C. K. McDonnell
* * *
THE STRANGER TIMES
Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
EPILOGUE
FREE STUFF!
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
About the Author
Born in Limerick and raised in Dublin, C. K. (Caimh) McDonnell is a former stand-up comedian and TV writer. He performed all around the world, had several well-received Edinburgh shows and supported acts such as Sarah Millican on tour before hanging up his clowning shoes to concentrate on writing. He has also written for numerous TV shows and been nominated for a Kid’s TV BAFTA.
His debut novel, A Man With One of Those Faces – a comic crime novel – was published in 2016 and spawned The Dublin Trilogy books and the spin-off McGarry Stateside series. They have been Amazon bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic.
C. K. McDonnell lives in Manchester. To find out more, visit whitehairedirishman.com
To Manchester – for the magic and the mayhem
Prologue
The two men stood on the rooftop, watching the city toss and turn in its sleep. The shorter of them looked at his watch – it was 4 a.m. In his experience, no city that was worthy of the name actually slept. Even now, there were signs of activity: the occasional lonesome wanderer and the odd taxi light, trying to find each other in the night. Still, this was the moment when it got as close to truly quiet as it ever would. The sliver of time before the day shift took over from the night.
‘And there’s definitely no other way?’
The shorter man sighed. ‘No.’ He pulled his coat tight around him. The internet had told him the climate of Manchester was ‘mild’, which it turned out was a euphemism for ‘permanently miserable’.
‘Only …’ started the taller man.
‘Only what? We’re not here to negotiate.’
The taller man glared down at his companion. ‘This isn’t easy, y’know?’
‘Believe me, my part is considerably harder than yours.’
‘It’s forty-two bloody floors!’
‘Yeah, but you only really have to worry about the last one.’
Anger flashed in the taller man’s eyes. ‘Is that supposed to be funny?’
‘No, none of this is funny. You have no idea how much giving you this chance has cost me, and now we get up here and it turns out you’re a pussy. Believe me, I am not amused.’
‘I’m … Could I not take something to take the edge off?’
The shorter man turned and walked a few steps. He looked up at the full moon hanging low in the sky. Irony of ironies, he needed to stay calm. He couldn’t say what he wanted to: that he’d let the last guy pop some pills to ‘take the edge off’ and it had resulted in a very nasty crater in the ground. This time it had to work, which meant that this guy needed to be a lot of things, not least of which was entirely unaware of the last guy. It had taken every ounce of the shorter man’s ingenuity to find another suitable candidate in just a week, but still, time was running out. He turned back, spread out his arms and smiled. It all came down to how you sold it.
‘Look, it’s very simple. You have to do this of your own free will, and for it to work, your adrenalin levels have to reach a certain critical level in order to react with the mixture I gave you – or the transformation won’t happen.’ He avoided using the word ‘potion’ – it set the wrong tone. This was the age of science – because they’d done such a good job persuading the masses that magic did not exist. He moved forward until they were standing side by side again and lowered his voice. ‘You’ve seen what I can do and you know I want to help. You just need to do your part.’
The taller man returned to his moody silence.
That was it. No more Mr Nice Guy. It was time to move this along.
‘OK. I’m calling it a night. I know when people say “I’ll do anything”, they don’t really mean it. It’s an expression. I thought you were different. I thought wrong. There’s a flight back to New York in three hours. See ya—’
The shorter man turned to leave but the other man grabbed his arm. His grip was vice-like.
‘Just …’
The shorter man looked down at the hand that was currently gripping his bicep. ‘Believe me when I say you do not want to do that.’
After a moment’s hesitation, his arm was released. He looked up into the taller man’s teary eyes. Anger, fear and a large dollop of hate swirled around in there. It was nothing he didn’t expect. ‘You told me you wanted to do this. You begged me, in fact. To use an expression from home, it’s shit-or-get-off-the-pot time.’
The taller man reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a photograph. He looked at it for a long moment, then tossed it away and started running as fast as he could.
The wind caught the picture and it hung in the air for a moment: a smiling blonde woman, her arms wrapped around a dimple-cheeked young girl with the same sparkling blue eyes, who beamed a gap-toothed grin up at the camera. Then it was gone, swept away into the night.
The taller man didn’t slow as he disappeared over the edge of the building. Surprisingly, there was no scream on the way down; or if there was, it was carried away by the wind.
The shorter man ambled forward and looked over the side. Forty-two storeys beneath him lay pavement – gloriously craterless pavement. The tall man was not dead, merely transformed. Now, he was something else. Something useful.
‘Looks like we got ourselves a ball game.’
The shorter man turned and walked away, whistling a happy tune to himself.
Somewhere near by, what sounded like a very big dog howled.
CHAPTER 1
Hannah glanced around as quickly and discreetly as possible, and then threw up in the bin. It had not been a good day. In fact, even though it wasn’t yet lunchtime, today stood out as one of the worst days of her life – or it would have, if it wasn’t for the fact there had been so many of them recently. Life had become one long stress dream she didn’t seem capable of waking up from.
In her bag sat Only One Direction, the self-help book by Dr Arno Van Zil, the South African life coach. ‘The past is unwanted luggage we don’t need to carry.’ She had been clinging to the book like a life raft. The author’s warm smile on the front cover had started to feel slightly mocking now. ‘All that matters is the next step.’ She couldn’t look back; she had to keep moving forward.
Having said that,
she did need to sit down for a second so she could scour her bag for the mint that, please God, would be in there. She perched on a bench beside the bin. She was in a park not far from the centre of Manchester. The sound of kids whooping and hollering in the nearby play area mixed with the wash of ever-present traffic in the background. She shoved her phone into her coat pocket. She was starting to really hate the bloody thing. When she had made the decision to walk away from her old life and not take anything with her, the phone had been one of the few exceptions. She might not want the money or the houses, but she still needed to communicate with the world.
Unfortunately, the phone contained social media, and Hannah was unable to stop herself from looking at it. A window back into a world of summers spent in London and the rest of the year in Dubai. Of wealth. Of conspicuous consumption. The feature that showed you pictures of what you’d been doing at the same time the previous year was particularly brutal. On the one hand it reminded her of the empty and soulless vacuum her life had been, but on the other … God, it had been easy. Comfortable.
Last week she’d heard the Pulp song ‘Common People’ in a shop and had felt like bursting into tears. There she had been, staring at tins of suspiciously cheap peas in a budget supermarket, wondering how long she could live on them for, when Jarvis Cocker of all people decided to put the boot in.
She had just come from an interview for her dream job. It had not gone well. She’d bet good money that it would still appear in her dreams, albeit in a nightmare that she would be reliving over and over again.
Storn was a range of upmarket Norwegian furniture. Exquisitely handcrafted and elegantly minimalist, it had quickly become a must-have for those who could afford it. Hannah loved it. Hannah had furnished two houses with it. Hannah could very probably never look at another piece of Storn furniture again without being violently ill.
When she’d seen the job advertised, it had felt like a sign from God that she was going to get through this. That, despite what everyone had told her, she was making the right decision.
She had plucked up the courage to ring Joyce Carlson. Amongst the numerous ‘friends’ from her ‘old life’, Joyce was one of the few who had felt like a real friend. Once she’d known her for a while, Hannah had come to realize that, while being part of that life, Joyce had a healthy sense of realism that allowed her to simultaneously recognize the ridiculousness of it all. She was also one of the few women in that crowd who had got herself a job. An actual job. Joyce had met the CEO of Storn through her husband and been hired in a ‘marketing’ role when the company had launched the shop in London. Joyce knew the right people and had thrown the right parties, giving the brand exactly the kind of splashy landing they’d been hoping for. So much so, they’d now opened a second store in Manchester, catering to the Cheshire set, and they were looking for staff.
So Hannah had swallowed what little pride she had left and contacted Joyce.
The small talk had been as awkward as she had expected it to be. Joyce had expressed solidarity with Hannah while being classy enough not to ask any questions. In any case, Hannah was sure Joyce already knew much of what had happened. The most salacious details had, after all, made the newspapers. Undoubtedly, for the previous three weeks, Hannah’s fall from grace would have dominated the gossipy conversations over lunch among the old set. She had been very aware when making the call that she was handing Joyce a tasty morsel to share if she so chose: Oh yes, she rang me – she’s looking for a job now!
Still, she had needed the help. Once Hannah had raised the subject of the job, Joyce had seen where she was heading immediately and had seemed extremely sincere in her assurances that she would do all she could to assist her. After all, Hannah had been one of her first and most loyal disciples in the cult of Storn. By the end of the call, Hannah had been all but assured that the job would be hers. She had put down the phone, light-headed with the thought that not only would she soon be able to support herself, but also that she had at least one real friend. The last eleven years might not have been a complete waste.
She had gone into the interview with real confidence.
‘I’m really sorry, Ms Willis, I think my assistant must have made a mistake when printing your CV out.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. I’ve got you down as having read English at Durham University.’
‘Right.’
‘But you didn’t graduate?’
‘Ehm. Well, yes, about that—’
‘Then there’s nothing else on there apart from your hobbies and some charity work. If you give me a moment, I’ll just ring her and tell her to print out the full thing. I do apologize. Are you OK for tea, coffee, espresso, cucumber water?’
‘Yes, ehm – yes. Actually, that is all of my CV.’
‘Ah, I see …’
That had been bad, but nothing compared to when the other interviewer had recognized Hannah’s name. As she’d fled the Storn premises, Hannah had checked her watch. Her first proper interview had lasted seventeen excruciating minutes.
Sitting on the park bench, she found what she was fairly sure was a Tic Tac at the bottom of her bag. Beggars can’t be choosers. She popped it in her mouth.
As well as the Storn interview, Hannah had another one lined up for today – mainly because she had forgotten to cancel it. The advert on the website had been, well, different: ‘Publication seeks desperate human being with capability to form sentences using the English language. No imbeciles, optimists or Simons need apply.’
She hadn’t been sure it was even a genuine advert, but still, she had sent in her CV regardless. A nice lady called Grace with an accent somewhere between Mancunian and West African had called up and offered her an interview. She’d accepted it, but then the Storn thing happened and, well, this one had completely dropped out of her consciousness. On her way into Storn this morning, she had even debated whether to ring Grace and tell her that she couldn’t make it, but had decided against it – it was good to have a back-up plan. If the last couple of months of Hannah’s life had proven anything, it was the importance of having a back-up plan.
So here she was, sitting in a park in an unfamiliar city, sucking on what she was increasingly less sure was a Tic Tac, heading for an interview for a job she knew absolutely nothing about and now desperately needed. She glanced at her watch. Christ, she was late now too. She pulled her phone back out of her coat pocket. The map showed the blue dot of the location as being behind an old church on the far side of the park.
She stood and brushed herself down. As she did so, a homeless guy with an eyepatch and a long brown beard that stretched down to his chest wandered up to the bin and looked in it. He wrinkled his nose in disgust and shook his head.
‘I tell ya, love, there’s some bloody monsters around here.’
CHAPTER 2
Hannah rushed around the corner and looked up and down the street. The park lay behind her, there was an all-weather football pitch to her right and a church to her left. The rest of the street was a stretch of wasteland, with some terraced houses at the far end. At the edge of the empty plot of land was a sign indicating that the site was going to be developed into luxury apartments, but the board was so battered and covered in graffiti that it now looked like someone’s big idea whose time had passed.
Hannah started digging around in her bag for the scrap of paper she had written the address on. Maybe she had typed it into her phone wrong?
‘Excuse me, sweetie, would you mind moving?’
Hannah immediately started to apologize – although, as she looked around, she couldn’t find the source of the voice. She was entirely alone on the street.
‘Up, dear. Always look up.’
Hannah took a step out into the road and did as she was told. The church was red brick, with bars on many of the windows. It possessed a sort of shabby, unloved beauty. The pockmarked brickwork climbed to a black slate roof. As Hannah looked further up, she saw a round, unbarred window of multicoloured
stained glass. To her untrained eye, it would have been the building’s most notable feature – had it not been for the portly man in a tartan three-piece suit who was standing on the roof above it.
‘Oh my God,’ said Hannah.
‘No, sweetie, I’m definitely not him.’ The man spoke with a plummy accent, like that of a camp Shakespearean actor. ‘Could you be a dear and scooch over a smidge?’
Hannah realized she was directly below the man and scampered out of his projected flight path.
‘Are you … Are you OK?’
‘Sweet of you to ask, although it does demonstrate a frightful inability to assess a situation. Still though, no need to concern yourself. Off you pop.’
He cleared his throat and raised his voice to address the world at large. ‘Fare thee well, cruel world. You shall have Reginald Fairfax the Third as your plaything no more!’
Hannah looked up at the man, desperately trying to think of something to say. However, she was beaten to it.
‘Oh no, please don’t do it, Reggie,’ came a voice with the overenunciated vowels she was already learning were a signature feature of the Mancunian accent.
Hannah took a few steps further back and found its source: an East Asian man with an unkempt beard who was leaning out one of the side windows of the church, looking up at the other man.
‘You have so much to live for,’ he continued.
What struck Hannah as odd was the relaxed tone of the second man, as if he were engaged in a half-hearted read-through of a script for which he had little enthusiasm. He seemed considerably more enthusiastic about the large bag of Kettle chips he had on the go.
‘No, Ox, my dearest friend. I shall cast off these mortal chains and free myself from this sullied flesh. I leave you all of my earthly possessions.’
‘Oh great,’ said Ox, as much to himself as anyone else. ‘A collection of waistcoats and a sink full of washing-up you said would be done first thing.’
The Stranger Times Page 1
