‘A first class terror story with a relentless focus that would have made Edgar Allan Poe proud.’
New York Times on The Cormorant
‘Gregory writes with the hypnotic power of Poe.’
Publisher’s Weekly
‘Gregory’s voice and vision are wholly original.’
Ramsey Campbell
‘Intelligent and well-written.’
Iain Banks on The Cormorant
‘A considerable delight... the quality of the prose and the economy of expression are particularly impressive.’
Time Out on The Cormorant
‘An extraordinary novel - original, compelling, brilliant.’
Library Journal on The Cormorant
First published 2013 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
ISBN (epub): 978-1-84997-646-6
ISBN (mobi): 978-1-84997-647-3
Copyright © 2013 Stephen Gregory
Cover art by Nicolas Delort
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
for Broo Doherty at Wade & Doherty
and Jonathan Oliver, Solaris
Prologue
‘LAWRENCE LUNDY,’ MY father said, blurring the words oddly in his mouth.
Then, to try and remember where he’d heard the name before, he pretended, with an invisible chisel in one hand and an invisible hammer in the other, to carve it onto an invisible gravestone. He stared at the empty space, reading and re-reading the letters as he cut them.
This time it didn’t come back to him.
He’d always said he had a head for names: he’d been a monumental mason for forty years, staring at a name for hours on end as he cut it into the stone. He claimed he could remember exactly where and when he’d carved each one.
But this one wouldn’t come.
‘Lawrence Lundy,’ he said, and he started to carve the name again, shaping each letter with his lips as he tapped it carefully, painstakingly, into thin air with his invisible tools.
I told him it didn’t matter, but he ignored me. He carried on working, in the same way he’d ignored me when, as a boy, I’d sat with him on a frosty morning in a country churchyard or a hot afternoon in a military cemetery. I watched him. He seemed to have forgotten I was there, although I’d flown over seven thousand miles to visit him. I imagined I could hear in my head the knock of the hammer on the handle of the chisel, the nick of the blade into stone.
The room was small and stuffy, already cluttered with the few books and pictures he’d managed to bring with him. It smelled of him and his clothes, although he’d been there less than a fortnight and the window was wide open. There was an impressive view: the nursing-home was on the promenade and his room was on the top floor. For a man who’d worked outside since the day he’d left school, suddenly confined in such a narrow space, it was good that he’d be able to breathe the sharp salt air and watch the changing moods of the estuary.
Now, quite oblivious of me, he was still chipping away. He was tall and very thin, all bumpy joints and jutting angles; strong fingers with swollen knuckles, horny nails, glasses slipping to the end of a bony nose... my stricken father, mouthing the letters of a name he’d heard somewhere but couldn’t quite remember.
He looked very tired. His face, indeed his whole demeanour, was lop-sided. He’d tried talking to me, but his tongue was wet and heavy. He’d listened to my brief account of another year overseas and my plan for the summer. When I told him I was going to stay not far away, that I’d taken a tutoring job for a couple of months and could come into town by bus to see him every week, he’d rummaged in his bedside drawer and pulled out a ring of keys.
‘Use the car,’ he mumbled, and when he saw me wince at the suggestion, he shrugged and added, ‘See if she’ll start, take her round the block a couple of times, it’s up to you.’ He pressed the keys into my hand, and in doing so he held my fingers between his. ‘So soft,’ he smiled, ‘not a day’s work in all your life.’
His eyes were drooping. A trickle of saliva shone on his chin. I stood up and made softly for the door, meaning to let myself out and tiptoe down the corridor.
But he heard me and shook himself awake again. He stared at me as though I’d just come into the room and he didn’t know who I was. Startled, smearing at his mouth with the back of his hand, he tried to say that name again. For a moment, as he blinked at me in bewilderment, he seemed to think that I, a stranger he’d never seen before, was Lawrence Lundy. And suddenly – I could see from a flicker of fear in his eyes – suddenly he remembered the name... yes, he knew it, he’d seen it somewhere, he’d read it somewhere, and at last it had come back to him.
But his tongue and his lips refused to work. He writhed in his chair, infuriated, impotent.
‘No, Dad, it’s me,’ I said, ‘it’s me, it’s Christopher,’ and I moved across the room again, to try and calm him.
He recoiled from my touch. His face twisted into a grimace of revulsion. ‘Bad boy... bad boy...’ he was blubbering through numb, wet lips, and he squirmed away from me.
I left. And as I closed the door and moved along the corridor, I could still hear him trying to get the words out, spluttering with anger and frustration.
Chapter One
I WALKED ALONG the promenade, past holiday hotels, bed-and-breakfasts and old people’s homes. I reached the town and turned into a narrow side-street. The air was shrill with the ill-tempered cries of gulls, and the sky was grey and cold, lowering onto the chimneys and slatey rooftops of the town.
I felt fidgety in England after more than a year away. It prickled on me. It was an itchy old coat I hadn’t worn for a long time, unwashed, stale, with forgotten oddments mouldering in its pockets. In five minutes, I saw things I’d never seen in the gently complacent country I’d left behind: homeless teenagers huddled in blankets, a drunken woman yelling in a pub car park, a man in an ugly confrontation with a traffic warden, shop doorways blocked by bags of rubbish, the pavement sticky with chewing-gum. I rounded a corner into a cobbled alley and came to my father’s lock-up garage. As soon as I slotted the key into the big padlock, snicked it easily and then withdrew the key with a sheen of oil on it, I knew that the car would start and I’d have no choice but to roll it out and drive it dutifully, foolishly, around the town for a mile or two.
I swung the garage door up and open. The car bulged out of it, huge and slabby, mottled grey, like the carcase of a whale.
It was a Daimler hearse. My father had bought it from a local undertaker when I was seven, and for more than twenty years he’d used it as his everyday transport, as his workshop and even as a place to sleep when he was away from home. My mother had hated it, but he’d insisted it was both useful and distinctive, appropriate for his line of business. Now it loomed out of the garage, as though it had been swelling and bloating in the darkness, pressing against the walls and the door to get out. I eyed it with a curious mixture of dislike and irresistible nostalgia. It was ridiculous, the embodiment of my father’s pig-headedness, and yet it was a real, tangible piece of my childhood and adolescence.
Sure enough, when I slipped onto the worn leather of the driver’s seat, turned the ignition key, waited for a moment and pressed the starter button, the engine stirred into a lazy,
rumbling rhythm. It ticked over almost silently when I took my foot off the throttle. I eased the car out of the garage and into the alley, left it running while I went around and opened the back door. The smell hit me straightaway, and I blinked into the gloom of the space that my father had converted for all his tools and materials, a place to rest and read, even a little stove on which he’d made soup and brewed tea in a hundred cemeteries from one coast of England to another. It was the smell of my father, of my youth, of well-oiled tools, well-worn raincoats, work-gloves and work-boots and pipe tobacco: the smell of all the days and nights he’d spent in and around the hearse and the times I’d spent with him. His tools were there, a mahogany chest of hammers and chisels and brushes, the rags and oils he’d used to maintain them, and a cardboard box full of old newspapers. He’d installed a couch for himself, now with its rugs and pillows neatly folded. There were books and maps, and the floor was covered with a green carpet.
I slung my bag inside, the only luggage I’d brought across the world with me. A few minutes later, the hearse was rolling through the town centre.
A dull, squally Sunday afternoon. Grimsby, on the north-east coast of England. Along the prom to Cleethorpes, grimmer than Grimsby.
A gust of wind from the estuary slapped into the side of the hearse. It creaked and swayed, and a spatter of spray fell on the windscreen. People turned to look as I drove by. An elderly couple, arm in arm for a bracing walk, swivelled their heads and stared, a look of sullen resentment in their eyes. A group of youths simply guffawed, a horrid braying noise. A very fat, middle-aged man, drinking beer on his own in a seaside shelter, pulled himself to his feet and stood, head bowed, in mock respect. And when I stopped at the traffic-lights at the end of the promenade, two small boys who’d been kicking a football on a patch of waste ground ran up and pressed their faces to the back window, curious to see if there was a coffin inside. When I accelerated away, they left smeary fingerprints and a mist of hot breath on the glass.
Lawrence Lundy. The name was lodged in my head too. I’d arranged to meet him the following day. I had a night to kill.
I manoeuvred the car back into town, and with some difficulty reversed it into the garage. Six o’clock, that dreadful, deadly hour on a Sunday evening. When a church bell started to ring, and the gulls screamed around the rooftops more defiantly than ever, I slipped into a pub and tucked myself into the darkest, deepest corner I could find.
The beer was flat and warm. The place filled up with people determined to ward off the looming approach of another Monday. Suddenly very tired, after an eighteen-hour flight and then six hours on the train from London to Grimsby, I stayed where I was, now and then struggling to the bar and into my corner again, and I let the beer salve the itch of being back in England. When I emerged at eleven o’clock, the chilly air hit me, I swayed unsteadily and looked around to find my bearings, and I realised I hadn’t found anywhere to stay the night. I’d left my bag in the hearse.
It was raining. I had the uncomfortable feeling that someone was following me as I turned into the alleyway and crossed to the lock-up garage. I fumbled with the lock and snicked it open. When I pulled the door up and over and the enormous chromium grille of the hearse gleamed in the darkness, I saw the shadowy movements of three or four figures hurrying down the alleyway towards me. I ducked into the garage. Swinging the door shut behind me, I managed, in a slit of light from the wet cobbles outside, to ram the bolts into place. Just in time. There was a cannonade of fists and boots, hammering on the door, rattling it on its hinges.
I backed away, into the dark depths of the garage. My pursuers couldn’t get in, although they bellowed and hammered for a few minutes. At last they gave up, urinating long and noisily onto the door before they moved away and the alleyway outside fell quiet.
A soft green light came on, when I opened the back of the hearse. I climbed inside. It was warm, and the familiar smells were a comfort to me. I sat on the couch, meaning to wait and listen for a while until it was safe to go out and try to find a side-street bed-and-breakfast. But when the silence grew around me and every bone in my body ached with tiredness, I kicked off my shoes and lay down, pulling my father’s blankets over me.
Twenty-four hours. From one side of the planet to the other, from one world to another. From the balcony of my spacious, sun-filled house in Sarawak, to a couch in the back of a hearse, in a lock-up garage in Grimsby...
The weight of sleep folded around me. My eyes closed and my head pressed deeper onto my father’s pillow. His face came to me. He was struggling to speak, gagging and grimacing, mouthing a name whose meaning he was powerless to explain.
Chapter Two
I ARRIVED AT Chalke House at noon the following day. It took two hours to drive there. The countryside changed and softened as I drove inland from Grimsby, away from the bleakness of the coast, across the plains of Lincolnshire and into the wolds.
I’d decided to use the hearse after all. After a night of untroubled sleep, I’d stepped outside, into the cool sunshine of a May Monday morning. Over a bacon sandwich and a mug of tea in a cafe next to the bus station, I considered the advantages of taking the ridiculous machine, as my transport and as a base in case things didn’t work out with the job: the hearse was working, it was comfortable, it would save the expense of hiring a car or the inconvenience of public transport.
I regretted my decision every mile of the way. People stared, from one border of Lincolnshire to the other. Everybody, every single person who happened to see the hearse go by, took a lingering second or third look. It was a relic of all the graveyards it had sat in: blistered by the seasons it had endured, weathered and worn down, not so much a car as a tomb on wheels. It had carried hundreds of coffins, but now it seemed, when I glimpsed its reflection in the window of a shop or a car showroom, as though the hearse itself was doomed to its final resting-place. Hollow, vacant, it was ready to be rolled into a barn and colonised by chickens, or crushed in a breaker’s yard.
I came closer to Chalke House, in the wolds. The lane narrowed and twisted, dipping deep into a wooded valley. At last I saw the sign at the foot of an overgrown drive. I had an impulse to roll the car into the shade of the trees and conceal it. How? More and more eccentric, all but impossible, to hide such an enormous, incongruous thing in the dappled sunlight of a Lincolnshire woodland... I turned into the drive and drove very slowly, crunching over gravel. The car wallowed through long grass. Thistles swished along its flanks and belly.
There was a tremendous crash on the windscreen.
The glass imploded. I felt a spatter of splinters onto my face, as something big and very heavy thumped into the soft leather of the passenger seat.
I jammed my foot on the brake. Swiping at my forehead, sensing a smear of blood on the palm of my hand, I opened the driver’s door and tumbled out.
I’d stopped in the shade of a Scots pine. There was a cry from overhead. The sunlight dazzled through the branches, and as I squinted upwards a figure dangled into view. Like an elf descending on a cobweb in a children’s pantomime, a woman slipped silently to the ground and stood there, blinking, staring at me and the car, brushing the hair from her eyes.
Neither of us spoke. When she stepped forward and the look in her eyes suggested that she’d guessed who I might be, she reached to my face and touched my forehead with one fingertip. Her touch was very cool. She withdrew her finger, with a tiny drop of my blood on it.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, a bit out of breath. ‘How awful. I think it’s just a scratch, but I’m so sorry. Are you Mr Beal? Christopher Beal? I’m Juliet Lundy, Lawrence’s mother...’
She wiped my blood onto her shirt, brushed again at the hair which fell over her forehead. Without realising it, she left a smudge of bark and proceeded to smudge and smudge the rest of her face by running her hands around her nose and mouth – as distractedly and naturally as a kitten cleaning itself. She was tiny, in a man’s shirt and a pair of faded blue jeans, with a point
y, questing, twitchy face and a shock of foxy-russet hair. Now that her skin was smeared with the dust of the Scots pine, she had the look of a whiskery wild animal, a squirrel or a marten which had skittered to the ground from high in the branches.
‘Your car,’ she said, and she bent inside it to pick up the thing she’d dropped out of the tree. It was a claw-hammer. She hefted it from hand to hand, and her face twitched and puckered as she looked at the broken windscreen. ‘I was up in the tree, trying to fix Lawrence’s tree-house. Your car kind of startled me, the hammer fell out of my hand...’
‘Your hammer kind of startled me too,’ I said. ‘Yes, I’m Christopher Beal. Don’t worry about the car right now. Can I leave it here?’
For a moment, a queer shadow seemed to pass across her. She shivered and glanced up into the tree from where she’d appeared. She craned her neck, shaded her eyes with her hand and peered up and up to the very highest branches – back down to the car, then back up again, as though, for some reason, she was measuring the distance and angle between the two points – perhaps the trajectory of the claw-hammer. At last she said, with another shudder of her narrow shoulders, ‘Yes, leave it here. A good place. Come along to the house, and we’ll get you cleaned up...’
I followed her through the garden... or rather, a piece of woodland through which the ghostly outline of a long-ago garden was just discernible. Beech trees, their scarred grey trunks towering into the foliage of early summer. A pond the size of a tennis court, a mirror of peaty, unfathomable water. A derelict greenhouse, built against an overgrown chalk cliff, from which an ancient vine forced its tendrils through broken panes, crumbling and lifting the brickwork with its roots. Everywhere, a dense cover of bramble and nettle and cow-parsley.
The Waking That Kills Page 1
