by Adam Nevill
The adjoining dining room was mostly in darkness, but enough light fell from the kitchen to illumine two of the three visitors that had come to their home that evening: the two still alive.
The elderly couple were naked save for their kitchen aprons, but their visible flesh was stained. They held each other upright and huddled against the far wall. They were shivering, or trembling from shock. And that was the first erection, beyond the pornography he’d looked at, that Douglas had ever seen between another man’s legs. It was long and thin and protruded through a jagged hole cut into the front of the old man’s floral-patterned apron.
The couple’s faces were concealed by the paper plates they wore like masks, and upon which were drawn crude childlike faces with big, oblong eyes.
‘It’s done,’ the old man said, his voice muffled by the circular plate. ‘The Maiden has lain down with the little black lamb. But before you get started on this lot, can you drop us home?’
Story Notes: About These Horrors
‘On All London Underground Lines’ was written after one of many hellish journeys that I endured while attempting to travel in London. Transport in our capital can thwart you to a stuttering psychosis; literally, it can bring you to a standstill, or to your knees. If a portion of the Tube malfunctioned (when did it not?), the buses filled up, the taxis were soon taken, while the roads became long queues of vehicles, churning out diesel fumes. In my twelve years in the city, I found that my feet were my best means of transport. I only needed to use public transport for work for two years out of twelve. For the other ten I made sure I lived within walking distance of my place of work; even walking three miles from Holland Park to Hammersmith was faster than using the Tube. So awful was the transport for long periods that I’d even been known to walk from Holland Park to Vauxhall Bridge Road.
The journey this tale is mainly based upon was a disastrous trip in 2009, as I tried to travel from Holland Park to Vauxhall Bridge Road. I left the house at 8 a.m. and reached my desk at 11.30. The Underground was insufferably hot, every platform crowded; at one point I couldn’t even get above ground because of the crush of bodies trying to ascend. Crazily, another crush of bodies at street level was attempting to descend through the gates of the same stations.
The second experience that added a particular flavour to this story occurred during a city-wide power-cut that took out the London Underground, which I think occurred in the winter of 2008. Save the lights from motor vehicles, London fell into an apocalyptic darkness. As I walked from Vauxhall Bridge Road to Holland Park, I remember circling the fence of Hyde Park and often being unable to see my feet on the pavement. To make this experience stranger, I was walking among tens of thousands of West Londoners making the same journey on foot in the darkness. What I found alarming was their absolute lack of conversation. A vast crowd walked in fearful silence through the darkness of the night. Here and there, against the railings, figures sat, exhausted. Who knows how far they had walked before giving up? Given these two incidents, is it any surprise that I wrote this story? In my own way I guess I tried to suggest what happens after the thin, invisible strands that hold great cities together break. And yet, out of routine, ritual, habit and disbelief, even the dead still attempt to get to work.
The busker with the tambourine, however, existed and haunted the horrid tiled subways that passed beneath Birmingham city centre in the eighties. People always stopped talking as they passed him.
What can I say? London has great PR. But if you’re neither rich nor young, it’ll take you out, drive you out or drive you mad. London has its own rules. Anything can happen there. For me it was the best of times and the worst of times. So when Jon Oliver asked me for a story for his themed anthology End of the Line, I had something ready for him.
‘The Angels of London’ is the second London story in this collection, and another macabre visit, via my imagination, to my domestic circumstances during the earliest period of my time in the city. I began life in London in a room on top of a pub that was falling apart, both inside and outside. Not only was I shocked at what I grew to tolerate, I was also astonished at what had become normal for others around me. Perhaps London had always been this way, with space and accommodation at such a premium. The city, from the micro-level to the epic, is a Petri dish for the unscrupulous and the opportunistic.
My nearest Tube station was Angel, and an Australian man I’d met told me that there was an actual angel in Islington from which the Tube station took its name: a stone sculpture that had been surrounded by private flats, and perhaps was once a religious icon. Bizarrely, as a child, Angel was also my favourite station on the Monopoly board (purely because I liked the name and colour). As an older man, down on his luck, the statue, the name of the station and the pub all became something else within my mind.
This is one of three stories I’ve written for Paul Finch’s Terror Tales series. At the time of the tale’s composition, I remember really being up against other deadlines and family duties. But when Paul invited me to write for the London theme, I felt that I had to. It was necessary. London gave me Apartment 16, and other parts of my novels; it often crops up, re-imagined, as a background, a context or a representation of a theme. London was a big part of my writing, and continues to be so after my life in the city. And what London endowed me with was the facility to imagine countless hideous creatures, as well as grotesque eventualities and fates for the individual in large cities. But in this regard my literary representations of London seem at odds with those of many other writers.
‘Always in Our Hearts’ was also written for Jonathan Oliver when the call came to write a story for his themed collection End of the Road. My little family unit had not long left London. My wife and I and our fifteen-month-old baby relocated to Birmingham, the second city, and the hometown that my wife and I share. To my horror, after twelve years without driving, I now needed to drive a car again. Only this time there would be a baby inside the vehicle too! Paroxysms of anxiety and terror ensued, most often as I tried to sleep. The brief soliloquy that the private hire driver Ray Larch shares at the story’s opening echoes the author’s own preoccupations. On my return to motoring, after over a decade away, I realised the roads were much busier, the cars faster, and the Highway Code seemed to have been reduced to, at best, mere guidance to the motorist.
The setting of this story owes much to Joel Lane and his vision of Birmingham. His fiction helped me see what was possible, imaginatively, in my home town. I’d admired and enjoyed Joel’s fiction for years, and, while I was back in Birmingham for two years, Joel passed away, leaving us at far too young an age. In my own way, I’d like to leave this story as a tribute to one of the finest British writers of the modern weird.
During this period in Birmingham, I also felt compelled to write at greater length about the city where I’ve spent nearly half of my life. So I wrote the novel No One Gets Out Alive, setting that tale in the north of Birmingham too.
‘Eumenides (The Benevolent Ladies)’ marks the first of four tribute stories in this collection. This tale was written in homage to Robert Aickman, and was intended for an anthology due for publication in 2014, to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of this great English writer of strange stories. Sadly, the Aickman tribute collection was never published. Titan Books and Mark Morris came to the story’s rescue, however, and published it in the first of what I hope is an annual horror collection, entitled New Fears.
I sometimes think that, in the new weird renaissance, mostly occurring within the small presses, Aickman’s influence almost matches that of Ligotti and Lovecraft. As my late friend James Marriott once said, Aickman is one of few writers who can change our perception. By that, I’ve always thought, James didn’t mean changes in our values, politics or judgements, but in the way our consciousness interacts with certain situations and places.
At the time of this story’s composition, I often took my infant daughter to Dudley Zoo – a fabulous zoological garden, built ar
ound a hill that you ascend and descend in order to view the animals. We were still living in North Birmingham at this time, while looking for a family home in Devon. And on successive visits to Dudley Zoo I imagined the place derelict and overgrown. I interspersed these thoughts with my memory of a trip to London Zoo, the worst zoo that I have ever visited: an old cement place, built by the Victorians, with enclosures far too small for the animals, and no hope of extension because of space restrictions in Central London. In fact twice during my visit I felt like weeping, once at the ticket prices, and then seeing the faces of the apes. I’ll never forget the gorilla’s expression. My heart broke.
I have visited some extraordinarily good zoos around Europe and the UK, my favourites being Berlin, Munich and our very own zoo in Paignton, Torbay, only a few miles from where I now live. But London Zoo seemed to reinforce the tragedy that has befallen the animal kingdom through the actions of mankind; your only chance of evading extinction through poaching and the invasion of your environment is by being in here.
So my experiences of these two zoos, Dudley and London, combined in my mind and began to create an Aickmanesque environment for a story. Though he is famous for his enigmatic approach to tales of the fantastic and the supernatural, I have noted the erotic undertones in Aickman’s stories – even a hint of what borders on erotic fetishism. I suspect he loved glamorous, intelligent women and what they wore. This facet makes his fiction richer and more interesting psychologically, and it was this impression of his narrators that also provided the inspiration for M. L. Hazzard, my cross-dressing, astral-travelling cult leader in Under A Watchful Eye.
Aickman’s stories often contain dry humour too, and a sardonic commentary on the state of the world and the people in it. I wanted a hint of these qualities to seep into my own story, and I also dared more of an authorial voice, but one that I hoped didn’t risk pastiche.
Also, in the spirit of Aickman, don’t expect an explanation of the mystery, though I probably give more away than he would. But the core mystery is: why did the Sisters of the White Cross (who are mentioned in an Aickman story and used here in tribute) murder the zoo’s animals? And what have they conjured to infect its ruins? I drop hints about their bizarre theology, which attributes great significance to the Garden of Eden, but thought it best to leave the revelation undisclosed. Enigma is vital to horror, but I never fail to be surprised at how many readers of horror find no value in this quality. Ten minutes of reading reviews on Amazon could leave a writer of enigmatic horror feeling unloved, unappreciated and lonely.
‘Eumenides (The Benevolent Ladies)’ is also the only story I’ve ever written on a train, and during a long train journey too. When I was a guest author at the Plymouth International Literary Festival, I began a first draft in the quiet carriage between Birmingham and Plymouth, and then finished it on the return journey.
‘The Days of Our Lives’ might be the oddest story in this collection. Officially, the story’s trigger and theme were to be based upon an item of missing post that had been returned to sender; but the mail had been returned to the wrong address and opened by the narrator of the story.
My own unique package and trigger were sent to me by the writer and editor Conrad Williams. He was putting together a collection entitled Dead Letters for Titan, and the authors who were invited to contribute a story on the theme were required to write about the actual item of missing post that they received from Conrad. Can you guess what I received?
It was a woman’s wristwatch: cheap, scuffed, faded, no longer working. In some ways it reminded me of horrors peculiar to my own country.
The tale was also informed by the research that I had undertaken for my novel No One Gets Out Alive. In that story I explored the domestic horrors of Great Britain, the ordinary horrors that arise from ordinary items and ordinary people. Eschewing the traditional spectres, tropes, the Gothic and the haunted historical settings, I wanted to try and refine and distil what I found to be grotesque, depressingly mundane and unintentionally macabre about my own country, but domestically. The story would involve regular people in unremarkable settings who experienced extraordinary things. This short story was a continuation of that aesthetic intention.
It is also the story of a dysfunctional relationship, in which two people who loathe each other are still held together by some strange, ineffable force. Domestic violence is a scourge in our times, but I wanted to reverse the usual roles and have the woman as the sadist, bully and aggressor, while the curiously reduced male figure became a kind of beleaguered valet. His sexuality had also been perverted into a fetish for female dominance.
Having been an editor of erotica for eleven years rendered me incapable of surprise at just how imaginative and perverse sexual fantasies can be. Oddly, much of the fiction (the best fiction) submitted to me by male writers involved a fixation with male debasement before female empowerment. Clearly, in this story, my former editorial role left a peculiar mark. It is another occasion too when I’ve explored the compressed drama and tension in a bad relationship that refuses to free either inmate. I’m sure we’ve all had them.
As in No One Gets Out Alive, there are also echoes of killer couples. Terrible collusions between partners with curious bonds, which result in the victimisation and destruction of vulnerable outsiders who are seduced into their domestic spheres. With Brady and Hindley, the Wests and others, we have a society that occasionally seems to produce a particular form of grotesque and loathsome human behaviour, which is committed in domestic situations and orchestrated by couples or even entire families. So the juxtaposition of the ordinary and depravity was the descriptive motif and theme of that novel, as well as this short story. A theme and idea that I find strangely affecting but horrifying. If there were fewer vampires, werewolves and their ilk in British horror, and more of these domestic horrors, I don’t think the field would suffer. A writer doesn’t have to look far to find material either.
This story also features for the first time, though it will not be the last, the mysterious Movement, a hideous occult organisation, camouflaged by the banal and the everyday. I find their members everywhere . . .
Ellen Datlow reprinted this story in her Best Horror of the Year: Volume Nine.
‘Hippocampus’ is another story with an unusual approach: it doesn’t contain any characters. I remember a poet on my creative writing course writing the opening of a story that was to be the pure description of a landscape and a place within it. I never read the end of the story, and am not sure he ever finished it. But I was intrigued by an idea of producing a horror story without characters: a relationship between the reader and an anonymous narrator, with the latter mimicking a roving camera.
This roving point-of-view was, in effect, showing the reader a form of found footage: footage of a place in which something terrible had happened. All that was left for the reader was the aftermath and the evidence: the horrors. The reader becomes a witness at a crime scene; the horrors occurred before the story even began. This creates a story that only the reader can piece together within their imagination. So instead of using characters as a vicarious medium, I would just show the reader the raw footage with no middle ground.
I found this form could not sustain a story much beyond two thousand words, and I chose for my subject a vast but derelict container ship. From our local shores and coastal paths, I watch these Leviathans cross the horizon all the time, on their way to Plymouth. Despite their size they have small crew complements. As a location for a horror story, and in my process of getting the sea and coast deeper within my imagination, a container ship was just the ticket. Ellen Datlow reprinted this story in her Best Horror of the Year: Volume Eight.
‘Call the Name’ is another short story that mirrored one of the novels written in more or less the same timeframe. Lost Girl probably involved my biggest research project to date. Most of the material that I covered for the world of that novel was reduced to informing the story. Much of it was never used. But that portio
n of the research was not all in vain; parts of my reading, and even one scene in which the Red Father watches the news on a television screen, I salvaged for this long story – the longest short story I have written.
This tale is the second of the four homage stories collected in Hasty for the Dark, which attests to just how popular these tribute anthologies have become in recent years. ‘Call the Name’ is my first overtly Lovecraftian story, and the first tale written for a Lovecraftian mythos anthology.
Even though this great author’s mark tends to manifest itself only in spirit, through my attempts to conjure a sense of cosmic dread and awe (as in The Ritual), or in the architecture of some of my fictional histories and publications (as in Apartment 16 and Last Days), I would always cite Lovecraft as a significant influence. As a teenager I devoured everything Lovecraftian that I could get my flabby claws on. So when Aaron J. French asked if I would like to write a mythos story for his Gods of H. P. Lovecraft anthology, I thought it was time to attempt a more direct interpretation of Lovecraft’s brand of cosmic horror.
I was offered a list of his deities to form the basis of my story. My first choice was Dagon, but he’d already been taken. As I live by the sea I wanted a deity of the water and, bizarrely, no one had yet reached for the most legendary of Lovecraft’s creations: Cthulhu. I thought there might have been a fight for him. But I took a deep breath and agreed to have a go.
One thing led to another, and, from an idea of attaching my preoccupation with climate change to the return of a Great Old One on Earth, this story grew far beyond my initial ambition. In the spirit of Lovecraft’s tendency to underwrite his tales with an array of scientific and scholarly knowledge, to enrich fiction with alternative histories whilst adding an authenticity to what he wanted the reader to accept, I found myself attempting the same thing through the natural sciences. So this tale became a story of science fiction and horror, something I have always enjoyed as a reader but never really tried to write until Lost Girl – though that novel is not Lovecraftian but futuristic and pre-apocalyptic.