by Adam Nevill
She and Josh had burned Fergal’s emaciated remains, and the charred remains of the idol of old Black Mag, in a metal skip. Josh had located the skip inside an empty feed barn near Newton Abbot. Amber had not watched the cremation. Nor had she been expected to watch Josh’s smashing of the bones and teeth of the effigy that had survived incineration. Because it was not sawdust or stuffing that they had found inside the burned idol. Amber had assisted Josh, with her face masked throughout the operation, with the sweeping of the ashes of their foes into dust pans, and then into the plastic bags that they had later emptied into an outgoing tide from the end of a deserted jetty.
They left nothing behind.
Josh had then made sure that the fire in the farmhouse began in the kitchen, close to where she had lain. The incineration of Amber’s home was not viewed as suspicious by the police; Josh’s expertise in such matters ensured the subtle tracks were covered. Amber’s solicitor was dealing with the insurance company over an electrical fire.
She had briefly wondered whether a priest could be paid to bless the ground, but had then realized that what had been buried in her home was probably much older than Christ and had been served before the first Roman footfall on British soil. She was left hoping, desperately, that her salvation had been determined by something as crude as the exhuming and incineration of the relics and remains that had followed her to Devon.
After they’d finished off her home and its unsightly intruders, Josh began his leave of absence from work. He’d didn’t know whether he would return to security duties, or what he might do instead. Neither of them had been sure what they would do next. They had resided, mostly in silence and away from each other, in neighbouring hotel rooms for one week, and they had waited, and waited, each dreading the fall of night to see what might happen in the darkness about their beds.
Nothing had happened. No nightmares had opened inside Amber’s dreaming mind, no desolate voices had called from beneath her windows, and no long, grubby figures had stood upright and raised their blackened faces to grin at her. On the first night she’d slept eighteen hours. Only waking once when Josh checked on her.
Josh had struggled to communicate what he had experienced in the garden of the farmhouse. He had tried, but Amber realized that he was currently being forced to do what she had been forced to do many years before: to question everything he had taken for granted, and believed, in life. And he too had been driven to wonder what else was out there, around them; where this torrid and uncoordinated journey through life was headed, and what lay at the end of it. A man’s thoughts could not get much bigger.
But Josh had admitted that after they had left the garage that night, he had seen Fergal and Arthur Bennet, and other things that may have once been people; forms that no handgun offered any protection against; things that were not there after the garden and sky had been briefly lit with a false red dawn.
Nothing had ever frightened him as much as what came to them within the darkness outside the rear walls of her house; nothing in the call of duty had shaken him in the same way before. His presence had enraged Fergal and Bennet, he knew that much. And he had been sure that he had been only a boy when he could no longer find Amber in the darkness. He’d hoped to prevent them from reaching her, but only half remembered being knocked around, then down, and finally savaged by what might have been dogs, or what had once been men, on a stone or cement surface that should have been a grassy lawn beneath his body. He’d told Amber in the only way that seemed available to him, that he had ‘unravelled. Lost it. Thought I was a kid at school again. I was dragged around the ground by someone with cold hands. My shirt was ripped off. I thought I was dead. They hit me hard. Think it was with a house brick. But I could still think, but not see. I thought I’d been blinded. It was like hell.’
The bruises and gouges on his flesh had eventually faded. The septic bites she had cleaned and dressed for him had now healed. But Josh did not know where exactly he had been during that night; he was certain he had not been in the garden that they had run into from the garage. Nor did he ever want to visit such a place again, and so he had agreed without complaint to the destruction of the building where such impossible things had reappeared in his client’s life.
Eventually, Amber rose from the balcony lounger on stiff legs and sniffed. Brought a tissue to her eyes and nose. And slowly made her way back inside to the light and warmth of her cabin. She would continue to sleep and eat inside there, to pass the time with small distractions, to accept sleep warily as if she was a sentry on watch for an unpredictable, patient enemy, and she would let this ship take her wherever it went before she boarded another. And she would wait, and wait, and wait, until she knew where to go and what to do next.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It is with genuine fondness that I acknowledge the influence of the encyclopaedic work of the late Peter Haining and the late Dennis Bardens, who both wrote so enthrallingly about apparitions. The absence of their books from my shelves would haunt me. The chilling, and near unbearably ghastly, true crime books of Howard Sounes (Fred and Rose), John Leake (The Vienna Woods Killer), Stefanie Marsh and Bojan Pancevski (The Crimes of Joseph Frizl) were invaluable in my attempts at creating these killers, as were the studies of Martha Stout (The Myth of Sanity) and Robert D. Hare (Without Conscience). P.V. Glob’s classic, The Bog People, offered a shrivelled hand in the service of creating Old Black Mag’s history.
Many thanks to my editor, Julie Crisp, for her keen thoughts and suggestions, to my agent, John Jarrold, to Kesia Lupo and the Pan Macmillan team, and the teams at St Martins, Minotauro and Braggelonne. Additional gratitude goes out to my beta readers: Hugh Simmons, Mathew Riley, Anne Nevill and Clive Nevill.
My sincerest thanks to the British Fantasy Society and to the community of bloggers and reviewers who continue to check out my books and support them.
Readers: I salute you! You keep me going.
Also by Adam Nevill
Banquet for the Damned
Apartment 16
The Ritual
Last Days
House of Small Shadows
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE. Copyright © 2014 by Adam Nevill. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
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First published in Great Britain by Pan Books, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
First U.S. Edition: May 2015
eISBN 9781466837393
First eBook edition: March 2015
