With the VW’s window cranked down and Clapton’s full-tilt blues solo on the radio, Ben Shelton drove through the suburbs as they gently stirred into life.
The sky was full of wheeling birds, banks of gulls flying tip to tip whilst the climbing sun warmed their wings. Westbrooke had given way to the slopes of moorland with its broken dry stone walls laying like grey necklaces criss-crossing the hills. The moors in turn surrendered to the waking streets. Terraced houses and Tyneside Flats with gardens of no size at all; some of them well kept, others, with the detritus of the city cluttering their patch.
On a street where the flagstones were still clogged with the residue of last night’s rain, Ben saw a small woman in a head scarf lurching herself and her straining shopping bags toward the corner. Her face lit up red as she puffed on the butt of the short cigarette stuck in the corner of her mouth.
Seeing things like a writer again, are we?
Ben slowed to let her cross the street.
From the other direction, a lorry chugged around the corner and turned into the mouth of a tight alley, and headed for a builders yard. The spindly fingers of its iron gates clawed at the cobalt sky.
On the radio, Eric Clapton kicked in with another freewheeling riff.
At the bottom of Grainger Street, he lost sight of the wheeling flock behind the city's rooftops.
The market traders along the Bigg Market side of the street were busy slotting their pitches together along the sloping pavement; the sounds of the steel cylinders clattering on the damp cobbles like Caribbean drums designed solely to accompany Clapton on his journey through the Blues.
All signs of the waking beast. Signs that together worked their own special kind of magic.
Whistling tunelessly along to Wonderful Tonight, Ben guided the Beetle between the broad granite pillars that stood guardian to the University’s entrance. In his hut the gateman waved him through. The gesture spoke of a thousand mornings of similar hellos. Ben answered with a wave of his own. He tucked the VW neatly into a space between a red Sierra and a white Subaru and cut the engine. He got out and headed off across the wide tarmac sea, past the music block where a lone cello sang mournfully to itself, and up a short flight of concrete steps that linked the car park with the Quadrangle. The campus was one of the largest in the country, with its bleak industrial landscape of red brick, glass and steel. Corroded sea horses stood watch from the bell tower, casting their disparaging gaze over the growing hub-bub below.
The English faculty was in an old redbrick mansion set away from the modern monstrosities of the library and the Student Union building. Ben pushed open the huge oak door and stepped into the coolness within to join a sudden swell of slow moving students as they drifted toward the lecture hall. He looked at his watch: 8:45 a.m..
On the glass, some helpful soul had taped up a piece of paper with "2nd Year Creative Writing" written on it in the thick letters of a red marker pen. For his benefit, no doubt.
The mumbled conversations hushed as fifteen rows of nearly one hundred and fifty faces stared curiously at him. He perched on the corner of the central table. “All right ladies and gents, let’s settle down shall we?” A blonde in the front row gave him a vacuous little smile and rested her chin on the knuckles of her bridged hands. “Come on, hush. I thought we’d go over some of the basics this morning, by way of introduction to the mechanics of the creative writing. Nothing too fancy. Just the nuts and bolts. After all we need to know how it’s supposed to work if we are going to unlock the secret code and take that first step on our path to millions,” he paused, waiting for the inevitable groans to subside before moving over to the whiteboard.
“Opening line,” he said, chalking the words: "The waitress was talking politics, while the business man slowly exploded!" on the board. “So, the abuse of poor old Billy Joel aside, dazzle me. . .”
The remainder of the hour passed surprisingly painlessly -- if slowly -- with Ben flying in the face of the usual Thursday morning blues. He was at once easy going and relaxed with his captive audience, cautioning them to observe the basics, even those as obvious as spelling (Jesus was condomed to death by the Jews), gently introducing his Would-Be's to the delights of craftsmanship, sweat and blood, offering his own thoughts on the metaphor that placed the writer in a helicopter hovering above the whole story, and focusing on the problems of perspective during the course of a longer narrative.
A few students dutifully wrote down his every word whilst others made a few brief notes, and others studiously ignored him.
* * * * *
As the buzzer sounded the hour, the students yawned, gathered their papers and files together and filed out of the room and into the corridor, immersed in their tight huddles, their conversations growing in volume with each step towards freedom.
One of the stragglers, a non-descript youth with the thin shadow of two-days growth peppering his chin and not much hair on his head, edged closer to the tutor's desk.
“Mr Shelton, sir?”
“Yes?”
“Joe Morris, sir. We met in the Green Room when you gave that reading from The Swords of Scorn last year,” he spoke slowly and in a low, uncertain tone, swallowing between words as if constantly needing to strangle the urge to cough. He was clutching a manila envelope under one arm.
“Yes, I remember now. . .” Ben said, although he didn't, it was just one of those lies you told people. “What can I do for you Joe?”
“Oh. . . Well, I know that you're busy working on your own stuff, but I was kind of hoping that you might have a look at some of my stories. . . Tell me what you think, maybe how I could make them better. . .” His accent was softly southern, as if displaced by more than his two and a half terms in Newcastle.
“I'm not sure,” Ben began, and cursed himself for sounding so utterly unenthusiastic.
“Oh, I understand, it was only that I loved just about every story in The Swords of Scorn, and I thought Uneasy Streets was incredible. . . and after hearing you talk I thought. . . God I feel stupid. . . I'm sorry for wasting your time. . .”
Ben shook his head softly and tried to hide the smile he felt forming. “No, Joe. Sorry. Look, that's not what I meant at all. I'd be delighted to read some of your stuff, really. I'm flattered that you thought to ask me when there are so many better writers out there. . . Have you noticed how we all call it "stuff"?'
“You'd really like to read it?” he sounded dubious, as if Ben's answer had surprised him. “You're not just saying that are you? I'll understand. . .”
“I'm not, honestly,” said Ben, reaching out for the envelope.
“Thank you. . . I don't know what to say.”
“Then don't say anything.”
Joe smiled and shrugged. He had the sort of face that was made to smile, big, wide eyes and just the hint of dimples beneath the exaggerated five o'clock shadow. “I seem to have been having so much bad luck recently, but maybe it’s going to break at last?”
“Maybe,” Ben agreed, finding Joe's smile infectious. “Bad luck doesn't last forever,” and neither does good luck, he thought.
“No, I don't suppose it does, but it's sure felt that way some times.”
“Don't I know it?”
“Well, I've sold a few stories since I talked to you about writing seriously. In Darkness, We Sleep – my favourite – was taken up by one of the glossy horror magazines, but that went bust about a month before it came out.”
“Ah, happens to the best of us. Still you’ve got your first war story.”
“Yeah, I guess I found that out the hard way. Still, it's good news about the other sales,” Ben went on. “I suppose. . . Three of them sold to one of those small press magazines that only come out once in a blue moon. It's getting so the guys think I'm bullshitting all the time. I don't think any of them believe anything I say anymore,” he said, wearily, stuffing his now empty hands into his pockets, obviously unsure what to do with them.
“I know how you feel,” Ben sympathi
sed, sliding the bulky envelope into his briefcase and snapping the catches closed. “When I started out some of the people I always thought were my closest friends found it hard to accept the fact that I wanted to be anything other than good old Ben. Certainly no one took the idea seriously. I was just good old Ben, nothing more, nothing less. You know how it is. More than anything though, I wanted to be a writer, and I needed them to believe in me. . .The best advice I can give you is to try and put everyone else out of your mind. Don't write for them, write for you. Do what you want to do. If you've got what it takes, go for it. Ignore the knock-backs and ignore the praise. It's a job just like all the others and if you get to believing what they say about you, well, you may as well hang-up your computer after all.”
An awkward silence fell between them then, counter-pointed by the racket of the growing rabble gathering in the narrow corridor beyond the glass doors.
“Okay, sermon over,” Ben laughed a little self-consciously, and lifted his hands to the sides of his head, massaging his temples gently with the tips of his fingers. “I can't promise anything, but I'll certainly read the scripts and if there is anything I can do to help, I will. Deal?” Ben held out his hand and Joe Morris, smiling his good-humoured smile again, took it without hesitation.
“Deal.”
- 14 -
Brent Richards opened the door.
From the outside the building retained its countrified stable facade but inside was a different matter entirely. Behind the door a passageway was cordoned off by a series of airlock-type doors that kept what was inside locked firmly inside and what was outside, outside.
Richards stepped over a crate of rotting vegetables. A full-scale laboratory had been assembled within the old stable. Two polished steel operating tables. Oscillating neurological monitors and cardio-vascular regulators. Each thing in its place. A row of detention cages dominated the furthest wall, inch-thick steel bars caging Jude Kenyon and the other test cases. Richards had little patience with this part of the job. The endless rounds of tests. It was the calm before the storm whereas he craved the thunder and the lightning, the explosive release of nature.
Kenyon herself was pressed up against the gate of her cage, one skinny arm groping through the bars in search of something solid she might be able to drag back into Hell with her.
“Anything for me, Stephanie?”
Stephanie Nolan looked up from the E-motion culture she’d been studying to switch slides on the microscope. She shook her head. “Nothing, Brent. Absolutely nothing. The culture appears to self-perpetuate during Down-Times but there is nothing particularly disconcerting about that, after we anticipated something similar was going to be the case. This though?” she gestured at the wretched shape huddled up in the corner of Jude Kenyon’s cell. “I’m beginning to think that the regression might be of a psychological rather than physiological nature but I am at a loss as to where to go from there.”
The pattern of alpha waves on one of the wall mounted monitors went into the familiar pattern of lows they had come to call Down-Time. It was similar in nature to the R.E.M. phase of sleep. A regeneration process perhaps?
“Wake the boy up, Stephanie.” Richards demanded. “Let’s see what happens when the cultivation period is interrupted.”
A single jolt of electrical current applied through the metal floor of the cage brought the boy awake screaming and bucking as the charge circuited through his withered frame. Horrors no-one else could see replayed behind his glassy eyes, his brain re-inventing the worst moments of his short life for the boy to live through again. To him these pseudo-images passed beyond vivid. They were real.
On the wall monitor the alpha-waves peaked in rhythm with the nightmares then troughed dramatically as a second pulse, one none of them had seen before, sparked across the low-points.
“There it is,” Richards smiled as he said it.
“But what is it?”
“I have no idea, Stephanie. But I will find out. That single line, my dear, is the nigger in the woodpile.”
The boy threw himself against the steel bars, slamming his fists into the metal with a rage so pure, so undiluted, Richards was sure he’d continue beating the bars until his hands were bloodied, splinters of bone jutting out through the raw wounds if no-one stopped him. The emotion had arisen from something as insubstantial as vapour. A whisper. Memory. He saw it in the boy’s eyes and smiled to himself.
They had faces, now, his demons, and he hated them for making him remember…
- 15 -
Kristy thumbed through the rack of CDs as Jason Kelso, junior of The Gazette’s three staff photographers, guided the small Citroen through a series of increasingly tighter switchbacks. Gravel chips and a mulch of muddy slake sprayed out from beneath the car’s tires. Both front windows were rolled down and Kelso was driving with one arm resting on the ledge, the wind ruffling his dark hair like some affectionate grandmother.
Kristy’s fingers dawdled over several unfamiliar names, Dave Matthews Band, Hootie and the Blowfish, Marcy’s Playground, The Verve Pipe, Ben Christophers and Ben Folds Five before settling on one from her college days. In seconds Message in a Bottle was filling the car with its distinctive early Eighties sound.
Kelso was talking about something but somewhere along the way she’d tuned him out. Instead she gave her attention over to the rolling greens, the custard fields of rape and the outcroppings of sandstone that spotted the fields like blood stains on a handkerchief. Birds perched in the trees, talking to anyone prepared to listen. It was all so very different from the streets of Newcastle with their metallic outcroppings of rusted shopping trolleys and twisted wire baskets. Byker Wall, the closest man had ever come to building Hell on Earth; nothing to see in either direction but red brick walls thick with graffiti rising higher and higher in claustrophobic steps. Pavements cluttered with spilled garbage sacks. Tower blocks, ominous sentinels, standing guard over the compound. And this, unbroken countryside with real farms, real animals in the fields, and that almost tangibly relaxed pace of life. Even through the protective layer of steel it was contagious. She found herself imagining the land as a witch, an old crone luring her deeper and deeper into her folds with proffered charms and offers of sweets for the sweet.
Kelso’s camera cases were on the backseat, anchored down by his battered leather reefer jacket.
Manipulating the pedals, he changed down for a tight turn, grating the gears loudly.
“Hey, if you can’t find it, grind it.” He joked, forcing the stick shift home against all of its protests.
Up ahead two brooding oaks reached across the road, branches weaving into a thick welcoming arch. A weather-beaten sign said:
WELCOME TO WESTBROOKE
PLEASE DRIVE CAREFULLY THROUGH OUR VILLAGE
Only some local wag had crossed out the ‘drive’ with green spray paint and replaced it with ‘joyride’.
Steep-sided hills cupped the small cluster of houses, as if shielding them from the worst the world had to offer.
The road forked and cut away sharply on the far side of the leafy arch, one branch dropping down toward the village proper, the other disappearing into the gloom of roadside trees and curving on up the hill. Kristy spotted the overgrown marker for Rogan’s farm as they passed it. Beneath the sign a large blackbird searched the dirt for worms.
Kelso backed the car up ten feet and made the turn onto the steep gravel climb. Odd spots of sunlight dappled the track like so many coins scattered here and there. The sudden gloom was positively oppressive. Coming around a blind bend something at the roadside caught Kristy’s eye. She cried: “Stop!” with such vehemence that Kelso stamped down too hard and too fast on the breaks and the car slewed sideways in a rubber-melting skid. The front of the Citroen dipped as one of the front wheels rocked out into a shallow roadside ditch, still spinning. Thick foliage crumpled back from the bonnet, a hundred tiny impacts merging into a single Hellish cackle. The seatbelt bit angrily into Kristy’s shoulder a
s she was thrown forward. The camera cases slid off the back seat.
The engine spluttered and stalled.
“Christ,” Kelso was breathing hard. “You okay?” his voice came across as heavily slurred, as if the words were wading through thick molasses to reach her. The outside world of snapped back branches and spinning wheels settled. “Are you okay?” Kelso repeated. He leaned in close, giving her a quick once over. “No blood, at least.” He muttered, patting her knee with a reassuring hand but it was as if she was seeing right through him. Her gaze was fixed on something outside the window. Kelso tried to follow it. Flies buzzed thickly around the carcass of a deer. “Oh Jesus, it’s horrible,” he breathed, watching the black congregation pick its way through the torn flesh. Instinctively he reached into the back for a camera and then was out of the car, slamming the door.
After a minute, Kristy followed him. It stank. She tried breathing through her mouth, but the reek was inescapable. The stench of violent death. Ugly. It clung to the air.
Kelso was on his knees, snapping close-ups of the dead animal’s sliced stomach walls.
Without thinking, Kristy reached into her pocket for the mini-cassette recorder she kept there, and began describing all that she saw:
“The embankment, thick with tall grass is heavily spattered with blood. The deer, most of it, is on the grass at the roadside. Two of its forelegs are lying about three feet away from the mutilated torso. One of the hind legs is stretched out impossibly in an inverted 'v'. The wounds look wrong. No sign that the animal was hit by a car… and poachers wouldn’t do this… I can’t see the head,” she broke off.
“Up there,” Kelso whispered, firing off another shot, this time of an overhanging branch. The animal’s head was impaled on one of the thickest branches. There were bloody holes where the eyes should have been. “What kind of sick fuck would take the eyes…”
“There’s blood everywhere. The eyes are gone. It doesn’t make any sense to me. It looks as if five or six strong men have torn the deer to pieces with their bare hands. None of the cuts look clean enough to have been done with a knife.”
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