by Adam Nevill
But navigating his way through the world outside the house, which no longer felt so familiar, defeated him. When he went out for tools, his attempts to move on the Pershore Road wasted him before he’d reached the bus stop in front of the bowling alley.
Unpredictable tides of energy, and the staring eyes of pedestrians and motorists, had seemed to pull his thoughts apart and then compress him into a muttering standstill. He was thinking of too many things at the same time, but then forgetting one train of thought at the same time as another began.
The pressure the city exerted upon him was tangible. Uncomfortable, like a head-slappy wind on a hilltop, or a coat pocket caught on a door handle. Unless he was inside the house, or Happy Shop, he didn’t fit in anywhere and was in everyone’s way. And so his recent life had been reduced to quick forays outside the house, because he was unable to cope with anything else and wasn’t wanted anywhere. Never had been. The house had opened his eyes. And there was now something wrong with one of his legs; a pain that started inside a hip. So he should keep off it.
On the day he went out to buy the tools, the further he ventured from the house, the greater was his physical discomfort and his confusion. Frank lit endless cigarettes for the slight comfort they promised. Silk Cut. He’d started smoking again at the weekend after being driven by an unstoppable urge to light up during the National Lottery. At the bus stop, fat pigeons had scurried around his feet and watched him with amber eyes.
After boarding a bus, he’d made his way upstairs. With his bad hip it had been similar to standing upright in a rowing boat. Sitting by the window as the bus trundled toward Selly Oak, where he knew there was a DIY store, he’d looked down at the streets for women wearing tight skirts and leather boots; such a sight usually made him dizzy with longing. Now the women and their clothes just appeared ordinary, and he felt dead to the previously strong images. This impotence led to an incredulity that such a part of himself had ever existed.
From a seat in front of him, a mobile phone began to ring in a girl’s handbag. The noise distracted Frank from what had seemed like important, meaningful thoughts that he could barely remember a few moments later. He’d groaned aloud. The girl spoke in a loud voice. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he’d said, wanting to take the phone from her hand and drop it out of the window. He’d wanted to hear it smash on the asphalt below.
Muttering under his breath to prevent himself swearing aloud, he was forced to listen to the stranger’s conversation. The girl’s voice was controlled and sounded too much like a prepared speech to be part of a natural discourse. There were no pauses, or repetitions, or silences; just her going blah, blah, blah, and addressing everyone on the bus. It was not a phone that she was holding, but a microphone. Perhaps the most disappointing thing about getting older, he’d mused, was to still be confronted by childish actions and behaviour, these increments of self-importance and vanity that he now observed all about him whenever he left home.
By the time he reached the Bristol Road, Frank had felt sickened by his aversion to everything around him. A hot loathing, but a fascination too, and a pitiful desperation to be included. In one mercifully brief moment, he’d also wished to be burned to ash and to have his name erased from every record in existence. He was rubbish. No one wanted him around. He’d dabbed the corner of one eye with a tissue and had wanted to go home, back to the house.
As the bus brushed the edge of Selly Oak he’d fallen asleep. And awoken to find the vehicle had trundled and wheezed into streets he didn’t recognise. He’d slept through his stop and found himself in a bleak part of Birmingham that he had never seen before. Somewhere behind Longbridge maybe? In a panic, he’d fled down the stairs, alighted and then stood beside a closed factory and a wholesaler of saris.
Everything there was inhospitable. Self-loathing had choked him. Can I not leave the house without a map? He’d lived in the city for ten years, but he recognised none of this. It was as if the streets and buildings had actually moved to disorient him while he’d slept on the bus.
He’d followed a main road in the opposite direction the bus had taken, but grown tired and eventually turned his face to a wooden fence surrounding a building site and there suffered a paroxysm of such contained rage that it had left him with a broken tooth and cuts on the palms of his hands. Clenching his jaws together and grinding his teeth, he’d felt the enamel snap on a tooth at the side of his mouth. His cheeks had filled with grit. But when the tooth snapped the tension had passed from his body, leaving him confused and expecting shockwaves of agony. But there was no pain and he’d decided against going to a dentist. He didn’t know where the dentists were in the city. He’d then noticed the little half-moons of blood on the inside of his palms, made by his own nails. It had been so long since he’d bitten them; his nails were like unpleasant, feminine claws. How could they have grown so much and he not noticed?
Trying to retrace the bus route and find a landmark, Frank became hopelessly disoriented. He went into a tacky women’s hairdressers, which was the only place that he’d been able to find that offered him any sense of familiarity, to ask for directions. Girls in heavy make-up had exchanged glances when he found himself unable to speak. He’d just stood and trembled before them. After throwing his arms into the air in silent exasperation, he’d left the shop, crimson with shame. Speech only returned to him at the kerb where he’d stood muttering. Some people had stared. A taxi had taken him home.
These things never used to happen to him, but he had a notion that the potential for such a slide had always been in place. In the back of the taxi he’d hidden his face inside the lapel of his overcoat and bitten his bottom lip until his eyes had brimmed with water.
Two days later, or it might have been three or even four, someone knocked on the front door, and for a long time too. So Frank had hidden by lying on the floor of the spare room. He’d heard voices outside, talking in the neighbour’s garden, and he’d known that they were trying to look through the back windows of the house.
For the rest of that afternoon he’d chain-smoked Silk Cut cigarettes and didn’t relax until it was dark outside and Coronation Street’s theme tune was booming through the living room. The thought of going out to buy food had made him feel nauseous, so he’d stopped tormenting himself with the idea of leaving the house.
He tried again to fix the broken cabinets to the kitchen walls, but only succeeded in making his fingers bleed. He’d gone upstairs to wash them, but when he arrived on the landing he couldn’t remember why he had gone upstairs. He went and lay down on the bed instead. And around him clouded the smell of perfume, old furniture, stale carpets and chip fat. The radiators had come on with a gurgle. He’d felt safe and closed his eyes.
Sometime in the night, Florrie came into the room on all fours and climbed onto the bed. She sat on Frank’s chest and pushed a thin, cold hand inside his mouth.
About These Horrors: Story Notes
‘W here Angels Come In’ is much like my earlier story ‘Mother’s Milk’, in that I attempted to tell a horror story from the point of view of a child, or from a childlike state. It’s the time in our lives when most of us probably suffered our most intense terrors of the imagination. And for me the first draft of a story of this nature isn’t planned, but is anticipated in the form of a few images, and often adapted from a voice announcing a few lines in my imagination. I have scant idea what the story will make itself into; they’re expressionistic for me too, I go deep to find something that impacts on me, no matter how strange the image, and I don’t approach the stories rationally. What comes out in the first draft does need extensive rewriting, but I try to preserve the style and voice that are there from the start.
This story and ‘Mother’s Milk’ are also a cause of regret, because I wish I had written far more stories like them at that time, when this type of voice most often tried to get onto the page. I’d like to have written a full collection’s worth of stories in this style. I never did. But though this approach feels lik
e an instinctive and natural part of my writing, it has found less of a role in my novels, and the novels have always been my priority. The process of pushing the envelope, and daring to be fresher in the use of voice and imagery, at the same time as wrestling with the more conventional, expected and more widely appreciated forms of voice and structure, is a tension that has dogged, and perhaps even assisted, my entire career as a novelist. From collisions can come sparks and maybe even new forms that combine the best of two forces.
This story has struck chimes in a few readers and editors too. Ellen Datlow and Stephen Jones both reprinted ‘Where Angels Come In’ in their annual best horror collections. Ellen Datlow even came back for the story for her collection Hauntings. Nightmare Magazine recently reprinted it, and the Secretari de Cultura in Mexico has translated the story into Spanish for a state-funded horror collection. The response to this story has often made me sit back and think: what did I do right?
It was written after my first Fantasycon, in 2004, in which the publisher/writer Gary Fry asked me to write a story in the spirit of M. R. James for the Gray Friar collection Poe’s Progeny. Such was my enthusiasm that I wrote two stories: ‘The Original Occupant’ initially, and then ‘Where Angels Come In’. Gary Fry used each story in a different Gray Friar collection. ‘The Original Occupant’ was later published in Bernie Herrmann’s Manic Sextet.
The founding image for this story, however, came to me as I walked between two long rows of Georgian terraces in Holland Park, West London, near where I lived for seven years. I imagined glimpsing an elderly face, but one too bloodless, wasted and harrowed to be that of the living, at an upstairs window, which quickly withdrew into the darkness of the room. I held the image and, when I next arrived at the building where I was employed as a porter in Mayfair, I began writing the story. The entire first draft came out in one sitting, and I remember that writing the story slipped me into a trancelike state.
Though the story is entirely Jamesian in intent and imagery, and even features the spectres from some of his stories, it was also an anti-Jamesian story, in which I eschewed any hint of the social background and erudition of his world, the age of his narrators, and the time in which the story is set. After all, the editor had asked for the spirit of James and not a pastiche. Since Banquet for the Damned this is what I have always tried to do with the enormous influence that M. R. James has wielded upon my imagination: to try and mirror his approach to the supernormal, and some stylistic traits, while avoiding pastiche.
‘The Original Occupant’ was another attempt to use a particular and distinct voice, though a much older, more traditional, educated, and patrician male voice that dominated the classic era of the ghost story. I’ve rarely used this voice again, and wasn’t sure whether to even include this story in the collection, but it has significance to me because the ideas and location in this story planted the first acorn for my later novel The Ritual. The mannered voice in ‘The Original Occupant’ too easily leans to contrivance in my ear, and when I am reading it is an idiom that can bounce me out of a story if it doesn’t seem natural. It’s not my voice, and I don’t share its social background, and it often seems part of a consensus in English literature, embedded within the class structure. I’ve taken against it for long periods as a reader.
Most of my short fiction is written in the first person, though not one of my eight horror novels has been. I mention this because the short story has been a palette for experimenting with voice from the beginning of my writing. I think it’s also why I’m often told that all of my books are different from each other; how something is written, both the narrative and the voice, or voices, is something I never stop mulling over, before, during and even after I’ve finished a story or novel. Is this right? is a common question that I ask myself. Another question is: so who is actually telling the story? I make no criticism, and have often envied their consistency, but there are writers with long careers who seem to have written every book in the same way and in the same voice. I think I’m incapable of that dedication to a single style and approach.
I also began writing The Ritual five years after finishing this story (though that novel is written in a very different way, and tries to break with the literary, in some ways, and to marry itself with the cinematic), and that’s how long it can take for me to realise an idea fully enough to attempt it at novel length; generating ideas is never a problem, but how they should be written is a perpetual puzzle. But this story was an attempt to offset the horror; to tell stories within stories, from three characters, varying from a narrator to reported conversations to correspondence; but the primary narrator is only ever offering hearsay. This was intended to create layers of distance from the actual horror, before bringing it forth at the very end.
At this time, I was also seriously considering emigration to Sweden or Norway. I’d visited and travelled in Scandinavia many times from 2000 until 2005. My original, lunatic aim was to live in a Fritidshus too, for one entire year, in order to see what kind of fiction I could produce in twelve months of isolation within a wilderness. I remain relieved that I came to my senses.
‘Mother’s Milk’ dates back to the mid-90s and is the only fiction from my earliest period that I have allowed to survive.
So critical were the comments of tutors on my creative writing master’s degree in 1997 about my work submitted to workshops and tutorials that I remember suffering a sense of hopelessness and feeling genuine despair about my writing and writerly aspirations. It is the only time that I ever considered giving up (albeit briefly!). But the tutors were absolutely right about the incoherence in my writing at that stage, and never intended to inflict any real damage – in fact, they practised a very genial bedside manner – but young writers can be as fragile as old eggs.
In order to crawl before I could walk, as opposed to trying to run as a more sophisticated writer that I certainly wasn’t, I decided to infantilise as a writer. So I stripped myself back to year zero in voice and intention and revisited an early version of this story in 1997; a story in which I had written very simple sentences in a childlike voice. I was now interested in clarity, voice and effect above all else. So, I rewrote the story until every image rang true, until I could hear, taste and see what I was describing. I’d been over-writing, over-confidently, for years until 1997, and had produced a collection of short stories and a short novel by the mid-90s; I’d even sold a popular erotic novel to a mid-size publisher. But nothing from that period I consider salvageable besides ‘Mother’s Milk’. The year 1997–98, in which I received formal instruction on my writing, was therefore pivotal for me.
‘Mother’s Milk’, submitted to workshops on that creative writing course, was the first piece of my work that was widely appreciated by those who read it. In the first place, it took a friend to persuade me to even put the story into a workshop; I was embarrassed by the strange voice and the grotesque themes in the story, particularly in a place like St Andrews, but I privately acknowledged that the tale was an authentic catch from deep within my imagination. Ultimately, the way the story was received was one of the most confirming experiences I had as a fledgling writer.
The second most confirming experience at this stage was Ramsey Campbell publishing the story in Gathering the Bones in 2003. This was my first time in print as an author of horror and the weird. Prior to this, I’d sent ‘Mother’s Milk’ to a well-known horror magazine to have it sent back with a comment that it was too descriptive and also badly written. Discouraged, it was only years later in 2000–1 that I’d shown the story to my editor at Virgin, the late and much missed James Marriott, who was a devotee of horror and wanted to see something I’d written in that vein. Without my knowledge, James passed the story on to John Coulthard, who passed it on to Ramsey Campbell. My first rune had truly been cast. And out of the milky blue I received an email from Ramsey in which he explained that he liked that the story contained ‘the texture of a nightmare’ and wanted to publish it in Gathering the Bones. Ramsey t
hen helped me into print as a novelist too, by recommending that I send my first supernatural horror novel, Banquet for the Damned, to his UK publisher, PS Publishing (Ramsey also wrote the introduction to that first edition of the novel, published in 2004).
I do sometimes wonder whether, if ‘Mother’s Milk’ had been dismembered on that creative writing course in 1997, I would have subsequently learned to write as openly as I do in my horror fiction.
A first draft of ‘Yellow Teeth’ was written sometime in 2004, but was revised and extended a few years later after Tim Lebbon, James A. Moore and Christopher Golden invited me to write a story for a collection they were compiling, British Invasion, that Cemetery Dance were publishing. Writing this story mirrored a difficult period in my existence in London, stretching from 1999 until around 2005, in which my living arrangements, and my personal standards, were often severely compromised by having very little money and working at night. This forced me to live in some shoddy places and to cohabit with, quite frankly, people with the most appalling habits, who may even have been suffering from personality disorders. That whole period was a maelstrom of sleep deprivation, poverty, despair, conflict with others within small living spaces, and grave anxieties about my future. This story was a reflection of my being inspired while down (you always have writing to turn to). But my experiences in my first years in London really manifested in the novel Apartment 16 (I was twice asked by mental health professionals, after they’d read Apartment 16, if I suffered from schizophrenia).
During these early years in London, as well as working as a porter, writing one erotica novel each year and putting the finishing touches to Banquet for the Damned, I also felt that most of my energy and capacity was being wasted in just coping with my existence in London. And once I’d begun this story, I was convinced that it was a novel too. Problem was, I already had two novels on the go in different fields, and so I decided to leave ‘Yellow Teeth’ as a long short story and to revisit the ideas and characters sometime in the future. And I did revisit them in 2015, with my novel Under a Watchful Eye (as it is called at the time of writing), which is scheduled for publication in early 2017.