The Dead Yard

by Adrian McKinty

  If I get up, I know how it will be.

  I know what will happen. A hushed absence and around me the sentient creatures will move aside in recognition. They know there will be more slaughters down the road. For I am the one, the master of the art. I am the favored son of Death. Touched was a mere pretender. They’ll run and the skeleton will smile beneath his hood.

  No.

  I’ll resist it. I’ll stay here. With her.

  An ocean wind. A faltering front. The snow is ending. Back in its box until December. The weather will return to something more autumnal, but the world will not be as it was before. I’ve changed it. Everything remade with a bitter quality. I see it manifest in the ghost of pine trees, in the clouds, the black bark, the dead girl next to me in the snow.

  I shake my head.

  I’ll resist it . . .

  A jet.

  The moon.

  Aye.

  Do that, Michael.

  Don’t get up. Don’t let them see you. They can leave you for a while yet. They can let you be. Those tongues of midnight. Whispering incantations. Casting glyphs. Biding their time. They’ll weather well their wait, blessed as they are with the virtues of patience and fortitude and the knowledge of their propagation with the blood from the never-ending works of man.

  You’ll live to see another day. They’ll let you have some years of peace.

  You’ll live because she is out there and she wants you. And her power is growing and will grow until she cleanses the deck of all the captains.

  And you’ll live because he is out there too. And no one knows. And he is coming. And the rage in you is as nothing to the bursting dam that is him. And you’re the one that set him free.

  It’s a dangerous world, Michael. Stay in the woods. Hide.

  From the paramedics, the feds, the killers, hide from them all.

  Don’t get up.

  Don’t get up if you know what’s good for you.

  Snow blinks into my eyelids.

  I watch the sky.

  Not a jet.

  A helicopter.

  Rotor blades.

  Engines.

  Sirens.

  Cars.

  A squeal of brakes.

  A slamming door.

  Voices.

  Footsteps.

  I get up.

  Other Serpent’s Tail titles of interest

  David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet

  Nineteen Seventy Four

  ‘Breathless, extravagant, ultra-violent…Vinnie Jones should buy the film rights fast’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘Peace has found his own voice – full of dazzling, intense poetry and visceral violence’ Uncut

  ‘Peace’s storytelling may be unrelentingly dark, at times even nightmarish, but what impresses most about the books…is the author’s literary ambition. Peace uses prose like a blunt weapon. His sentences are hypnotic, repetitive, incantatory. Pages seem to fly by. Sharpened dialogue jostles with drifting thoughts. Snatches of pop lyrics wrestle with the fractured ravings of the killer. Victims swirl through the text, alive, dead, alive again…Peace is at the forefront of a generation of hard-boiled crime writers pushing the genre into new and difficult territory’ Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘David Peace’s stunning debut has done for the county what Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy did for Los Angeles…This is a brilliant first novel, written with tremendous pace and passion’ Yorkshire Post

  Nineteen Seventy Seven

  ‘Quite simply, this is the future of British crime fiction…the finest work of literature I’ve read this year – and its ending is as extraordinary and original as what precedes it’ Time Out

  ‘With a human landscape that is violent and unrelentingly bleak, Peace’s fiction is two or three shades the other side of noir’ New Statesman

  ‘One hell of a read’ Crime Time

  ‘Peace’s Boschian landscape of West Yorkshire’s all-out dystopia began with Nineteen Seventy Four and a young girl’s murdered body, found in a ditch with swan’s wings sewn to its shoulder blades. While atmospheric with ’70s music and ads, that first installment set the quartet’s bleak Orwellian tone, though with echoes of the complex modes of Dos Passos’ USA and the demonic grimness, violence, corruption and conspiracies of James Ellroy’ Kirkus Reviews

  Nineteen Eighty

  ‘A bleak portrait of those times, written in a stylised prose that takes a few pages to attune to but which admirably suits the subject matter. It’s black and moving’ Observer

  ‘His best yet, a top-drawer thriller which grabs the reader by the scruff of the neck and doesn’t let go until the last page…unmatched…his writing these days stands in comparison with American masters like Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy and Walter Mosley… Another winner from David Peace, whose name on the cover is these days a guarantee of existence, a must-read thriller of originality and style that confirms him to be one of the best crime writers anywhere’ Yorkshire Post

  ‘He has found his own, equally experimental, approach and it further enhances the oppressively sombre tone…an impressive addition to the noir genre’ Metro

  ‘Read a book by David Peace. If you want to know what Leeds was like in the 70s and early 80s then David Peace is the authority’ Leeds Guide