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Hasty for the Dark: Selected Horrors
by Adam L. G. Nevill
Published by
Ritual Limited
Devon, England
MMXVII
[email protected]
www.adamlgnevill.com
Stories © Adam L. G. Nevill
This Edition © Ritual Limited
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address above.
Cover design and artwork by Simon Nevill
eBook formatting and conversion by Bluewave Publishing
ISBN 978-1-9997242-2-1[Mobi]
ISBN 978-1-9997242-3-8 [ePub]
Hasty for the Dark / Adam L.G.Nevill. —1st ed.
For my readers, who must endure my horrors each year, but whose contribution to my motivation and morale has been priceless. Thank you all for being so hasty for my darkness.
“What is it that keeps you so wide awake and restless?’
‘The winds,’ she whispered in the dark. For hours she had lain watching the tossing of the trees through the blindless windows. ‘They go walking and talking everywhere tonight, keeping me awake. And all the time they call so loudly to you.’
And this strange whispered answer appalled her for a moment until the meaning of it faded and left her in a dark confusion of the mind that was now becoming almost permanent.’
Algernon Blackwood, ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’
Contents
Author’s Preface
On All London Underground Lines
The Angels of London
Always in Our Hearts
Eumenides (The Benevolent Ladies)
The Days of Our Lives
Hippocampus
Call the Name
White Light, White Heat
Little Black Lamb
Story Notes: About These Horrors
Publication History
Acknowledgements
More Horror Fiction from Adam L. G. Nevill
Author Biography
Author’s Preface
You hold the second published selection of my short fiction. These stories were written between 2009 and 2015, and published between 2010 and 2017. My original aim with Ritual Limited was to anthologise stories that I deemed worthy of single-author titles, in two volumes. So this collection completes the first twenty one years’ worth of my horror and weird short stories, with the final tales written as late as 2015. I intend there to be more stories in the future, but for now these are the last of the stories that I have raised from the darkness and want to keep within the light.
The stories are arranged in the chronological order of their composition, but I think there are subtle differences between the stories in this collection and those in Some Will Not Sleep. Chiefly, the stories in this collection, I would say, are more speculative in tone; the monstrous and supernatural may be expressed more abstractly and enigmatically in this volume.
This collection also presents four tribute stories: conscious homage to other writers within the field of horror. Some Will Not Sleep only contains one story in that vein, ‘Where Angels Come In’.
I was also a more mature writer when these stories were written; I don’t think that makes these stories stronger or weaker, but different, if only in nuanced ways. Readers of both volumes of my selected horrors, however, may be the best judges.
Hasty for the Dark contains nine stories, not the eleven of Some Will Not Sleep. But ‘Call the Name’ came out at near novella length, and my gut tells me that the length of this collection remains comfortable. Too many more pages and the stories risk blurring in the reader’s mind. I draw this hypothesis from my own reading experience.
This volume is also published from the advantageous position of the author and publisher, me, having more experience in an independent publishing capacity. When I cast the first book into the maelstrom of modern independent publishing I was inexperienced as an independent entity. But the appreciation of the first collection provided an auspicious wind that filled my sails as I produced this second anthology. And such was the enthusiasm of readers for the first book, the second is dedicated to you. Ritual Limited would not have risen upon its hind legs without your interest and patronage.
The collection’s title suggests that I might be guilty of indulging myself, because it is taken from one of my recent novels, Under a Watchful Eye – part of a quotation from my character M. L. Hazzard, writer of strange experiences and a cult leader. Looking back on his life, one filled with mental projections into spheres invisible to the naked eye, the nefarious Hazzard concluded that ‘none should be hasty for the dark’. Neither living or entirely dead, the good doctor Hazzard becomes proof of this within his ghastly limbo. But from the safety of our homes, or during our own travels, in these stories we can vicariously experience the travails of those who sought the darkness, or clawed at what they believed to be the light . . .
Manes exite paterni.
Adam L. G. Nevill
Devon, May 2017
On All London Underground Lines
‘There is a good service running on all London Underground lines.’
There are too many of us down here.
‘’Scuse me. ’Scuse me,’ a voice cracked by age says to my left, and a face with dirty teeth is turned towards me.
No. Not now. Please. Can’t you see I’m in a hurry. The smile I show the woman becomes a grimace. I think I’m showing too much gum, like her.
‘I was wondering if you could tell me which way to the Piccadilly Line,’ she says.
Her hair is brittle, the perm a carapace of dead coral that could be snapped off. Her face is deeply lined, as if it’s been put through a pane of glass. I doubt there is any blood in that head. No make-up either. She’s really let herself go. This London lifestyle is hard on people: all the rushing about underground with long hours of pressure and stress between journeys; impossible aspirations for professional advancement in this recession; the ambition to find the right partner and start a life; the need for peer approval, status, glamour, fulfilment. It makes them all mad, then mummifies them. Once the hair’s gone all wiry like this, with tufts of grey and odd patches of orange mixed in, sprouting like the trees on a model railway, it’s all over for a woman too. Then they’re just slow nuisances down here, asking for directions.
I’m too thick-headed with dehydration to think of anything to say to her, or even to form words into a sentence. Inside I’m dry, my joints are stiff and my muscles ache. I need to sleep more. I forget what it was she asked me. Thoughts of bottled water I can buy from a concession at Victoria Station spur me on towards the end of the platform.
A page from a free newspaper catches on my shin, clings and flaps at the same time. Makes me kick that leg out. It won’t come off. I turn around and it slides down and over my shoe.
The woman speaks to another
man. ‘’Scuse me, ’scuse me.’ He is sitting down, bent over his lap, on a bench at the rear of the platform. He doesn’t move. Maybe he’s asleep. I suddenly remember her question.
‘Central Line Eastbound,’ I call to the woman. ‘To Holborn. Change there.’
All I can see in her expression is incomprehension. She wants to tell me something. Her question was just a ruse. How can a face be so grey? She returns to her position beside the intercom where passengers can call for assistance. She presses the green button. No one answers. I don’t think the service is working. I have a vague memory of pressing that green button myself, a long time ago, but no one answered.
‘’Scuse me. ’Scuse me,’ she says into it.
From my position on the Central Line Eastbound platform at Oxford Circus, I can see the queue for the Victoria Line Southbound has already begun in the distance. The delay on the Victoria Line must be colossal if they’re all waiting on this platform. I could just fall to my knees and weep.
When I get closer to the queue, I am confronted by a wall of slumped shoulders. Are all of these people hoping to reach the distant platform promised to them on the stained direction board above their bowed heads? It’s hard to tell if they are standing still or shuffling forward one inch at a time. And how long have they been waiting to ascend anyway?
I’ll have to take the Bakerloo Line to Embankment and then pick up the Circle Line to Victoria. If I don’t, at this rate, I’ll be hopelessly late for work. Again.
I can just squeeze up the side of the staircase. None of the pale faces in the crush even turn to look at me; they are committed to their immobile, futile yearning upwards. A smell hangs about the crowd, like old clothes left in airless spaces, and something else: the sweetish, hormoney smell of spoiling meat.
At the top of the staircase, I duck into the tunnel forking left and head for the next staircase, which should lead to the Bakerloo Line. I follow the curved roof, discoloured like a long-empty swimming pool, and arching over a scattering of figures that appear to have come to a halt under the flickering striplights. They are moving, but not progressing, as if lost. Confused perhaps. No time to find out. Fuck them; I have a train to catch.
I duck to miss the wires hanging through an aluminium mesh. Surely that is not safe? I wipe the face of my watch and check the time: 9.15 a.m.
‘Shit. Damn.’
I have fifteen minutes to be at my desk. Not going to happen. I have at least twenty minutes underground ahead of me, and then a fifteen-minute walk from Victoria to the office. At this rate, I’ll be lucky if I’m in by ten. My chest is tight with so much frustration I’ve given myself indigestion, or heartburn. I feel weak. When did I last eat?
The air is hot and thin in the tunnel housing the second staircase. I can smell sweat, and something like old curtains ruined by damp in a garage that I once investigated as a child.
At the foot of the stairs a small woman gets in my way and brings me to a sighing halt. She is trying to lift a suitcase on wheels to the next step. The terrible smell is coming out of her case. Ordinarily I would stop and help, but I am in a rush and can’t waste a moment.
With tight thighs I climb the second flight of stairs and enter a connecting tunnel. This leads to the Bakerloo Line platforms.
The lights are so dim in the tunnel I bump into someone coming the other way. Neither of us apologises and we both rush on, but I can still feel the impression of his bony elbow against my ribs, as he can feel mine in his.
Temporarily bewildered by the collision and bad light, I tread on something that crunches beneath my foot.
Looking into the silty shadows, I see a shape huddled against the wall. I stepped on its leg. I see a flip-flop and some kind of robe extending across the floor from the side of the tunnel. But whatever I stepped on with my entire weight made the sound of a handful of breadsticks being snapped in half. I look down, wince. ‘Sorry.’
Does the head wrapped so tightly in the dirty scarf look up at me, or is it not bothered? In the thin light I’m reminded of a balloon I once covered in wallpaper paste and strips of newspaper at school, before painting it. Within days the balloon was punctured and removed, leaving a dry, hollow head behind that I didn’t want to take home with me, and was glad to see crushed into a bin that smelled of orange peel and pencil shavings.
This head doesn’t have defined eyes either. They look papery and flat in their sharp-edged sockets. But something moves under the robes. An arm extends, I think, and then drops to the grubby tiles upon which the figure sits. The hand clatters as if it is holding dice.
At the end of the tunnel, the platform marked Bakerloo Eastbound is thick with commuters, who don’t seem to be making much progress into the waiting train. I assume they wait for people to alight from the carriages.
Vanilla light leaks from within the stationary train carriages and glows between the crowd’s motionless forms. Against the grimy windows the heads of those passengers lucky enough to be seated at this time of the morning are visible. Some of the heads are dipped to read newspapers and books, or to just look away from all of those crammed around them. Who wants the sudden glare of a stranger’s eyes in the enforced cohabitation of a Tube carriage?
I shuffle into a gap in the crowd waiting on the platform. Make my way around the edge, hoping to see a chink in the bodies through which I can squeeze close to a carriage door. But I can’t get nearer the train because each open door is encircled by a ring of immobile people looking for a similar opportunity to get on board. No one seems to be alighting and there is no room on board for any more bodies. Standing before the open doors, the passengers inside the train look out in silence. No one meets anyone else’s eye.
‘Passengers are reminded to keep their belongings with them at all times.’
The announcement is repeated twice before I lose patience and ask the man closest to me, ‘What’s up?’
But then I see the trickle of a white wire trailing from his ear and disappearing inside his overcoat. iPod. His overcoat has seen better days and I wonder why he doesn’t brush the dandruff from the shoulders.
‘Due to a person under a train the Jubilee Line is suspended in both directions.’
Maybe there is a knock-on effect to the Bakerloo Line; I know how a terrible momentum of malfunction can spread down here.
I turn around and catch the eye of a young woman. I raise my eyebrow and shake my head – the familiar sign of the thwarted London Underground passenger. But her face remains blank. And her skin is in a bad way, and it would be rude to stare for any longer than I already have. She wants no parley anyway; just wants to get going again and is standing still, with all of the others, quietly willing the Bakerloo Line trains to move again.
I look to the digital display to see what that has to impart. It reads NO SMOKING AT ALL IN ANY PART OF THE STATION. Then it changes to inform us that the next train bound for Elephant and Castle is 7 MINS away.
Oh, enough of this; I can’t stand here for hours staring at a stationary train. This one will have to go and, when the next train arrives, everyone already clustered at the edge of the platform will get on first. I’ll have no chance.
I bump and sidle and squeeze my way through the silent, fixated crowd and go back into the tunnel to check progress on the Victoria Line. Maybe the crush will have cleared by now.
Back inside the darkened connecting tunnel three indistinct figures are walking very slowly in front of me, and abreast of each other so that no one can pass in either direction. Tourists, no doubt. No etiquette. Ambling in rush hour, unsure of where they are going. Just blithely unaware of the needs of those who actually work in the city. Walk on the left, for fuck’s sake, in single file. The whole system would fail if we all took this attitude.
I try to step around them but end up on my toes, overbalancing and clipping the heels of the figure on the left. She must be infirm or elderly because the merest touch of my toe against her heel makes her stumble forward. She raises her arms on either
side of her hunched body, like she’s trying to keep her feet on ice.
Have I hurt her? Her? Is it a woman, with those thin legs ending in some kind of white sports shoe? She’s wearing a skirt too, I think. It’s hard to see. The other two stop and turn their heads to the side to watch their companion totter like a child taking baby steps away from a parent’s hands. They say nothing.
‘Sorry. Please. Excuse me,’ I say, but the two upright figures don’t react beyond turning their faces, that I cannot see properly, towards me. I sense animosity within the silhouettes of their heads, or defiance, and possibly outrage at being rushed.
Am I being inconsiderate, or unnecessarily aggressive? I pause to examine my behaviour. But then they all start milling about on the spot as if the interruption or change in direction is disorientating for them. One of them looks at the ceiling as if trying to remember a distant event in its life, and sighs. With slow and deliberate movements, they seem to spread further apart, while still leaving no easy way through. I reach out to help the figure I have knocked aside.
‘Sorry,’ I say again.
But I quickly pull back my hand when my fingers encircle something hard, but no thicker than a flute, inside the thin sleeve of a blouse. And even though the tunnel is only illumined by the ambient light spilling from the Bakerloo Line platform, I am sure the figure I have touched has just bent forward at the waist and tried to bite my retreating hand. I hear the sound of something clacking, like two domino pieces in a wooden box. I step away.
All three of them have turned to watch me.
‘You’re walking three abreast in rush hour. Jesus!’
I push through them and continue on. Behind me, there is a moan, a shuffle of clothing and then a slapping sound like the palm of a hand on a ceramic surface. Back there someone is moaning too.
I turn around at the end of the short tunnel and peer back, guiltily, into the darkness I have emerged from. Against the distant semicircle of white light at the far end of the tunnel, I can only see one of the figures standing upright. Its head is tatty, like an old man with unkempt hair grown long at the sides.