by Alex Bell
X7
Published by KnightWatch Press
This edition published 2013
All rights reserved
This book is a work of fiction. The characters and situations in this book are imaginary. No resemblance is intended between these characters and any persons, living, dead or undead.
Conditions of sale.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Edited by: Alex Davis
Contents
Dead End
If I Were You
Gravy Soup
The Devil in Red
Stormcats
Walls
Seagull Island
INTRODUCTION
by
Alex Davis
Some questions in life are difficult to answer. But, luckily, there are others that are far easier to answer. Such as, would you like to edit an anthology on the seven deadly sins?
Hmm. Let me take a nanosecond to think about that.
Most anthologies are of course based on a theme, and I could hardly think of one more classic than the seven deadly sins. This is a concept that you can track all the way back to the bible, and one that has lived on through the ages in various forms since. As with the ten commandments, these are set out in order to help define the ethics that a person should live by. These are behaviours to be avoided, undesirable assets in a person and a personality, a guide to morality. That’s what makes it so ideal for a horror anthology – these are things that, by their very nature, can only lead to undesirable results, to darkness and nightmares.
For the purposes of this anthology, I’ve stuck with what has pretty well become over time the definitive list of the seven deadly sins – that is: envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, sloth and wrath. However, when you look back through history, there are many others that have featured on lists of this nature – adultery, hatred, idolatry, sorcery (?), drunkenness, dejection, sorrow, uncleanness, murders (I should hope so!) and many more. Thankfully this list has been whittled down over time, becuase this anthology might have ended up resembling War and Peace. Not that I’m suggesting that any of the aforementioned are OK, of course...
So what you are about to enjoy is seven stories, each based upon one of those classic seven deadly sins. And each is a fascinating take in its own right. We lead with Nicholas Royle’s take on Lust, Dead End, which is delivered beautifully subtly and justifies more than one read to get the very maximum out of. Amelia Mangan’s If I Were You is a story that delivers great psychological horror, taking the theme of Envy to deliver a number of scenes that have been living on in my mind since reading it. Simon Clark’s spin on Gluttony, Gravy Soup, was delivered with a warning not to read while eating. I’ll pass that warning on, because I ignored it to my cost. That’s one takeaway I’ll never have again...
Alex Bell’s The Devil in Red is a take on Wrath that stunningly counterpoints the criminal mentality with a domestic viewpoint to show how that wrath can impact all kinds of lives. Simon Bestwick’s Stormcats takes Greed in a direction that I could never have expected – and a direction that I was delighted to follow. Gaie Sebold takes on Pride in Walls, which is a great tale about possession that I won’t spoil by saying too much about! And we close with Tom Fletcher’s Seagull Island, a languid and superbly handled tale on Sloth which, ironically, was the first story I received for the collection.
The thing that stood out for me in the whole collection was the subtlety with which each is handled – perhaps the concept of each sin would invite something very overt, something brutal, something over the top. But each story eschews this in favour of something more thoughtful and in turn thought-provoking. So enjoy this journey through sin – and let’s see if we can’t keep them on the page rather than anywhere else...
Alex Davis
Derby, July 2013
Dead End
by
Nicholas Royle
A ragged scream tears through the leaden heat. He sees a fountain of blood erupt from a body torn in half. Hears – or imagines he hears – the nauseating grind of a siren. Flash of a dentist’s overhead light. Muscles tensed to snapping point. Then the eyes, in close-up. James Garner’s from Grand Prix, but they could be anybody’s. They could be his.
He half-opens one eye. From under the brim of his straw hat, he watches a brown lizard with an orange stripe. It moves across the pebbly path like an illuminated message on a dot-matrix information board.
Arms and legs tingling in the direct sunlight, he hears footsteps on the pebbles, sees the lizard dart into the grass.
‘Hello, my love,’ Isabel says as she bends down to deposit her book and towel on the sun lounger next to his.
He pushes the brim of the hat up a little. She leans over him, sarong falling open against her thigh. He watches his hand rise, his finger touching the exposed flesh. The weight of her breasts pulls against the elastic material of her tankini top.
‘Coming for a swim?’ she says, taking half a step back as a bee lumbers between them.
‘No,’ he says, watching the bee. ‘I’m not much of a swimmer.’
‘I love swimming.’ She backs away, unwinds the sarong.
He hears her enter the pool, one careful step at a time, then the sound of her pushing forward into the water, arms outstretched. The physical reaction he’d had to their momentary closeness begins to subside, and then returns as he pictures her body moving though the water.
He pokes at the brim of his hat so that he can watch the movement of the top of her back and pale shoulders as she swims. He can’t make them out at this distance, but she has the faintest freckles on her shoulders and back. The first time he saw them, as he and Isabel undressed each other in her bedroom on a weekday afternoon, he had traced his finger over the random patterns.
They hadn’t had long; he’d been expected home.
When she reaches the far end and turns around to come back, the kicking of her legs splashes pool water on to a bricked-up doorway in the nearest wall.
He looks at the doorway. At some stage in the past it had, presumably, led somewhere.
After a while, he realises the noises have stopped.
‘It’s thirsty work this, darling,’ he hears her say.
He smiles and gets up from the sun lounger. The garden of the house is criss-crossed by paths, some of which lead only to flowerbeds. He takes one that he knows leads to the house, passing between two beds of lilac festooned with butterflies and abuzz with bees. He walks under the archway and enters the gîte, which is attached to the side of the main house. He pours a glass of orange juice and returns the carton to the fridge, then looks at the glass he has poured and picks it up. Condensation forms on the outside of the glass as sweat runs down into the small of his back. He lifts the glass to his mouth.
The glass now half-empty, he places it back on the work surface and stares absently at the wall behind the wickerwork sofa in the lounge area of their studio room. There’s a watercolour in a gilt frame above the right-hand end of the sofa and a curtain hanging from a rail covering the wall behind the left-hand end. He approaches the sofa and pulls the curtain to one side. Behind it is a glass-panelled door with another curtain on the other side – in the main house.
In his pocket his phone vibrates. He takes it out to find a text from his daughter.
Hi Dad. I swam 10 lengths xx
He smiles as his index finger picks out his reply.
Well done darling. More than I can manage! xx
He stares at the curtain behind the sofa again, his smile fading.
He returns to the garden with a fresh glass of orange juice to find Isabel floating on her back in the pool absolutely still.
‘I don’t know how you do that,’ he says, appraising the outline of her body in the water.
‘It’s easy.’
‘I couldn’t do it.’
‘Anyone can do it.’
‘Not me,’ he says. ‘Not without moving my arms and legs.’
She keeps her legs together and her arms outstretched and lies perfectly still.
He smiles at her as sweat runs from his hairline.
He kneels down, placing the glass of orange juice by the edge of the pool. Isabel turns on to her front and kicks out behind. She approaches the side, her fingers alighting on the tiled rim. He covers her hand with his and she smiles up at him. He looks down at her breasts, wondering if his sunglasses will conceal his wandering eyes, but knowing they won’t. He feels a tightening in his shorts.
‘I want you,’ he says.
Her lips part. She grabs his wrist and is about to try to pull him into the water.
‘My phone,’ he says, resisting.
There’s a hoarse scream or a cry from somewhere beyond the confines of the garden. It sounds like an animal in sudden, unbearable pain. It sounds like the same scream that he has heard before.
‘What is that?’ he asks.
‘A donkey?’ she suggests. ‘Every time I hear it, I think it’s being sawn in half.’
‘I know how it feels,’ he says.
Her face hardens; she looks down, her grip on his wrist abruptly relaxing. Then she lets go and drops beneath the surface. She twists around underwater and when she kicks to propel herself away from the side of the pool, she gives him a good soaking.
He takes his phone from the pocket of his shorts and places it on the nearest sun lounger, then removes his sunglasses and puts them down next to the phone. He checks her position and dives in.
With his eyes closed he reaches for her as he moves underwater. She twists away, trying to free herself from his grasp, but he holds on. They surface and he rubs his eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, gasping for breath. ‘I’m sorry. Really. It was a silly thing to say and it’s not even true.’
She struggles a bit more, but he senses the fight has gone out of her.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says again, and he moves her hair out of her face as they tread water. He draws his legs up and encircles her waist, tightening his grip, but she tips forward, taking them both underwater. His protest emerges in a stream of bubbles.
*
Isabel is lying on her back on a sun lounger. He is standing a few feet away, wondering if it’s forgivable to have sex in a swimming pool. The sun has already dried the remaining droplets of water from her legs, and now the dark patches on her tankini – which she has put back on, since they don’t know when the owners might reappear – shrink even as he watches. She is breathing regularly and he thinks she might be asleep.
He passes under the archway to the front of the property. Their hire car stands on the gravel drive. To the left, the single-track lane leads back to the road, the only route to Villefranche de Rouergue. To the right, the lane peters out into a cinder track, which runs into a high hedge. He remembers when they came out for a walk the night before, hearing the creatures in the fields and hedgerows. The churring and chirruping of birds, he had said; the chiming of cicadas, Isabel had thought. He wonders who was right.
He looks down the lane, which Isabel had described as a cul-de-sac. He had pointed out that the phrase, although French, was not used by the French. So the phrase itself was a linguistic cul-de-sac, n’est-ce pas?
‘Not so much cul-de-sac as mise-en-abîme, in that case,’ he remembers her saying.
He stares into the distance, the skin under his right eye twitching.
In his pocket, his phone vibrates for an incoming text message.
*
They are in Villefranche, walking through streets of grey stone.
‘We could be in Yorkshire,’ he says, taking her hand and enjoying the warm, damp hollow of her palm.
‘Except for the sub-tropical conditions,’ she says.
‘And the French graffiti,’ he adds, pausing by a stencil of a skull signed, apparently, ‘TOMBO’. ‘And the brasseries and patisseries, and the smell of Gauloises et cetera.’
By mutual consent they turn down an alley that looks as if it will offer another way out. It doesn’t. They stand and face one another at the end of the alley, each taking the other’s hand, and kiss.
Eventually the medieval town surrenders its main square and they wander around the market. He stays by her side, either holding her hand or touching the back of it. Sometimes their legs come into contact and he presses against her hips, whispering into her ear. She smiles and makes faint noises of pleasure and encouragement.
She stops at a stall selling a variety of dry sausages.
‘What’s “myrte”?’ he asks, pointing to one labelled “avec myrte”.
‘Myrtle, I expect. Sounds delicious.’
‘I know what “cochon” is,’ he says, looking at another label. ‘What about “âne”?’
‘Donkey,’ she says, catching his eye, before they both turn to look at the looped sausage, a deep reddish-brown colour speckled with chalky white mould.
‘That explains a lot,’ he says.
They stop in a café for a glass of wine, then walk back slowly to where they had left the car, parked in a line of vehicles overlooking the railway station. There is a languid quality to Isabel’s movements that he finds exquisitely erotic and as he lowers himself into the driver’s seat he finds that he is aroused. She fans herself as he starts the engine and he buzzes down her window as well as his own.
The houses lining the road soon fall away and he changes down to second as dictated by the gradient, the car traversing the contours, first one way then the other, to reach higher ground. As they turn left onto the narrow lane down to the hamlet he unclips his seat belt and allows it to loop back on to its spool. She looks at him and raises her eyebrow.
‘Last time you waited until we were halfway down the lane,’ she says.
‘I’m relaxing,’ he says with a smile.
*
Together in the kitchen they prepare ingredients for dinner.
‘Is the sun over the yard arm?’ she asks.
‘Pretty much.’
He opens the fridge and takes out a bottle of wine and a beer. He pours a glass of wine and passes it to her.
‘Cheers,’ they both say.
He pours his beer into a glass. He’s always done this since reading in a magazine that being able to smell your beer as you drink it enhances your enjoyment.
He tops up Isabel’s wineglass and takes the empty bottles outside and stands them with the others that have accumulated by the side of the gîte. At the end of the week, if not before, he will take them into Villefranche and recycle them. As he looks at the line of bottles standing to attention he suddenly has a very clear memory of his son asking him why, when he had swept up a broken wineglass at home, he had dumped the broken glass in the regular bin rather than the recycling bin for glass, metal and plastic. He had told his son that he believed broken glass couldn’t go in the recycling, but had to go in the general waste, and his son had asked about bottles breaking when being dropped in the recycling bin. Was that a problem, he had asked? Did those broken bottles then have to be fished out of the recycling? He hadn’t answered, he now realises. Something else had happened, some distraction had intervened, and they had all moved on and the question had remained unanswered, and he now realises that it’s not that t
he wineglass is broken that’s important, but that it’s a different kind of glass, and he feels an urgent need to tell his son, to explain, so that when his son eventually finds out one day, perhaps from someone else, the truth about glass, he won’t think back and remember how his father misled him. Lied to him, really. He wants to text him now, his son, text him and tell him about the different types of glass, but it further occurs to him that he doesn’t really know enough about it. He doesn’t know why the fact that it’s a different kind of glass is so important. Surely glass is glass. Surely it all gets melted down and remade, doesn’t it? What does it matter if some of it is thin and clear while some of it is green or brown and quite a bit thicker? Although not that much thicker – it depends on the type of glass.
He becomes aware of Isabel standing in the doorway of the gîte with an anxious expression on her face.
‘Darling, what’s wrong?’ she says, approaching him now, arms outstretched. ‘Why are you crying?’ She wipes his tears away. ‘Darling, darling,’ she murmurs as she holds him.
*
In the morning they need bread.
‘I’ll go. You stay in bed,’ he says.
‘No, I want to come with you.’
He tries to persuade her to stay, but she refuses.
It’s warm but hazy. The haze will have burnt off by the time they get back from Villefranche with the bread.
They park in the same spot overlooking the railway station. Isabel is wearing a white short-sleeved top that gapes at the front when she leans forward. That she appears innocent of intent and oblivious to any effect only makes the effect all the more powerful.
‘This is our space,’ she says.
‘I don’t like to drive any further in,’ he says. ‘Feels like there’s no way out. That one-way system.’
When they return to the car carrying a baguette and a bag containing two pains aux raisins, he fastens his seatbelt but then unclips it almost as soon as they start climbing the hill out of town. Isabel looks at him with that same raised eyebrow.
