriend Alabama. Jude and Georgia take to the road in search of an answer, dogged every step of the way by spectral attacks, with the only hope for Jude to confront the demons of his past.

This book comes with a lot of baggage, hoopla, expectation, what you will. For starters, Joe Hill is the son of Stephen King, so lots of people are curious to see how far the acorn has fallen from the tree, and ready to start crying nepotism if the work doesn't measure up. For seconds, as far as I can recall it is the first time for a long while in the UK that we've had a mass market publication of a first novel by a horror writer, which puts a lot of expectation on Hill's shoulders from those who want to see this bud as a sign of the horror genre's revival. And as with other writers before him who've made their name with an impressive body of short stories, such as Clive Barker and Poppy Z. Brite, there's the question of whether Hill can deliver the goods at novel length.

So how good is it?

For starters, it has a great opening hook. I remember a story from a few years back about somebody trying to sell a cursed doll on e-Bay, and Hill has lucked onto something similar and made it the jumping off point for his story. It's a fascinating idea, and one that grips the reader's imagination from the get go though not quite as original as some would have us believe (the echoes of James’ Casting of the Runes are apparent). From then on we are in safe hands as Hill employs an impressive range of special effects and atmospheric touches to raise the ante for Jude and Georgia, both in their home and on the long road trip at the heart of the book. The story has a strong cinematic feel to it, seen in the fast pacing and the shocking set pieces that punctuate the text, such as when Craddock's ghost cuts loose at Jude's family home and possesses his father in the final scenes of the book, and I can easily imagine it being made into a sfx heavy film and doing decent box office.

In Craddock we have a memorable villain, somebody who seems like a hick at first, almost a joke, but becomes much more sinister and significant as Jude digs into his past. There is a chilling back story, the revelation of work in ‘psychological operations’ for the US Army in Vietnam, with a subsequent career as a dowser and mesmerist, and in more recent times the complete dominance of stepdaughter Alabama, who thought Jude would help her but instead just placed him in the path of Craddock's malice. Hill is excellent at capturing this quality in Craddock, his lazy southern drawl and the words he uses simply oozing menace and vindictiveness. Craddock is ably abetted by other stepdaughter Jessica, and the thing the two have in common is that neither is willing to confront the evil of what they have done, preferring to shift the guilt to Jude and vent their anger on a scapegoat.

In a similar vein, Jude is not really dealing with his past, which is littered with failed relationships; with his former wife and band partners, but the most significant that with his abusive father. He has become a user of other people, a completely egotistical person, seeing everything in terms of his own needs. Part of Jude's journey to the book's resolution involves facing his responsibilities and growing emotionally, to the point where he can actually commit to Georgia, a sea change marked by his use of her real name, the outward demonstration that she has become a person to him and not just a convenient bed mate. Strip aside the supernatural elements and what remains is a rite of passage of sorts, though here is where I have one of my few reservations about Heart-Shaped Box, in that what I'd looked forward to as the climax of the book, Jude's confrontation with his father, is derailed by Craddock's intervention. That scene was superbly stage managed, as I observed before, but at the same time it felt like a cop out and didn't provide the closure expected.

So, to repeat myself, how good is Heart-Shaped Box? It's a very good book but not the great book it's being touted as in some quarters: it doesn't have that extra quality that engenders greatness, be it the feeling that you are reading something completely new and original, or a situation that moves you profoundly (and these are qualities Hill's best stories possess, so we know that greatness is in his grasp). Rather, let's say it is a supernatural thriller which is well written, superbly paced, convincingly plotted and populated with intriguing characters, a story that will grip you from first word to last, the embodiment of the phrase page turner, and for a first novel that is damned good going.

The Appetite by Nicholas Royle

It's the 1980s and Britain is hit by a storm of hurricane proportions, with several hundred people going missing, apparently snatched up by the winds. Office worker Simon is going home one day when Sally drops out of the sky and onto him, and he gets her to a hospital. All of the ‘Fallen’ arrive in a similar manner over the course of a few days, and none of them have any memory of what has happened to them. Recovered from her ordeal, Sally gets in contact with Simon and they begin an affair, carrying on even though the pain of deceiving husband Peter, who Sally still loves, is tearing her apart. Meanwhile the world around them appears to be shrinking, a ‘turning in', though miraculously nobody is hurt by any of the disruption that occurs consequent to this. In some way the fate of our lovers and that of reality itself have become entwined.

The first section of this novella is introduced with weatherman Michael Fish's infamous pronouncement concerning the non-appearance of hurricanes. Everyone has their memory of the so called ‘great storm’ of 1987. My own concerns walking down the road to catch a bus that never showed up and having the hat snatched from my head, watching it disappear in an easterly direction. Royle's characters suffer a more fanciful fate, and one that is far from convincing, though of course he doesn't intend us to take these events literally.

I have mixed feelings about The Appetite. Royle writes as well as ever, bringing the affair of the two leads to compelling life, but at the same time it does come over as slightly mundane, a succession of she's leaving him, she won't leave him, move and counter move, almost as if the author has a daisy and is tearing off the petals in lieu of concocting a plot. Still, love affairs often do seem mundane to those looking in from the outside. The idea of the world shrinking is much more intriguing and rather well done, with plenty of incidental detail, such as buildings that seem smaller, collapsing architecture, shorter journeys, a whole catalogue of existential claustrophobia. The natural order has been upset and is in need of restoring, though the manner in which this is accomplished struck a somewhat dubious note for me, the hint that some appetites if not properly fed may be routed into destructive channels. It is perhaps best understood as a metaphor for how reality contracts around those in love, eventually opening out when they accept and embrace their condition.

There's nothing here to seriously dislike; it's just that for a writer of Nicholas Royle's calibre it seemed superficial on occasion, more good idea than good story as such. Certainly I enjoyed it, but not quite as much as I expected to.

Lost Boys by James Miller

James Miller is a writer who will be familiar to some of our readers from the early days of this magazine's predecessor, The Third Alternative, when we published several of his stories. Lost Boys is his first novel and, as you'd perhaps expect given that track record, it's not a straightforward story.

Timothy Dashwood is the son of an oil industry bigwig, brought back to Britain from Iraq after his father was held for a time by insurgents. The boy misses his former life in an armed compound and cannot fit in at his new school. He dreams of an Arab boy who calls on him to run away, and meanwhile other boys from the school are disappearing, many of them sons of diplomats and industrialists. Finally, when the time is right, Timothy absents himself from the family home and his own life.

In the second section of the book, Timothy's father Arthur Dashwood plays back the tapes made by an irregular, one might even say psychic, detective employed to find his son when the regular police failed. A picture emerges, from the words of people interviewed by the detective, of fractured family units and a society at war with itself, if only on the emotional plane. Coincident with this the detective reports on the police investigation, gangs of runaways tracked down and broken up by the authorities, and strange threats to his own safety, which end with the detective's disappearance.

In the final section Arthur embarks on his own search, egged on by e-mails that may or may not be from his son, led into the S&M subculture where his own guilt and feelings of betrayal are punished. The final picture that emerges is of a Children's Crusade, a revolt against the adult world, with the sons training in military tactics on computer games and hiding in secret camps.

Miller has produced a complex and beautifully written novel, one that embraces a world of influences and makes them its own, from the lost boys of Barrie through Burroughs wild boys, the dystopian mindset of Ballard and, at a stretch, the unique appreciation of the wonder of childhood that is the hallmark of much of Bradbury's oeuvre. There are overlapping texts here, disparate effects that should not work together but do so marvellously well thanks to Miller's skill and assured grasp of the material. The hints of a boy's own adventure filtering into the strange and sinister story of the detective, the sexual excesses of the final passages bleeding out of the emotional demands of a family life rooted in quiet desperation, and echoing yet earlier scenes of torture and betrayal, a recurring theme throughout the book. Z

Realistic in its framework and set in the world of contemporary geopolitics, Lost Boys intrudes an ‘unreal’ element to question that same world, reifying the child soldiers of global conflict as the first warriors in a Children's Crusade. The subtext here, reinforced by the surreal streak that permeates the narrative, seems to be that by jettisoning our own innocence and ideals for the sake of profit, adults have also sacrificed the far more precious innocence of their children and a terrible price will need to be paid for that.

Lost Boys is a rich, vibrant and important work from a writer who will be one to watch in the near future. And to think, you probably read him first in The Third Alternative.

Therapy by Sebastian Fitzek

(Pan paperback, 352pp, [British pounds] 6.99)

Well-known psychiatrist Viktor Larenz is haunted by a tragedy in his past, the disappearance of his twelve year old daughter Josy, snatched from a doctor's office where she had gone for treatment of an undiagnosed sickness. No trace has been found of the girl, either by the police or the private detective hired by Larenz. Close to despair he withdraws to a family home on the isolated North Sea island of Parkum, where new hope arrives in the form of beautiful stranger Anna Glass, a writer of children's book. Anna suffers from a rare form of schizophrenia and claims that all of her characters appear to her in real life, and she has been writing about a girl who sounds just like Josy. Larenz takes on her treatment in an attempt to find out the truth behind her stories, but there is much more to Anna Glass than at first appears to be the case.

This is a clever book, one in which different layers of reality are exposed as the narrative progresses, so that reading it is rather like peeling away the skin of an onion. Unfortunately this makes reviewing a hazardous endeavour, with the chance of giving away a vital plot twist and spoiling things for the reader. The story is intriguing, starting as it does with a terrible event, the disappearance of a child, a fear with which most of us can identify, and then moving further away from reality with each chapter, as Viktor's world and Anna's fiction overlap. As the story progresses and events grow increasingly surreal, serious doubts set in about Fitzek's ability to rein it back in and provide a solid rationale for what is happening. And the trick is that he doesn't, instead peeling back one of those layers to reveal something else entirely, and then just when we have accepted that he pulls yet another rabbit out of his silk top hat, like a conjuror wanting to bring the curtain down with a final flourish. There's an element of cheat to this I think, echoes of the old ‘then I woke up and it was all a dream’ gambit that I usually abhor, but here made a lot more credible than is often the case.

Also to Fitzek's credit he does a superb job of delineating Viktor Larenz's character, the love and despair of a father dealing with an impossible situation, the dawning horror of the truth of his situation as the psycho-drama unfolds. There is no padding either, with the prose sparse and lean, building up a ferocious pace, and coincidentally giving us little time to consider possible glitches in the story. Those glitches may be a little too much to swallow for some readers when the closing revelations come, but for me I think Fitzek just about managed to pull it off, producing a book that is highly readable and that little bit different from most of what the thriller genre has to offer.

Chemical Wedding by Julian Doyle & Bruce Dickinson

Chaos mathematician Joshua Mathers arrives in Cambridge to pursue his research at the university there, bringing with him an interactive suit to be linked up to one of the world's most advanced computers, but his discoveries are usurped by disciples of Aleister Crowley to enable the spirit of the Great Beast to possess the body of literature professor Oliver Haddo. To make this chemical wedding stick, Crowley must sacrifice student Leah Robinson, with whom Mathers has fallen in love, and to save her the mathematician must risk everything.

And that is about all there is to it, a genre standard plot of possession from beyond the grave, with a scientific gloss thrown over everything and the only real difference being that this time the interloper is Crowley. There are moments when it comes to life, such as when Haddo/Crowley is behaving outrageously, but overall it is poorly written and predictable, the text padded with a wealth of info dumps about Crowley, quantum mechanics, the occult and sundry matters, all of which suggests the authors know their stuff but not how to wear that research lightly.

The book was written to coincide with the release of director Doyle's film of the same name, starring Simon Callow and co-scripted by Iron Maiden singer Dickinson. To be fair, there is a lot of interesting stuff here, but it's in the details that back up the story rather than the story itself, and that could be deliberate on the part of the authors who describe Chemical Wedding as ‘the first Science Faction novel'. If so, then it's a risk that hasn't paid off, with the end result a somewhat unwieldy narrative that doesn't stay on message for very long, which is a pity. Crowley was a fascinating character and eminently suitable to be fictionalised, but this book doesn't serve him well.

Charles Fort by Jim Steinmeyer

Reviewing The Book of the Damned in 1919, Ben Hecht described Charles Fort (1874-1932) as ‘the man who invented the supernatural'. Steinmeyer's eloquent and concisely written account of Fort's life comes with that phrase as its tag line though, as Steinmeyer is at pains to inform us, Fort himself would have eschewed such a label. In his philosophy there was no such thing as the supernatural, nor any possibility of it.

Like most people I know of Fort mainly through the adjective ‘Fortean', that catch all term for those inexplicable phenomena he delighted in cataloguing and throwing in the face of conventional scientific thinking. With a wealth of quotes from a man who never seemed unwilling to record the minutiae of his life, Steinmeyer sets about fleshing out the story of this remarkable individual. It's a tale of childhood bullying, of an early career as a journalist and determination to succeed as a writer, of two years spent travelling as a way to pile up vital experience, of marriage and critical success, but never commercial. Friendship with Theodore Dreiser, who was to become his greatest champion, was a turning point for Fort, though he was still to suffer crushing poverty and a hand to mouth existence, until a timely inheritance freed him to pursue scholastic pursuits. With the publication of The Book of the Damned and its successors Fort's reputation was assured, with modest recognition and cult status for his writings on the unexplained during his lifetime, followed by a posthumous career as standard bearer for sceptics everywhere, with various journals and societies devoted to keeping his legacy alive.

Steinmeyer's book is a well written and engrossing story of one man's dogged persistence and eventual triumph over adversity, though for the wannabe writers in our ranks the subtext won't be encouraging (get an inheritance or deal with the idea of sleeping on park benches). Steinmeyer never loses sight of the importance of Fort's work, the fact that he was neither dogmatic or a proponent of the supernatural as such (he thought it was all supernatural). Instead, Fort comes over as a rigorous opponent of dogma and orthodoxy, whether rooted in faith or science, his books composed with a cheery wit and thoroughgoing scepticism. Agree with him or not, it was a valuable role for somebody to play, particularly with such good humour and perseverance in the face of all the odds.

By way of a coda, some may also appreciate this book for its portrait of America in the 1920s, the era of changes in the national psyche that made Fort's ideas appealing, and for all the sketches of the various literary worthies of the day, most especially Dreiser. Recommended, and not just to people who read biographies.

The Final Murder by Anne Holt

The first victim is a talk show host who is found dead, with her tongue removed and cleaved in two. The second victim is a right wing politician, the leader of one of Norway's most prominent parties. She is crucified to her bed, with a Koran pushed between her legs. Somebody is murdering celebrities and in an especially horrific manner. The case is handed over to Superintendent Adam Stubo, but it is his wife Johanne Vik, a former FBI profiler, who stumbles across the thread that links these killings and reaches the conclusion that her husband will be the final victim.

This is a book that works on several levels. The gore quotient is high, catching the reader's attention from the start and shocking, but a red herring of sorts, as really what we have here is a puzzle story, with the criminal playing a game against the police, showing who is the smarter. It's a cleverly concocted story, with each brick of the plot slotting neatly into the previous one to produce a solid edifice regardless of how contrived any element might seem in isolation. While serial killers with an overly complicated modus operandi have been the undoing of many a crime novel, in this case it is fiction itself being transformed into reality.

Characterisation is another plus, with Stubo and Johanne brought to life on the page as the paradigm married couple, with children left over from past relationships and a whole history that they carry around with them. Their interplay has a lived in feel to it, that of people who are comfortable with each other but still have no go areas. In isolation Stubo comes over as a hard bitten detective, someone from whom much is expected and conscious of pressure to deliver the goods.

But of course the most intriguing creation here is the villain, a ruthless and calculating psychopath who always manages to stay one step ahead of the police, though it is really Johanne who is being challenged, her reputation acting as a goad to the other. The final scene in which the killer confronts Johanne is simply chilling, on the surface nothing more than a simple exchange of pleasantries between two people in a park, but with a subtext that is pure menace.

This is the second volume in an ongoing series by Norwegian writer Holt, and on the evidence so far English language readers have some dark delicacies waiting for them.

Say Goodbye by Lisa Gardner

FBI Special Agent Kimberly Quincy is approached by a young woman who believes a man she knows, called Dinchara (an anagram of ‘arachnid'), is dangerous, but there is nothing Quincy can do without corroborating evidence even though she sympathises with Delilah Rose, who is pregnant just like her. Special Agent Sal Martignetti is receiving anonymous tips about missing girls and feels the two ‘cases’ may be connected, with a serial killer on the loose. As the evidence mounts, albeit all circumstantial, they gain a picture of a deadly killer, a man unhealthily obsessed with arachnids and who chooses his next victim from the loved ones of the last person he killed. Kimberley starts to receive late night phone calls from somebody needing her help, and in one of them a murder appears to be happening in the background. As she digs deeper Kimberly realises that she may very well be the next victim.

This is a complicated book, one with a plot that seems to be shooting off in several directions, but Gardner neatly ties up all the loose strands before the end (perhaps a bit too neatly, as one big plot twist was completely transparent to me). Along the way she feeds the reader enough titbits to maintain interest and keep us gripped right through to the last page. Verisimilitude is added by virtue of a wealth of convincing detail about FBI and police procedure, and Gardner deftly incorporates personal details, such as Kimberly's arguments with her husband who wants her to be a stay at home mother, that will strike a chord with many readers who are not employed by the FBI.

The main appeal for horror fans will be Dinchara, a memorable and utterly chilling monster, Gardner detailing his habits and way of life with a grim but compelling rigour. She also provides a convincing back story for this monster, showing how his character was forged in the crucible of abuse, and by doing this Gardner further muddies the cloudy waters of the plot, conflating the roles of victim and victimiser so that, despite everything, there is an element of sadness, tragedy even, about the figure of this killer, reminding us that the greatest monster may once have been a frightened child willing to do anything to survive.

Each chapter is introduced with a factual snippet about spiders, which is a nice touch but possibly more disturbing than what's going on with the main story: few of us are ever likely to meet a serial killer, but those pesky spiders are everywhere.

Copyright © 2008 Peter Tennant

Bridgeman could hear the roaring the moment he walked in through the front door. As usual it was coming from the room to the right, directly off the hall. He closed his umbrella beneath the porch light and shook it with a brisk snap of his wrist. He propped it in the hoop at the bottom of the coat stand and closed the door on the wet late November evening. Still, the incessant roar; it was like listening to someone mouthing words they didn't understand with a large cardboard box over their head. Echoic, indistinct and menacing.

To get to the small galley kitchen, Bridgeman had to walk past the door and go along a narrow corridor made by the stairs which rose to the left and the wall to the communal lounge on the right. Bridgeman always found himself skipping past the door, dreading the moment when it might open to reveal the occupant; a man, he imagined, head concealed within its box, stumbling out of the room, roaring, quite mad, his shirtfront wet with rage-sprayed saliva—Bridgeman quickened his pace and tripped down the step into the kitchen. He palmed the light on and the mean 40 watt bulb hanging from a greasy cord above the sink lit the room. His heart was beating with a supplementary nervous flutter.

Work had been a disappointment; Juna had left today, terminating her agency contract with immediate effect following a bust up with Gary on the factory floor. And Bridgeman hadn't even known she'd been seeing the black welder. Bridgeman had been sniffing around the little brunette for over a week without a shred of success; it was like everything, he mused, filling the kettle and dragging a chair out from beneath the flimsy little table pressed against the wall between the fridge and the draining board: life had just never opened its legs for him.

He lit a cigarette and waited for the kettle to boil. He could still hear the muted roaring, above the resolute hum of the fridge and the escalation of steam from the kettle. Bridgeman felt jumpy; it was as if the whole house and everything in it was becoming impatient. He stood up and went over to the sink. It was filthy. Nothing left on the drainer but fatty scum, no mugs in the cupboard beneath. Just a tall white tube of supermarket brand economy scourer and a broken Breville sandwich maker without a plug.

He kneed the cupboard door shut and pulled a mug from the washing up bowl. It was glossy with fat and covered in bits of spaghetti as if parasitized by monstrous, ginger bacterium.

Bridgeman pulled a length of blue paper from a roll lying on top of the fridge. He opened the cupboard beneath the sink again and took out the scourer. He chipped an accretion of chalky chemicals from around the nozzle and squirted a blob of gritty white fluid onto the paper, which he used to rub over the mug. Bits of spaghetti dropped into the sink. He ran the mug under the tap again and was cheered to see the china come up spotless. He dried it on another piece of blue paper towel and lobbed in a tea bag. As he was filling the mug with hot water, the front door banged open and Jase came in.

"Make us a fuckin’ cuppa, man,” he said, striding into the kitchen. “I'm colder than a mother-in-law's kiss."

Bridgeman sighed and looked down at the one clean cup. “Sugar?” he asked.

"Four,” Jase said, taking his donkey jacket off and slinging it onto the table. He stood behind Bridgeman, rubbing his hands. “Nice and milky,” he added, eyebrows raised. Bridgeman edged past him and went to the fridge. As he opened the door, he heard Jase say, “Fuck it, let's go for a pint!” and then the thick splash of the mug being chucked back into the squalid washing up bowl.

Bridgeman was about to say something but changed his mind when he caught Jase's expression. There was something compulsive in his demeanour, a horrid kind of uncivilised charisma which Bridgeman found debilitating and frankly impossible to oppose. With his muscular neck the circumference of a cake tin, eyes like knife ticks in a pie crust and unmerciful, thuggish wardrobe, this mate, in truth no more than a little known acquaintance, was the only thing that stood between getting out of the house and engaging in some kind of social contact, however demoralising, and another forlorn night locked in his room with a dog-eared pile of wrist menus.

Bridgeman followed Jase down the hall. Jase walked with a rolling gait, positive of his own loutish magnetism; while Bridgeman felt that he trailed with a gutless gay-boy mince, all self-assurance drained, sapped by his muscular companion. As they passed the door off the hall, Bridgeman almost hoped it would open so that he could finally view the occupant, cordoned from behind the pelmet of Jase's wadded shoulders.

But the door didn't open, although the occupant still maundered within, and they passed out into the night without incident.

"Forgot my brolly,” Bridgeman said, wincing beneath the drizzle, but Jase was halfway up the path.

"Don't bother,” he said. “We'll go to the Orange Tree. It's only up the road."

Ten minutes later, the lights of the Orange Tree were visible on the horizon. Jase was the kind of bloke who walked ahead. Bridgeman trotted along behind, head down, hands in pockets, listening to Jase as he went on.

"Mate paid for this bird the other night. Pretty little thing, on her knees with her tits out. She goes, ‘You can't come in my mouth, I don't like it.’ Mate pisses himself and goes, ‘For two hundred quid an hour, darling, I expect to be able to come in your fucking brain!’”

Dear God, thought Bridgeman. “Did he?” he said.

"Did he what?"

"You know, come in her—"

"Her brain?"

"No, her—"

"Facialed her,” Jase said, and pushed through the heavy saloon bar door into the pub.

Bridgeman followed Jase to the bar. After a moment of standing in silence, Bridgeman asked, “What you having?"

"Stella,” said Jase, and wandered over to the fruit machine.

Bridgeman ordered and leaned against the bar. The Orange Tree had always been a lively pub but since the smoking ban it had lost its heart. Whereas previously the bar had been a place at which to sit, up on a high stool, do a crossword and enter into shallow intimacies with barmaids, it was now a gleaming counter, soulless as a serving hatch, at which you bought your drinks and headed outside to stand beneath the shelter and complain that the patio heaters weren't working. Smoke had once softened the air; now everything was too sharp under the lights, the generic pub chain décor too evident. It saddened Bridgeman, who enjoyed the occasional cigar with a pint, that never again would he be able to sit at a bar and relax into a sedentary, civilised evening, choosing with whom to converse, maybe treating himself to a glass of port with a Hamlet, watching the evening unfold from within that hazy, warm, mitigated glow, without having to get up every five minutes to go outside for a smoke. It was like having diarrhoea.

Jase came back to the bar for more change. “Cunt's gagging to pay out,” he muttered. He grabbed his pint, took a long swallow. Then he noticed the large bottle behind the bar, half full of coins, a charitable collection for life-limited children. “Mate nicked one of them once. Walked straight out of a pub with a nebuliser of champagne under his coat. Over a ton in it.” Bridgeman noticed how Jase's eyes were already starting to dart around the pub, looking for other people, people who weren't Bridgeman specifically, to come in. Older mates. Bridgeman had seen this distraction before, Jase's rapid attention deficit, so he got his question in:

"Who lives in the room downstairs?"

Jase peered at Bridgeman over the rim of his pint glass. His expression became guarded, vigilant. “Some bloke,” he said, and took a sip of lager while watching Bridgeman through narrowed eyes.

Bridgeman laughed, suddenly nervous. He hated the uncomfortable deference Jase generated in him. Why couldn't he just talk to the man like anyone else? Something about Jase kept him off-balance, constantly alert to misinterpretation and derision.

Jase put his glass down on the bar and stood, arms dangling, staring at Bridgeman.

"Well—"

"Well what?” Jase said.

"Well, what's he like? What's his name?” Bridgeman felt weak, girly again. But he persisted, because he wanted to know. “Why does he shout all the time?"

The saloon bar door opened. They both turned to see who was coming in; a bus drove past, bright windows crammed with faces like the cluttered panels of a comic strip sliding through the night, the stormy hiss of its passing drowning Jase's reply.

"What?” Bridgeman said, leaning closer.

Jase turned to face him. “Because he's a mouthy cunt!” he said.

Bridgeman was about to say something, but Jase had already returned his attention to the fruit machine. Bridgeman observed a whitening of Jase's knuckles around the pint glass. Pub etiquette was about to be violated.

"Cunt's just walked in,” Jase said through clenched teeth. The words were like bits of static.

Bridgeman glanced over. The middle aged man who had entered a moment ago had toddled straight over to the fruit machine and was preparing to slot in a quid. Happy as you like.

Jase slammed his pint down on the bar and started across the floor towards the man. In went the quid. Round went the barrels; lights flashed, buttons lit up, options presented themselves. The man stabbed at a Hold button. Bar. Bar. Bar.

Bridgeman watched, enthralled and mortified, as Jase sidled up to the man.

Lost to Bridgeman amidst the merry sound of a cascading jackpot, Jase's remarks nevertheless had a profound effect on the man at the fruit machine. He started to reach for the money pooling in the well beneath the screen and then froze. He turned his head to look at Jase, mouth open. Jase nodded with an expression of great seriousness, and then kicked him in the bollocks.

Jase filled his pockets with the man's winnings, stepped over the shuddering body and sauntered back to the bar. Bridgeman's mouth hung open.

"What?” Jase said. He picked up his pint and drained it.

Bridgeman felt sick. Jase's predilection for casual offences both disgusted and fascinated him. He watched as the man pushed himself to his knees, breathing in deep gulps of air, leaned his elbows on a tabletop and attained a stooped upright posture before stumbling out of the pub.

Despite Jase's recent winnings, it was Bridgeman who bought his next pint (with a vodka chaser and a packet of pistachios); he was too stunned by the sudden violence to point out that it was Jase's round. By the time he'd paid, Jase had wandered off again and was talking to a couple of birds out in the smoking area. No doubt one, or both, of these local lovelies would wind up back at the house, shrieking and clumping about, getting a seeing to across various items of furniture. Jase brought someone home nearly every night. It mystified Bridgeman how he did it.

Jase behaved like a priapic stereotype. His conversation revolved around whatever cavorted through his head at the time, predictable fantasies about sex and violence, explicit re-enactments during which, Bridgeman imagined, Jase selected mental images from a palette of fantasy beavers—vaginas appearing like ventricles in his mind, like the mouths of red-throated carp coming up to feed—and applied them liberally over the memories of the knackered old growlers, the torn croissants, that dangled in reality up between the spokes of his genuine conquests.

Bridgeman got himself a gin and tonic and a cigar and went outside. Rain blew in beneath the awning and he shivered as a fine spray spattered the back of his hand and beaded his glass. He hunched his shoulders and stood close to the outside wall. He unwrapped his cigar and put it in his mouth. He was about to light the cigar when Jase emerged from the shadows beyond the awning. His close-cropped hair glittered with hundreds of tiny drops of blood, the reflection in raindrops of infrared from the wall-mounted heater above the conservatory door. There was no sign of the girls, which might have been the reason why, when Bridgeman said, “I'm going to have this and go home.” Jase walked straight past him without even a grunt of acknowledgement.

Bridgeman shook his head as he watched Jase barge through the conservatory and disappear around the corner towards the toilets. He lit his cigar but only had a couple of puffs before he felt his mood dip and he became enervated by a sense of aloneness. He stubbed the cigar, drained his glass and went back into the pub.

Bridgeman put his glass on the bar and waited for Jase. The entire saloon was empty. Even the barmaid had deserted her station; Bridgeman could hear a faint clonking sound from somewhere, probably a barrel being moved in the cellar. He drummed his fingertips on a bar mat.

The place used to be full of blokes and their laughter, their quick, chin-jutting aggression. Now it seemed only to provide service to a passing trade, people coming in for a quick pint on the way home from work or a couple of builders from the site opposite having a game of pool before knocking off. Jase kept coming, kept getting lucky, but it must only be a matter of time before even he got bored with the thinning pickings.

Bridgeman waited for another five minutes. When neither Jase nor the barmaid returned, he decided that was it, he'd go home.

It had stopped raining when he left the Orange Tree and turned right up the high street. He lit a cigarette and began walking back to the house.

Bridgeman had been living there for three weeks. When things had gone sour with Kelly and he'd found it impossible to live with her any longer, it had seemed easier just to move out, to find somewhere to stay as a stop-gap, somewhere to re-evaluate and get his head together. He still missed her at times, missed coming home to somebody, a bit of decent cooking, a clean flat. No; Bridgeman sucked on his cigarette, flicked the butt into a bush, chided himself for his sentimentality. It had been a fucking nightmare. Always something wrong with her, the anxiety and panic attacks, the headaches, the poxy miscarriage, all that stress over something bad happening to her family, her loved ones, her sense of doom—sapping his life, draining him. He remembered the nights she had lain next to him following the miscarriage, sobbing, whispering her fears to him while he had draped a limp arm about her and stared flatly at the ceiling, wishing it would all go away. How fragile he had felt then.

She'd begged him not to leave, promised to get help. Medication, counselling, some kind of talking therapy. Bollocks, he'd said, and left her while she was out visiting her mum. All he'd taken was a rucksack full of clothes, some bedding and his stereo. He'd found the house a few days before, advertised in the local rag. A room in a shared house, communal kitchen, bathroom and lounge. Seventy five quid a week. He'd gone round on his lunch break and met the landlord. It was a grimy terrace house in a side road off the high street. The downstairs front lounge had been converted into a third rentable room. Each door had a Yale lock fitted and a bolt on the inside for added security. Bridgeman was shown into the back bedroom. It had a pervasive atmosphere of gloom, haunted by the wasted lives that had lodged there on feculent mattresses amongst the cans, bottles and oily containers of long, stotious, malnourished afternoons.

"I'll take it,” Bridgeman had said.

The landlord handed him the key and pocketed Bridgeman's deposit and first week's rent in advance. “Rent's due every Monday. Give it to Jase. He's the guy's got the front bedroom. He collects for me."

Bridgeman nodded. The room smelt stale and spicy, like the palm of an old woman's hand. A single sash window looked out over the back yard. Bridgeman could see nothing green in any of the neighbouring yards; just dirt and large plastic toys. A greyhound lifted its shoe-stretcher head and stared up at Bridgeman while it shat behind a roll of chicken wire in the yard opposite. “Make yourself at home,” the landlord said. Bridgeman had followed him back down the uncarpeted stairs. In the hallway, the landlord said, “Telly in the back room don't work. I'm just waiting for someone to hire a skip then in it goes. If you smell gas, tell Jase and he'll let me know."

"Okay,” Bridgeman said. “I'll probably only be here a few months, anyway."

The landlord had frowned. “Just make sure you give me plenty of notice. No midnight flits owing me rent. I won't have it."

Bridgeman shook his head, “Of course not, I—"

"I've marked your card, that's all,” the landlord said. He buttoned his grey overcoat and let himself out onto the street. “Bins go out Wednesday nights,” he said, then turned and walked away.

Bridgeman thought about the day he'd moved in, finding Jase sitting in the kitchen eating inspissated rice straight from the saucepan with a plastic fork.

"Mate needed to store some floor tiles so we stuck them in your room,” Jase had said.

Bridgeman remembered how nerveless he'd felt at the time, how that statement seemed to be the deadpan precursor to a whole new species of communication, a series of announcements to which he could never formulate a sensible reply.

He reached the house and took out his keys. As he lifted the bunch to locate the street door key he thought he saw the curtain in the downstairs room twitch. He stepped back onto the path and waited, watching the bay window for signs of movement. The heavy curtains were veiled behind grubby nets, the runners thick with dusty nodes of cobweb.

After a minute, Bridgeman shrugged and let himself into the house. As soon as the door swung inwards, Bridgeman heard the roaring. He looked at his watch. Twenty past seven. He thought about getting a snack and a cup of tea but remembered the state of the kitchen and changed his mind. His chest felt tight. A line of light flickered beneath the door to his right. The muffled roaring sounded like someone ranting in an artificial language. Bridgeman held his breath. He took a step closer to the door, cocked his head. He could hear the TV but the volume was low. Over the sound of the TV, he tried to make out some words but all he could discern was a loud modulating drone. What would happen if he knocked? Would the occupant answer the door? Bridgeman felt a fluttering in his guts and a vertiginous tingle down the backs of his legs. He had always had a deep-seated fear of nutters, a dread of mental disorder. He had thought too hard about it in his twenties and it had scared him. The loss of control, loss of dignity, the fragmenting of reality and personality, the descent into delusion and paranoia. He thought about Kelly, about her brief, disastrous hospitalisation. She'd come out more of a wreck than when she'd gone in. The roaring continued, drawing Bridgeman back. This bloke was clearly mental. They didn't lock them up so often nowadays, though. He might have been placed there by some charity, left to rave with foul voices roaring in his head, perhaps visited once a month by a nurse with a syringe full of antipsychotics. Bridgeman stepped away from the door. “Mad as a lorry,” he said under his breath. He put a hand in his jacket pocket and fingered his mobile phone. He was thinking about calling Kelly for the first time since he'd moved in. He'd changed his number when he'd left because the endless texts were making him anxious, but he remembered her number. Perhaps losing out on Juna at work and the realisation of how fetid his accommodation was had made him reflect on what he'd had with Kelly, what he'd chucked away. Bridgeman pulled his hand from his pocket. Sleep on it, he advised himself. The phone remained in his pocket, and he trod upstairs to use the bathroom and retire to his room.

Bridgeman urinated with the bathroom door ajar, using the landing light to illuminate his ablutions. The bulb was blown in the bathroom and no one had replaced it since he'd moved in. It was as dank and unseemly as an alcove in a derelict bathhouse, Bridgeman thought. How had he ended up in such a shithole? He must have been blinded by the need to move on, to extricate himself from Kelly's web of collusion.

Bridgeman glanced across the landing at the door to Jase's room. He had only seen inside once, hovering on the threshold as Jase took his second week's rent. As Jase counted the notes with painstaking and distrustful labour, Bridgeman had taken in the sight of a moderate sized room containing a double mattress, portable TV and a multi-gym.

"You're ten short,” Jase had said.

"What?” said Bridgeman.

"You're ten short."

"No, I've literally just counted it."

"You're literally ten short,” Jase had said. Bridgeman could see this turning nasty. He felt suddenly unanchored, frightened. His mouth dried, filled with a cramping mist of adrenaline. He wasn't used to standing his ground. Maybe Jase could consider a reduction in the rent in return for the twelve boxes of terracotta floor tiles still stacked in his room.

"Okay,” Bridgeman had said. “Okay. Here.” He took a ten pound note from his wallet and handed it to Jase. Jase took it, folded it and put it in the back pocket of his jeans. He rolled the rent up and put it in his front pocket then shut the door in Bridgeman's face.

Remembering this now, Bridgeman felt the colour rising to his cheeks. He zipped up and washed his hands beneath a trickle of tepid water. He shook his fingers dry; he could smell the bacteria brewing on the hand towel draped over the edge of the bath.

He went onto the landing and opened his bedroom door. He switched on the lamp by his metal-framed single bed and dragged the curtain across the window, then turned around and stood, eyes flicking from wall to wall, something akin to panic rising in his chest. What a fuck up. He jumped, startled, when the dog opposite bayed a sudden, nervous volley of barks. He took off his jacket, threw it on the plastic swivel chair in the corner then sat on his bed. He felt like he was staring at the back of his eyes. The room seemed to unfocus, darken. Nothing seemed real at that moment and he was suddenly sure that he had woken up dead that morning. Nothing recent felt like it had taken on any substance at all; he could have been a ghost, frail, immaterial, dead but unknowing. His hands shook. Tears filled his eyes.

"Shit,” Bridgeman said in a quiet voice, “this is awful."

He sat like that for a while, dwelling on things, while across the way the dog rattled off sporadic yaps and the sound of lunatic rage rose up from the room below. Bridgeman sighed and took out his phone. When he keyed in Kelly's number all he got was a voicemail message which kicked in on the first ring. It was a message recorded in happier days, a time before miscarriages and despair, and Bridgeman closed his eyes against the sunshine in her voice.

He made a decision. He pulled his rucksack from beneath the bed and started to pack his clothes. He couldn't stay in the house another night. He'd go over to Kelly's and if she couldn't take him in then he'd go to his mum's for the night and see what developed in the morning. He breathed deeper, the impulsivity of his decision giving him a sudden psychological boost. He put the rucksack on his bed, pulled off his pillowcase and bundled his duvet into a black bin liner. He put his jacket on and went out onto the landing. All clear. He went back into his room, slung the rucksack over his shoulder and picked up the duvet. He had little else besides his stereo, which he'd come back for after stowing the bags in his car. Before he opened his door, he ground his heel onto one of the boxes of floor tiles stacked against the wall. He grinned as he heard a number of tiles splinter. “Oops,” he said.

Bridgeman went downstairs and opened the front door. As he stood in the hallway, he realised that the roaring had stopped. He looked at his watch. An hour and a half had passed since he'd got back from the Orange Tree. Often the roaring would go on until after eleven, then, Bridgeman assumed, whatever medication the crazy bastard was taking probably took effect and dropped him into a synaptic oblivion. Oh well, not his problem any more. God, it would be good to snuggle up in a soft double bed, the only sound to break the silence the rustle of the wind in the trees outside the bedroom window. What had he been thinking of these past three weeks? He allowed himself an indulgent smile as he racked it all up to the understandable phenomenon of male angst and the need for space.

Bridgeman put the bags in the boot of his car, and then went back inside to get his stereo. He had decided to leave his keys on the kitchen table; he had no intention of returning or seeking out the landlord. He was paid up until the end of the week and owed nothing, so this didn't count as a flit. He could have given some notice, but fuck it. That was the way of these seedy lets. He reached the bottom of the stairs and Jase said, “Where the fuck are you going?"

Bridgeman cried out. He missed his step and jarred his back as his foot jammed against the bottom riser. He turned on trembling legs as Jase stepped out from the darkness of the communal lounge. Jase's bulk filled the hallway. Bridgeman took a step backwards. What could he say? “I'm moving out,” he said.

Jase stumbled as he came towards Bridgeman and Bridgeman could see that he was quite clearly drunk. “You owe me,” Jase said. “You're short."

Bridgeman backed up the stairs. “Don't be ridiculous, I—"

"I see you standing outside that room listening,” Jase said as he started to mount the stairs. He used the banister to steady himself. “Mate don't like spying."

Bridgeman realised with a kind of dumb clarity that Jase must have been skulking there all the time, watching him as he stood outside the mad lodger's door. Jase must have left the Orange Tree before him and beaten him home all along.

Bridgeman reached the landing. “He's your mate?” he asked. He recalled the anecdotes, the constant stream of degenerate yarns, and couldn't make the connection between their content, however exaggerated, and the low-functioning mentalist in the room downstairs.

As Jase reached the stairwell, Bridgeman retreated into his room. He went to close the door but Jase lunged across the landing and shouldered it open. Bridgeman staggered backwards and tripped over a pile of floor tiles. He sprawled, reaching out as he did so, and took hold of a shard of terracotta from one of the tiles he had broken earlier. Jase came into the room and stood over him. “It's time you met my mate,” he said.

"I don't want to,” Bridgeman said, and slashed at Jase's thigh with the shard. He missed, and Jase knocked him unconscious with his fists.

Bridgeman came to. He was tied to a chair. He moaned and licked his lips but his mouth was so dry his tongue felt more like a gloved finger. His eyes were swollen shut. He was in a lot of pain.

And then he was fully alert, all sluggishness gone the instant he realised where he was. He was tied to a chair, facing the corner like some brutalised dunce, in the room downstairs. His bladder weakened as he heard the sound of something moving behind him. Something crossing the room.

Bridgeman tried to twist his head around, but the back of the chair prevented him from seeing anything more than a peripheral view of the bare grey wall and half of the door. The room stank of sweat and meat and excrement. Bridgeman gagged.

Bridgeman began to weep. Somehow he knew Jase was outside the door, listening, waiting. Pickings were getting thin, the society he kept was becoming scarce; he needed a boost it seemed. Needed someone to refuel his flagging invention. The overstated adventures, the embellished capers, needed a top up now and again. How many other hapless lodgers had gone this way? Lonely, lost men adrift in impermanence, ushered into this wretched address, to be picked off by Jase and used to feed the embodiment of his turbid ego?

Bridgeman froze; it was standing behind him: the personification of Jase's fantastic bragging. Bridgeman felt it lean towards him and part of it came into view. From the corner of his eye, Bridgeman could see what made up the bulk of its head. His weeping continued but they were silent tears now as he tried to lean his body away from the thing that stood behind him in that dark and fearful room.

And as the roaring started an inch from his ear, he realised that the thing in the room was, as Jase had said, all mouth.

Copyright © 2008 Paul Meloy

WATERY DARK: INSIDE & OUT

Guillermo del Toro leads the charge for today's resurgence of Spanish horror, but the likes of Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza bring their own vigour and style to the field.

Written and directed by Balagueró, the absorbing mystery of The Nameless (Los Sin Nombre, 1999) adapts Ramsey Campbell's acclaimed 1981 novel into a deliriously ominous conspiracy thriller, mixing David Lynch's arty weirdness with Clive Barker's penchant for sheer nasty effects. Atmospheric supernatural thriller Darkness (2002) benefits from a notable cast (Anna Paquin, Lena Olin, Iain Glen), all of whom engage our sympathy for their sinister predicament, confronting occult forces and prominent use of watery images, with ritual sacrifice timed for a Solar eclipse, and plenty of cold sharp threats, despite telltale ambiguity regarding the wickedly treacherous menace. Balagueró's haunting chiller Fragile (2005) stars Calista Flockhart (of Ally McBeal fame) as American nurse Amy, starting over in England, working at a rundown children's hospital that's home to a ghostly mechanical girl. Paco Plaza's gothic fable Romasanta: The Werewolf Hunt (2004) features Julian Sands as mid-19th century Spain's wolf-man serial killer. Here's a surprising blend of necrophilia, scientifically ‘rationalised’ courtroom debate (genetic predisposition of violent criminals), quirkily amusing historical inaccuracies, and romantic tragedy adding a broader appeal to its cross-genre tropes. Balagueró and Plaza's zombie horror [REC] (11 August) compares favourably to George Romero's underrated Diary of the Dead, as both intriguing exploration of improvised pseudo documentary narrative, and terrifying siege drama. Ambitious TV presenter Angela (Manuela Velasco, School Killer) visits a fire station in Barcelona for an impromptu ride-along during their night-shift callout, but all are taken unawares when entering a building where infected tenants have become flesh-hungry undead. Narrative energy abounds as varied helpless residents and unlucky cops are trapped, along with Angela and her vexed cameraman, in a quarantine situation, where every grisly or unsettlingly candid moment is caught on video—"so you don't miss a bloody thing."

I interviewed ‘[REC]’ directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza.

Did you have any problems adapting Ramsey Campbell's novel ‘The Nameless'?

JB: The Nameless was my first movie, so I had the typical financing problems. It was very hard to find a company and enough budget to produce it. I spent almost two years to find the way make it.

In horror film villainy, which generates the strongest ‘fear’ on screen: a lone monster or a conspiracy of evil?

JB: A conspiracy of evil, definitely. I think most scary things are those you can't see or you can't understand.

What's the enduring appeal of haunted-house movies?

JB: I've always loved the haunted houses genre, this strange menace hidden in abandoned building, full of secrets from the past. When I was a child I always felt attracted by empty buildings, the remains of the past, the echoes of old disappeared lives. I find it very scary and disturbing.

Why are children so commonly effective as spooky ‘monsters'?

JB: Children combine the pure cruelty and the pure innocence. You never know what to expect from a child. For me, that means subtlety and mystery.

Why did you choose the Isle of Wight as location for ‘Fragile'?

JB: I needed to locate the hospital in a very isolated place, in order to get those children in a critical and dangerous situation, almost abandoned. That's why I choose an island. The Isle of Wight is incredibly creepy and silent, like a haunted place.

How important is the unpredictable ‘twist-ending’ in genre cinema?

PP: It depends of the film and the strategy of storytelling you want to use. There are a lot of brilliant films that don't have one, but it's true that for the audience it is amazingly satisfying to leave the theatre feeling they collaborated in sorting out the puzzle. And especially after The Sixth Sense it's become more and more usual.

Working on ‘Romasanta’ and ‘Darkness', how did each of you get on with producer Brian Yuzna?

PP: Brian is a lovely and a very clever man. Sometimes you can obviously disagree but he's got a lot of experience and he was very generous to me.

The wolf-man transformation in ‘Romasanta’ is very distinctive. Was there any particular inspiration for that nightmarish sequence?

PP: More than a particular film, we wanted it to have an old-fashion look. We didn't want anything digital involved; I wanted it to happen in front of the camera, like in a classic Hammer or Universal film. The work of DDT was, once again, superb.

Why did you decide to co-direct ‘[REC]'?

PP: That decision was never taken, it just happened naturally. We started to think together, to discuss the film and everything began to grow, and before too long we knew we had to do it together, for we both had given that much to the film. Moreover, in this case, for the atypical nature of the project, it was possible to do it with four hands.

Which film directors have influenced you most?

PP: It's impossible not to forget a lot, but here we go: Carpenter, Spielberg, Ford, Mizoguchi, Polanski, Berlanga, Buñuel, Cameron ... it's very difficult to stop!

Eric Red's twisted serial-killer farce Body Parts was a perfect exemplar of the genre's organ-donor horrors, where innocent recipients of limb-transplants become guilty of murder although someone else's hand wielded the knife. If eye-surgery produces dark movie visions, what chills await wearers of hair extensions? It lacks the melancholy atmosphere of Won Shin-yeon's cancer-survival drama The Wig, but successfully plugs into the lore of Japanese spooky movies about long black hairdos, and Sion Sono (maker of Suicide Club) directs the grisly Exte: Hair Extensions (Ekusute, 14 July) as lightweight satirical comedy that quickly segues into absurdist fantasy shocks. Happy-go-lucky Yuko (big-nosed Chiaki Kuriyama, homicidal schoolgirl Go-go in Tarantino's Kill Bill) is a talented apprentice stylist, until lumbered with child-minding her obnoxious half-sister's abused daughter, and the eccentric fetishist of a local mortuary decides to profit from his macabre hobby by selling a dead girl's braids at the thriving salon where Yuko works. Introductory dialogue offers info-dumpy narration, and playful chats to camera solicit amused responses from viewers, but such levity does not last. A corpse stuffed with hair sprouts wild tangles. A scalp-ripping hanging by ‘live’ whiplash tresses follows the psycho-hairdresser attack. Soon, autonomous curtains/carpets of hair, to curl up and die inside, spread like jungle vines and there's no escape from bald medusa nightmares, or the particularly disturbing imagery of hirsute tongues. “Let it grow, let it grow,” croons the necro/trichophiliac weirdo. For hairy-eyed, dry rustling, wall-to-wall, suffocating mane-monsters, Exte is a cut above and beyond the lunatic fringe.

American starlet Gina Philips was great in Jeepers Creepers, but fails to elevate British horror The Sick House (14 July) from becoming a hideous timewaster, which barely holds attention, let alone interest. The storyline about plague rats and medieval ghosts in modern London probably looked very good on paper, especially with such a clever twist ending. However, the casting of so many young actors, all turning in dreadfully unsympathetic performances of largely irritating characters, and director Curtis Radclyffe's choice to shoot the film's ragged spectres and the majority of chase scenes in the perpetual gloom of a condemned hospital setting means there's almost no colour except dark green rot, and too many poorly-framed close-ups fail to generate feelings of claustrophobia, as probably intended. Although its primary menace, the revival of a 17th century doctor-turned masked serial killer, makes for a potentially intriguing villain, the ‘archaic survivals’ plot of lingering disease and consequent slaughter lacks general coherence. Still, it's the unrelieved dimness and the relentlessly squalid ugliness of the ‘underworld prison maze’ set décor which makes this supposedly “haunting and atmospheric chiller” simply unexciting and occasionally boring to watch.

Diary of the Dead (30 June) marks George A. Romero's unexpectedly quick return to zombie affairs since the excellent Land of the Dead (2005) enthralled fans of his earlier trilogy. Unfairly criticised as a blatant fake-docudrama rip-off, this offers plenty of black comedy scenes, energetically celebrating Romero's discriminating subversion of subgenre clichés (especially that delicious ‘mummy movie’ irony). Film students and their professor escape from Pittsburgh, while the world succumbs to the virulent mania of cannibalistic plague. Much bullshit laconicism and savagely dark hilarity ensues (the homicidal Amish bloke is shrewdly brilliant) amidst the juicy gore and a smattering of digital effects, making this a gleefully nasty triumph of wit, with a forgivable minimum of self-referential moments. Despite its fairly predictable nature, there's much to enjoy along the assorted survivors’ dangerous highway odyssey to safety in a mansion's panic room. Even watching youth stereotypes coming to terms with their mortality can be entertaining, compared to the blatant vacuity of many recent teen slasher pictures. This deserves your attention for its postmodernist film-within-a-film (Jason Creed's broodingly philosophical ‘The Death of Death') byplays, and the director's unique grasp of how to balance social criticism against the standard bloody thrills of dismemberment and head smashing. Riding above yet another decade's explosive wave of cut-price imitations this indie production marks a truly inventive return to creative worthiness for the undead apocalypse movie.

The latest shocker from Thailand, Ghost Game (Laa-thaa-phii, 23 June) posits a reality-TV show in a disused Cambodian prison camp on a seemingly cursed island, where eleven young contestants are given contrived tasks to perform, and soon find themselves confronting supernatural forces. It's an Asian remix of Big Brother and Most Haunted. Staged pranks to frighten players are disrespectful provocation of the dead, resulting in unwelcome visits by unquiet spirits and the wrath of wraiths. Exploring the war memorial to barbaric atrocities evokes a minimum of atmosphere, while clumsy first-time director Sarawut Wichiensarn foregoes anything resembling suspense in favour of cheap scares derived from such hackneyed devices as a proverbial dark and stormy night in the dungeon, and overuse of thunder-crash sound effects for the unsurprising appearances by scarred and grotty phantasms. The colour scheme is generally dreary, dominated by the very limited palette of grainy blacks and drab greens, and, unfortunately, this makes even daylight scenes visually unappealing. With nothing going on except a few bumps in the night to sustain any tension, the film conforms to a vapid formula of tiresome shrieks, and plot shirks (don't waste your time scanning for cultural subtexts or socio-political statements) for un-endearing passionless and sketchy characterisations, all underplayed almost to the point of somnambulism.

On the run through Parisian riot hell after a rightwing election victory, a carload of youths decamp to the countryside, but are waylaid at a stopover motel by a psycho family of neo-Nazi cannibals, in gore-fest Frontiers (Frontières, 7 July), the feature debut of writer-director Xavier Gens (maker of Hitman). Yasmine (Karina Testa) is three months pregnant, which is all that saves her from joining murdered friends in elitist Von Geisler's larder of salted cadavers, as these reclusive holdouts for a ‘master race’ need to expand their (contaminated) gene pool. Following several rounds of hardcore sadism, there's an operatic dinnertime ordeal in store for Yasmine, where the hosts welcome her as their new leader's bride. Familiar episodes from Texas Chainsaw Massacre scenarios collide with the brutal torture-porn of Hostel and much frenzied bloodshed ensues, with an intense and gritty style that only falls back to rather less convincing horror action for the heroine's brief visit to local mine works (where unwanted offspring lurk), the climactic slaughterhouse fighting, and a crowd-pleasing shootout for the archetypal bad girls with guns. Harassed, beaten, nearly broken, Yasmine is the slasher genre's newest ‘final girl', repeatedly drenched in her attackers’ blood, arterial spray reaching the fountain heights and lawn-sprinkler breadths of Shogun Assassin's legendary blanket coverage of ‘red rain'. If intro montages of TV news reports and location footage recall the seriousness of apocalyptic SF, the spectacular ending's blunt force vengeance is reminiscent of spaghetti westerns. Part evocative fairy tale, part cautionary myth, with layers of sinister and savage theatricality in a blatant attempt to moderate our grieving heroine's pain and suffering with some reassuringly disreputable ‘Grand Guignol’ retribution. This film is no respecter of safety zones or boundaries, delivering a wild rush of moral outrage, unflinching shocks, chilling despair and dark comedy. Prefer your tragic horror movies resolved by merciless ultra-violence? ('Born into a world of chaos and hatred?') This one's for you.

When a horror cycle is not promoting newcomers, it's developing alternative shooting locations. Bulgaria seems to be the new Canada nowadays, and for Zombies (aka Wicked Little Things, 21 July) southeastern Europe stands in for Pennsylvania mountains, where ghost-ghouls of mineworkers’ children—buried alive ‘accidentally’ nearly a century ago—haunt local woodlands. Directed by capable hack J.S. Cardone (Shadowzone, The Forsaken, 8MM 2), this unfocused chiller documents unsavoury feeding habits, shuffles a handful of shabby cardboard characters (shark-mannered property developer, a grieving widow and mismatched daughters, devoutly religious hillbilly acquainted with town's awful secret history), while exhibiting a jumble of quaint or weird customs loaned from Stephen King's library/oeuvre. Pasty-faced, black-eyed, spooky kids swing picks or hammers for killing, and behave like a wolf pack, sweeping away cattle or stray teens, during their nightly hunts for guilty flesh and blood. The hills and vales are heavy with ground mist but even well photographed scenery, suggesting the appropriate mood, cannot generate suitable atmosphere without directorial inspiration, a perfectly attuned score, or some involving drama. Alas, the ambiguous title Zombies is a match for the film's regrettably inadequate entertainment value as fairly timid horror, stuck with a 15 certificate.

TLA Releasing launched their ‘Danger After Dark’ label to champion indie horror, but recently they have given us only insipid cheapo stuff—like turgid backwoods slasher Carver (reeking of many so many Texas Chainsaw clichés you might well start thinking Tobe Hooper has a lot to answer for!), and from the Crook brothers we get hopelessly naff ‘psychological thriller’ Gruesome (aka Salvage), in which comely shop girl Claire (Lauren Currie Lewis) finds her day keeps repeating like a nightmare, and she keeps getting murdered. Now, Hell's Ground (Zibahkhana, 4 August) is billed as the first Pakistani splatter movie, and it's no exception to delirious fanboy rules, imitating favourite scenes from Night of the Living Dead and Texas Chainsaw (yet again!), while fielding a monumentally camp (with the emphasis on bloody mental) slayer of teens (rebels, boys and girls, together) who disobey strict parents, and take a road trip away-day for a rock show. Directed by Omar Khan, it's a one-way journey into polluted and medieval bandit country, where a bedlam-happy maniac in a bloodstained burka swings a spiked ball and chain. Even with cheerful comicbook style asides, chaptering plenty of engagingly demented gore, and a batch of shamelessly two-dimensional characters ripe for culling, this quickly reveals itself to be a disposable novelty. The Lollywood mix of English and Urdu seems designed to confuse or irritate. Moments that are intended to shock fail to frighten because these filmmakers seem far more interested in generic ‘homage’ than using their own imaginations. It's adequate enough as ridiculous fun (the frequently inappropriate music is likely to be treasured by aficionados of mondo macabre cinema), but hardly intriguing or entertaining on any level except sub-standard parody or feckless knockoff.

Foreigners are not the only novice filmmakers guilty of spoofing exploitation movies. British farce Bloodbath at the House of Death (produced in 1984, now uncut on DVD, 28 July), was co-written by veteran joke merchant Barry Cryer, starred Kenny Everett—once hailed as TV comedy genius—and director Ray Cameron (like Cryer, a regular contributor to Everett's frequently absurd and vaguely anarchic telly series) assembled a cast of popular performers, including Pamela Stephenson (from Not The Nine O'clock News), Gareth Hunt (Gambit in New Avengers), Don Warrington (of Rising Damp), John Fortune (recently, a hit as one half of the ‘Long Johns’ duo), Sheila Steafel (Ghosts of Motley Hall), pin-up Cleo Rocos (unusually demure here, after so many ‘naughty bits’ for Everett's shows), and the great Vincent Price—in Satanist supreme mode, as ‘sinister man’ playing up to the fanboys’ gallery. Kenny camps it up, encouragingly, as the boffin with a mecha leg, but acting never rises above venerable pantomime grade, there's enough toilet humour, slapstick and lazy innuendo to embarrass Mel Brooks, and tawdry lampoons of Carrie (schoolgirl-torment flashback), Alien (a chest-burster that's only a burp), The Entity (a once-controversial topless scene), and the climactic parade of doppelganger body-snatchers, achieve little if anything except killing 90 minutes of your viewing time. It's a slight shock to realise that Carry On Screaming (1966), and even The Monster Club (1980), are better horror comedy in every respect. Not in the least bit amusing, this is mostly sad, occasionally dull, and entirely witless in its basic ‘satire’ of The Legend of Hell House (1973).

Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona's debut feature The Orphanage (El Orfanato, 21 July) visits familiar creepy territories, with standard genre depictions of spooky children and a haunted house, but shifts through enough different moods during the unfolding of its mystery-chiller storyline that it's sufficiently entertaining overall to be worth recommendation, even to jaded cynics who've seen it all before. Nostalgic mother Laura (Belén Rueda) returns to her early-childhood home and draws husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and young Simón (Roger Princep) into conflict with a history of dark secrets, damned lies and murders. Treasure hunt games unexpectedly lead Simón to discover that he's adopted ("Is Father Christmas a lie, too?"), while the intrusive old biddy that claims to be a social worker has only vengeful malice in mind. The carnival atmosphere of a welcome party, when Laura and Carlos reopen their place to disabled orphans, is swept away by waves of disquiet, regret and fear. Following the young boy's alarming disappearance, worryingly inexplicable bumps in the night prompt Laura to get help from spiritualist Aurora (Geraldine James, in a great casting coup) to solve the mystery, and the medium's techie crew remain amusingly supportive and uninterested in debunking phantasmal visitations, investigating Simón's ‘invisible friend’ Tomas, or speculating about rational explanations for ghostly phenomena. The filmmaker's creaks and shadows approach to screen terrors is finely tuned and deliciously creepy, yet a tragic poignancy is all that develops by the predictably bittersweet (the lost children are found, but not ‘saved'), happy ending, and various allusions to Peter Pan seem more like free association thinking than genuinely creative inspiration. Fans of similar, moody genre treats like The Devil's Backbone and The Others will enjoy this a lot.

Franck Vestial's grimly mysterious Eden Log (28 July) presents SF-horrors from the dark soul of optimism. Tolbiac (Clovis Cornillac, villain of Eric Barbier's The Serpent, and star of Poltergay), crawls out of a mud pit, as if buried alive in the underground network of neglected maintenance tunnels, junked labs, and hidey-holes of a derelict complex in some failed utopian world. As a bewildered amnesiac fugitive, he's both protagonist and catalyst for change amidst clashes between the riot-cop security of above, and random attacks from bestial mutant-worker drones of below. Tolbiac's physical and mental struggle is a quest for sanity and freedom that feels like a surreal climbing journey from the centre of the Earth. With a tone reminiscent of Luc Besson's non-dialogue The Last Battle (Le Dernier Combat), and uphill plotting that's permeated with a nagging sense of betrayal, this trek in a maze becomes a draining and dispiriting experience, lacking the puzzle-solving focus of the Cube trilogy. Watching archived surveillance playback to reveal backstory also makes for an emotionally deadening climax, despite obvious evidence of the precarious state of the biotech Eden Log project, leaving curiosity just hanging by a thread, but at least that avoids breaking the show-don't-tell rule. Although cluttered and grungy set designs call to mind a garage Terry Gilliam style, there's none of the humorous appeal that's found in trash chic interiors of Brazil or 12 Monkeys. There's a distinct lack of varied colours too. (What's up with today's filmmakers? Is this some weirdo bleak aesthetic reaction against the vivid glamour of popular comic-book movies’ visual styling?) Director Vestial's co-writer Pierre Bordage has contributed to Marc Caro's forthcoming Dante 01, a space opera that might be worth looking out for.

Joby Harold's start-up.com Awake (25 August) tackles the medical phenomenon of ‘anaesthetic awareness’ when too-trusting newlywed heir with a rare blood type agrees to heart transplant, while crooked doctor, patient's gold-digger wife and their cohorts plot surgical sabotage. Unlike typical end-users, victim remains fully conscious, but paralysed, throughout ordeal of cold reality/memory lane walkabout/imaginary life overlaps. Luckily, the dupe's mum figures out wicked plot, just in time ... Programme celebrity features: Hayden Christensen/Jessica Alba/Lena Olin. Minimum system requirements: Configuration IQ: 50+. Attention span: 5-10 minutes. Memory: 80+ minutes. Drivers: fast-forward button 2.0 (optional itchy finger). Credibility: supports out-of-body experiences. Morbidity level: virtually bloodless, if considering scalpel/bone-saw/ribs-spreader apps. Morality: tolerance for urgently heroic suicide preferred. Sentimentality: gross. Special circumstances: none. Limbo escape clause: life affirming, eventually.

A blandly washed-out colour scheme in which town and country palettes look interchangeable, and the annoyingly explosive sonic overkill of every OMG utterance and each predictable fright getting a crashing music underscore or roaring sound effect, are the twin mistakes of Matthew Leutwyler's utterly by-the-numbers thriller Unearthed (18 August) made in 2007 and easily confused with Craig Kovash's 2004 film of the same title—which appears to have the same basic hokey plot too! Ever since the triple whammy of Alien, John Carpenter's The Thing, and Predator, re-established sci-fi monster movies as profitable entertainment, this subgenre has been flooded with cheap rip-offs and mired in the simplest of clichés. Although it steadily improves as big-dumb-fun movie, towards the end of its 90-minute runtime, this routine exercise in amateurish exploitation follows writer-director Leutwyler's Dead and Breakfast, a similarly tawdry mix of typically suspense-less generic menace clumsily segueing into a standard checklist of action heroics. Alcoholic-sheriff babe (Emmanuelle Vaugier, sadly typecast nowadays, far better in House of the Dead 2) teams up with scientist chick (dozy Tonantzin Carmelo) to help obsessed local archaeologist (Luke Goss), philosophical grandpa (Russell Means), and unwary travellers stranded in a US desert, where an extraterrestrial creature with a bad temper after 900 years of hibernation is dug up in a cave. Graduating from livestock to human slaughter, the beastie wisely skulks about in dark corners until called on to scamper about in plain sight for a final half-hour's killing-spree, at which point it becomes instantly silly not scary. Occasional hits emerge from the squishy meld of seen-it-all-before trashy movies: Slither was good fun; Tremors deserved its franchise run. This depressingly hackneyed offering lacks the knowingly wacky charm of Uwe Boll's Alone in the Dark, is full of missed opportunities and pointless asides, and fails to match the expected average standard for inclusion on a horror festival bill.

Copyright © 2008 Tony Lee

Vegas brought life to the desert of Nevada, but it could be a deadly place too, Frankie knew. It was only a matter of time before his luck ran out and he'd be pushing up the cacti with others like him. So this time he'd be the one catching the flight out. Him, Kim, and the briefcase.

He glanced over at it. On this stretch of highway he could afford to take his eyes off the road. He must've seen two cars in as many hours.

"Don't worry,” he said, “You'll still get your ride. You just ain't going to the usual place. You're coming with me."

Talking to the case was a habit he'd picked up some time ago. He'd been running it from casino to airstrip every month for nearly three years now. Running the cash was a regular chore and bore, but at least it wasn't as messy as the other jobs he got; sweat washed out a lot easier than blood. Due payment; everybody got what was owed them. It had been his only companion for the long journey each time, and while he knew it probably wasn't normal, there was some comfort in conversation. Right now, he needed that comfort. Stealing from guys like these was bad for your health, and stealing from Paul Clietelli was worse.

"How about somewhere a bit cooler?” he asked.

The case didn't reply. It never did.

Frankie turned his attention back to the road. He wiped at his forehead with a shirt sleeve already wet with sweat. Each was rolled as high up his muscled arms as he could get them, but bunched as they were he simply sweated more in the pits. He could feel his back stuck to the seat, and his pants clung uncomfortably to his legs.

"Yeah, this place is far too hot,” he said. He realised he'd made a joke and laughed. “Too hot for us, that's for sure."

Especially since they'd screwed over the Haitians. Those motherfuckers were mean. Plus that scary voodoo shit, who needed that? Frankie didn't. It was a good time to get out.

He tapped at the air vent for the hundredth time and finally decided to hell with the air conditioning. He cranked the window down.

Hot desert air filled the car, thick and stifling, but at least it ruffled the clothes. He stuck his head out of the window and closed his eyes against any sand, letting the wind tousle his hair. It felt like a hair dryer on full heat.

"Goddamn."

Frankie came back in and cranked the window shut again.

"Really, I should know better.” He paused. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Shut the fuck up."

The case had been shut the fuck up the whole time, so it had no problem with that.

Frankie looked at the miles done and checked his watch. “Almost there."

He thought about Kim. She must be going through hell. Okay, so she ain't driving this beat up piece of shit through the Nevada desert with the sun blasting down like a blowtorch, sweating like a nigger in a courtroom. In fact, she was probably making the most of that motel shower right now, full cold spray on that perfect hot body. He wouldn't mind sweating if he was making it with her. She looked good in a sweat. She always looked good. A beauty queen once, if you believed the stories, and Frankie believed the stories. First thing he'd do when he got there was make her sweat with him. Get her all shiny and glistening like a wet Barbie doll. Get that tired panting smile on her face. Then get her the hell out for cooler climes and a happier life.

She must be going through hell right now.

Frankie considered calling her. He was running late and she'd be worrying. Mr Clietelli wanted him to do a bandit walk first. Eight years in the business and Clietelli had him walking the casino machines like a goddamn new heel. “It'll do you good, Frankie. Lots of nice ladies out there on the bandits. Such a waste of arm action."

He'd laughed like he was supposed to, and did the walk like he had to, telling himself the whole time it was the last time he'd ever have to do what Pauly said again.

And now he was late.

He reached around for where his jacket lay across the back seat. He groped for the pocket, trying to find his cell. Couldn't find it. His gun, yes, but not the phone. He gave up. Probably wouldn't have a signal anyway; everything was dead out here.

"She'll be okay. Probably appreciate me more when I get there.” He grinned, thinking of how that appreciation might be demonstrated. He'd get some due payment of his own. Kim was a good woman to share a bed with, and not because she didn't snore. In fact, she could make some very loud noises in the bedroom when she wanted to, and Frankie liked to make her want to. Beauty queen? Shit, she could have been a rodeo queen. She could have been anything. So why'd she have to go and be Paul Clietelli's wife?

He sighed. Love: it even happened to the bad guys. What ya gonna do?

There was a building ahead, a dirty white squat thing with a large board announcing motel, clear enough even from this distance, shimmering heat and all. Closer, he saw there was a gas pump, too, and a grimy-windowed diner.

"The Ritz."

If the case agreed, it kept the opinion to itself.

The guy behind the counter looked like Norman Bates. He told Frankie that his ‘wife’ had checked in already. The way he said it suggested he didn't buy the wife story at all. Not Frankie's wife, anyway.

Frankie didn't much like that. He wished he hadn't put on his jacket getting out of the car; he knew how his arms looked in rolled shirt sleeves.

"Room eight,” the desk man said, putting the key on the counter.

"You need that many?” Frankie took the key and turned away.

"You can park out back."

"Yeah, yeah."

He wouldn't be staying long enough. Just a quickie, then they'd be long gone.

Frankie was still thinking these thoughts as he let himself in, swapping the dry dusty air of outside for the coolness of a dark air-conditioned room. He'd been right about the shower; he could hear it running. He tossed the case onto the bed next to a small lacy fortune of underwear. He imagined Kim's naked body arching under the shower spray. That, and his thought of doing her on the bathroom tiles, distracted him from noticing the purse on the floor. He missed the phone too.

"Hope you're not washing in there, baby, you know I like you dirty."

He kicked off his shoes. One of them struck the purse and finally he noticed it. It was open, puking its contents of make-up, sunglasses, and cigarettes onto the carpet. Not far from it a phone lay broken and cordless.

He reached into his jacket as a man stepped out from the bathroom.

"Hello, Frankie.” He had a gun. Adapted for quiet.

"Pauly—"

Clietelli waved away whatever he was going to say. It was just as well; Frankie didn't really know what he was going to say.

"Good pun with the washing/dirty thing. What's next, ‘Let's clean out Clietelli'? ‘Wash our hands of him forever'? Maybe a money laundering gag? I see you brought it with you."

"It's all there Pauly."

Clietelli nodded in a way that said it wasn't important, or he didn't care. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't a lot of money. But no one stole from Paul Clietelli. Frankie had delivered that line himself many times. Besides, he was stealing more than the cash.

"I think you lost first name privileges, Frankie. Back to Mr Clietelli for you. Now get your hand out of your jacket."

It seemed the bandit walk wasn't the last time Frankie would do as he was told after all. He got his hand out of his jacket.

Paul Clietelli sighed. “I wanted it to come out empty."

Frankie shrugged, but he kept his own gun. Things could hardly get much worse. He could try sorry, but he knew Clietelli wasn't the kind to accept apologies. “Looks like we got a Mexican stand off,” he said.

"Yeah, well, this ain't Mexico."

They stood.

"I mean it, Frankie. Put that pissy piece of shit down."

"You put yours down. We'll talk.” It was the closest to no he could get.

"Frankie, you talk too much."

The case would have agreed if it could.

"Put it down. Please, Pauly."

"Say ‘pretty please'."

Frankie blinked and Clietelli shot him. There was a soft thup sound, like a bee had hiccupped. He fired again and again, walking forward as he did so, emptying the gun at Frankie who caught every bullet in his chest. Red nickels grew into dimes, darkening his white shirt, then spread into inkblot tests he didn't care to read. Frankie only managed to fire his gun once. He missed. The bullet shattered a mirror somewhere in the bathroom. He fell. He tried to say something.

He died with his mouth open.

Clietelli stared down at Frankie. “Just a kid, for Christ's sake,” he said. Then, louder, “You fucked him up good, sweetheart."

He went to the bathroom.

Kim Clietelli was naked in the shower, as Frankie had imagined (and the desk clerk, actually). But she was cowering under the cold water, not writhing sensually, and her hands were tied to her feet with telephone cord. It kept her in an unflattering position, and her pretty face, held away from the shower spray, was a mask of blood. The gush from her broken nose had stopped, but her split brow still seeped over her swollen eye.

"Yep. He loved you alright."

She sobbed.

"Aw, come on. Love is a beautiful thing.” He tugged roughly at the cord binding her until she was free, and pulled her up out of the tub. He shoved her into the bedroom. “Go take a look."

She stumbled across the carpet and let herself fall when she reached Frankie. She put her hands on his bloody chest and cried.

"Jesus. Romeo and Juliet. I think I'll just go puke."

He went to the bathroom and turned off the shower. He checked himself in the broken mirror. “Sorry about your nose, baby. I'll buy you a new one. Right now, though, you gotta get dressed. This place is a dive, but I still don't think they're used to hearing gunshots."

He stepped from the bathroom and had just enough time to raise his gun before he was shot at again, this time by his wife. No skilled shooter, it was luck that let her hit his gun hand. He yelped. The weapon flew backwards. It clattered in the sink behind him.

He dodged back behind the door frame clutching his numbed hand. Kim continued to shoot off rounds, each smashing uselessly into the bathroom tiles. Shards of sharp ceramic stung his face. He grabbed a towel from the rail and wrapped his bloody hand in it, growling with pain and anger when he realised a finger was missing. He glanced at the sink but couldn't see into it.

In the other room, the gun clicked empty.

Right, you bitch.

Clietelli strode into the bedroom. Kim tried to take up the cowering pose she'd used in the shower, but he didn't give her time. He crossed to her in two steps and laid her out next to her underwear with a punch to the jaw.

"Fuck the dental bills."

He retrieved his gun from the sink (good shot, definitely a three-pointer, but the game wasn't over yet) and found his finger by the toilet. It was pretty ragged, but most of it was intact. He rinsed it, wrapped it in a handkerchief, and put it in his pocket.

In the bedroom he had one dead man, bloody, one unconscious woman, naked, and one case holding one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

It all added up to a busy afternoon.

The desert looked different at night. Instead of a big bright open expanse of sand and sky, it was a big dark open expanse of sand and sky. And it was cooler.

The desert came to life at night. Clietelli had already seen a coyote, its eyes aglow in the headlights, and lizards skittered across the road. Scorpions crunched under the tyres. He paid the wildlife little attention. Most people didn't like to get involved when they heard gunshots, but it wouldn't be long before someone arrived at the motel to check it out. Clietelli didn't want to be there when they did. He needed to be somewhere else, establishing an alibi. He'd dump Frankie, take his wife to a friend's, and get gone.

Just one problem, though. He was lost.

Clietelli did not bury bodies. He used to, but those days were long gone. He'd climbed the ladder out of such chores. He didn't even shoot people very often any more. Somebody else did all that. In fact, that was Frankie's job. Ironic. What Clietelli would do is sit in his room, watch his monitors, and make money. That's what Clietelli did. So it was no wonder he couldn't find the pointing tree. He'd already driven the same stretch of road twice. Now he was heading back Vegas way, it was late, and—

There.

He slowed the car and peered at the tree, finally parking alongside it. How'd he miss it? It was the only fucking tree around. Its light bark was split and two boughs separated from the trunk. One of them twisted upwards, but the other curled out and back on itself to point out into the desert.

"Nearly there, folks."

Unlike Frankie, Paul Clietelli spoke to people when he drove. These ones were dead and unconscious though, so like Frankie he didn't get much by way of a reply. He killed the headlights and turned the car off the road, driving slowly over the hard ground and shallow sands.

Despite Clietelli's slow speed the car heaved and bounced, rising and falling with the terrain. Kim's head knocked against the window with each bump, but it didn't wake her. He'd reached over and pulled her upright a couple of times, but she'd slump back down eventually and continue head-butting the glass. After the third time he'd left her to it.

Frankie, previously sitting up in back, had slid down as if resting. He would have looked like he was sleeping if his eyes weren't staring. Pauly Clietelli had put the jacket on him and done it up to hide a shirt that was black with blood, but it was clear the man was dead. He couldn't wait to get him under the sand.

The car slammed down hard and Clietelli gripped the wheel as tight as his injured hand allowed. He still had a cloth wrapped around it but blood was making the steering wheel sticky.

"Should have brought your car,” he said to his wife.

She would have looked peaceful, if not for the ugly welt across her brow, her purple swollen eye, and the dried blood on her face. Her car was still at the motel, a nice jeep that would have handled this well. But he wasn't going to leave his own vehicle there; fuck that. Let her explain why her car was at a motel where gunshots were heard and blood was probably found. (It didn't matter how well you cleaned up, you never got rid of all the blood.)

But he didn't have to go far off road to get to where he was going.

The occasional body was an occupational hazard in his business. Because of that, people like Frankie, bless his wife-stealing soul, prepared graves in advance out here. You didn't want to dig a hole with a body next to you the whole time; you see officer, it's like this ... No, what you did was have a hole ready, tumble the guy in, and cover it up. Filling a hole was so much easier than digging one.

And now he'd found the spot.

"Hey baby, we're here.” He shook his wife. She groaned. Stirred. “Wake up sweetheart."

He waited for her good eye to struggle open and flicked on the headlights. He didn't want to be seen from the road so he'd only keep them on a moment, but he wanted her to see clearly where they were.

Several holes were dug in the ground, about a dozen in all. Inside each was an inky blackness darker than the starry sky. Mounds of sand and coarse earth waited to be pushed back into the void.

It took a moment to sink in. When it did, she screamed.

"No, no Pauly, no! No! Please Pauly, please no! God!"

He turned off the headlights. It didn't matter what kind of bitch she was, he wasn't going to put her in the ground. Must have been love. He just wanted her scared.

"Shut the fuck up. What kinda scream-stutter mumble shit is that?” He said it casually, a reflex, not really thinking about it because something of what he'd seen puzzled him.

There were about a dozen holes. What the hell? Someone planning a war or something? Frankie wasn't that efficient.

He flicked the lights back on.

So many holes.

Kim screamed. Or still screamed; she couldn't really tell any more.

She'd been on edge all day, what with running away, stealing mob money, and everything, starting again somewhere else. But that was an exciting edge. That edge was a diving board and she was just waiting to jump.

Now it was a different edge she was on. The pool was empty. Pauly had turned up, like she knew all along he would if she looked hard enough in herself. He came and she was in the shower and she thought it was Frankie (oh, poor Frankie, he shot Frankie, dear dead Frankie) so she called “Hey big guy, in here.” It was Pauly and he didn't like the hello. There'd been slaps and punches, sinister and quiet, and that ring, that fucking ring with its fucking diamond. Then the cord. No more running away for her, unless Frankie came to the rescue.

Frankie was in the back but he wasn't really, not any more, Frankie was dead. Frankie came and Frankie was killed.

And now it was her turn.

Pauly turned the lights back on to scare her, showing her the graves, but she was already scared.

"Stay here,” Pauly told her.

Like, where else?

He got out and went to the nearest of the holes. Was he checking if it was deep enough? What? Then he walked to the next. Like it mattered which ones he picked.

Kim opened the glove box and scrambled around inside. She would stay like she was told, but she wasn't stupid. She tossed out a map, three ties, and, amazing, a pair of gloves. People like Pauly were probably the only types of people to actually keep gloves in the glove box in Nevada. No gun, though. No knife. No weapon at all.

She glanced up to check on Pauly and, just for a moment, a split second out of the corner of her eye, thought she saw someone else out there. A quick blur off to the side, out of the range of the headlights. It startled her into another scream, which startled Pauly into spinning where he crouched, bringing his gun out. It was a clumsy move, grabbing with his uninjured left. The first place he pointed it was at her, so of course, she screamed again.

"What? What!” he yelled, coming back to the car. He wasn't running, but there was a quickness to his step that said he was spooked. “Shut the fuck up. What?"

He was by the window now, tapping it with the gun for her to wind it down.

She did.

He shoved the gun against her cheek, pressing it hard so the flesh inside pushed against her teeth. She squirmed back and away, crawling crab-like and clumsy over the stick, under the steering wheel. Still the gun pointed at her, so she pushed herself against the driver's door, turned her head to the door, wanting to be the door. Like the added range would make a difference. He could probably hit her if she ran out into the darkness of the desert. He'd probably give her a head start.

She whimpered.

Pauly turned away and looked around outside again, still puzzling over something. At least the gun was down.

The keys dangled from the ignition.

Kim had acted rashly a lot, lately. She knew this. She did it again. She twisted the keys and brought her legs round to the pedals. She kicked the handbrake by lucky chance and the car lurched forward as the engine turned.

"Hey!"

The gun hand was back in the car, but he was fumbling for the door handle as he ran alongside. Kim would only have to floor it and—

A figure ran in front of the car and she braked.

Pauly was thrown against the side and stumbled, but the door lever came up in his hand as he went down.

Was it a coyote? It was about the same size. But it was awkward. Like a man hunched over, bounding on all fours. It couldn't have been Tony so it must have been a coyote. Tony ‘grease man’ Lanteloni used to fix the machines, until he fixed them a bit too good. He was dead now, so it must have been a coyote.

"You crazy bitch! What the fuck you doing?"

Pauly was back in the car, and the gun was back in her face. The muzzle pressed against her skin, digging deep and leaving its circular mark. The sights bit into her cheekbone. But she was looking out into the desert. She wasn't scared of the gun because she thought she'd seen a dead man lumbering through the darkness. Coming for the car. Now she couldn't see him.

There was a bang at the window beside her and for a moment she thought he'd done it, thought Pauly had fired. That bang was the gun, and any second now the pain of a bullet passing through her face and brain would register and she'd die. She was stunned, which was probably why she didn't scream this time.

Pauly did. It was a yell of high-pitched surprise. He came off her suddenly, scuttled back against his door. He raised the gun to point at her window. “What the hell?"

Kim looked. There was nothing there.

There was another bang. The car lurched. Something had hit them. Kim tried to see.

The figure came back out from the dark in a rush, hitting the car with its shoulder. His hands slapped against the glass. He was a crouching shape in the shadows, pounding at the glass and leering in at them.

It was Jimmy Spades. Jimmy Ricci, actually, but Jimmy Spades to them. Whatever. Jimmy, dead Jimmy. There was a hole in his head to prove it. Frankie would recognise it; he put it there a few months back. Nobody cheated in Clietelli's casino.

Kim had cheated, but she didn't care about that now because Pauly didn't care about it now. He was shooting at Jimmy. The glass of the driver's window fell away and chunks of Jimmy's face exploded with each shot. He grinned, even when his eye burst. He reached into the car for them. Kim saw a hole open up in the palm of his hand and something sticky splashed her as she cringed.

"Drive! Drive! You stupid bitch!"

She put down the gas and they revved forward, bounding down the gentle incline. She twisted hard on the wheel to miss the first of the graves. Twisted again when another came close.

Next to her, Pauly was reloading. “It wasn't him,” he was saying, so she knew he saw Jimmy too. “No fucking way it was him."

Then Tony was in front of them. Definitely Tony, though he was dead, too. She didn't brake this time. She hit him hard. He rolled over the grill and slid up the bonnet to the windshield. He clutched at it with dirty hands.

The front of his shirt was a gaping hole and his rib cage was missing. His chest looked like the excavated desert ground behind him. A shotgun in the back at close range will do that.

Kim rammed the brakes to the floor and screeched, sound effects the sand wouldn't make. Tony rolled off and flopped into one of the open graves.

The soil of this one wasn't arranged in a neat mound beside it. It lay in spread clumps around the hole. The hole wasn't all that neat and tidy either. They could see hand prints in the earth around it, and oval shapes, too. Like where you might put your knees when climbing out.

She stalled the car.

"Shit!"

They said it together, but for different reasons.

Jimmy was back.

Pauly reached across her and fired.

Jimmy didn't react at all; the only sounds of pain came from Kim. One of the hot shell casings spat from the gun had landed inside her blouse between the cups of her bra. She tried to shake it out as more ricocheted inside the car. Every blast was deafening, every muzzle flash a blinding light that stayed on the retina. It was a wonder her blouse didn't catch fire.

When the gun clicked empty, Pauly crushed both his feet down on hers, pushing the gas pedal down. He twisted awkwardly at the key. The engine roared and Jimmy stumbled away. He dropped out of sight and the car lurched. It bounced up and down, quick, but only on one side.

Kim looked behind them and saw a red pulpy mess on the ground. Some of it was the brake lights, she knew, but some of it was Jimmy. She saw him trying to get up.

"Watch it!"

Pauly's hands were on hers, tugging the wheel left to avoid another hole.

"There's another one!” she yelled.

"It's fucking Joey Martelle."

He was right. Keeping pace with their erratic movement, Joey the Card was staggering. He was running like a monkey, probably because his back was broken; something falling from one balcony onto the railings of another will do to you.

"Shoot him!"

She didn't need to tell him. He released the wheel to her, slammed in another clip, then did as she suggested. For all the good it would do. Except for a minor stumble when he took a hit to the knee, Joey kept coming.

Before she could suggest anything else, two strong arms came over from behind and pulled at her. Familiar hands squeezed at her breasts, probably by accident, and then they were under her arms, pulling her back. She grabbed at them. The car, out of her control, swung wildly. She kicked out, hitting Pauly as her legs moved with the motion of the swerving car.

Her throat was too dry to scream. It came out a hacked and broken sound.

Pauly turned just as she was dragged over the seat.

"Frankie! Give her back!"

He grabbed at her legs, clawing at her thighs. The car dove down into a gaping mouth of the desert, one of the many that had spewed its contents back out into the world. They dipped, tilted, and Kim was swept backwards. Pauly got a good hold on her ankles, and she tried to help him, but she slid further into the back until she was draped in Frankie's bloody lap.

Pauly tried to get out, but his door was wedged shut in the hole. There was just enough room for Tony and Joey and Theo Miloni, and others she hadn't even met, to slip down and clamber onto the car. They reached for Pauly, clawing at him. He pushed himself away and kicked at them. One bit his foot, trying to gnaw right through his shoe. Pauly hit him across the head with the gun. It was no use; it was already a sunken concave mess where nothing inside supported it. Those bits had gone out the back.

Frankie leant over her, his face slack and his eyes glazed. He didn't look to the front of the car. He looked at her. For a crazy moment Kim thought he was going to kiss her.

He bit into the flesh of her throat.

Her eyes went wide with shock and pain. She could scream again, but only for a short moment. Then she was gargling.

In the front, Paul Clietelli did screaming enough for them both.

Pauly had big plans. He told them to Kim as he drove them back.

"We'll join with those island niggers,” he kept saying, thinking the idea was his.

Kim tried to respond. She wanted to offer support, she really did. They were good plans. The business would do well. But her chewed up throat stopped her from speaking.

"It's okay, baby, I understand.” He patted her bloody tattered thigh. He was missing more fingers now. They wriggled playfully on the dash, fat worms with fingernail heads.

In the back, Frankie grinned an idiot grin and Jimmy nodded his empty head as his eye socket oozed. They liked Pauly's plans.

"They still back there?” Pauly asked.

Frankie checked.

Kim's jeep followed. They'd dropped back a bit, but he could make out the waxy features of Joey Martelle and Theo Miloni. The others were in the back. They swerved, over-corrected and swerved again; it had been a while since Joey had drove.

"Yeah, they're coming.” Frankie's voice was wheezy now he had holes in his chest.

Pauly found he needed to concentrate more than usual, but he risked a glance out the window. Nevada, all around them, looked like a lifeless desert as the sun rose. But the city of Vegas, appearing a few miles ahead, gave it life. Not always a pleasant one, but a life was a life.

He smiled. “Viva Las Vegas!"

Copyright © 2008 Ray Cluley