The Stone Man - A Science Fiction Thriller

by Smitherd, Luke

  I don’t know how I feel about those ideas. It makes their masters, or even them, into something else in my mind. I think of them as, I suppose, evil. They are the bad guys. But thoughts like that suggest something else; that they think of us simply as cattle, a means to an end. We’ve been seeing it all along as some kind of sinister master plan, but this might be something basic to them, something that they’ve been doing for centuries, coming from wherever they are and going to other places like ours and creating … what, Stone Men, other things, other workers, other helpers? Whatever it is that makes their place function. It might be as common to them as working out the council budget for the year.

  I don’t like all that though. It makes it harder to hate them. Whatever the reason, they come here and they scare people into their gruesome deaths. Fuck their reasons. I hate them.

  Ah … I don’t like using this thing. It makes me think of Andy. They let me hear his recording, after I kept asking for months and months. They did a few assessments beforehand. It was a hard listen, very hard, but I was glad I did. There were things on there he wanted me to hear. I heard them, mate. I liked you too. I don’t blame you for getting me into this. Which you did, by the way, but anyway.

  I don’t regret not taking Andy’s way. I don’t regret it at all. He was a hero? Good. Good for him. I mean that. But let’s see who saved more lives in the end, eh? That’s what counts. He was brave? Absolutely. Incredibly brave, or at least I think so. He didn’t sound so sure. And did I delay, did I hesitate, did I risk lives because I was too scared to do the right thing? Fuck it, yes. I can say that. Enough years have passed. The therapy is about keeping me sane in here, but we’ve talked about the past as well, and I’ve come to terms with it. I was scared. Who the fuck wouldn’t be? But here’s what I did do, what I did have.

  I thought on my feet. I thought of a solution. And here I am, and as bad as it gets—and sometimes it does get very bad—I’m still pretty sure it’s better than the alternative (ask me again, if I’m still here in ten years, and see what I say then, but for now I’m pretty sure). And thinking of that solution not only kept me alive—and let’s be honest, let’s be really honest, that was why I thought of it, anything else that comes of it is a bonus—but might well mean we figure out how to beat them. So Andy might well have been the braver man, but I might be the guy who made the difference, and I was the ‘coward’. So what the hell does that mean then, eh?

  And for me, personally, what’s come of it? I might be saved yet. I might get to live and go free, whilst Andy’s in the ground somewhere. I’d have been rewarded, and what would that mean then? The brave man dies and the coward lives, how does that work?

  Yeah, okay, it might still go the other way, especially as … actually, sod it, I’m gonna delete this anyway, but hang on …

  Right. I’ve made it look like I’ve finished and I’ve gotten into bed, so they can’t read my lips. If I talk quietly, they shouldn’t hear me under the duvet, and this is being deleted anyway, but I need to say this out loud. For me.

  Tony slipped up last week. Just briefly, and he moved on, but it’s been a different physio that’s come back since. Told me Tony was on holiday, but I don’t know. Anyway, the last time he was here, Tony was chattering away about traffic where he lives—he has a tendency to rant sometimes, Tony, I don’t think he realises that he does it—when he said that his wife was in the car with him.

  “She says to me I shouldn’t complain,” Tony said to me, “as it’s not as bad as it was a few years back. She says I should remember what it was like, back when we kept having all the bother every couple of months—” Then he suddenly stopped dead, and the pause was only very brief, but I looked to my right, at the guard—obviously, Tony was stood up behind me, working on my back, but I could see the guard’s face all right, a young guy—and he was glaring at Tony, but not even angrily; more like he was worried too. He didn’t want to get in trouble either, and they both knew the camera and mic would be on. Then Tony had started talking again, rounding off the story by talking about football traffic. The change was quite smooth, but the way the guard had looked at me afterwards—and then looked away suddenly—told me that something had nearly been given away. And I still haven’t decided whether it’s good or bad news for me.

  See, I think ‘the bother every couple of months’ were the Arrivals. And I think that, since ‘it’s not as bad as it was’ when they were having the ‘bother’, that says to me there hasn’t been another Arrival since the last one. I think that, since we’ve caught the original one here, and effectively have it stuck in a loop with me, it’s somehow gumming up the works. I don’t know, maybe they have to have them all back before they can start again, or maybe—and I think this is more likely, seeing as it was always the original that turned up first before the others came—that they need it back to make the system work, like it’s the linchpin or something. Or maybe they’ve just given up and moved on elsewhere, worried that we’re figuring them out or that we’re just too much trouble. I haven’t a clue. But either way, I think from the government’s point of view, the situation is this:

  As long as they keep the original here, and following me, the others don’t come back. And I think that, unless the research yields some results soon, that will stay as the bottom line. And what that means for me, I don’t really like to think.

  But better than the alternative? I still think so. I think I still think so. For now, at least, I’m here. There’s air in my lungs and blood moving in my veins. I still want to keep it that way.

  ***

  Paul paused for a moment, breathing slowly, then pushed the ‘STOP’ button on the Dictaphone. He looked as if he was going to start recording again and add something else, but then he pushed the ‘DELETE’ button instead.

  Throwing back the duvet, Paul sat up in bed and swung his legs over the edge, rubbing at his face. He looked up into the upper right-hand corner of the cabin, at the small black camera lens, and gestured at the bed behind him. He then shrugged, put his face to his flattened hands to mime sleep, and then shrugged again. It wouldn’t look out of the ordinary; he often mimed things to it throughout the day, even though they could hear him. He didn’t like to talk to it for some reason.

  He got up, reaching for a grab handle as the cabin turned, and walked the few feet to the sideboard. Grabbing a mug out of the rubber holder, he clicked the button on the kettle, and sighed gently as it boiled. Whilst he was waiting, he pushed the button on the CD player, and music began to play through the surround sound speakers embedded in the walls. A thought occurred to him, and for the first time in many months, he reached for the curtains that covered the small porthole window in the nearby wall.

  As ever, if he really wanted to see it, he would have to flatten his head against the glass. They’d deliberately placed it so that he would see as little of that particular view as possible, but he’d learned that he could see it if he tried. The best time to do so was always on the turn. He remembered again how Straub had told him of one report, a bright spark of hope that said there’d been a drop in some of the energy readings; but the dip had only lasted a few days before everything had returned to normal. Even so, they were sure it meant something, but Paul didn’t dare to believe it.

  He pulled back the curtains and pressed his face to the glass. The Stone Man was still there, of course, walking steadily after him. Just as it had always been.

  *

  IF YOU ENJOYED THIS BOOK, PLEASE LEAVE A STAR RATING ON AMAZON; THE FEEDBACK I’VE HAD IS NOT ONLY THE THING THAT KEEPS ME WRITING, BUT ALSO MEANS MORE PEOPLE ARE LIKELY TO BUY MY BOOKS (WHICH MEANS I MIGHT ACTUALLY MAKE SOME DECENT MONEY OUT OF THIS ONE DAY …) BUT PLEASE DO SO VIA THE AMAZON WEBSITE, AND NOT VIA THE ‘RATE THIS BOOK’ FEATURE ON YOUR KINDLE; THOSE REVIEWS DON’T CONNECT TO THE WEBSITE HALF THE TIME! CLICK ON THESE LINKS INSTEAD: THE AMAZON UK BOOK PAGE OR THE AMAZON USA BOOK PAGE. IT MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE! YOU CAN ALSO FIND OUT ABOUT MY OTHER AVAILABLE BOOKS WHILE YOU’RE T
HERE. FOLLOW LUKE SMITHERD ON TWITTER @travellingluke OR GO TO FACEBOOK UNDER ‘LUKE SMITHERD BOOK STUFF’. MOST IMPORTANTLY, VISIT WWW.LUKESMITHERD.COM TO SIGN UP FOR THE SPAM-FREE BOOK RELEASE NEWSLETTER, WHICH NOT ONLY INFORMS YOU WHEN NEW BOOKS ARE OUT (AND ONLY DOES THAT) BUT ALSO MEANS YOU GET NEW SHORT STORIES FOR FREE! A SYNOPSIS OF THE ORIGINAL ENDING TO ‘THE STONE MAN’ IS ALSO AVAILABLE AT THE VERY BACK OF THIS BOOK.

  NOW READ ON AFTER THE AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD TO READ THE BEGINNING OF ONE OF LUKE SMITHERD’S OTHER BESTSELLERS (THE ONE THAT HE RECOMMENDS YOU TRY NEXT IF YOU’RE GOING TO READ MORE OF HIS WORK) ‘THE BLACK ROOM, PART ONE: IN THE BLACK ROOM’. THAT BOOK IS FREE TO DOWNLOAD FROM AMAZON RIGHT NOW!

  Author’s Afterword:

  (Note: at the time of writing, any comments made in this afterword about the number of other available books written by me are all true. However, since writing this, many more books might be out! The best way to find out is to search Amazon for Luke Smitherd or visit www.lukesmitherd.com …)

  Well, here we are at last. The ‘Difficult Second Novel’ is finally finished. Admittedly, it should have been finished about eight months ago, and I’ll get to why in a second, but before any of that, I have something far more important to say.

  Thank you.

  The support I’ve received from complete strangers who have read The Physics Of The Dead, be it by e-mail, tweets, nice reviews on Amazon (vital!) or even financial means has been an extremely nice surprise. At the time of writing, there are currently a combined total of 33 positive reviews on the Amazon US and UK kindle stores, and the fact that somebody took the time purely to say that they enjoyed my work (and to encourage others to check it out) never fails to absolutely make my week. The downside is I’m left continually checking the site for new reviews at least five times a day. (Needy? If you only knew how much. But you can leave your star ratings/reviews on the AMAZON UK BOOK PAGE or the AMAZON USA BOOK PAGE. The ‘Rate this book’ feature on the Kindle is notoriously unreliable, so don’t use that ;-) ) But seriously; I can’t stress enough how important those reviews are to me both personally and to the continued progression of any kind of writing ‘career’ that I might have. So thanks a million, all of you, it really helps me keep going with this. And if you’ve read TPOTD (as absolutely no one calls it, no matter how hard I try) and if you liked it, and you haven’t put a nice review up, well … hint, hint. YES, I know there were a lot of typos in the first version that went up, so I checked, and reposted, and STILL people said there were typos, and I checked and reposted, and STILL people said there were typos … so I did a fourth draft and left it. I basically read too fast to notice my own mistakes. Look, make me a millionaire and I’ll hire a goddamn copywriter, okay?? Sigh … just do me a favour though please? If you’re gonna mention typos in your otherwise very nice review, just don’t put it in the freakin’ review title (I’m looking at you, Ms Janet Farley … but whilst I’m here, thank you so much for your very kind words ;-) )

  Okay, so some of you that read Physics (and if you haven’t … hint, hint, again *author’s note from the future: since I wrote The Stone Man, I’ve written another short novel called The Man On Table Ten, and a much longer novel in four parts called The Black Room. If you were thinking of reading another of my books, I would suggest starting with that instead — part one is free! – because TPOTD has a slower start that you might not stick with unless you’ve developed a bit more faith in me as a writer. So I would go The Black Room (TBR!) a nudge first, then The Man On Table Ten (TMOTT!) then TPOTD if you were gonna work your way through my back catalogue … okay, now I’ll hand you back to my past self. Hmm. Weird) may have been wondering where the hell this book has been, seeing as I signed off the last one by saying I was going straight into writing the next.

  Well, to be honest, it was all a matter of logistics.

  The nature of the book you’ve just read—things having an impact on a national scale, military and government involvement, evacuations, religious mania—depended on the logistical side of those things being believable. By now, you’ll have probably made your own mind up about how successful I was in addressing those things, but it was something I initially found immensely intimidating. I had to decide what would actually happen—realistically—in a scenario that no government on earth would have prepared for, and how much of that would actually be seen by a man chasing a fantastical stone creature across the country. And I didn’t have the faintest clue where to start … so I kept on putting it off. I even ended up writing a load of plot notes for my next novel instead of doing the same for the actual book I was supposed to be working on. Something you should probably know about me—and this is going to sound like a bad joke but I swear this is true—I bought a book about overcoming procrastination and I never got around to finishing it. Honest injun.

  Eventually, slowly but surely, I started to piece things together, including military research (difficult when performed in the context of a purely imaginary situation) and had enough to at least get started. Along the way, there were lengthy pauses whenever I got to a bit that meant more large-scale planning, but eventually the thing was completed. Funnily enough, Straub was never intended to be a woman; one emailer pointed out that, whilst they’d enjoyed TPOTD (Eh? Eh?) a great deal, they thought there was a lack of female characters.

  Now, whilst I’ve never subscribed to the theory of writing characters specifically to appeal to a wider demographic—I write what I feel is correct for the story—I found myself thinking, well, could Straub be a woman? And a quick Google search told me that, at the time of writing, the highest ranking female officer in the British army was a brigadier. And, so far as I could tell, a brigadier could realistically be the person operating at the level Straub was in the story, and so, a woman she became. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t think it would benefit the story, and I really think it did. But what do you think? Get in touch at lukesmitherd@hotmail.co.uk and let me know. Incidentally, if there’s any military stuff that I’ve blatantly fudged, please don’t just post things slagging it off, instead let me know how I’ve gotten it wrong so that I can correct it.

  The story as a whole started off as an image in my head and a question; the image being that of a huge stone figure, emerging from the sea and passing through a crowd of people as if they were made of butter, and the question being ‘what would a nation do if that figure was there to claim the life of one man, and was causing great damage in the process?’ I don’t know where those thoughts came from—they’d been there for a long time, a couple of years maybe—but I knew there was a story in it. It just needed drawing out. So, following the same process I used when I finally got round to bashing out the plot outline for TPOTD (EH?? EH???) I figured out what the hell was going on with that big stone bastard, and what it was actually there for. And what you’ve just read is what you got as a result.

  You probably noticed them earlier than I did (if you read the last book) but it was only once I was nearing the end that I noticed some of the similarities between this story and the last; two men, thrust together into an extremely bleak situation, ending up trapped within a boundary that may mean their doom. The one major difference with the other book being, I guess, that they’re already dead (don’t worry, that’s not a spoiler; there’s a clue in the title.) Angela says that she sees a lot of myself in Andy—the few good bits, I mean—but I’d like to think that if a man offered me a bed and shelter for the night, I wouldn’t fuck his wife. I’ve recently put myself forward for reasonably extensive testing regarding Asperger’s, ADHD and the like (see: major procrastination issues, above) and various other minor neurological hiccups (I always feel like I have brain fog a lot of the time, and am so frighteningly easily distracted) and it was my experience and reading about all of that that made me inject some of that into Andy. I didn’t want to have him dwell on it any more than someone that actually has the condition would, but both as a plot device and a way of explaining some of Andy’s social views, as well as his shortco
mings (and I’m not saying that Asperger’s makes you a bit of an asshole, that’s just him) it fitted very nicely for me. He turned out all right in the end, I think; a lot that was as a result of the experiences he’d been through, but where his guts came from in the end … well, that’s the question, isn’t it?

  I hope I managed to make the Stone Man as scary for you as I wanted him to be. For me, he’s that thing from your dreams that’s chasing you down whilst you’re having to run away through treacle. Except this time, he’s not in your dreams, he’s coming right down your street, and worse, everyone wants him to get you.

  The key scenes that I was the most excited about writing were, as you could probably guess, Patrick’s death, the boys meeting Henry, and Paul’s reflection at the end. I enjoyed those very much, even if I actually felt pretty sad writing the first two.

  The ending only changed as recently as a month or so ago, however. I was on a plane to New York (I really wanted to finish the book there, so that I could write this bit and sign off with ‘Luke Smitherd, Brooklyn, New York, October 2012’ and sound like some kind of porn star jet-setter … rather than a guy who had blagged a cheap holiday by going to visit a mate who lives there) when, settled in nicely by a pint of cider, a shot of Sambuca and a vodka and orange (nervous flyer), it suddenly occurred to me that the original ending (having Paul’s situation clearly resolved at the end of the book) not only meant that the whole thing petered out a bit, but didn’t sit quite right for me thematically. I decided that leaving his fate ambiguous felt much better, but if you want to know what I think eventually happened to Paul, I’ve put a quick summary on the very last page. It’s not that different at all—a simple answer to the question ‘Did he get out or not?’—but if you’re someone who’d like to leave it as is, don’t skip to the very last page. If you aren’t, it’s all there for you.