Chris Lynch

Welcome to Neverbury

First published by Neverbury Press 2023

Copyright © 2023 by Chris Lynch

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Chris Lynch asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book and on its cover are trade names, service marks, trademarks and registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publishers and the book are not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. None of the companies referenced within the book have endorsed the book.

First edition

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

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For Emily, for William, and for Daniel, as always.

With thanks to Terry Cooper for his selfless and ceaseless support.

And finally, a special mention for Louise. She is my wife’s friend.

Contents

1. Foreword

2. Yes, No Refunds

3. Dead Letter Office

4. Three Line Whip

5. Limited Edition

6. What are the Odds?

7. We’ll See You Right

8. Negative Exposure

9. Bring the Thunder

10. A Design for Living

11. Sell Now, Pay Later

12. It’s Not Life or Death

13. Open House

14. Time and Tide

15. The Thing Below

16. Return to Neverbury

17. Thanks for Reading

18. About the Author

19. Also by Chris Lynch

Foreword

Neverbury doesn’t exist… except for when it does. It’s not a real town, not a real place, but I’m sure that you will recognise it. You’ve been there. You just don’t quite remember it…

Neverbury was born out of the Storytelling Collective’s Flash Fiction February Challenge. The original challenge was to write a new short story, somewhere around the five-hundred-word mark, every day in February 2023. To save its valiant entrants from finding their well of ideas running dry, the Collective provided a prompt every day, harvested from The Notes and Commonplace Book of H. P. Lovecraft.

If you’ve not come across a ‘commonplace book’ before, it’s essentially a precursor to the modern practice of bookmarking websites or making notes in the note-taking app of your choice. Commonplace books have been kept from antiquity and were particularly popular during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Simply a way of collecting useful information, a commonplace book could contain recipes, quotes, letters, ideas, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas, notes from sermons, and remedies for common maladies, among many other things.

In the case of Lovecraft, he wrote lots of notes for ideas for stories.

Now, more than eighty years after his death, I’ve pinched them.

And that’s where things go wrong. Or very right… I suppose that’s up to you.

The challenge was to write stories of five hundred words. My first story, which I wrote in a single session in front of my trusty Chromebook, came out at just under two and a half thousand words.

That was easy, I blithely thought to myself. If I can crack out one of those every day this month, I’ll have myself a tidy sixty-seven thousand words by March.

Two things you should know about me:

1. When I write, I write fast.

2. I tend to forget that normal life exists when I am writing.

Story number two came in at two thousand, six hundred words. The juices were flowing.

I’d set both stories in the same fictional town, Neverbury. I needed a setting and having created a perfectly good one for the first story, it seemed odd to create another for the next. I continued the pattern through stories number three, four, and five. Word counts grew, hitting three thousand eight hundred by story number five. I didn’t care. I was still getting a story out each day and some weird magic was starting to manifest itself. Characters were crossing over between stories, threads from one being picked up in another.

I realised, somewhere around story number seven, that I wasn’t writing short stories anymore. I was writing one big story - the story of Neverbury and its inhabitants. The town found itself a location and began to interact with the outside world. Travellers came and went. The history of the town started to take shape and no matter what Neverbury has revealed to me, it has, so far, always remained consistent to its own internal narrative. Neverbury had a life of its own.

Somewhere around story twelve, however, real life came calling. (You remember the second thing I warned you about: I have a habit of forgetting that the real world exists when I’m writing.) Then I got stuck, and a story spilled out into a couple of days. I didn’t have as much free time to write and I fell behind, Neverbury stubbornly guarding its secrets from me. I found myself, if only briefly, locked out of my own world.

I returned to Neverbury shortly before the end of the month to complete stories twelve, thirteen, and fourteen. In less than twenty-eight days (I don’t count the days I didn’t have time to write) I’d written over forty-two thousand words. Ask any writer; this is quite an achievement.

For reference, this made my Neverbury collection roughly the same length as my first children’s novel Curse of the Mirror Clowns, which had taken six months to write.

I can confidently say that Neverbury isn’t done with me. I’m not done with Neverbury either. There are still fourteen unwritten prompts and, I’m sure, far more stories going on in Neverbury than that, just waiting for me to write them down.

So, I’m delighted to say, ‘Welcome to Neverbury’.

I think we may have been expecting you.

Yes, No Refunds

There were three important things to know about the Neverbury Dogs and Cats Home Charity Shop (West). First, it never closed. Second, it never gave refunds. Third, it was under no circumstance to be confused with the Neverbury Dogs and Cats Home Charity Shop (East), from which it had declared independence after a short and brutal spat over opening hours and return policies.

The shop sat on the corner at the western end of Neverbury’s High Street, a short pedestrianised street that was thankfully curved just enough so that loyal volunteers of the Neverbury Dogs and Cats Home Charity Shop (West) never had to come into contact with the equally loyal volunteers of the Neverbury Dogs and Cats Home Charity Shop (East), except at meetings of the local Women’s Institute, the Church Council, the Village Council, the Parish Council, and the Committee of Volunteers who arranged the Neverbury Summer Fete and Winter Carnival, bodies that all signed lengthy declarations of neutrality rather than be drawn into the protracted cold war between the two charity shops.

Sadly, for both shops, volunteers were increasingly hard to come by and recruitment of any newcomers to the village was hotly contested, once the newcomers had served a suitable probation period and been judged to be ‘Neverbury people,’ of course.

And so it was that, on a rainy Sunday, shortly before four o’clock in the morning, Dorothy was the only soul to be found in the Neverbury Dogs and Cats Home Charity Shop (West). Dorothy was always there, a stalwart of the shop since before anyone could remember. Every other volunteer the shop could boast in its ranks had been recruited by Dorothy, trained by Dorothy, and lived in mortal terror of Dorothy.

Dorothy was the kind of woman that villages like Neverbury breed as successfully as the local farms do rare breeds of heritage pig. Rail thin and angular, she was more bone than flesh and bone, looking from the wrong angle as if a skeleton had thrown some skin-coloured tissue paper over itself before donning a tartan skirt, blouse, cardigan, and sensibly thick, if somewhat worn, stockings for an afternoon of dedicated volunteering. Her hair was pure white and held up in a beehive by pins and clips with the strength and efficiency of a sailing ship’s rigging. Everything about Dorothy was precise, controlled, sharp, and orderly.

All of which was why, despite having been one of the original architects of the decision for Neverbury Dogs and Cats Home Charity Shop (West) to open twenty-four hours a day, and a four-star general in the ensuing bloody schism with the Neverbury Dogs and Cats Home Charity Shop (East), Dorothy was most perturbed to be receiving customers at shortly before four a.m. on a Sunday morning.

It began with a banging at the door. Dorothy looked up from the pile of old books that she had been sorting through, checking to make sure that none of them contained any content she deemed inappropriate. Outside, a woman was pounding on the door of the shop, leaving bloody handprints on the glass. Next to her, holding on to her other arm, was a girl of no more than fourteen. She was clutching something large in a bag against her chest. Both were in their nightclothes, the fabric torn in places and stained with blood from cuts and grazes on their bodies. Behind them, their small car was parked in the middle of the street, the engine running and doors left open.

‘Hello?’ called the woman outside. ‘Is there anybody there?’

Dorothy stood up, taking off her reading glasses and letting them hang down on their delicate, little chain.

‘That’s a pedestrianised street,’ she said loudly, pointing past the woman and the girl at the car behind them. ‘You can’t park there.’

A look of bafflement crossed the woman’s face.

‘Can you help us?’ she pleaded. ‘Can you let us in?’

‘It’s open,’ said Dorothy pointedly. ‘We are always open.’

The woman looked down, grabbed the door handle, twisted it hard and let herself in. The girl tumbled in after her, stumbling as she tried to keep hold of whatever it was she had with her.

‘It’s the original door,’ said Dorothy proudly, pushing past the woman and the girl to close the door behind them. ‘We don’t hold with those automatic, electrical ones. They let the cold in.’

‘Is this the place?’ the woman asked the girl, her voice frantic. ‘Is this where you got it?’

The girl looked around, her body shaking, her eyes wide and filled with terror.

‘Yes, yes, I think it is,’ she stammered. ‘Or maybe the other one? I’m sorry, Mum.’

The woman took the bag from her daughter gently, wrapping an arm around her at the same time. Dorothy noticed more cuts on the woman’s forearms and a row of dark purple bruises like grapes ripening where her neck met her jaw.

‘Do you have something she could put on?’ the woman asked Dorothy, motioning to the girl. ‘My daughter? She’s freezing.’

‘We have an excellent selection of coats?’ suggested Dorothy, pointing with a bony finger across the shop to a metal rack where, indeed, an impressive array of coats was hanging in Dorothy-like readiness. ‘We don’t carry fur, though,’ continued Dorothy. ‘It’s not a political thing. It’s just on account of Gladys’s allergies.’

The woman grabbed a large, red winter coat from the rack and wrapped it around her daughter’s shoulders. She kept glancing at the door, her eyes furtive. Dorothy eyed her carefully. There had been an incident, just over thirty-two years ago, with a teenage lad who had forced the till open with a knife, grabbed some money, and made a run for it. Dorothy had stopped him, of course. The ladies of the Neverbury Dogs and Cats Home Charity Shop (West) were a stern breed, and Dorothy hadn’t even flinched when the lad had turned the knife on her. The whole incident had made it onto the front page of the local newspaper, although nobody had been able to get a word out of Dorothy about it. She had been back the next day, carrying on as if nothing had happened.

‘Aren’t you going to help us?’ asked the woman angrily.

‘Feel free to browse around,’ said Dorothy, with a polished perfection that any retailer would have been proud of. ‘If you need any help, I’ll be just over -’

The woman shoved the bag that she’d taken from her daughter into Dorothy’s hands.

‘Take it back,’ she said firmly. ‘We need you to take it back.’

Dorothy walked over to the counter where the till was, placed the bag down, and reached inside. Slowly, she pulled out the thing inside - a cracked and battered piece of wood the size of a serving tray, embossed with a faded alphabet and words in the corners.

‘I don’t know what you think you’re playing at, selling a Ouija board to a kid,’ said the woman angrily. ‘But we’re giving it back! We’re giving it back; do you hear me? This is your place now! You’re back where you belong!’

Dorothy watched with a sour expression on her face as the woman turned around in circles, shouting at the walls and the ceiling about how someone or something was going back where it belonged. In general terms, Dorothy was very much in favour of things being put back in their rightful place, but this seemed overly demonstrative for her tastes. After a minute or two, the woman dropped to her knees, clearly exhausted, and began to sob quietly. She muttered over and over, ‘I’m bringing it back, I’m bringing it back,’ as her shoulders heaved up and down unsteadily.

The woman’s daughter sat down next to her, wrapping an arm around her mother. She spoke to her gently, calming her down and promising that ‘it’ was over. Dorothy had no idea what ‘it’ was, but she did know that she would prefer that ‘it’ wasn’t happening in her shop. She rapped her bony knuckles on the countertop for attention.

‘Excuse me,’ she said politely, ‘But I think you should read this.’

She pointed to a small piece of cardboard, neatly folded into a little triangular sign. On it, carefully printed in Dorothy’s own handwriting, were the faded words ‘NO REFUNDS.’

The woman looked up, her eyes red and bleary with tears.

‘What?’

‘No refunds,’ said Dorothy sweetly. ‘Shop policy, I’m afraid.’

The woman got slowly to her feet, her daughter steadying her. She stalked towards Dorothy, malice in her eyes.

‘You have to take it back,’ she said, her voice so low it was almost a growl. ‘It needs to come back!’

Dorothy pointed to the sign again.

‘Rules are rules, I’m afraid.’

The woman grabbed the Ouija board from the countertop and shoved it in Dorothy’s face. The wood smelt of damp, and trees, and earth tinged with sulphur. It was blackened around the edges and splintering, and by rights falling apart, but was somehow holding itself together.

‘You’ve no idea what this thing has done to us,’ growled the woman. ‘It let something into our house. Something evil. We can’t sleep, we can’t rest. Every night it’s there and now tonight… tonight…’

The woman’s voice trailed off, her eyes looking past Dorothy at something far away.

‘You just have to take it back, please. We looked it up online and it said if the person who sold us the board took it back, then it would stop. Please, it’s the only way we can be free.’

Dorothy gently pressed the board back into the woman’s hands. She had always been a cold person and the wood was warm against her skin, the subtle warmth of a living thing.

‘I’m afraid our policy is -’

‘I don’t give a damn about your policy!’ snapped the woman. ‘I know my rights. Take it back!’

‘Well, actually -’

‘No, wait!’ said the woman, ‘Wait!’

She grabbed the bag from the counter and shoved her hand inside, rummaging around in the folds and crevices. She pulled out a crumpled piece of paper and waved it triumphantly at Dorothy.

‘There!’ she spat. ‘We’ve got a receipt! Now you have to take it back!’

Dorothy took the piece of paper from the woman and inspected it, lifting the half-moon spectacles on their chain up to her eyes like a jeweller inspecting a rare diamond.

‘This isn’t a receipt,’ said Dorothy confidently. ‘You see here? All it says is that you made a donation. We’re a charity shop, you see. We take donations. We don’t sell things.’

‘Donations? Donations?’ said the woman, her tone exasperated. ‘So, I can just take anything I like, leave any amount of money, and you just call it a donation?’

‘We used to call them “offerings” but apparently that has “connotations” according to Gladys, so now it’s donations. It’s the honour system,’ said Dorothy proudly. ‘We’ve only ever had one incident where someone tried to —’

Dorothy was cut off by a low, moaning wail that came from the woman’s daughter. Sat on the floor, wrapped up in the red winter coat with her knees tucked under her chin, she was rocking rhythmically back and forth.

‘He’s coming,’ she muttered to herself. ‘He’s coming. He’s coming. He’s coming.’

Overhead, the lights of the shop flickered, electricity hissing like an angry snake.

The woman looked back at Dorothy desperately, grabbing her by the shoulders.

‘Please! Please! You have to take it back!’

‘I’m sorry, but if I make an exception for you, then I’m setting a precedent for everyone who comes in here. People will be returning things all the time. We’ve only just got rid of our last John Grisham, I don’t want those all flooding back in!’

‘Please,’ the woman begged. ‘This thing, the thing the board let in… it attacked us. It attacked my daughter…’

Dorothy looked at the girl where she sat on the floor, rocking back and forth. She looked at her torn night clothes, the cuts on her arms and shoulders, the dried blood splattered on her face and neck. It reminded her of something, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. A lot of things had happened in the shop over the years; she couldn’t be expected to keep track of them all.

‘Please,’ the woman begged again. ‘I’ll do anything.’

Dorothy arched an eyebrow.

‘Anything?’

‘Anything, I swear it.’

On the countertop, the board rattled. Dorothy took a deep breath.

‘Tuesday mornings, eight until eleven.’

‘What?’

‘Tuesday mornings, eight until eleven,’ repeated Dorothy. ‘It used to be Mabel’s shift, but she can’t do it anymore on account of her bunions. Personally, I think she made a mistake taking up salsa lessons, but you can’t tell that woman anything. If it were down to me -’

‘Yes!’ blurted the woman. ‘I’ll do it. I’ll change my hours at work, go part-time, anything. I’ll make it work. Tuesday mornings…that’s it?’

‘That’s it,’ said Dorothy. ‘I’m not a monster, dear.’ She held her hand out and the woman grasped it eagerly, gasping and retracting it a second later. Fresh blood dripped from her palm.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, dear. I must have caught you with something.’

Clutching her hand, the woman backed slowly away towards her daughter. She helped the girl up, never taking her eyes off Dorothy. They staggered towards the door together, the woman keeping her arm wrapped tightly around her daughter.

Dorothy coughed quietly as they reached the door. The woman and her daughter froze.

‘Although it’s not technically mandatory,’ said Dorothy quietly. ‘It would probably be a good idea if you made a donation if you’re thinking of taking that coat with you.’

Without turning around, the girl shrugged off the coat, letting it fall to the floor. For the first time, Dorothy saw the slash marks in the back of her nightdress, three parallel tears through the fabric and matching gouges through the flesh beneath.

‘I’ll hang it back up for you,’ said Dorothy. ‘I can show you how we do it on Tuesday morning.’

‘Tuesday morning,’ said the woman, opening the door and stepping back out into the street. Dorothy watched as the woman and her daughter staggered back to their car, climbed in, and drove away back up the high street.

When they were safely out of sight, Dorothy picked the Ouija board up from the countertop and carefully slid it in amongst a box of board games that she pulled out from underneath one of the clothing racks. She patted it affectionately as she pushed the box back and it gave a little shudder of appreciation in return.

‘Ah,’ sighed Dorothy. ‘You see? I told them. It really does pay to stay open. A brand-new volunteer! Take that, Neverbury Dogs and Cats Home Charity Shop (East). Take that!’

The shop lights flickered a happy response.

Dead Letter Office

The Neverbury Post Office and General Store was the very heart and soul of the community. At least, that’s what it said on the posters. These days, emails had all but replaced letters and most parcels didn’t come by Royal Mail. Patrick, the Neverbury Postmaster, watched from the Post Office window with envious eyes as various couriers and colourfully branded delivery companies whizzed around the village in their electric vans whilst his trusty old red post van sat, rusting and dormant, in the yard behind the post office.

If the Post Office was the heart of Neverbury, then a severe cardiac incident was imminent.

These days, the only reasons anyone came into the Post Office were because Patrick stocked the sort of stuff that nobody else did anymore, like string or proper boot polish, or to get their holiday money, put up a ‘for sale’ card in the window, or to send something in the post themselves. Thankfully, the couriers and shiny van drivers were only interested in delivering parcels for the big shops and those websites that Patrick had heard about.

Patrick liked to say he didn’t believe in the Internet, even though deep down he knew it was real.

And so, bright and early every day, Patrick opened up the Post Office and General Store and served the people of Neverbury. Big or small, light or heavy, Patrick took in every parcel and diligently ensured that it was properly labelled, properly stamped, and ready for collection when the van came from the central sorting office to collect. He closed only briefly for lunch, just two hours from twelve until two, and then shut up shop at three. If people ever complained about the hours the post office was open, Patrick would politely inform them that owing to a mismatch between the Royal Mail’s policies and the agreed Union working-time arrangements, he technically only needed to be open for seven minutes every ninth Friday. If necessary, he had a diagram to help explain this.

Deep down though, just a bit lower than his suppressed belief in the Internet, Patrick knew that his beloved post office should probably have closed years ago. Thankfully, however, Neverbury had an extraordinarily powerful and strident village council that picked up placards, and torches, and pitchforks where necessary, at the slightest provocation. Through objecting to practically all forms of progress, Neverbury had established itself as a fertile source of stories for newspapers, radio shows, and television programmes that had an audience hungry for things that they could point at and shout ‘That’s what’s wrong with this country!’ before launching lengthy tirades about what they would do differently if they were in charge and why ‘that sort of thing,’ whatever it might be, shouldn’t be allowed.

Patrick had lobbied the village council to have electric delivery vans banned from Neverbury but had fallen at the important practical hurdle that he was unable to deliver placard-making supplies, the wooden poles being too long for his short-wheel-base van.

His implausibly ironic ‘working hours’ did give Patrick time to exercise his genuine passion though, which he had discovered, quite by chance, was kidnap and murder.

Patrick was a traditional sort of fellow and so it had all started in the traditional way that psychopaths do… with a small animal. The small animal in question was a dog called Mr. Peanut, an intensely annoying animal that had made it its business to attack Patrick with Hessian ferocity every time Patrick tried to deliver anything to the small cottage that was Mr. Peanut’s home. Mr. Peanut was the kind of small, straggly dog that, despite being a very expensive pedigree, looked to most people like an emaciated rat that had been stretched out, given a perm, and forced into a tartan body warmer. The hellish thing started yelping the moment Patrick opened the garden gate, rocketing out of the shrubbery to growl and bark and snap at Patrick’s ankles. The only person who seemed able to approach Mr. Peanut without being mauled from the ankle up was his owner, a recently divorced middle-aged woman who had moved to the village a few months ago and who was in the process of trying to open a Yoga studio in the church hall (all facts known to Patrick as certainly legal paperwork still required the kind of special delivery that only the Royal Mail could offer). She would dash out at every visit, always dressed in some sort of revealing sportswear, scooping up the savage creature and speaking to it in a strange combination of baby talk and mock barking, like a perimenopausal paediatric Doctor Dolittle. She made frequent remarks about the ‘nasty postman’ scaring her baby and, when Patrick pointed out that perhaps Mr. Peanut should be on a lead, set out a detailed list of reasons why Mr. Peanut needed to roam freely and why leads, of any type, were tools of oppression. She was, in Patrick’s opinion, the type of person whose modern outlook Neverbury could well do without.

Patrick grew to hate Mr Peanut and his owner. It was not a fiery hate or a passionate hate, but the kind of low-level seething hatred that is destined to one day explode unexpectedly and quite cataclysmically. Patrick hated her multi-coloured sportswear, her bleached blonde hair, the way she would bow and say ‘Namaste,’ her hands held out in prayer, whenever Patrick took her a recorded delivery. He particularly hated the fact that she seemed to take a different holiday every month, but never came to the Post Office for her holiday money like any normal and right-thinking Neverbury person would. She also received a large number of deliveries from couriers in electric vans, but Patrick assured himself that none of these things were ultimately the cause of what happened next…

It all started with an accident.

It was a warm summer morning and Patrick had been on his rounds since shortly after sunrise, a heavy bag of post slung over his shoulder, proudly parading through the streets and lanes of Neverbury in his freshly pressed Post Office uniform. He sometimes imagined himself as a sort of all-year-round Santa, except that he mostly delivered bills, legal paperwork, and an ever-increasing volume of angry missives between the Neverbury village council and their various mortal enemies.

He had barely set foot into the garden when Mr. Peanut attacked, a particularly vicious bite to Patrick’s exposed calf, the summer season, of course, being Patrick’s perfect opportunity (and Union-backed, contractually agreed right) to go about his business in shorts. Patrick had given a howl of pain as the horrible creature’s teeth had sunk into his flesh and, to this day, he could still hear the wet, growling noise the thing had made as he had tried to shake it off.

After a minute or so, Patrick had managed to shake Mr Peanut loose, paying the price with a small chunk of flesh that Mr Peanut took with him. Agonised, infuriated, Patrick had felt something rise within him that he’d never experienced before and, without truly thinking about his actions, he had lashed out with a kick that had launched Mr Peanut through the air, over the hedge, and bouncing off the bonnet of a car parked on the roadside.

Panicking, Patrick had run back up the garden path and out into the road.

There, lying dead in the road, his neck folded over as neatly as a well-sealed envelope, was Mr. Peanut.

Patrick remembered scanning the area for witnesses, checking windows for the tell-tale twitch of net curtains, and gardens for eagle-eyed children put out by their parents to play before the sun was too high in the sky. Convinced that nobody had seen him, Patrick had grabbed Mr. Peanut and stuffed him into his bag.

Patrick had finished his round as usual after that, carefully plucking letters out from under the carcass of his dead adversary, and grateful for once that nobody waved or greeted him as he went about his rounds. Uniforms have a curious way of making people invisible.

His deliveries done, he made it back to the Post Office, turned the sign on the door to say ‘CLOSED’, locked it, and vanished into the office-cum-sorting room behind the serving counter. Sitting quietly on his office chair, he looked down at the wreckage of Mr Peanut in his postbag. A few hours of being jostled around amongst letters and small packages had not improved things. Instinctively, Patrick knew he had to dispose of the body. Without the body, Mr Peanut would be just another lost dog, another poorly designed A4 poster in the post office window. Neverbury was the countryside; animals ran away here, anyone would tell her that.

His hands shaking, Patrick picked up a notepad and pen and started jotting down his options, considering all the ways he could get rid of Mr Peanut. Burial was the obvious option, but Mr Peanut wasn’t, or hadn’t been, the only dog in Neverbury. Things had a habit of being unearthed here, and the last thing he wanted was Mr Peanut being dug back up. He scratched through that possibility. Then he remembered watching a documentary about a serial killer who kept his victims in a freezer, which had potential, but the thought of Mr Peanut lying in state next to Patrick’s frozen meals for one was deeply unappealing.

Panic rising in his chest, Patrick racked his brain for an answer.

And that was when it came to him.

If you wanted something to vanish, if you wanted something to be lost utterly without a trace, without any hope of ever being found no matter how hard you looked, then there was one and only one way to guarantee that would happen.

You put it in the post.

Patrick grabbed a box from a nearby shelf and shoved Mr Peanut inside, folding him over awkwardly. His back legs were already stiffening, or perhaps they just didn’t bend the way that Patrick needed them to. Either way, with a little pressure (and two loud cracks) the dog was the right shape to fit perfectly into the box. Patrick sealed it up and then, after quickly referring to his wall chart of UK postcodes, addressed the parcel to a place that didn’t exist. He took some stamps from a drawer and fixed them to the outside of the box before dropping it into a mail sorting bag ready for collection. A moment later, he pulled it back out and added a tracking sticker to the underside of the box. Even when posting a dead dog, Patrick was a stickler for the rules.

And that was how it started, eight years ago.

Since then Patrick had graduated through larger animals, the frequency of his kills increasing over time until, finally, he had moved on to humans just three years ago…

Mr Peanut’s owner had been unsuccessful in her attempt to open a Yoga studio, it clearly being one of ‘those sorts of things’ that people in Neverbury were simply against. After receiving a number of red-topped bills and final demands, all diligently delivered by Patrick, she had started the process of converting her small cottage into a boutique bed-and-breakfast. Patrick had delivered the paperwork for this as well, so it came as no surprise to him when he heard that the village council had convened for an emergency session to discuss what was to be done about the impending opening of this new venture. This was also, of course, the type of thing that they were against. For once, however, it was possible that the village council may have met their match. Permits were arriving, regulations were being studied and conformed with, standards were being checked and met. Patrick had to admire, to some extent, the woman’s determination.

But he, like the council, was also against this sort of thing and even though he himself was not a member of the village council but he believed, truly believed, that the post office was the beating heart of the community and, even though they had denied his attempt to ban all electric vans from Neverbury, he still felt a sense of duty towards them. The village council had stood shoulder to shoulder with Patrick in keeping the post office open. Killing the owner of Mr Peanut seemed like the least he could do.

In the end it had been easy. He’d taken a large box, filled it with reams of unused paper to give it some weight, put a fake address label on it, and driven it around to the cottage in his van. Early in the morning, just as day was dawning, he rapped on the front door of the cottage with his special delivery. Mr Peanut’s owner had answered the door in her nightwear and, when presented with the large and heavy box, had accepted Patrick’s offer to bring it inside for her. It was all part of the service, he’d assured her, something that those couriers and fancy delivery drivers would never do.

He strangled her in the hallway a few moments after the front door was closed. There wasn’t much of a struggle and, afterwards, Patrick made himself a calming cup of tea. Yoga-lady had an extensive range of strange sounding teas from around the world, but Patrick did manage to find a few bags of what he considered “normal” tea. When he had drained the cup and washed up, he emptied his fake delivery of paper into the room that Mr Peanut’s owner had converted into a home office (with the confusing inclusion of an exercise bike that also seemed to be used as a drying rack for underwear) and proceeded to pack her lifeless body into the empty box. She was surprisingly flexible, much easier to rearrange than Mr. Peanut had been and Patrick wondered if the village council might have been too keen to denounce the benefits of yoga after all.

His prize safely secured, he dragged the box back to his van and was heading back to the Post Office before the first curtain-twitching neighbour had even risen from their bed.

Since then, Patrick had continued to improve his technique.

He’d realised as soon as he got back to the Post Office that the lady in the box was too large to be lost. Even his beloved Post Office had its limits. Thankfully, the general store had everything he needed and after a relatively innocuous discussion with Harry Price, the local butcher and a member of Patrick’s pub quiz team, Patrick had been able to successfully exsanguinate and dismember the body. He’d managed it relative cleanly, wrapping each part in plastic before boxing them up and posting them separately to a variety of non-existent addresses around the country. It reminded Patrick of a story he’d heard as a child about a witch whose body had been cut into four pieces and buried in different parts of the village to ensure that she never returned from the grave. Patrick remembered having nightmares about that. At least Mr Peanut’s owner still got to travel.

The Post Office remained the beating heart of the village and Patrick’s little red van got a fresh coat of paint after an unexpected donation from the village council. Patrick still opened up only a few hours a day, but he was far from idle the rest of the time. The downside of Neverbury being in the news for being successfully ‘against that sort of thing’ was that it was attracting lots of people to it who were, despite themselves, also exactly the ‘sort of thing’ that Neverbury didn’t like.

In total, Patrick now had 178 parcels of carefully wrapped and deliberately mis-posted body parts in circulation. Every now and then, a parcel would end up back at the Neverbury post office, stamped and franked and with tracking stickers plastered all over it. Patrick would carefully open it, holding his breath against the stench of the rotting contents, re-box and repost it. Around and around they went, trapped in an endless loop of being posted out and returned to sender, never arriving anywhere at all.

It was as close to hell as Patrick could imagine anything being.

And that was quite all right with him.

He wasn’t against that sort of thing.

Three Line Whip

Rupert may have been working at the Houses of Parliament for only a few months, but he felt more at home here than anywhere else in the world. Rupert worked for his father, an MP who was the son of an MP who was himself descended from a long line of MPs, politicians, ambassadors, and diplomats. His family could trace their lineage all the way back to courtiers in the medieval courts of England. They were old blood, old money, old stock.

And so it felt strange to Rupert, who thought he knew just about everything that there was to know about this place, that he found himself walking down a corridor that he couldn’t remember ever having visited before, looking for the office of an MP that he had never heard of.

Arriving at the door, he straightened his suit and pushed a hand through his wavy red hair, another family inheritance to go with flat feet and a guaranteed career in government. He checked the piece of paper he’d been given by his father one last time; the official crest of the House was at the top and there underneath, in an elaborate and flamboyant hand, a simple handwritten note:

‘2PM - Don’t be late. A.P.N’

Rupert checked his watch. It was a quarter to two. It didn’t do to be late.

He raised his hand to knock at the wooden door of the office but, before he could, a voice called from inside.

‘Hail, young Rupert! Don’t stand on ceremony, young man. Come on in.’

Rupert pushed the office door open tentatively. Most MP’s offices were cramped and messy, the modern-day requirements of computers and monitors and Wi-Fi hubs and printers fighting with the legacy of filing cabinets, fax machines, and bookshelves. This office was different. It was larger than most and seemed equipped for only one person rather than the usual team of secretaries, advisors, and researchers that most MPs surrounded themselves with. There was only one desk, with no computer, and two chairs that looked more suited to a gentleman’s club than an office. It was dark and warm, the only light coming from an ample fire burning in a grate under an ornate fireplace that dominated one wall. Next to it, a full-sized suit of armour stood upright, the metal reflecting the amber and red of the fire. What walls were not covered in bookcases housed photographs, a great many photographs, of politicians of the past shaking hands with various dignitaries, heads of state, and celebrities. Rupert’s father had a similar wall in his office, a visual history of not just his own career but of his father’s and his father’s before that. The faces in the photographs in this office had a strong familial resemblance, a dynasty much like Rupert’s own.

Languishing next to the fire was the man Rupert had come here to see. Tall and with a muscular build, he had a mane of wavy blond hair that framed a tanned face with deep lines around the eyes. The same blond hair was trimmed into a neat goatee that ended at a point just over his chin. The man wore a dark blue suit with a chalk pinstripe and a golden lion embroidered on the left breast. He wore a heavy gold ring on the little finger of the hand he extended towards Rupert.

‘Sir Algernon Percival Neverbury,’ said the stranger. ‘At your service.’

Rupert shook Sir Algernon’s hand nervously, conscious that his palm was suddenly wet with sweat.

‘A-P-N,’ said Rupert, ‘That’s you.’

‘I am he, yes,’ smiled Sir Algernon, offering Rupert a small bow. ‘Please, take a seat.’

Rupert picked the seat furthest from the fire, the heat of the room already making him feel uncomfortable. He didn’t think the fireplaces in the offices were supposed to be used anymore. Modernity seemed to hold no sway here, however, even when it came in the form of fire regulations.

‘Drink?’ asked Sir Algernon, opening up a cupboard underneath one of the bookshelves and lifting out some glasses and a decanter.

‘Water, if that’s all right?’ replied Rupert. His father had warned him about the perils of mixing alcohol with politics, as well as the potential upsides if it was the person you were dealing with who was imbibing.

‘I haven’t drunk a glass of water since 1978,’ Sir Algernon said, handing Rupert a crystal glass with a brown liquid that moved suspiciously sluggishly as he swirled it. ‘That’s a rather good drop, a gift from the Queen back in ‘88 as it happens. A bit of an acquired taste though, I suppose.’

Rupert lifted the glass. The brown liquid smelt of caramel and cinnamon and, mostly, of alcohol. He allowed a little to wet his lips, a burning sensation spreading instantly across his face. He waved his hand in front of his face, trying to cool himself down.

‘It is rather potent,’ said Sir Algernon with a smile. He took a sip himself, seemingly untroubled by the potency of the drink. He sat back, legs crossed, and stared at Rupert. Rupert shifted uneasily in his chair, Sir Algernon’s scrutiny feeling like ants on his skin.

‘I must confess,’ said Rupert, his voice hoarse in his throat, ‘I had to look you up. I thought I knew all the MPs but I couldn’t even find you in Hansard.’

Sir Algernon rolled his eyes. ‘Ah, the venerable Hansard. Every word ever spoken in our hallowed halls of discourse, painstakingly recorded for posterity. Well, I’m not much of one for the grandstanding of parliamentary debate. I find you can get a lot more done outside of the chamber. I presume that’s why you’re here. Your father wants something from me?’

Rupert looked down at his feet.

‘It’s the bill, my father’s bill. It’s coming up and the vote is going to be… tight.’

Sir Algernon took another drink, swigging rather than sipping this time.

‘And he sent you to find out which way I intend to cast my ballot?’

‘Oh, he didn’t send me,’ said Rupert. ‘I asked to come. I was the one who requested the appointment. It was rather odd actually; they told me that you don’t have a secretary or an assistant or…anyone?’

Rupert looked around the office. There wasn’t even a telephone on the desk, just an old-fashioned blotter and an expensive-looking fountain pen. He couldn’t imagine how Sir Algernon managed to function in any way without even the most basic telephone, let alone function as an MP.

‘There are ways to reach me,’ said Sir Algernon, tapping his hand on his jacket. ‘But I do prefer the personal touch. I like to conduct my business in person, face to face.’

‘My grandfather would have liked you,’ said Rupert. ‘He hated technology.’

‘But you don’t, I take it?’ asked Sir Algernon. ‘A firm adherent of Saint Isidore I sense?’

‘Excuse me?’

Sir Algernon stood up and walked to one of the bookcases, running his fingers along the spines of the books. They were leather-bound and gilt engraved, the kind of books that Rupert had only ever seen in stately homes or under glass. His grandfather had sold off the family library before Rupert was born, during what the family now referred to as ‘a brief period of financial upheaval.’ They’d come through it, of course. Old money always did.

‘Saint Isidore of Seville,’ said Sir Algernon. ‘Fascinating fellow. Sixth-century historian and theologian, amongst other things. It’s not official, but quite a few people refer to him as the patron saint of computers and the internet.’

Sir Algernon carefully withdrew a book from the shelf and handed it to Rupert.

‘Etymologies,’ he said. ‘His greatest work. Used as a reference by scholars for centuries afterwards.’

Rupert opened the book reverently and then froze, his fingers resting on the first page.

‘Of course, very few people even know it exists anymore. That’s progress, I suppose.’

Sir Algernon refilled his glass from the decanter before sitting back down. He looked curiously at Rupert over the rim of this glass as he raised it to his lips.

‘Something the matter, young man?’

Rupert held up the book so that Sir Algernon could see the first page. Printed on it was a crest, two stags butting horns over a curled snake.

‘That’s my family crest,’ said Rupert, his voice shaking. ‘In this book.’

‘Really?’ said Sir Algernon. He placed his glass on the edge of his desk and leant forward, peering at the book. ‘Well, isn’t that interesting? Heraldry was a grand passion of mine once… when I was a younger man.’

Sir Algernon reached over and gently took the book from Rupert, examining it before handing it back.

‘I’m afraid I have no idea how I obtained it. I have a marvellous man who collects things for me. You’re welcome to keep it if you like. I’m sure I can obtain another.’

‘Thank you,’ said Rupert, closing the book and placing it on his lap, his hands crossed over it defensively.

‘Shall we get to business then?’ asked Sir Algernon.

‘Yes, er, yes, if you like,’ said Rupert. His fingers closed around the spine of the book so tightly he could hear the leather creak. He felt the need to protect it, this fragment of reclaimed family history, as if Sir Algernon might snatch it back at any moment.

‘You asked to see me,’ prompted Sir Algernon. ‘Charge your lance, young man.’

Rupert took a deep breath and composed himself. Of course, Sir Algernon had known that this book had once belonged to my family, he thought. The mention of some obscure saint was too random an occurrence otherwise. The old man was obviously trying to unsettle Rupert. The wily old fox had a game plan, after all. He probably had a telephone hidden somewhere as well. Rupert took a deep breath and prepared to do battle.

‘Well, as you know, my father has a rather important bill coming up,’ he said.

‘And you want to know which way I will vote,’ Sir Algernon interrupted. ‘You’ve already said that. Your father could have asked me that himself. I’m wondering why you asked to come here?’

Rupert smiled and reached into his pocket. ‘Let me show you something.’

He pulled out his mobile and pressed his thumb against the glass to unlock it.

The screen unlocked and displayed a scrolling list of names. Next to each name was a tick or a cross, along with a percentage. Highlighted in red was one name: Algernon Percival Neverbury. That name had a question mark and a flashing zero where the percentage should have been.

‘This app tracks the voting habits of MPs, plus everything they’ve ever said in Parliament, online, in a TV interview, everything,’ explained Rupert. ‘Then we feed it with new information, speeches, debates, attack lines, sound bites, and it can accurately predict resulting voting intention with over ninety-five percent accuracy.’

‘Fascinating,’ said Sir Algernon, in a tone that indicated he found it anything but. ‘And better than a three-line whip, I’d wager. And what does it have to say about your father’s bill? Will it go through?’

‘It’s fifty-fifty.’

‘Can’t the party push it through?’

‘The PM has made it a matter of conscience. All the other leaders have followed suit. It’s a free vote across the house.’

Rupert dug his finger into his collar and pulled it away from his neck. It seemed to be getting hotter and there was sweat running down the inside of his shirt.

‘Ah, I see. And I suppose I have the swing vote, according to your crystal ball?’ asked Sir Algernon.

‘Yes,’ said Rupert, his voice croaky as he struggled to catch his breath for a moment. Sir Algernon leant over, reaching for the phone, but Rupert slid it back into his pocket. ‘Of course, the app is a closely guarded secret. I shouldn’t even be… telling you about it.’

Sir Algernon took a sip from his drink, then raised his glass to Rupert and nodded that he should do the same. Despite himself, Rupert took a sip. This time he let the brown liquid into his mouth, the heat he’d felt on his face burning his tongue and throat. It was less uncomfortable this time, the warming of his insides bringing some balance with the prickling heat crawling across his skin underneath his clothes.

‘An impressive achievement,’ said Sir Algernon. ‘American, I take it?’

‘Actually, it was me,’ said Rupert. ‘I developed it.’

‘Really?’

Sir Algernon sat forward in his chair. He had a hungry look in his eyes.

‘You surprise me, young Rupert. Most boys of your generation assume the old duffers like me are just going to hand the world over to you when we’re dead and done with it. Born to rule, that’s what you say, isn’t it?’

‘Not me,’ replied Rupert. ‘I’m the youngest of seven, all brothers.’

‘Well, that didn’t do your father any harm,’ replied Sir Algernon. ‘A tragedy what happened, of course, but air travel can be very unpredictable.’

‘I’ve never really thought about it,’ said Rupert. This was a lie, of course. The story of how his father’s brothers had died, of the fluke bout of influenza that had kept his father at home, was the stuff of family legend. Rupert’s family dynasty had been almost wiped out and his father had made it no secret that he wanted to rebuild the family to its past glories. Rupert’s older brothers had been groomed since birth for power and there was no small amount of infighting and back-biting in the family as the brothers jockeyed for position and their father’s favour. Rupert, the youngest of them all, had often wondered how his fortunes might improve if the herd was thinned a little.

‘My dear boy, if there is one thing that being in my… position makes you excellent at, it’s spotting on a lie,’ said Sir Algernon. His voice was kind, not confrontational, as languid and as smooth as the drink that Rupert found himself raising involuntarily to his lips once more.

‘You seek to earn your father’s favour with this magic trick of yours,’ continued Sir Algernon. ‘A way to mass produce influence, to industrialize persuasion. Am I right?’

‘He said if I could get it to work on you,’ said Rupert, his voice slurring a little. ‘Then that would prove it. But… there’s nothing on you. Anywhere. You don’t speak in Parliament, you don’t give interviews, and you abstain from every vote even when there’s a three-line whip. You don’t even tweet.’

‘As I said,’ Sir Algernon replied with a smile. ‘I like to do my business in person.’

‘There has to be more to it… than…’

Rupert’s head began to swim. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the drink. Maybe it was the way that Sir Algernon was looking at him, the smiling predator lurking down here in his dark office. Rupert felt his head tip forward and found himself being caught in Sir Algernon’s strong arms. He lowered him down on the floor, the soft fabric of a rug against Rupert’s face. He stood over him, a looming shadow lit from behind by the flames of the open fire. He was holding Rupert’s phone in his hand now. He squeezed it, the metal buckling until the glass popped loudly, before he tossed it into the fire.

‘What’s happening?’ croaked Rupert.

‘Poison,’ said Sir Algernon. ‘I’ve been taking a little of that tipple every day for years and I’ve built up quite the tolerance. I did tell you it was an acquired taste.’

Rupert tried to get up, but his limbs wouldn’t respond. His thoughts became slow and he felt himself sinking down within himself, as if he were being buried alive inside his own body, lost under a cave-in of his own flesh. He felt his throat closing up, each breath becoming more tortured than the last.

‘Why?’ he gasped, his face rolling down into the warm pile of the rug.

‘As a favour,’ replied Sir Algernon. ‘Your older brother came to see me, and tipped me off about your scheme. Don’t ask me which it was, just one of the middle ones. Awful middle-child syndrome. Not the heir, not the baby, and an average intellect at best, but he did have one redeeming quality. He was utterly devoid of any morality.’

Sir Algernon crouched down over Rupert and ran a hand gently through his hair, pushing it out of his eyes so that they could see each other clearly. Sir Algernon’s face was dark, a shifting shadow with eyes lit red from the firelight.

‘This is how things work, Rupert. A favour for a favour. Handshakes and whispers, nods and winks behind the scenes. I’ve been a politician for a very, very long time and we can’t have anyone, not even one of our own, upsetting the system.’

‘My… father…’

‘Oh, your father knows all about it,’ said Sir Algernon softly. ‘He owed me a rather large favour too, you see. That’s the real secret, you know. Delegation. It’s how I’ve survived for such a long time. Well, that and Neverbury and District having the most remarkably powerful village council.’

Limited Edition

Mick’s torch scanned across the pitch-black interior of the Neverbury Toy and Collectables Emporium. The place felt more like a museum than a shop, the walls lined with floor-to-ceiling glass cabinets, display cases arranged in neat rows through the centre. A large wooden workbench dominated one corner, a series of woodworking and sewing tools hanging up above it in neatly arranged rows. Everything had been arranged and labelled with obsessive precision. Mick smiled. This would be easy.

Something clattered behind him and Mick spun around. Dazzled by the torchlight, Benny held his hands up in front of his face. Mick rolled his eyes. Benny was a lummox, ill-suited to housebreaking and burglary, but he had his uses.

‘Watch what you’re doing, Benny,’ hissed Mick. ‘The old bags who run this place live upstairs.’

‘Sorry, Mick,’ replied Benny. He straightened the cabinet he’d walked into, scraping it loudly across the floor. ‘Sorry.’

‘Just keep an eye out,’ whispered Mick. ‘Can’t believe they left the back door unlocked, but they might wake up any minute and remember. We don’t want Dunstable all over again.’

Benny looked up, his broad face breaking into a gap-toothed smile.

‘I liked Dunstable.’

‘I know you did, mate. But it was a bloody mess afterwards. Now, what do we say if the police come?’

Benny looked at Mick, his deep brow furrowed in concentration.

‘What did you lose, Benny?’

‘I lost my toy rabbit,’ said Benny slowly, taking his time over each word. ‘I came to look for it.’

‘That’s right,’ said Mick encouragingly. ‘You’re just looking for your toy rabbit and you wandered in here and we’re very sorry for any inconvenience, aren’t we?’

‘Yes, Mick.’

Mick breathed a sigh of relief and turned back to his search, slowly working his way from one cabinet to the next, scanning from top to bottom. Tin robots, encrusted with rust, aimed rockets and guns at him in defence of their tiny glass fortresses while miniature cowboys brandished six shooters and lassos. The dolls were the worst though, staring at him, their lifeless eyes full of accusation.

‘What are we looking for again?’ asked Benny.

‘PH Hartlock’s House of Horror in the Old City,’ replied Mick tersely.

‘What’s that then?’

‘It’s a little wooden house. Part of a set but they only made two hundred of this particular piece. Spooky-looking thing,’ said Mick. ‘Anyway, I’ll find it. You just keep your eye on the door and make sure we’re not disturbed.’

A car drove past outside, its headlights illuminating the frosted glass of the shop windows.

‘That’s stupid,’ said Benny, pointing at the window. ‘People can’t see in.’

‘This kind of place doesn’t need to advertise, Ben,’ said Mick patiently. ‘It’s specialist. I mean, look at this stuff.’ Mick tapped the glass of one of the display cabinets. Inside, a stuffed monkey sat with its head lolling over listlessly to one side. It had an arm missing, the other holding a cymbal that lacked a partner to clang against. ‘This one’s worth over a grand even in the state it’s in. Restored, you could be looking at ten plus, easy.’

‘I don’t like these toys,’ said Benny. ‘They’re scary.’

‘They’re valuable, is what they are, I’ve just told you,’ countered Mick. ‘You remember what we said? No more smash and grabs or taking old lady’s pensions. We’re professionals now. We’re the specialists.’

His torch beam ran across a display case full of stuffed animals, brightly coloured creatures with maniacally smiling faces. Each one was bagged in polythene, as if they had suffocated with their grins firmly fixed in place. Mick smiled back at them; he’d got his start in this game when he’d stolen one of these completely by chance during a run-of-the-mill burglary. It wasn’t until Jimmy, Mick’s fence, had spotted Benny hugging it in the back of Mick’s beat-up old van that he’d had any idea what it was worth. Six months of reading, researching, and scouting the right auctions and internet chat rooms and Mick had graduated from petty thief to toy dealer and professional burglar for hire. He had a nice new van now.

‘Here, you remember these, Ben?’ he whispered, waving Benny over. Benny lumbered through the dark slowly, Mick illuminating a path from him between the displays with his torch. Benny smiled when he saw the stuffed animals.

‘A snuggly!’ he said, pointing at a fluorescent pink frog with glee. ‘Like the one I had before! Can I have him, Mick?’

Mick peered into the case.

‘That’s a 2002 Phineas Frog from the “Round the World” Collection. Nine thousand released worldwide. Not the rarest piece but-’

‘So, can I have him?’

‘No, you can’t have him!’

The voice that answered came from somewhere in the darkness, a nasal, spiteful voice that made Mick and Benny both leap backwards, bumping into the case behind them.

Mick raised his torch, illuminating the fat, pockmarked face of a woman standing in the darkness. She wore brown work overalls and, despite being easily in her fifties, had her greasy blonde hair tied up in two childlike bunches.

‘Jesus Christ!’ gasped Mick. ‘You nearly gave me a heart attack.’

‘Shall I do a Dunstable, Mick?’ asked Benny eagerly. Mick could hear the leather of Benny’s gloves creak as he flexed his meaty hands.

‘Now, now, there’s no need for that,’ said Mick in a conciliatory tone. He held up his hands to show that he wasn’t holding anything other than his torch. ‘Now, listen, missus, we don’t want any trouble. My brother here, he lost his toy earlier today in the village somewhere. He’s doesn’t always think straight and - ’

Mick stopped as, with a flash and a fizzing hiss of electricity, Benny collapsed behind him. The big man crashed into a display case, shattering the glass and bringing a rain of stuffed toys down on himself as he crumbled to the floor. Mick spun around, his torchlight cutting through the darkness. In the doorway behind, a woman stood holding a taser, its unfurled wires still stuck into the back of Benny’s thick neck. This one wore the same brown coveralls as the other woman and shared the same greasy blonde hair, but was tall and thin and wore her hair in a tight bun. Mick had the distinct impression he had broken into a toy shop owned by two evil aunts from a children’s book.

‘Look, ladies, let’s not let things get out of hand,’ said Mick. He adjusted his grip on his torch, getting ready to throw it or use it as a cudgel. Violence was usually Benny’s department, but Mick was perfectly capable if called upon. Before he could make his move though, something hard made contact with the back of his head and he found himself tumbling forward to land on top of Benny. The last thing he heard was the comical squeaking of soft toys as his vision faded to black.

Mick woke up tied to a wooden chair, his ankles bound to its legs and his hands tied firmly behind him, stretching his shoulders awkwardly over the back of the chair. Benny was next to him, still unconscious, his head on his chest and with his arms and legs also bound. Drool ran from the corner of his mouth, making him look like a huge dog that had been captured wearing stolen human clothes. Mick struggled but couldn’t move more than a few millimetres. He felt weak, as if he’d not just been knocked out but also been drugged afterwards. Getting your lights put out was an occupational hazard in Mick’s old line of work. He knew what a mild concussion felt like and this wasn’t it.

They were still in the shop. The lights were still off, except for a powerful lamp above the workbench that was pointed directly at Mick’s face. In front of him, silhouetted, the two women had their heads together in intense conversation, their backs to Mick and Benny. Between them was the prize Mick and Benny had come for, a tiny model house. Something about it made Mick feel queasy, he could feel his stomach twisting in knots and his skin crawling just looking at it. Something deep inside him, something old and primal, was telling him to stay away from it, to get as far away as he could.

It was just a toy, he told himself.

Just a stupid, spooky Halloween-themed add-on to a model village collection.

Still, something made him look away.

‘I still say we keep something back for later,’ said the taller, thinner woman. ‘We’re still waiting on that 1938 Little Miss Sugarheart and you know as well as I do the hair is going to need restoration.’

‘But I want to finish Betty Lou,’ grumbled the heavier-set woman. ‘So, you keep the hair, but I take the teeth.’

‘Well, that seems fair.’

‘Not out of the big one, though, out of the small one. The big one’s got some missing.’

‘All right,’ said the thin woman reluctantly. ‘But I’m doing the eyes.’

‘I don’t care,’ said the other woman petulantly. ‘I hate doing the eyes.’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘Do, too!’

‘Hey!’ interrupted Mick. His voice came out differently from how he was expecting, slurry and slow. He couldn’t get his jaw to work properly and his tongue felt fat and heavy in his mouth.

The two women turned. They were wearing stained surgical face masks now and the bigger one had a jeweller’s magnifying glass held tight in her one eye.

‘Sorry to. . . interrupt,’ slurred Mick. ‘But I’d like. . . to go now.’

The women looked at each other and laughed behind their masks.

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ said the one with pigtails. ‘Well, not until we say so, anyway!’

Mick shook his head, trying to clear the fog. His face felt strange, like the muscles were still asleep or something. Whatever they’d given him, he decided he’d try to get hold of some for himself to play around with another time. Whatever it was, Benny was still under and Mick had never known the big fella stay unconscious for longer than a few minutes.

‘Look,’ said Mick, working his jaw back into life. ‘Seriously. We work for some powerful people. I get that you’re pissed off; you want to get paid for the house. I get it. So just… let us go. Let us go and I’ll speak to some people; we can come to an arrangement.’

The women laughed again.

‘We already have an arrangement,’ said the thin one. ‘The house has been sold.’

‘We’ll double it, whatever they’re paying,’ said Mick. He could offer these crazy women anything right now, just as long as they untied him. They’d had the benefit of surprise earlier. Even without Benny’s help, he could overpower the two of them, take the house, and get out of here.

‘Show him, Evelyn,’ said pigtails, giggling. ‘I want him to know.’

‘We said we’d keep this professional,’ said the one called Evelyn. ‘We don’t need another Leighton Buzzard.’

Pigtails crossed her hands across her chest and huffed, sticking her chin out like an angry toddler.

‘Fine,’ said Evelyn coldly. She reached into the pocket of her coverall and took out a mobile phone, an old style flip-phone that probably didn’t do more than make calls and send texts. Evelyn opened it and held down one of the numbers, speed-dialling a contact. She put the call on speaker, holding the phone up so that Mick could see.

‘Hello?’

Mick recognised the voice instantly.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi Jimmy, it’s Evelyn and Elizabeth here,’ said Evelyn sweetly. ‘From Neverbury Toys and Collectables?’

‘I know who it is,’ said Jimmy gruffly. ‘Is it done?’

‘What the hell, Jimmy?’ interrupted Mick. ‘Have you set us up?’

Silence came from the other end of the line for a moment.

‘Mick?’

‘Yes, it’s bloody Mick! What the hell have you set us up for here, Jimmy? I swear to Christ, when I get out of here-’

Elizabeth bent down and clamped a muscular hand over Mick’s mouth, muffling his voice.

‘Jimmy? Jimmy, it’s Evelyn here, I just want to double-check the terms of our agreement.’

‘You know the terms.’

‘And you still want it? The house that is? PH Hartlock’s House of Horror in the Old City?’

Struggling to breathe with Elizabeth’s fat hand covering his mouth and nostrils, Mick’s eyes were drawn once more to the house. It seemed bigger, somehow, or closer. It couldn’t be either; he knew nobody had touched it. But there it was, bigger than it had been before. Mick could see the detail on it now and whilst mostly he only cared about the things he stole in terms of their value, he couldn’t help but appreciate the exquisite level of craftsmanship the house exhibited. It wasn’t plastic or wood, but a mix of materials, tiny stonework walls, a real wooden door, and even real glass windows. Everything was decorated for Halloween, with pumpkins on the doorstep and ghosts hanging from the eaves. It was as if someone had simply frozen a haunted house somewhere and shrunk it down to the size of a toy. In the half-light of the shop, the lamp pointed straight into his eyes, Mick could even have believed he could see shadows moving around inside the house, tiny dark figures going about their unknown business.

‘Yes, you know I want it,’ said Jimmy on the other end of the call. ‘I’ve got a buyer all lined up and, trust me ladies, you do not want to mess with this guy or who he’s buying for.’

‘And the price, we’re agreed on that as well? We settled at two, didn’t we?’

‘Yes,’ said Jimmy grimly. ‘Two.’

Mick yanked his head away from Elizabeth’s hand.

‘Two grand?’ he yelled. ‘Is that it? I’ll give you ten, girls. Just let me out of here and let me go. I’d like to get back home and have a little word with my mate, Jimmy.’

‘I’m sorry, Mick,’ said Jimmy. ‘I really am, mate.’

The line went dead, leaving only a repeating beeping tone in its wake. Evelyn folded the phone shut and put it away in her pocket.

‘It wasn’t two grand,’ she said quietly. From her other pocket, she pulled out a set of latex surgical gloves. She blew inside them to inflate them before putting them on, letting the latex snap close on her wrists.

‘Two what then? Two hundred grand? Two million? It can’t be two million!’

Elizabeth turned around and started taking tools down from the wall.

‘What shall we do first, Ev?’ she asked.

Evelyn looked appraisingly at Mick, then took a small pair of pliers off the workbench.

‘Let’s do the teeth,’ she said. ‘Then you can take the hair off the other one while I do the eyes.’

Elizabeth turned around with a syringe in her hand. Mick pulled away, trying to topple his chair, to get away in any way he could. A powerful hand closed around his neck, tight enough that he could feel himself going back under even before the needle pierced his skin and whatever was inside forced its way into his bloodstream.

Evelyn changed the position of the lamp and tipped Mick’s head back, letting his mouth fall open. His eyes rolled back in his head but he fought to stay awake even as the numbness spread through his whole body. He kept his eyes on Evelyn for as long as he could, until she moved behind him and her hands came down on either side of his face, holding him steady. Then all he could see was the workbench and the house. He felt a momentary twinge as Evelyn pulled one of his teeth out, and listened as it tinkled into a bowl being held out of sight by Elizabeth.

The numbness overtook him swiftly and he didn’t feel the second tooth come out at all.

All he saw was the house and, as he slipped back into unconsciousness, he was sure someone turned the lights on.

What are the Odds?

Gemma’s mother brought the car to a stop outside Grandad’s cottage. Gemma hated the place. She hated its chocolate-box frontage; she hated its carefully manicured rosebushes; and she hated the way Grandad’s old bike was left to lean casually up against the front door even though he hadn’t ridden it in years. The whole place reeked of old-timey, small-village life. Gemma hated old-timey village life. She checked her phone as Mum turned off the engine.

‘You know there’s no signal here,’ she grumbled. ‘Not even a bar. This is like hell.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s Neverbury for you,’ sighed Mum. ‘Village council refused permission for a mast to go up, so it’s a bit hit and miss for signals. Your Grandad’s got a phone anyway, so you can call me if you need anything.’

‘Does he have broadband?’

‘I doubt it.’

Gemma let out a sound that sounded like someone had tried to inflate a small mammal with a set of rusty bellows.

‘How long have I got to stay for?’

Mum glanced at her watch.

‘Two hours?’ she replied. ‘My appointment’s in thirty minutes, shouldn’t take more than an hour, so then that’s thirty minutes to get back and…’

‘Two. Hours.’ said Gemma, as if the words were in a different language but translated to ‘Agonising Death’ in English. ‘What am I going to do for two hours?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Gemma’s mother, ‘Talk to him. See if he needs anything done around the place. He only came out of the hospital a few days ago. He needs to be looked after.’

‘Why can’t you do it?’

Mum leant across Gemma and opened the car door. ‘I told you, I’ve got an appointment. Your Grandad asked me to go see his solicitor; there’s paperwork that needs to be signed and, for reasons best known to your Grandad, it has to be today.’

‘You don’t even like Grandad,’ sparked Gemma. ‘You said he -’

‘That’s enough, young lady!’ said Mum firmly. ‘Your Grandad’s been poorly, and he’s decided to put his affairs in order. Family is family and we need to be there for him. All I’m asking you to do is sit with him, have a cup of tea, and make sure nothing happens to him while I get this paperwork sorted out, okay?’

‘Fine,’ said Gemma. This time, her tone indicated that the word ‘fine’ might, in another language, have been translated to mean ‘Only if the alternative was a painful and gruesome death.’ Despite this, she picked up her phone from where she’d stashed it in the cup holder, got out of the car, and didn’t slam the door quite as hard as she could have done.

‘You don’t even like him!’ she shouted at her mum as the car pulled away.

‘But I do like his money,’ replied Gemma’s mother under her breath as she drove away, heading for the nearest road out of Neverbury.

Turning around, Gemma slouched up the path to the cottage, her hands in the pockets of her tracksuit bottoms. Grandad was already at the door, holding it open.

‘Come on, love; you’ll catch your death out there!’ he called.

Gemma looked around. The weather was fine, not exactly summer, but somewhere past spring. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

‘It’s fine, Grandad.’

Grandad peered out at the sky suspiciously.

‘I give it half an hour,’ he said gravely. ‘Let’s get inside.’

Inside, Grandad’s cottage was every bit as chocolate-box as it was outside. Plates were hung on the walls of the hallway, each one painted with a pastoral scene from a romanticised version of the English countryside idyll that Gemma suspected had never existed, whilst ceramic figurines jostled for position on every available surface. It wasn’t a riot of colour, more a genteel tea party of pastels and beige.

‘They were your grandma’s,’ said Grandad, shuffling down the hallway and into the lounge. ‘Can’t stand them myself, but thought it best to leave them, in case she ever came back.’

Gemma had never managed to get the full story from her mum about her grandma. She knew that she’d disappeared one day and that her mum had been raised after that by her father. She’d heard, mostly when her mother had been drinking, vague allusions to different aunts that had come and gone, usually described as whores, gold-diggers, or strumpets. Of Gemma’s grandma herself, very little was said other than that she had come from a wealthy family who hadn’t approved of her marrying Gemma’s grandad and that she must have ‘come to her senses’ one day and just decided to up and leave. Gemma had always concluded that if her mother ever upped and left her without a backward glance, she probably wouldn’t want to talk about it much, either.

Grandad shambled into the living room and eased himself down into his chair. It was one of those old-man chairs that were about a decade past being comfortable for anyone other than the one person to who it had warped and moulded its shape to over time. Grandad sank down into it and let out a contented sigh.

Gemma sat on the sofa opposite. Between them, laid out on a coffee table, was a strange contraption that looked like something a mad scientist might have used to try to reanimate a patchwork corpse. Circuit boards were linked with a chaotic mix of bare wires and ribbon cables as lights winked, an antenna stood proudly upwards, and everything appeared to be powered by a daisy chain of leaky car batteries. On Grandpa’s side of the table was what Gemma guessed were the controls for whatever the device was, a series of dials and switches mounted on a polished wooden board. The only thing Gemma thought she recognised was what looked like the mouthpiece of a CB radio, the type she’d seen truckers using in the old movies she watched with her mum.

‘She’s a beauty, isn’t she?’ said Grandad. It wasn’t really a question.

‘I… guess so?’

‘You don’t know what it is, do you?’

‘No.’

Grandad laughed until his body decided that he’d experienced sufficient mirth and threw a phlegmy spanner into the works and left him coughing and spluttering. Gemma waited quietly for it to be over, silently praying that the old man wasn’t about to drop dead in front of her.

‘It’s a wireless,’ the old man said proudly, once he’d regained his composure.

‘Mum said you didn’t have broadband,’ said Gemma.

‘Not that sort of wireless!’ said Grandad. ‘You know, the wireless. A radio.’

‘I prefer podcasts,’ said Gemma sullenly.

‘Oh, I think you’ll like this,’ said Grandad. He flicked a switch on the control panel and the whole device started to hum softly. Gemma was pretty sure she could feel herself being irradiated by it. She watched with the kind of mute dispassion that only a teenager can muster as Grandad turned the dials this way and that, flicking switches as he went. A speaker whined into monotone existence, crackling static rising up and down in a crashing sea of white noise until Grandad hit the right frequency.

‘And now, the results from today’s racing at Kempton,’ the announcer said clearly.

‘Perfect,’ said Grandad, licking his lips. He grabbed a pen and paper from somewhere underneath himself, shoved down into the cushions of the chair. He licked the tip of the pen to get it started and began to write down the results of the race. Gemma slouched down on the sofa and reached into her pocket for her phone. She frowned as she pulled out one, then another.

‘Urgh,’ she huffed. ‘I’ve got Mum’s phone. Brilliant. I told her not to get the same one as me. This is always happening. She’s going to go nuts when she can’t find it.’

Grandad ignored her, fully focused on noting down the racing results. Gemma stashed her mother’s phone in her pocket and unlocked her own. Still no signal. Hoping against hope, she turned on her phone’s Wi-Fi. Still nothing. She was about to start scrolling through her old photos, looking for something new to share, when Grandad turned off the power to the radio.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘Let’s get cracking. Have you got the internet on that phone?’

‘What?’ asked Gemma. ‘No, there’s no signal.’

‘Give it here,’ said Grandad, reaching out.

‘I’ve already tried,’ said Gemma, doubtful that the old man would have the first clue where to start with her phone. ‘It’s a new phone so . . .’

‘Give it here!’ insisted Grandad. He lurched forward and snatched it out of her hand. ‘We haven’t got much time.’

Gemma watched dumbfounded as her Grandad tapped and swiped at the phone screen. She’d expected him to be bamboozled by the device, but his nimble fingers worked quickly over the screen and, in just a few seconds, he handed it back.

‘There,’ he said triumphantly, ‘Internet.’

Gemma looked at the screen of her phone. The old man was right. Where there had been a cross there was now a bright green radar icon reporting a strong signal. Gemma tapped the screen and went into the settings of her phone.

‘Shared Internet of Neverbury?’

‘Village council set it up,’ said Grandad proudly. ‘No need for a mast, no need for anyone to get ripped off by them phone companies.’

Gemma shook her head in disbelief. She hadn’t expected the village of Neverbury, which seemed to be trapped in a time warp when it came to most things, to have such a progressive approach to free internet access.

‘Fair enough,’ she said, ‘So, what did you want me to look up?’

Grandad checked his watch.

‘You got any of those betting apps?’

‘No,’ Gemma replied slyly. ‘But I could install one. You got a credit card?’

Grandad pulled a battered wallet out of his pocket, opened it, and took out a credit card. It was completely black except for the silver lettering on the front. He handed it to Gemma.

‘What kind of credit card is this?’ she asked, already tapping and swiping her way through her phone’s app store in search of a betting application.

‘Neverbury Mutual,’ replied Grandad. ‘It’s quite exclusive, actually.’

‘Yeah, of course it is,’ said Gemma sarcastically.

‘Minimum of two million on deposit,’ Grandad said casually. ‘Or maybe that’s not that much, down in that London where you come from.’

‘Shut up. You don’t have two mill’.’

Grandad went back to tinkering with his radio, his eyes fixed on the dials and switches.

‘No, I don’t have two million. I said it was a minimum of two million.’

‘Shut. Up. How do you have that much money?’

Grandad looked up from the radio and, just for a moment, the kindly old dodderer vanished. There was something hard and hungry in its place.

‘If you hurry up and get that app ready, I’ll show you.’

Gemma got to work, tapping in her Grandad’s details and then his credit card number. Within a few minutes, she was set up and ready to go. Starting a gambling habit was remarkably easy.

‘OK, what are we betting on?’ she asked.

‘Kempton.’

Gemma sighed. Of course. The old man was losing his mind.

‘Grandad,’ she said, mustering as much compassion into her voice as she could. ‘You just listened to the results from Kempton. That race already happened.’

‘Did it?’ replied Grandad. ‘Don’t you want to check?’

‘I heard it.’

‘Check.’

‘I heard it.’

‘Check.’

Gemma grunted her frustration at the old man, but tapped on the app anyway. Then she tapped again. And again.

‘This can’t be right.’

‘Can’t it?’

Gemma held up her phone so that Grandad could see the screen.

‘We just listened to the results from Kempton, right? But it says here the race doesn’t start for another five minutes? It must be a bug or something.’

‘Place a bet,’ said Grandad. He passed the pad with the race results written on it over to Gemma. ‘First, second, and third. You’ll get good odds.’

‘It’s a bug,’ replied Gemma. ‘They won’t honour it.’

‘Then what is there to lose? Besides, it’s not even your money. Humour an old man, eh?’

What the hell, Gemma thought. She’d expected to be sitting here with nothing to say or being stuck listening to old family stories or, worst of all and horror of all horrors, being forced to look through family photo albums. At least this was interesting, even if the old man clearly had a head madder than a sack full of rats.

Gemma tapped the screen, placing bets on the first, second, and third positions. She kept the bets low. They couldn’t possibly come in, anyway.

‘Now what?’ she asked.

Grandad shook his head. ‘We wait,’ he said. ‘But if you really can’t wait for three minutes to see if you just won your bet, go and stick the kettle on.’

Gemma got up with a teenager-grade sigh and headed out to the kitchen. Based on the kitchen units, which didn’t seem to have been updated since sometime in the early 1970s, she had even more reason to doubt that Grandad had two million in the bank. She took two chipped mugs off a mug tree and filled the kettle. She switched it on at arm’s length, having never seen an electrical appliance that was older than she was and yet still in service. It boiled well enough though and Gemma was opening and closing cupboards in search of tea bags when her phone let off a loud trumpeting sound in her pocket.

She pulled it out and swiped a finger up through her notifications.

‘No. Way.’

‘Something happened?’ called Grandad, feigning innocence poorly. ‘Tea bags are in the last cupboard on the right, by the way. And I take three sugars. Thanks for asking.’

Gemma walked back into the lounge, her mouth open and no cups of tea in her hands. Instead, she just held up her phone and showed Grandad the screen.

‘We won.’

‘How much did you put on?’ asked Grandad.

‘Five quid,’ said Gemma sheepishly.

‘Five quid? I told you how much I had in the bank.’

‘I didn’t believe you, did I?’

Gemma threw herself down on the couch in frustration, punching the pillows so hard they threw out clouds of dust. She sat there, quietly seething in what, on some level, she knew was a thickening cloud of old-person dead skin.

‘Argh! What are the odds? I’m such an idiot!’

‘It’s all right,’ said Grandad calmly.

‘It’s not all right though, is it? We could have won big! We could have won . . .’

‘Millions?’ said Grandad with a wink.

‘Shut up.’

Grandad turned the radio back on. The electric hum filled the room again and a soft wave of white noise rolled in.

‘Let’s have another go.’

‘It’s not going to happen again, is it? The betting company is bound to notice.’

‘Humour me.’

Gemma sat and waited as her Grandad tuned and re-tuned the radio. It took a few minutes, but finally the static gave way again to the calm, polished voice of the announcer.

‘And in other news, a shock win at Cheltenham today after three horses fell and—’

‘Do it!’ said Grandad, ‘Get a bet on!’

Gemma shook her head in disbelief but did as she was told, quickly finding the right event on the betting app and placing a bet on the result being reported on the radio.

‘I can’t believe this,’ she said, ‘How much should we bet?’

‘Just go a hundred or two,’ said Grandad. ‘They get touchy about really big bets, I learnt that the hard way.’

‘What?’

‘Just do it!’

Gemma took a deep breath, keyed in the figure, and hit submit.

‘Now what?’

‘Well, I’m still waiting for that cup of tea,’ said Grandad.

Gemma was walking back in from the kitchen with the cups of tea when her phone trumpeted. Even though she had been waiting for the result, she almost dropped the cups in surprise. Quickly putting them down, she pulled out her phone and looked at the notification.

‘Oh. My. God.’

She turned the phone to Grandad. He smiled.

‘Believe me now?’

Gemma sat back down on the sofa. Her legs were trembling. She rubbed her hands over her face and pushed her hair back. This had to be some sort of dream. Or perhaps a trick. Gemma’s mum had sometimes said that her father could be cruel; perhaps this was just a cruel trick. But how on Earth could he pull it off?

‘It’s why I wanted to see you today,’ said Grandad. He took a sip from his mug of tea and let out an appreciative sigh. ‘I wanted to know if you had the gift.’

‘What gift?’ asked Gemma.

‘To see the future,’ explained Grandad. ‘Back in the old days, my grandmother used to read tea leaves. Before that, her grandmother used a crystal ball. Before that, they say, my grandmother’s grandmother was burnt as a witch, right here in Neverbury. Me, I use a radio. Much better, as you can see.’

‘Mum never said anything about any of this.’

Grandad sniffed derisively. ‘She doesn’t have the gift. If she walked in here now, you’d get nothing but static out of that radio. That’s your mother through and through, though. Always interfering.’

‘So, it’s not the machine then?’ asked Gemma. ‘It’s . . . you?’

‘And you.’

‘Wow,’ said Gemma. ‘So, I’m a what? A witch?’

‘If you want to call yourself that,’ replied Grandad. ‘But as you’re about to become very, very rich, the word most people will probably use for you is “eccentric.” Only poor people have to be called witches.’

Gemma sat in silence for a moment, her head swimming.

‘Does it only do horse racing?’ she asked. It was a ridiculous question but it was the first one that she could actually make come out of her mouth and she needed to start somewhere. She had the overwhelming feeling that the entire world around had changed, shifted on its axis just a few degrees, so that everything looked different.

‘No,’ said Grandad with a smile. ‘You’ll pick up more than just the sport. You’ll get news from all over, as well as . . . other things, sometimes. Funny thing is, it’s always that same voice. I’ve been using it before your mother was even born and it’s always been him. Funny that.’

‘Can you show me?’ asked Gemma. ‘How to work it?’

‘That’s why you’re here,’ said Grandad. ‘I’ve had a good life, Gemma. An easy life. Never been short of money, never had a problem I didn’t see coming, never—’

‘What about Grandma?’ interrupted Gemma. ‘Didn’t the radio say something? Warn you?’

Grandad looked down at the radio, running his hand along the polished wood of the control deck. There was something loving in the way he touched it, something caring.

‘Like I said,’ he answered softly. ‘I never had a problem I didn’t see coming.’

‘Sorry,’ said Gemma, ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’

‘It’s all right, love,’ said Grandad. ‘That’s the most important thing you need to learn. Don’t look too far forward. You might find something out you don’t like. Better to take each day as it comes. Play the short odds.’

‘Can I try it then?’ asked Gemma, reaching forward for the radio control panel.

‘Ah, I don’t know about that,’ said Grandad reluctantly, drawing the panel closer to himself. ‘She’s a temperamental old girl; it’s best to get to know her first and—’

‘Come on,’ said Gemma. ‘You said yourself, I’ve got the gift.’

Before Grandad could stop her, Gemma grabbed the control deck and lifted it over to her side of the table. She switched the radio on, just as she’d seen him do. The electrical hum came on immediately and the familiar wave of static rolled in. Gemma began twisting the dials, mimicking the movements she’d seen her Grandad make.

‘Gemma, you listen to me now; you go easy on that GAIN control. That’s what gives you the range and—’

‘Got it!’ said Gemma with glee, as the static gave way to the smooth, calm voice of the announcer.

‘And that’s all our sports news for today. In local news, tragedy struck today as the daughter of a local man was killed in a car crash.’

‘Gemma,’ said Grandad, ‘Turn it off.’

Gemma flicked the power switch, but the radio’s lights didn’t go off and the announcer continued speaking.

‘The accident occurred at just after one p.m. on Abbotswell Lane.’

‘That’s here,’ said Gemma, her face blanching.

‘Turn it off, Gemma!’ urged Grandad. ‘Now!’

‘The car, a blue Ford Fiesta, left the road—’

‘That’s Mum!’ gasped Gemma. She looked up at the clock. ‘It’s not one o’clock yet. I can fix this. I can save her!’

Dropping the control deck on the table, Gemma bolted out of the room.

‘Wait!’ called Grandad, struggling out of his chair. ‘Wait, you don’t understand!’

Grandad limped after Gemma, his old knees and tired hips betraying him. He heard her open the door. As he reached the hallway, he saw a shadow fall across the garden and, right at the moment he’d predicted it, the heavens opened. Gemma grabbed an old coat off the pegs in the hall and threw it on as she rushed out.

‘Gemma!’ he called. ‘Come back!’

But Gemma wasn’t answering. Pulling the hood of the coat up to shield herself from the rain, she opened the gate and ran out into the lane. She could hear the familiar sound of her mother’s car before she saw it, whipping around the corner. It raced down towards Gemma where she stood in the middle of the road, trying to flag her mother down.

Inside the car, Gemma’s mother turned on the windscreen wipers, but they did little to improve her visibility as the rain came down in biblical measures.

‘Bloody kid,’ she grumbled, ‘How am I supposed to find this solicitor without my phone? I’m going to be late.’

Suddenly, the radio in the car sparked into life, barking out static. The frequency scrolled up automatically, searching for a signal.

‘Argh!’ raged Gemma’s mum. ‘Stupid thing! That’s something else that’s never worked! Swear to God, as soon as the old man pops his clogs, I’m getting a new car.’

Taking her eyes off the road, Gemma’s mum fiddled with the radio controls, trying to turn it off. No matter how many times she pushed the power button or twisted the volume knob, the static just grew louder.

When she looked back up, there was a figure in the road. A figure in a hood, waving to her.

‘Mum?’

‘Gemma!’ yelled Grandad, hobbling down the path as quickly as he could, ‘Get out of the way!’

But it was too late. Gemma’s mother’s car hit a pothole and veered off course, heading directly towards Gemma. Her Grandad could only watch as the car ploughed into his granddaughter and she vanished underneath the wheels. The car carried on a few more yards, dragging Gemma along with it, until she wasn’t really Gemma anymore, just a streak of meat dressed in Gemma’s torn clothes and a borrowed coat. The car slammed a tree on the other side of the road and a low branch punctured the windscreen, a splatter of crimson painting the inside of the windscreen.

Grandad hadn’t even made it to the end of the path.

Inside the cottage, the announcer continued the news, moving on to the story of a local man who’d made a large donation to the village council to help with repairs to roads in and around the village.

We’ll See You Right

Thomas placed the small square bag onto the counter, folded over the brightly coloured string handles, and slid it across the counter with a grin that was as authentic as the fake rabbits in the Easter display of the optician’s window.

‘There you are, Mrs H—two pairs of brand-new reading glasses.’

Mrs H, an elderly woman clad in the head-to-toe tweed that was the standard uniform issued to all elderly ladies of the village of Neverbury, picked up the bag and smiled. ‘Thank you so much, Thomas. I can’t imagine how I lost the other ones you made for me.’

‘Not to worry,’ said Thomas, patting the old lady on the arm reassuringly. ‘You know what we say at Timothy Thomas Opticians, don’t you?’

‘You’ll see me right!’ replied Mrs H brightly.

‘That’s right,’ replied Thomas, ‘We’ll see you right.’ His grin strained as he pointed to the picture of himself on the counter. He was wearing his old army uniform, medals across his chest, and a rifle held up on his shoulder. He’d had the optician’s name, logo, and slogan printed on the photo. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

The bell above the door to the optician’s tinkled and Thomas looked past Mrs. H to see a new customer come in. The man crept gingerly through the door, his hands stretched out in front of him, his fingers wrapped in plasters, groping before each step. He wore what look like military surplus clothing, a thick woollen coat over a dark-green corded jumper and camouflage trousers. His boots were regulation. Thomas would know them anywhere, but they were dirty and had started to split. Underneath a woollen beanie hat, holed in places, heavy bandages were wrapped around the stranger’s eyes. Heavy bandages, stained and bloody.

‘And on that note,’ said Thomas politely. ‘I’ll be seeing you right out the door, Mrs H. Looks like I have a new customer!’

Thomas ushered Mrs H to the door, the old lady rubbernecking the new arrival as she went. Glasses or no, there wasn’t a lady in Neverbury whose eyesight was so impaired that they couldn’t see tantalising gossip a mile away. The bell tinkled again as Mrs H finally left, although she managed to feign interest in the Easter window display of the optician’s long enough to watch Thomas carefully approach the stranger and help him to a seat near the counter.

‘Is this Timothy’s?’ asked the stranger. His voice was rough and throaty.

‘It’s Timothy Thomas these days,’ said Thomas. ‘We rebranded.’

‘I need Timothy,’ said the stranger. ‘I was told to ask for Timothy.’

‘I’m afraid Timothy is no longer with the business.’

‘Did he get a new job somewhere else?’ asked the stranger.

‘No,’ replied Thomas tersely. ‘I’m afraid he died. It’s Timothy Thomas now. I’m Thomas.’

‘Why did you keep the Timothy then?’

Thomas let out a small groan of frustration.

‘If you must know, I did try to change it when I took over, and the locals boycotted me. Not a single person through those doors for three months until I put Timothy back above the door.’

‘I see.’

‘Well, you don’t though, do you?’ said Thomas sarcastically. ‘But rest assured, I will do my level best to help you. At Timothy Thomas, we’ll see you right, Mister—?’

‘Mudrick Scribner,’ said the stranger. ‘Friends call me Muddy.’

‘Well, Muddy,’ said Thomas, leaning in close to inspect the bandages around the man’s face, ‘Let’s see what we can see, shall we?’

Thomas took a pen out of his pocket and used the nib to pull back the edge of the bandages, looking for evidence of injury. ‘You’ve got some pretty heavy bandaging here. Were you hurt in some way? Did you have an operation?’

‘No,’ replied Muddy, ‘It’s my hands. They try to take the bandages off when I sleep. Have to make them thick and tight.’

He held up his hands and Thomas got a closer look at his broken nails and the plasters that covered over various cuts and grazes.

‘I hurt my hands a lot,’ said Muddy, ‘I have to feel my way.’

‘Can I take your bandages off?’ asked Thomas.

‘I’m supposed to ask for Timothy,’ said Muddy reluctantly. ‘They told me . . . Timothy.’

‘Are you from Neverbury?’ asked Thomas cautiously.

‘No.’

‘Then let me tell you something,’ said Thomas, checking the door as he spoke. ‘Timothy might have cast a spell over all the old beggars in this town, but he was the worst optician I’ve ever seen. There’s not a single person who has come through those doors to see me that hasn’t needed their prescription updated. I’m not just talking about the usual yearly tweak either. He had people walking around this town as blind as bats.’

‘Sounds perfect,’ said Muddy. ‘That’s all I want. Just enough to get about. I don’t want to see everything. I’ve already seen too much.’

Thomas began slowly unpicking Muddy’s bandages. A thick, cloying odour came off them, a smell that reminded Thomas of field hospitals he’d worked in as a military medic. He’d met men like Muddy there. Some soldiers came back hurt. Some came back dead. But some soldiers didn’t come back at all; they left a part of themselves out on the battlefield and what came back wasn’t the same person. Soldiers talk about ‘coming back in one piece.’ What they don’t talk about so much are the ones that come back with a part of themselves missing that isn’t merely physical. They don’t talk about how some soldiers come back from the battlefield as ghosts, haunting their old human shell.

‘I’m going to take your bandages away now, Muddy,’ said Thomas. ‘It might feel quite bright; it’s okay to close your eyes.’

‘They’re closed,’ said Muddy. ‘Don’t worry.’

Thomas kept unwinding layer after layer of bandage. The flesh underneath was pale and wrinkled from spending too long hidden from the sun, sweating under the layers of gauzy fabric. The smell grew stronger the more layers Thomas removed, the sickly, sweet smell giving way to the cloying back-of-your-throat pungency of rotting flesh. Finally, Thomas unwound the last layer of bandage, revealing Muddy’s eyes.

‘Jesus Christ,’ whispered Thomas, yanking his hands away.

Underneath the bandages, Muddy’s eyes were sewn shut with fishing wire. Yellow puss was encrusted around his eyelids in thick, warty scabs. Tears of it leaked from cracks in the scabs and ran down either side of his nose. Both eyes were puffy and inflamed, pregnant with stinking ooze.

‘How do they look?’ said Muddy, chuckling.

‘Who did this to you?’ asked Thomas, regaining his composure. He’d seen worse things than this in his time in the army, but horrors like this coming to Neverbury was unexpected.

‘I did it myself,’ replied Muddy darkly. ‘I couldn’t keep them shut all the time.’

‘Where did you serve, Muddy?’ asked Thomas.

‘All over,’ replied Muddy. ‘Private Mudrick Scribner, at your service. What about you—where did you serve?’

‘How can you tell?’ asked Thomas suspiciously.

‘Just something about you. An officer, right?’

‘Captain.’

‘Sir!’ Muddy saluted, although he was looking a few degrees in the wrong direction.

‘There’s no need for that,’ said Thomas. ‘We’re both on civvy street now, Muddy. Anyway, I’ve got a decent first aid kit. I’m going to have to see to these before we can really do anything about glasses. I’m going to take you through to the examination room now, okay?’

‘Lead the way, Captain,’ said Muddy.

It took a few minutes to get Muddy through to the exam room and settled in the chair. Thomas leaned him backwards and positioned an examination light so that he could get a proper look at Muddy’s diseased eyes.

‘Left one was easy, on account of my being right-handed but the right one was trickier. Of course, I was working blind towards the end.’

‘I’m going to cut the stitches away,’ said Thomas gently. ‘I’m afraid this is probably going to hurt. I don’t have anything I can give you for the pain.’

Thomas opened up his trusty old first aid kit. He hadn’t done anything like this since his time in the army. Retraining as an optician had supposed to have been a change from the front lines. Something simple, something easy. A little town in the middle of nowhere with a plentiful supply of pensioners, a combination of failing eyes and failing memories the perfect condition to sell large amounts of optometry. Truth be told though, Thomas missed the front lines.

‘Hello, old thing,’ he said under his breath. ‘Back again.’

After snapping on some latex gloves, Thomas took out a small pair of scissors and, with steady hands, began to snip away at the fishing wire. Thick, putrid puss sloughed out and Thomas had to hold his breath not to gag. Muddy kept his eyelids shut as tightly as he could.

‘Try to relax, Muddy,’ said Thomas calmly. ‘There’s quite a lot to clean up.’

‘Don’t want to see,’ said Muddy. ‘Don’t want to see.’

‘We’ll take care of that,’ said Thomas. ‘Just like you wanted it. I’ll see you right.’

Thomas had no idea what this meant, of course. He could have thrown the stranger out or sent him to a GP or a hospital. He could have phoned social services, had them come and take Muddy away. But that wasn’t what the army taught him to do. And it wasn’t what Thomas would do now.

Another snip, then another. Thomas took cotton wool swabs from his kit and used them to wipe away the puss that was leaking out, dabbing gently at Muddy’s eyes.

‘You’ve got a nasty infection.’ he explained. ‘You’ll need to see a GP, get some antibiotics.’

‘Can’t you give them to me?’ asked Muddy.

Thomas shook his head. ‘Not anymore, mate. I gave that up. Not a Captain anymore; not a medic either. Contact lenses and glasses are all I do these days.’

Muddy’s eyes flickered open for a second, two bloodshot orbs with hugely dilated pupils. He stared at Thomas with a disturbing intensity for a second, then threw his hands up and covered his eyes.

‘No! No! No!’ he shouted, ‘You made me see!’

‘It’s all right, Muddy, it’s all right,’ said Thomas, trying to reassure him. ‘Was it the light, is it too bright? You may have some photosensitivity, between the infection and keeping your eyes shut for so long.’

Muddy kept his hands over his eyes.

‘They made you give up, didn’t they?’ he said gravely. ‘The army made you leave!’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

Muddy dug his fingers into the raw flesh around his eyes, wailing and rocking back and forth. The chair creaked underneath him and he must have bumped into something, Thomas guessed, because the examination light flicked and died. The room was suddenly dark, save for a weak halo of light around the door to the rest of the optician’s. Thomas reached for the door handle, keeping his eyes on Muddy.

‘Wait!’ said the soldier from behind his hands. ‘Leave it dark.’

Muddy slowly lowered his hands, peeping out from behind them like a scared child.

Thomas took a small examination torch out of his shirt pocket and snapped it on, keeping the beam of light pointed down at the floor.

‘Muddy, I want to take a look in your eyes.’

‘No!’ shouted Muddy. ‘No lights. Not until you get me some glasses, like you said you would.’

‘I’m not sure glasses are the best idea right now,’ said Thomas. He approached Muddy warily, keeping an eye on the man’s hands. ‘I just want to see how we’ve done cleaning things up and maybe see if I can work out why you don’t like the light.’

‘It’s not the light,’ said Muddy. ‘It’s what I see in the light.’

‘And what do you see, Muddy?’

‘I call them Echoes,’ said Muddy.

‘Echoes?’

‘It started during my last tour. I got shot, right here.’

Muddy pulled up his jumper to reveal a staggered set of bullet wound scars, a constellation etched into his flesh.

‘The boys got me back to base, got me patched up, but they said I died at least a couple of times before they got me stable again. Dead for a while, they said.’

Thomas nodded. Post-traumatic stress certainly wasn’t uncommon after that kind of trauma and nor were hallucinations or flashbacks. Thomas had his fair share of nightmares but, thankfully, they had the good grace to occur at night and leave him alone during his waking hours.

‘First time I opened my eyes, one of them was looking right at me. I didn’t recognise him, although he did only have half a head.’ Muddy chuckled darkly to himself. ‘They thought I’d gone mad, stuck me on all sorts of drugs but that half-headed fellow and his mates? They followed me everywhere. And there were others too, other echoes following other people. Took me a while to work out what they were.’

‘What were they?’ asked Thomas.

‘They were people we’d killed,’ replied Muddy. ‘Some time, in some firefight or other, I’d blown that guy’s head apart. He must have been pretty gutted when he realised he had to follow me around for the rest of my life now.’

‘Muddy,’ said Thomas sympathetically. ‘These echoes—they aren’t real.’

‘That’s what everyone says at first, until I tell them what echoes they’ve got.’

‘What?’

Muddy looked up, his eyes giving off that same strange intensity again, that look that went right through Thomas like an X-Ray.

‘I can see yours now. They’re harder to see in the dark but they’re there.’

‘I was a doctor in the army, Muddy. I never killed anybody. There were too many I failed to save but I never took a life, not with violence.’

‘I know,’ said Muddy. ‘They say you just watched.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Muddy held a finger up his lips. ‘Shhh,’ he said. ‘I have to really concentrate to hear them.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ said Thomas. ‘I’m sorry, Muddy. I wanted to help you but I’m going to go and make a call now, see if we can’t get someone down here who’ll know what to do.’

The door clicked shut behind Thomas and he heard the lock turn from outside.

‘Hello?’ he called, trying to open the door, ‘Who’s out there?’

‘There are two women,’ said Muddy slowly, ‘And a boy. Oh, I’ve never seen a little boy Echo before.’

Thomas turned around, anger in his eyes.

‘Look, I don’t know who put you up to this but I was put on trial and my name was cleared. I didn’t do anything wrong!’

‘They said you watched,’ continued Muddy, ‘While the other ones hurt them. The men in the suits. You watched while they asked them questions and while they hurt them.’

‘It was an interrogation!’ argued Thomas. ‘I was there to make sure things didn’t go too far! We needed the information and the CO had authorised—’

‘They say you knew,’ interrupted Muddy. ‘You knew that they didn’t know anything.’

‘That isn’t true.’

‘They say you knew but you wanted to watch. You were the one who let it go too far.’

Thomas turned and tried the door again, but it wouldn’t budge. He grabbed the handle and pulled as hard as he could, then took a step back and started kicking at the door. The wood around the handle began to splinter and break away from the frame.

‘It’s all right,’ said Muddy. ‘They can’t do anything much. Just little stuff, hardly a bother. For the rest, the stuff they really want, they have to wait.’

Thomas turned to look at Muddy, fear in his eyes.

‘They wait?’

Muddy got up from the chair and took his bandages from where Thomas had piled them up alongside his medical kit.

‘They’re clever, mind you. They know exactly when it’s going to happen. That’s the worst bit really, knowing exactly how and when you’re going to die and exactly who’s going to be waiting for you when it happens.’

Muddy started to wrap the bandages back around his eyes.

‘It’s important to listen, now that you know about them. They’ll tell you things, if you listen.’

Muddy started shambling towards the door, bumping into things as he groped his way through the dark.

‘They do play tricks though. They told me there was a bad optician in Neverbury. Guess they meant you after all.’

The door clicked open as Muddy approached, swinging open of its own accord. Thomas stood, trembling, as Muddy stopped suddenly at the door.

‘What?’ he whispered, cocking his head to the side. ‘Oh, all right, I’ll tell him.’

‘Tell me what?’ asked Thomas urgently, ‘Tell me what?’

‘They said to say not to worry,’ replied Muddy. ‘They said they’ll see you, right?’

Negative Exposure

Magda had run the Neverbury and District Post for as long as anyone could remember. Nobody dared ask her age but, behind closed and guarded doors, there was great speculation. What was known was that Magda had had the kind of glittering modelling career that ensured two things: that she would forever be known only by her first name and that she would reputedly be a key figure in multiple scandals, love triangles, prominent divorces, and at least one kidnap attempt on a minor royal. She had been a muse to artists and musicians, a mistress to politicians, and the obsession of millions.

And then, one day, Magda had disappeared.

Some said that there was finally a scandal too big for her to weather and she’d been sent into exile. Others said that she’d had a breakdown and put herself into rehab in some far away and luxurious facility.

What nobody expected was for her to resurface in the small town of Neverbury, sashaying into the offices of the Neverbury and District Post as new owner and CEO in a whirlwind of fur, high heels, and designer office wear. Of her old life, the only thing she seemed to retain was her trademark sunglasses, worn at all times and in all environments. Even true Magda scholars argued about the colour of her eyes, which were never seen.

The Neverbury and District Post had immediately benefited from an influx of high-end advertisers who ploughed money into full-page adverts for products that certainly did not count the population of places like Neverbury as their target market. Computers were upgraded, and offices were painted. Cheap partition walls were torn down, replaced by a modern jungle of frosted glass and incomprehensibly modern art. A twelve-foot-high multicoloured picture of Magda by Andy Warhol was installed, looking down upon the entire office from behind her sunglasses.

The Post had boasted three staff members when Magda had arrived: Penny, the part-time reporter; Roger, the part-time photographer; and the full-time editor, Geoff. Geoff also performed every other possible function that the Post required, from doing the accounts to making sure the communal lavatory was stocked with toilet paper. To Geoff’s great surprise, Magda did not bring in a new team to run the Post. In fact, she kept the team exactly the same except for the addition of herself and her long-suffering personal assistant, Margo.

And so it was that life at the Post changed forever whilst remaining almost exactly the same. Magda rarely put in an appearance unless there was champagne being served, Margo dealt with the advertisers with a manic efficiency, and Geoff, Roger, and Penny continued as they always had, recording the day-to-day goings on in Neverbury and the surrounding district in painstakingly painful detail. All of which made it remarkable for Magda to make a house call on Roger, quite without warning, one Sunday afternoon.

Roger was the kind of man for whom the cardigan had been invented. A safe, unassuming man who lived alone in an innocuous two-up two-down terraced house on one of Neverbury’s less remarkable streets. Roger had never had a significant other in his life, pouring his time and energy into his various hobbies instead. Magda thought of him as a sort of genetic cul-de-sac, a configuration of DNA that the universe simply couldn’t be bothered to keep working on through any further versions. He was predictably hospitable however, a fact Magda appreciated as she lowered herself gracefully onto Roger’s sofa. It still had the plastic wrapping on it.

‘I didn’t expect to have visitors today,’ said Roger apologetically. ‘If I’d known you were coming, I’d have tidied up a bit and given the sofa a wipe-over.’

‘Quite all right, darling,’ replied Magda, flashing him a smile. She called everyone darling, even people she now suspected had some disgusting habit that necessitated keeping the sofa wrapped in plastic and giving it regular wipe-down.

Roger sat down opposite Magda, his plastic-wrapped armchair squeaking underneath him. He took the plainest possible biscuit from a plate of very plain biscuits he’d brought through from the kitchen and nibbled it with the furtiveness of a church mouse that had been caught reading pornography.

‘Tea?’ he asked, nodding at the teapot, cups, and saucers he had brought through.

‘I’m dieting,’ replied Magda. ‘No liquids before nightfall.’

‘Oh,’ replied Roger. ‘Is that safe?’

‘Not in the slightest.’

‘Oh.’

‘I suppose you’re wondering why I’m here, darling?’ said Magda, taking a mirror from her exquisite handbag and checking her profile in her reflection.

‘Well, yes,’ replied Roger sheepishly. ‘I hope I’m not in any trouble.’

Magda smiled, the dazzling smile that had opened doors and toppled governments on two continents. Roger smiled back, a thin smile that would have been lucky to punch its way through a soufflé.

‘I need to see the photographs from the village fete,’ said Magda. ‘Geoff said that there was something wrong with them and that Margo is worried. Margo is never worried.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Roger. He swallowed the last of his biscuit. ‘Yes, I’m afraid that there has been a bit of a problem.’

‘Can you show me?’ said Magda.

‘Yes, yes, I think that’s best,’ said Roger nervously. ‘Would you come with me to the darkroom?’

‘I thought you’d never ask, darling.’

Roger had converted his dining room into a darkroom many years ago, long before the advent of digital photography. He rarely had company, let alone enough company to warrant an entire room for dining. He lived primarily on things that came in tins and could be put on top of toast for solitary consumption in front of the television.

Trays of chemical fluids sat on a neatly organised bench underneath clothes lines for pegging up the drying photographs. Roger’s camera equipment was on a table on the other side of the room that backed into a set of floor-to-ceiling shelves that were stuffed with binders, folders, and box files. Every file was labelled with dates written in Roger’s spidery handwriting.

‘I still do things the old-fashioned way,’ explained Roger. ‘Geoff hates it, says it’s inconvenient for him to have to digitise everything but there’s something about modern cameras . . .’

‘They capture the image,’ said Magda, casually browsing the latest photographs that Roger had drying, ‘But they don’t capture the soul.’

‘Exactly!’ said Roger. He beamed at Magda, looking at her like a man who was seeing the sun for the first time. ‘That’s exactly it!’

‘Well, I suppose I’m somewhat of an expert,’ said Magda. ‘I’ve been selling my soul for years, darling. Now, show me what you captured at the village fete.’

Roger took a box from the shelves and opened it up, laying the photos out for Magda to see. They began predictably enough, shots of the village green decked out in its fete day finery, all taken in Roger’s prosaic but inoffensive style. Roger’s particular artistic style was such that he could have made the Mona Lisa look like a map of a supermarket car park.

‘So far, so good,’ said Roger, seemingly unaware of how offensively normal his pictures were to Magda. ‘Now . . . take a look at this.’

Roger placed a fresh photograph down. This one, thank God, thought Magda, had some life to it. Crossing the green, heading towards the fete, was a family of four: husband and wife, two young girls hand in hand. Magda leaned in for a closer look.

‘Do you see it?’ asked Roger fervently. ‘Do you see it?’

Magda continued to look at the picture and, as she did, the face of the husband began to change. It was a tiny change at first, a subtle shifting of the shadows that steadily grew until the man’s entire face had become a twisted, distorted mask of rage. Something black oozed from the corners of his snarling mouth as his eyes bulged forward out of his head. Behind her glasses, Magda blinked and the image returned to normal.

‘Show me the next one,’ she commanded.

Roger placed another photo down. Two elderly gentlemen stood eating hotdogs. Magda waited, staring at the photo until, quite suddenly, the chest of one of the old men opened up and a stream of moths flew out. The swarm flew frantically around for a few seconds, bouncing against the edges of the photograph unable to escape, before falling to the ground and turning to ash.

‘Another,’ said Magda.

Roger placed the next photo down with a trembling hand. He turned his face away as Magda looked at it. In this one, the village council were calling out the results of one of the various competitions that were the cornerstone of the village fete. Magda had been to real warzones but she had never seen brutality and inhumanity on the scale of the year she had offered to judge the ‘Best Cake (excluding Fruit Cakes)’ competition. Never again, she vowed.

As she watched, the village council members all turned their faces to look directly out of the photograph at Magda. As they did, their eyes turned into burning coals and their mouths elongated into giant, screaming voids. They raised their hands as one, fingers pointing directly out at Magda, before the entire photograph turned black. Magda looked away and when she looked back, the village council had returned to their normal duties.

‘How many more like this are there?’ asked Magda calmly.

‘Forty-nine,’ said Roger. ‘They’re all like it. I honestly don’t know how it happened.’

‘I see,’ said Magda. ‘And is there anything else you need to show me, darling?’

‘Ah,’ said Roger quietly. ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t ask about that.’

‘Show me.’

Roger took a different folder down from the shelves. This one didn’t have a label. He opened it carefully. The insides were lined with powder pink tissue paper, a single photograph resting on top.

‘I know . . . I know we’re not supposed to take photos of you,’ said Roger apologetically. ‘It really was an accident. When I realised what had happened, I couldn’t just get rid of it. I . . . well, let’s just say I was a big fan when I was younger. Still am, really.’

Magda suspected that Roger was blushing, but the red lights of the darkroom spared him any embarrassment. She, on the other hand, had a brief and terrifying vision of why Roger’s sofa might need to remain sheathed in plastic. She shook her head to clear the image and took the photo out of the box file.

It was a simple picture, Magda laughing and holding a glass of champagne in her hand, talking to Geoff and Penny. As she watched, her face in the image began to flicker, as if a TV channel was being changed, until there was nothing left but static. A creature of white noise, something that wasn’t there, held the glass of champagne for a moment, before collapsing into nothingness.

‘I see,’ said Magda. ‘Do you have any others?’

‘I’ve got a small collection upstairs; magazines, books, calendars, some DVDs, a few bits of vinyl from when you were recording. Oh, and I have got something quite special—did you know they made a doll of you in Japan? Very hard to get hold of, and expensive, but the girls from the toy place on the high street managed it. It really is quite something.’

‘Originals,’ sighed Magda. ‘Just originals.’

‘Oh, no, that’s my only original. I think it’s quite good actually. I really captured you.’

‘Yes, you did,’ said Magda sadly, looking at the photograph again. ‘But I’m afraid now you’re going to have to let me go, Roger.’

‘You used my name,’ said Roger, smiling. ‘You never use anyone’s name.’

‘Well, you’re very special,’ replied Magda. ‘You have a gift. You’ve got the eye, Roger.’

‘Thank you,’ said Roger, ‘Oh, thank you.’ The red light of the dark room illuminated the tears swelling in his eyes as he held his hands to his chest and Magda could almost hear his heart beating against his ribs.

‘What should I do?’ asked Roger meekly.

‘Burn them,’ replied Magda. She looked up at the neatly arranged shelves of files and folders, a row of tiny gravestones marking out the passage of time captured in Roger’s photographs. ‘Burn them all.’

‘All of them?’ gasped Roger. ‘But, you can’t mean . . . that’s . . . that’s my whole life! You said I had a gift . . .’

Magda turned to face Roger face-on. She towered over him, her natural height combined with a set of high heels that should have come with their own public liability insurance dwarfing him. She shook her hair and rolled her neck then reached up and took off her sunglasses. She fixed Roger in her gaze.

‘Oh . . .’ said Roger, bringing his hand up to his mouth. ‘My God.’

Magda slipped her sunglasses back on and patted Roger gently on the shoulder.

‘So, you understand, darling?’

‘Yes, Magda, I understand,’ replied Roger mutely. ‘These chemicals are actually very dangerous. I shouldn’t keep them in the house. A fire was inevitable, eventually.’

Outside, Margo waited by Magda’s car and breathed a sigh of relief as she finally left the decidedly average and innocuous two-up two-down terraced house in one of Neverbury’s least notable streets. Margo wasn’t worried about her employer being in any danger; she had safely shepherded Magda through warzones, military coups, and owning a flat south of the Thames, but Margo was worried that someone would see them here. The shame would be almost too much to bear.

‘Did you get it?’ Margo asked.

Magda took the picture of herself out of her coat pocket and gave it to Margo.

‘Put it in the vault, with the others.’

‘Will do, boss,’ replied Margo. ‘And what about the photographer?’

‘I’m taking the car,’ said Magda, opening the door of her deeply impractical but utterly fabulous sports car. ‘You stay here and make sure he doesn’t make it out.’

‘Will do, boss.’

Bring the Thunder

Dave brought the ambulance to a screeching stop, less than a yard from where the accident had taken place. Danielle had the doors open and her boots on the ground within seconds, covering the gap between them and the crowd quickly. She pushed her way through, swinging her heavy paramedic’s rucksack like a battering ram. If there was one thing that the people of Neverbury excelled at, it was bearing witness to misery.

‘Excuse me!’ she shouted. ‘Paramedics coming through!’

The crowd had surrounded a middle-aged man who lay on the ground, clutching his chest, barely conscious. His face was pale, his lips already starting to take on a blue tinge. His eyes bulged in his head as his body contorted in agony.

‘Does anyone know his name?’ asked Danielle, pulling on a pair of medical gloves.

‘It’s Tony,’ said someone from the crowd. ‘He runs the garage and second-hand car place.’

‘Tony?’ said Danielle loudly, trying to restrain the man as he writhed on the floor. ‘Tony, can you hear me?’

Dave arrived, positioning himself opposite Danielle.

‘Cardiac?’ he asked. Dave was a man of as few words as possible, zero wherever possible. That didn’t bother Danielle. She was a reader and she cherished the quiet times between calls when she could sit and read alongside Dave in the cab of the ambulance. She didn’t start a shift without a pile of old books wedged behind the passenger seat of the ambulance.

Danielle hadn’t wanted to be a paramedic but had discovered too late that a degree from a liberal arts college had precisely zero value outside of liberal arts colleges and had fallen into being a paramedic when she’d seen an advert in the Neverbury and District Post. Normally it took years to qualify but the Village Council had decided to fund their own ambulance crew and a twelve-week course was all she needed to take to qualify.

Danielle and Dave had been the only applicants and they’d been working in Neverbury ever since. Dave was, in many ways, Danielle’s ideal man—he was strong, dependable, and utterly silent unless spoken to, but Danielle didn’t have room in her life for a man. She had her books, she had her reading, and she had a regular date with her roleplaying group on Thursday nights. It was a packed schedule.

‘Cardiac?’ asked Dave again, slightly more urgently, which was agitated as he ever got.

‘Not sure, Dave,’ replied Danielle. ‘Give me a minute . . .’

A heart attack seemed obvious but this didn’t look like a heart attack to her. She looked up to the crowd again. ‘Does he have any medical conditions? Does anyone know? Has he eaten or drunk anything unusual today?’

Before anyone could answer, Tony vomited up a gout of blood and bile that splattered over the front of Danielle’s uniform.

‘Gross,’ muttered Dave, pulling on his own gloves and a protective face mask.

Tony reached up, grabbing hold of Danielle and pulling her towards him. With his mouth at her ear, he said something, something that nobody else heard but that made Danielle freeze. Suddenly, his grip on her weakened and he slumped down onto the ground.

‘Dave,’ said Danielle weakly. ‘Get the paddles.’

Danielle began CPR as Dave pushed his way back through the crowd to the ambulance. She took a deep breath, pushed a protective mouthguard into her mouth, and breathed air into Tony’s lungs. His chest rose and she began compressions again.

‘Dave!’ she shouted.

‘Here,’ replied Dave, crashing back through the crowd with the portable defibrillator slung over his shoulder. He crouched down again and switched on the device. It warmed up with a hum as Danielle pulled open Tony’s shirt. He was a rotund man with the kind of permanent tan that many salesmen seem to think is the key to success. Hanging down on his hairy chest was a silver medallion stylised to look like the wheel of a car. It seemed to have burnt itself into his skin and as Danielle lifted it off it took a layer of raw, red flesh with it. She lifted it on its chain over his head and shoved it in her pocket out of the way. Defibrillators and metallic jewellery were not a good mix.

‘Clear?’ said Dave, reading the paddles.

Danielle pulled back, giving Dave the space he needed.

‘Bring the thunder, Dave,’ she said. It was a stupid, unprofessional thing to say but it had become something of a ritual for them. Neverbury had a habit of throwing unusual things Dave and Danielle’s way. A little extra luck didn’t hurt.

Dave brought the paddles down on Tony. Tony’s body tensed, his back arching. And then he froze. In fact, everything froze. Tony, his back arched like an expert Yoga teacher. Dave with his paddles pressing down, fizzing with electricity. The crowd, their mouths open, fingers pointing, and no fewer than three of them filming on their mobile phones.

Only Danielle seemed able to move.

Danielle, that was, and the man with the thunderbolt in his hand.

Almost seven feet tall, muscular and bare-chested, the man had a thick head of red hair and a beard that moved in a breeze that didn’t seem to be troubling anything else nearby. A simple loincloth hung around his waist, sparing Danielle the sight of whatever was underneath. In one hand he held a thunderbolt that fizzed and crackled and seemed to struggle against his grasp. In his other hand, he held a spoked wheel that Danielle recognised as the same shape as the symbol on Tony’s necklace.

‘Zeus?’ gasped Danielle.

‘No,’ said the man. His voice was deep and, predictably, thunder rolled behind him when he spoke. It had been a sunny, cloudless day but now the sky behind this mysterious stranger rolled with brooding clouds.

‘Sorry, Thor,’ said Danielle.

‘No!’

‘Set? Shango? Mamaragan?’

‘No!’ thundered the stranger. ‘Also, you know a lot of gods.’

‘I’m a big reader,’ said Danielle. ‘And I’ve got a good memory. Basically, I’m dynamite in a pub quiz.’

The god looked down at Danielle, his brow furrowing, bright red eyebrows knotting together. Lightning crackled around his temples. ‘You are not perturbed by my presence? You do not tremble at the sight of the otherworldly? You are not awed by my godhood?’

‘This is Neverbury,’ replied Danielle. ‘You’re not my first otherworldly encounter.’

The god looked around. The clouds whipped from one side of the sky to the other as he did, always providing him with an appropriately atmospheric backdrop.

‘Ah,’ rumbled the god, looking around. ‘Neverbury. That does make sense.’

Danielle poked Dave in the face experimentally. His face was cold and hard, like marble. Danielle was about to try poking Dave in the eye but decided against it.

‘So, have you got a name?’ she asked.

‘I am Taranis!’ said the god, his voice booming even louder than it had before. Thunder rolled behind him and the clouds above him lit up with lightning that arced across the sky before grounding itself through the thunderbolt that Taranis held in his hand. ‘I am the God of Thunder and of the Wheel!’

‘Sweet,’ said Danielle, ignoring the light show. ‘And what are you doing here, exactly?’

Taranis rolled his eyes. ‘My disciple,’ he said glumly, the rumbling thunder draining from his voice. He pointed at the prone form of Tony on the floor. ‘I have come to usher him to the underworld.’

‘Ah,’ said Danielle, ‘I see.’

She took Tony’s medallion back out of her pocket and held it up for Taranis to see.

‘I suppose this is yours then?’ she asked.

‘It would appear to be yours now,’ replied Taranis. ‘Young Anthony had no wife or child. His place as my priest in these parts is now yours.’

Danielle tossed the medallion onto the floor as if she had just realised it was covered in spiders. She backed away from it until her back was pressed against the cold and hard flesh of the crowd of onlookers who stood frozen around her and Taranis.

‘Oh, no, no, thank you,’ she said hastily. ‘I’m not the priestly type.’

Taranis drove his thunderbolt into the ground, sparks flying from the tip as it burnt its way into the concrete. He closed the gap between him and Danielle in an instant and it occurred to her that, of course, he would be fast. Lightning fast. Standing over her, he placed his giant hand gently on her abdomen.

‘I’d say you are exactly the priestly type,’ he whispered, his voice sounding like rain.

‘That’s not your business,’ said Danielle indignantly, pulling away from his touch. ‘I’ve been working this patch for a couple of years and I’ve got one very important rule—don’t get sucked into the weird stuff. I patch people up, I move them on, and I never ask how whatever happened happened. You know what happens to people who get involved in other people’s business in Neverbury?’

‘I do not,’ replied the god.

‘They end up in the back of my ambulance,’ replied Danielle. ‘And, well . . . let’s just say Dave and I aren’t necessarily going to get through our next performance review without some awkward questions.’

Taranis looked down at Tony, disdain etched on his craggy face.

‘You would save this one?’ he asked.

Danielle looked at Tony. Middle-aged, overweight, perma-tanned Tony, fallen priest of a god she’d never heard of. What would Taranis ask of her in exchange for his life? What would she be prepared to do to save him? She knew the answer, and it scared her.

‘I’d like to save him,’ said Danielle, ‘It’s my job, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

‘Then save him,’ said Taranis. ‘You have everything that you need. Pay me no mind.’

Danielle crouched down over Tony. With him frozen, she was able to examine him more carefully. ‘This isn’t a heart attack,’ she said. ‘It’s more like . . . more like—’

Taranis gave a small cough that sounded like a peal of thunder and nudged his thunderbolt with a sandalled toe.

‘Like he’s being electrocuted.’

Taranis looked sideways at Danielle, a sly look in his eye.

‘Really?’ he said. ‘How strange.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I thought you wanted nothing to do with me.’

‘What did you do?’ asked Danielle again, more forcefully this time.

The god picked up his thunderbolt and twirled it around, leaving a catherine wheel of electrical sparks in the air.

‘You know, in times gone by, people would make offerings when they wanted something from a god. People sacrificed animals. Sometimes people sacrificed people. Now people call on their gods if they stub their toe or misplace their mobile phone. The atheists are the worst. Talk about crying wolf.’

‘He offended you; I get it,’ said Danielle. ‘But I don’t get to pick and choose who I save and I could really, really use your help.’

‘I’ve been helping you for years,’ said Taranis defensively. ‘You travel around in your tiny rolling hospital on wheels of my invention and when you want to breathe life into the dead, what do you call upon, hmm? Who do you call upon?’

Taranis looked pointedly at the defibrillator, the paddles still connected and charged in Dave’s hands.

‘Electricity,’ said Danielle quietly. ‘Huh . . . Bring the thunder.’

‘Bring the thunder,’ repeated Taranis. ‘I like that.’

‘So, will you help me?’ asked Danielle. ‘Help me save him?’

‘Of course. I shall begin by removing my curse from him.’

‘You cursed him?’

Taranis snapped his fingers over Tony’s body. An arc of electricity leapt from him into Taranis’s thunderbolt. Tony slumped to the ground, refreezing a split second later, his marble complexion returning.

‘Of course, I cursed him,’ said Taranis. ‘He betrayed me. For thirty years I had taken his offerings and aided him in any way I could. But he has become a lazy priest, my dear Danielle. Those dirty fire and forge gods have had it their way for too long. This was to be my millennium and what is he doing about it? Nothing!’

‘Fire and forge gods?’

‘Oh yes,’ grumbled Taranis, the storm clouds above him turning a deep and ominous purple. ‘Decade after decade of them and their cars. Mortals building roads this way and that, painting sigils across the landscape. Back in my day, you were lucky to get a naked man carved out of chalk on a hillside.’

‘And what did Tony do to earn your godly wrath, exactly?’

‘I wanted him to switch to selling electric cars. He refused.’

Danielle let out a sigh. As a paramedic, she was more than used to people bringing injury on themselves through their own stupidity, but it was normally sport or DIY or trying to make videos for social media. She’d seen her share of weird, working the Neverbury shift, but being cursed by a god because of a refusal to change sales strategy? That was new.

‘So, this curse,’ said Danielle, ‘What is it, exactly?’

‘Electrocution, obviously,’ replied Taranis. ‘But slow and steady. A thunderbolt is fun and all but mortals tend to burn very quickly. I’ve been cooking Tony for weeks, slowly upping the voltage . . .’

‘Until today?’

Taranis looked away. Could a god be embarrassed? Danielle wondered. Taranis certainly seemed to be finding it hard to meet her eye.

‘I got bored,’ the god replied. ‘Cooking isn’t as much fun as you mortals make it out to be. And his heart isn’t so strong. Too many business lunches. Too many . . . other things. Tony is a man with a remarkably large number of vices.’

Fine, thought Danielle, so it’s a lightning strike plus whatever days of steady electrocution does to you. She tried not to imagine Tony’s internal organs, cooked sous vide inside his body until they had ruptured and burst out of him to ruin her second favourite set of scrubs. No, whatever Taranis had done to Tony, that would be for the doctors to worry about. All she had to do was stabilise the patient, keep him alive, and get him to the hospital. And restart time. And deal with a petulant god. After that, he would just be another weird case coming in from Neverbury. What could go wrong?

‘So, what happens now?’ asked Danielle.

‘That is up to you,’ replied Taranis thoughtfully. ‘I require a new priest. If you wish for this mortal to live, then you will inherit that position from him and begin your worship of me. If you wish for him to die, then refuse my gifts and this man shall pass. You shall go free, without wrath or blessing from me.’

Danielle scowled. ‘That’s not fair,’ she argued. ‘I don’t want to choose who lives or dies.’

‘But you do,’ replied Taranis indignantly. He began to grow, his shadow falling over Danielle and her frozen crowd of onlookers. The clouds above him darkened and lightning arced between them. The sky became purple, flecked with orange, unseen fires illuminating the clouds from within. Sparks flew from Taranis’s thunderbolt and his wheel began to turn of its own accord as he spoke.

‘Humanity. Scrambling around, making a million decisions a day with barely any thought, all desperately trying to do so much with your small lives crammed into these tiny windows of time. Every decision you make creates a tsunami of consequences, impacting vast numbers of people, most of whom you will never meet and never know. You talk of butterflies flipping their wings, but humanity is more like a swarm of locusts, all flapping your wings at once, cancelling each other out and achieving nothing except to consume everything you can. And then, oh, how you cry out for your gods in your moments of need, having given us no thought until then.’

Danielle stood, arms folded, looking up defiantly into Taranis’s eyes.

‘Strong speech,’ she said sardonically.

‘You forget your place,’ rumbled Taranis. ‘This audience is over. My priest shall die and I shall leave you, godless and faithless in this place where to be so is to face certain death.’

Taranis turned and began to walk away, his footsteps taking him up into the air, his thunderbolt and wheel in hand. Around Danielle, the world slowly began to come back to life, the frozen statues thawing and beginning to move ever so slightly.

‘Not so fast, Sparky,’ replied Danielle.

The world froze again. Taranis stopped walking, a few feet off the ground, and turned. He raised his thunderbolt above his head. ‘To kill another mortal today would mean nothing to me,’ he grumbled. ‘If that is what you wish of me.’

‘Actually,’ said Danielle. ‘I feel I may have been a bit hasty. I would ask for an audience with my god, Taranis. There is something I would say.’

Taranis smiled and floated gently back down to the ground, sparks coming off his feet as he landed. Behind him, the clouds parted and the sun shone through, the fresh clean sunlight that illuminates the world after a storm.

‘Speak, child,’ he said.

‘Taranis,’ said Danielle, spreading her arms wide as she dropped to one knee. ‘Forgotten god of the thunder and the wheel. Fierce and powerful in the passing of his judgements, gentle and giving of his fertile rains.’

Taranis nodded sagely. Danielle smiled. What god did not like to be praised by a mere mortal?

‘Once worshipped far and wide, now known only to scholars and academics, yet poised to once more become one of the great powers, his thunder and his wheel united in mankind’s achievements.’

It was Taranis’ turn to smile now.

‘Truly, you are a worthy priest,’ he said.

‘Theologian,’ corrected Danielle. ‘That’s actually what I studied to be, in college. Turns out there isn’t much call for it.’

Taranis beamed. ‘And yet, it brought you here to me,’ he said. ‘Truly, we gods are wise.’

‘Well, mine is,’ said Danielle.

Taranis nodded but then, like a passing cloud, his smile faded.

‘You have a god?’ he said, the words choking slightly in his throat.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Danielle. ‘I have had for many years. Rather well-known, in a sense, although most people think it’s just a story. Funny, by letting people think they are made up, my god has really become quite popular. Books, films, t-shirts. Even stuffed toys.’

Danielle looked up from her crouch, her eyes meeting Taranis.

‘You petty gods, dreamt up by mortal men, who walk this plane thinking it your own,’ she said. Her voice had changed, grown deeper and older. It came from her and from around her, from the sky, and from the depths of the ground.

‘Why do you think you are drawn here to this place?’ the voice asked. ‘Why do you think this place has kept so firmly to the old ways?’

Taranis turned and tried to step up into the sky but, where once the air had supported his steps, now his feet passed through it and he stumbled forward. He fell to the ground, shrinking to the size of a normal man. His wheel rolled away and his thunderbolt tumbled from his hand, lying sparking on the floor.

Above him, his clouds had vanished and the sky had grown black. Stars unlike any stars that had ever been in the sky before burned above him, old stars, stars from a place far away from Neverbury and far away from Earth. Slowly, the stars parted and in their place was a darkness far greater and far larger than the sky itself should have been able to hold. Tentacles of the nightmare sky unfurled down towards the ground, coiling themselves around Taranis and lifting him up from the ground.

Danielle looked up at him, his eyes wide and a manic smile across her face.

‘We draw you here to feed upon you,’ said the voice that was not hers. ‘We drink the dreams of mortal men.’

Taranis screamed as he was drawn up into the sky.

A Design for Living

Rachel shuffled into the kitchen, half asleep and half-dressed, groping for the kettle to make her first coffee of the day. Pandora looked up from her phone. Unlike Rachel, she was the very picture of early morning vibrancy and ready-for-the-day-ness. But then, Pan always looked perfect in Rachel’s eyes.

‘Here,’ said Pan, handing over a freshly made cup of something steaming and slightly off-green in colour. ‘Tea. It’ll do you more good than the awful coffee you’re about to make.’

‘I don’t make awful coffee.’

‘You’re right, nobody could intentionally make coffee as awful as your coffee. Coffee just becomes that awful in your presence. It’s like a superpower.’

Rachel sipped the strange brew. It smelt of the woods and possibly of the things that bears famously did there. She gulped it down, hoping it might sneak past her tastebuds undetected.

‘Another rough night?’ asked Pan.

‘Yeah. Same weird dreams again. Did I keep you up?’ asked Rachel, wincing.

‘Only the first two hours. Then I popped an X-13 and it was dreamland all the way. I don’t know why you won’t try one.’

‘You remember what happened last time I tried one of your pills? No, thanks; I’ll stick to the tea,’ said Rachel, failing to stifle a yawn. ‘You can’t fix everything with chemicals.’

‘Everything is chemicals,’ replied Pandora. ‘And I don’t see the point of being engaged to a professor of pharmacology if you’re not going to take advantage of a little recreational experimentation. For the good of science.’

‘I prefer our other experiments,’ said Rachel coyly ‘And the other type of chemistry.’ She put down her tea and slipped her arms around Pan, nuzzling into the nape of her neck.

‘You smell, babe,’ said Pan. ‘Did you take a shower?’

‘I thought I did,’ replied Rachel self-consciously. She lifted her t-shirt to her nose and sniffed herself. ‘Maybe?’

‘Rach’, you need to get it together,’ said Pan, sliding past her and out of the kitchen. ‘Haven’t you got that big presentation today?’

‘That’s next week, the fifteenth.’

‘Today is the fifteenth.’

‘What?’

‘Seriously, Rachel, it’s the fifteenth.’

‘Oh,’ replied Rachel. ‘Well, that’s just fucking great.’

Pandora found Rachel, face down with her head resting on her arms on the dining table when she got home that evening.

‘Are you asleep?’ Pan whispered, creeping into the room.

‘No.’

‘Are you dead?’

‘Sadly not.’

Pan dumped her satchel on the floor and kicked off her shoes. She stroked Rachel’s hair gently, twisting her fingers through it.

‘So, it didn’t go well, I’m guessing?’

‘It was a disaster.’

‘I’m sorry, babe.’

‘It’s these bloody dreams!’ said Rachel angrily, banging a fist down on the table. ‘It’s been every night for months!’

‘Are they still the same?’

Rachel let out a noise like an animal dying, a defeated half-wheeze, half-bellow.

‘I’ll take that as a yes.’

‘Yes, Pan, they’re always the same!’ snapped Rachel. She pulled away, yanking Pandora’s hand out of her hair. ‘The same dream, every night, ever since you made me take that bloody pill!’

Pandora backed away, her face angry.

‘Hang on,’ she said defensively. ‘You know there’s no way any of that is still in your system, right? Jesus, Rach’, what do you think I am? And P-23 is on the market in the US. It’s passed all the trials.’

‘In the US. Not here,’ said Rachel.

‘That’s politics, not science. Pharmaceuticals don’t work differently just because you cross some invisible line a man drew on a map.’

Pandora stood with her hands on her hips, her eyes boring into Rachel.

‘And if you think, even for a moment, that I’d ever give you anything that I wasn’t one-hundred percent sure was safe, then what the hell are you doing being here with me?’

She waited for an answer. Rachel knew that Pandora was good at waiting. She was never the one who blinked, never the one who wavered. Rachel loved that about her, most of the time.

‘I can’t do this right now,’ said Rachel meekly. ‘I’ve got two days to sort out this account or Max said he’d have to give it to Ben. If that happens, I’m basically done.’

‘I can speak to Max,’ said Pandora. ‘Explain what’s been happening . . .’

‘I hate that you know my boss.’

‘I don’t “know him” know him,’ said Pandora, fishing her mobile phone out of her suit jacket pocket. ‘He was on the advisory panel when we had the investment from the Americans, that’s all.’

‘Yeah, well,’ said Rachel sullenly. ‘It’s still weird.’

‘I’m just trying to help,’ said Pandora, tentatively reaching out and placing her hand on Rachel’s shoulder. ‘Just tell me how I can help.’

Rachel pulled away again and stomped around the other side of the dining table and out of the room.

‘I just need to work,’ she said, slamming the door behind her.

It was over a day before Rachel properly surfaced. Pandora had done her best to carry on as normal in the meantime, even as a parallel universe manifested itself in the spare room that she and Rachel shared as an office. She left tea, the normal kind, outside the door every hour or so and made herself scarce whenever Rachel came out foraging for food. Her hair in a messy pile, her makeup smudged into dark rings around her eyes, her clothes dishevelled, Rachel looked like she had been in the office for weeks. Pandora had seen Rachel like this before, just once. She knew from that experience to keep her distance.

She was in the kitchen, trying to do something creative with an omelette, when a version of Rachel that was more recognisably Rachel appeared.

‘I think I’ve broken the back of it,’ she said quietly, her attention on a part of the kitchen floor that she was pretending to find deeply fascinating.

Pandora lifted her omelette off the stove and slid it out onto a plate.

‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘Do you think you’ll have something you can take into work?’

‘Why don’t you come and see?’ asked Rachel.

Pandora turned, plate in hand, and smiled. It wasn’t her best smile but, in the circumstances, it was a solid eight out of ten and, this being Pandora, would likely still have seen her scrape through to the finals of the World Smiling Championships to eventually win bronze.

‘Are you sure?’ she asked. ‘You don’t normally ask me to.’

‘Come on,’ said Rachel, reaching out her hand for Pandora. ‘I want to show you.’

Pandora put her food to one side, took Rachel’s hand, and followed her through the hallway, up the stairs and into their small shared office. The floor and walls were covered with pages torn from notebooks, sketches, printouts and architectural diagrams, all of which looked like the same building.

‘Oh Jesus, Rach’‘ said Pandora softly. ‘What did you do?’

Rachel snatched one of the pictures up from the floor, a pencil sketch of the frontage of a rambling old house, perched on the edge of a clifftop. The angles of the house were strange and awkward, as if some parts of it were being viewed through a kaleidoscope.

‘I had to get it out of my head,’ said Rachel, her voice high and manic. ‘I’ll be able to sleep now and once I get some sleep, I can get on with the hotel designs.’

‘Rachel, you’re not working on a hotel. You told me the designs were for a shopping complex?’

Pandora wrapped her arm around Rachel and tried to move her out of the room, but she wouldn’t budge. She grabbed more pictures from the wall and held them up for Pandora to see.

‘That comes later,’ she said, as if this were the most obvious statement ever made. ‘The hotel designs are for the house. The house from my dreams.’

‘Oh God, Rachel,’ said Pandora. ‘This is too much.’

‘It’s fine!’ replied Rachel, a smile manic enough to match her voice spreading across her face. ‘I just need to sleep now.’

‘Sleep?’

‘Yes, I’ve nearly got it all out; I just need a few details. I’ll dream them if I sleep.’

Pandora took a deep breath, looking deep into Rachel’s eyes, hoping to see her fiancé hiding in there somewhere, buried under the sleep-deprived mania of this strange Anti-Rachel.

‘All right,’ she said, trying again to move Rachel towards the door and out of the office. ‘Sleep it is. Let’s get you into the bedroom.’

‘Oh no,’ replied Rachel, slipping out of Pandora’s grasp. ‘I’ll sleep here. I’ll be ready then, for when the dreams come.’

Without another word, Rachel got down on the floor and curled up into a ball amongst the piles of paper, her drawings and diagrams, and her wild imaginings. She held up a finger to her lips in a child-like request for quiet, then lay down her head and closed her eyes. Pandora found herself, without understanding why, creeping out of the room, turning off the lights and slowly closing the door, a sheaf of drawings still in her hand.

‘Rachel? Rach’, wake up.’

Rachel opened her eyes slowly. The lights in the office were back on and the harsh artificial light was too bright for her. She looked sourly at Pandora, who was crouching over her.

‘I didn’t have a dream yet,’ she grumbled. ‘Why did you wake me up.’

‘I found it!’ said Pandora victoriously. ‘I found your house. Come with me.’

Pandora led Rachel down to the dining room where Pandora’s laptop was sitting open on the table. There, on the screen, was a picture of a house with a startling resemblance to Rachel’s sketches.

‘Falling House,’ said Pandora proudly. ‘It’s a real place. Some town called Neverbury over on the east coast. It’s abandoned now, sitting up on the cliff top just like in your drawing.’

Rachel stared at the laptop, bringing her face close to it to inspect every pixel of the image of Falling House. She stroked the screen gently, as if the image were a soft and newborn thing that she had been chosen to care for.

‘How did you find it?’ she asked, her voice little more than a whisper.

‘Image search,’ explained Pandora. ‘You always were such a good sketch artist. I took some pictures of your sketches and used them to run a search online. A few false starts but I got this hit eventually.’

‘It’s . . . amazing,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s . . . just like in my dream.’

‘You must have seen it somewhere,’ said Pandora. ‘And it just got stuck in your head. Like an earworm.’

‘A what?’

‘You know, when you hear a piece of music and you can’t get it out of your head.’

‘Oh, my God.’

‘You remember where you saw it?’ asked Pandora enthusiastically.

‘No,’ said Rachel reverently. ‘It’s for sale. My house is for sale.’

‘Yeah, about that,’ said Pandora.

Rachel turned around to look at Pandora and found that she was smiling, a proper Pandora smile this time, guaranteed gold in the Smile Olympics no matter the decade.

‘What?’

Pandora held up her car keys and jingled them in the air.

‘Don’t be mad but . . . I called Max. Said you needed some extra time for some research, that it would all be totally worth it and, well . . . I booked us a viewing.’

‘What?’

‘We actually need to get going; it’s a four-hour drive if we’re lucky. Apparently, there’s some old fella still working as the caretaker. He’s going to meet us there to let us in.’

‘Oh my God, Pan, I can’t believe it!’ gasped Rachel.

‘You’re not mad?’

Rachel threw her arms around Pandora and held her tightly.

‘Take me there,’ she whispered in Pandora’s ear. ‘I want to see it.’

The drive took a little over five hours in the end and the sun was setting as Pandora’s impractically large four-by-four wound its way through the narrow streets of Neverbury. The clouds were heavy overhead, the sky a purple bruise beyond a menacing weather front that was rolling in from the sea.

‘Look at this place,’ said Pandora, easing her car through a tight corner. ‘It’s like a time warp. Do you think they have electricity here?’

‘I love it,’ said Rachel, her hands against the glass of her window. ‘Not everything has to be modern, Pan. We don’t build things the way we used to. Places like this . . . they don’t exist.’

Pandora raised an eyebrow. ‘I cannot believe you just said that. Aren’t you the queen of modernity?’

‘Maybe not for much longer?’

Pandora turned the car through a gap in a low stone wall and dropped the engine down a gear as they climbed up a steep, winding driveway. Overgrown bushes flanked them, thick and thorny branches scratching against either side of the vehicle. Above them, the top-floor windows of Falling House looked down at them disapprovingly. The skies opened right on cue, the dark clouds letting down heavy sheets of rain.

‘There it is!’ said Rachel excitedly, pointing up through the rain.

Pandora swung the car into the gravel driveway, the tyres crunching as she brought the car to a stop. The caretaker was waiting outside the house, sheltering underneath an old umbrella. He wore thick glasses, a threadbare woollen cardigan, and dark brown corduroy trousers.

‘Ladies, we have arrived in the 1950s,’ quipped Pandora. ‘Please place your tray tables in an upright position.’

‘Don’t be like that, Pan’,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s kind of him to come out. He might be our new neighbour.’

‘We’re not—’ started Pandora, but Rachel was already out of the car and dashing through the rain towards the caretaker. ‘We’re not buying it. Ah, damn it.’

By the time Pandora had got out of the car, locked it, and run around to the front door of the house, Rachel and the caretaker were already inside. The old man was just about to close the door.

‘Excuse me?’ said Pandora incredulously. ‘There are two of us.’

The caretaker looked at her, his eyes huge behind his thick glasses. His eyes were almost entirely taken over by milky cataracts and Pandora was surprised he could see anything at all.

‘Ah,’ he croaked. ‘That won’t be possible, I’m afraid. The floors are weak inside and we can only allow so many people at a time.’

‘You’re joking, seriously?’

Rachel looked at Pandora apologetically. ‘I’m sorry, Pan’. You can come in next, okay? Have a look around for yourself and then we can compare notes.’

The caretaker shrugged and closed the door. Pandora was sure she heard a heavy bolt being thrown on the other side.

‘Unbelievable,’ she muttered to herself. She reached into her jacket and took out her phone, determined to call the estate agent and give them a piece of her mind.

‘Typical. No bloody signal.’

Inside, Rachel walked in silent reverence with the caretaker. She looked around, her eyes wide, taking in every detail and realising that she’d seen every inch of the place before. No detail had escaped her night-time voyages around the house and everything was just as it was supposed to be.

Dust fell gently from the ceilings in every room, as if the place were in an accelerating state of decay and might collapse at any moment. The floorboards were bare and missing in places, dark voids leading down into goodness-knew-where. The furniture was old and broken and musty, mould creeping over the fabric and anything else that could retain the slightest moisture.

‘The old place needs work,’ said the caretaker. ‘But she’s solid where it counts.’

‘It would make such a wonderful hotel,’ said Rachel, catching a sideways look from the caretaker. ‘If that’s permissible. We’d have to get a licence, maybe apply for a change of use . . .’

‘That’s not up to me,’ said the caretaker grumpily. ‘That would be up to the house.’

‘The house?’

‘The house,’ replied the caretaker firmly. ‘Old places like this, they have minds of their own. Personalities. You have to listen to what the house wants. You do that, everything’s going to go just fine.’

‘And if I don’t?’

The caretaker chuckled darkly. ‘Well, maybe you end up like me,’ he replied. ‘Stuck here until the end of days.’

‘That doesn’t sound so bad,’ said Rachel. ‘Neverbury seems like a lovely place to live out your days.’

The caretaker didn’t answer, although something in his demeanour made Rachel think that he wanted to correct her about something. They’d been wandering from room to room without any clear plan but now they entered what must have once been the dining room. The ceiling was higher here, vaulted with elaborate frescos that were slowly disintegrating. A fire had been lit, filling the hearth with light and warmth and casting strange shadows up the walls. There were other people here and Rachel was so surprised to see them, she gasped as she entered the room.

‘Sorry,’ said the caretaker curtly. ‘I should have let you know there were some other . . . interested parties here.’

Rachel eyed up the competition. One man in a hard hat and overalls, clearly a builder of some description. Another dressed strangely, in a light blue safari suit with a wide collar and a flared shirt underneath. The last, a woman, was dressed more formally in some sort of dark uniform that Rachel didn’t recognise.

‘Everyone,’ said the caretaker, ‘This is Miss Rachel White.’

Safari Suit Man sauntered over, extending his hand and offering a salacious smile. ‘And just what is it that you do?’ he asked in a strong French accent.

‘Oh, er, I’m an architect,’ answered Rachel. ‘Hotels and resorts mostly. Some retail.’

The others looked at each other and Rachel was sure there was some sort of silent communication going on between them.

‘Sorry, do you all know each other?’ she asked.

The builder approached next, smiling broadly.

‘I’m John,’ he said. ‘As you might be able to guess, I’m a builder.’

‘Forgive me,’ said Safari Suit. ‘My name is Anton. I am a chef in the finest French tradition.’

‘Except that he’s from Bolton,’ said John with a wink. ‘And the accent is a fake!’

‘Bastard!’ hissed Anton, skulking away to look into the fire.

‘And you?’ asked Rachel, peering over at the formally dressed woman.

‘I’m the Manager,’ she replied. As she stood up, Rachel recognised the uniform. She’d seen that in her dreams as well, the staff uniform of a hotel.

‘The manager?’ asked Rachel. ‘I’m sorry, is the hotel still open in some way?’

‘Only for very special clientele, for the time being,’ answered the manager. ‘But we are hoping to have a major refit soon and reopen to the public.’

The caretaker shuffled over and handed Rachel a length of rope, looped over several times and with a noose tied at one end. ‘The strongest beams are in the hallway, where you came in,’ he whispered before shuffling off again.

‘We have our builder to help with renovations,’ continued the manager, ‘And we have the most wonderful chef in young Anthony—’

‘Anton!’

‘Young Anthony.’ said the manager, unperturbed by the interruption. ‘What we need now is someone to help us modernise.’

‘What’s this for?’ asked Rachel, holding up the rope. ‘Is this a prop or something? Did you want to run murder mystery nights—is that it?’

‘Something like that,’ said the manager. ‘Although I think ghost tours might prove more lucrative.’

‘Look,’ said Rachel, backing away towards the door she had come in through, dropping the rope on the floor on her way. ‘I don’t know what all this is but if you’re looking for someone to help you with a redesign then maybe you can call my office? I’ll leave a card with the caretaker on my way out and—’

The floorboards immediately beneath Rachel suddenly let out a loud creak and snapped without warning. In a cloud of dust and splinters, Rachel disappeared down into the gloom, her head snapping hard against the floor on her way down.

The caretaker, the manager, the builder, and the chef all looked down into the hole.

‘Wow,’ said John the builder. ‘The house must really have been keen on her.’

‘She wants what she wants, don’t you, old girl?’ said the caretaker, patting the timber frame of the door gently.

Behind them, Rachel dusted herself off and stood on tip-toes to look down into the darkness.

‘What are we looking at?’ she asked.

‘We’re looking at a lot of hard work,’ said the manager, putting herself between the fresh apparition of Rachel and the spot where Rachel’s own body was still twitching and cooling somewhere down past the broken floorboards, in the dark bowels of Falling House.

‘I’ve never been afraid of hard work,’ said Rachel eagerly.

‘Have you ever renovated an old hotel like this before?’ asked the manager.

‘No,’ replied Rachel. ‘I’ve mostly worked on new builds but something like this? Well, it’s always been my dream project.’

Sell Now, Pay Later

‘You are not going out looking like that!’ bellowed Rob, blocking the hallway of the house.

Rob was a short, stocky man, the kind of man who had long ago done away with things like a neck, ankles, or wrists and morphed instead into a sort of fat, humanoid sausage shape. Rob’s stepson, James, thought that Rob looked like he was made of playdough.

James took after his father, so he was tall, and thin, and bony looking. His hair was dyed black and spiked up, his eyes edged with copious but inexpertly applied eyeliner. He wore a long black leather coat, a gift from his mother against his stepfather’s wishes, over a black t-shirt celebrating a band that Rob had never heard of and a pair of ripped black jeans. His boots, another gift from his mother, were black leather with metal plates over the toes. These had also been procured against his stepfather’s wishes.

James pursed his lips, which were also painted black.

‘I can wear what I like,’ he said. ‘Mum said so.’

‘Listen to your father,’ James’s mother called from the living room. ‘And keep it down. I’m on a video conference with work.’

‘He’s not my dad!’ shouted James as Rob pointedly closed the door to the living room, trapping the two of them in the hallway. James crossed his arms and pouted. With the exception of his own room, in which he had achieved a level of tolerable independence, he hated this house. He hated the twee choice in furnishings; he hated the signs and posters that advised him to do things like ‘Love Home’ or ‘Live Life’. He hated that Rob’s hobbies and achievements were everywhere he looked. He hated Rob’s mountain bike and his golf clubs that clogged the hallway and he hated his various trophies and shields and awards that choked the living room. He hated the way the whole house screamed out the family’s saccharin-sweet happiness, their total achievement of the suburban dream. And most of all, he hated that his mother was complicit in it, a willing collaborator in piling them all on an altar to be sacrificed to the great gods of IKEA, Homes and Gardens, Country Living, and the Neverbury Garden Centre and Nursery.

Rob squared up to James, his piggy eyes full of spite.

‘You’re right, I’m not,’ he spat. ‘I’m just the bloke that pays all the bills, that feeds you and clothes you, that—’

‘Mum earns more than you,’ said James flatly. ‘It’s not the 1970s.’

‘That’s not the point,’ said Rob angrily. ‘I’m up for Captain of the golf club this year and that’s going to open doors for me. It’ll put us on the map. But nobody on that committee is going to trust someone with a kid who creeps around town looking like Ozzy Osbourne’s undertaker!’

‘I don’t care what people think,’ replied James languidly. ‘People in this town are idiots.’

‘Yeah, well, you’ve got that right,’ said Rob. He seemed to calm down slightly, finding common ground with James in hating other people as much as they hated each other. ‘People in this town are idiots, short-sighted idiots. You can blame your mother for that as well though. She was the one who wanted to move down here.’

James sat down halfway up the stairs, drawing his knees up to his chin. To Rob, he looked like some giant leather crow, nesting in his hallway. ‘She wanted a fresh start,’ said James sullenly. ‘We needed it, after what happened.’

‘Listen, James,’ said Rob in his best I-am-being-reasonable voice. ‘You—’

‘I’m not called James anymore,’ interrupted James. ‘I’ve decided to change my name.’

Rob covered his face with his hands and took a deep breath.

‘God above,’ he whispered. ‘What is it?’

‘Nightshade Blackheart,’ said James flatly. ‘I really feel it—’

‘Nightshade Blackheart?’ roared Rob. ‘What kind of bloody name is that?’

‘I chose it.’

‘Oh, that is just bloody perfect, that is!’ hissed Rob. He had begun to turn a shade of puce that James knew well. Most conversations with his stepfather ended in Rob turning a strange colour. It was a sort of biological reaction, like a chameleon changing colour or a squid ejecting ink. It normally signalled to James, also known as Nightshade Blackheart, that it was time for his mother to intervene and save his skin. Sadly, she remained in thrall to the many-faced deity that was the work video conference and so had no idea that Rob was sending up a distress flare.

‘I can just see it now,’ continued Rob, jabbing a finger at James. ‘Your mother standing in the shop asking me why I don’t stock a novelty mug with your name on it!’

‘Do I really look like a person who wants a novelty mug?’ asked James sarcastically.

Rob paced back and forth in the hallway, rubbing his forehead. James suspected that this human frankfurter of a man found it genuinely difficult to imagine another human being who didn’t want to purchase a novelty mug with their name on it. Rob had owned a seaside gift shop when he’d met James’ mother, the type of place where copyright law didn’t exist and health and safety was something that people had heard of but didn’t think would catch on. It was a shrine to everything disposable, cheap, gaudy, and temporary. When the family moved to Neverbury, Rob had seen it as an opportunity to move up in the world. Now he sold scented candles, dreamcatchers, cushions with caricatures of dogs on them, and little books that promised calm, zen, or inner peace. Bit by bit though, Rob’s inner awfulness had polluted the place. First, it was greetings cards with disgustingly rude slogans that Rob referred to as ‘cheeky.’ Then it was the novelty key rings, mugs, and hats. Every Saturday, James worked at the shop and lived teetering on the brink of seeing a box of fake breasts or novelty inflatable sheep being delivered. He had vowed to burn the place to the ground the day that happened.

‘Look, you’re not going out like that and that’s final,’ said Rob, resolving his inner turmoil by deciding he had been right in the first place. ‘Go upstairs, take off the makeup, flatten your hair, and get changed into something normal.’

‘I’ve got friends waiting for me.’

‘Text them.’

‘They expecting me!’

‘Your fancy college mates will be fine without you. I’m sure they’ll find the graveyard or the mortuary or wherever you were going to haunt tonight on their own.’

‘This isn’t fair!’

‘Get upstairs!’

‘No,’ replied James.

‘James!’

‘It’s Nightshade!’

Rob thumped the wall with the side of his fist and James recoiled further up the stairs.

‘Mum’s just there,’ stammered James, pointing at the door to the living room. ‘You won’t do it with her here. You won’t.’

Rob advanced, all sweaty scarlet quivering flesh and impotent anger. He showed James his balled-up fist of crude, sausage-like fingers.

‘I do what I like,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Maybe I should tell your mother I need a bit of help down at the shop, eh? I’m sure there’s something that needs moving in the stock room.’

‘Leave me alone,’ said James, without an ounce of the strength he wished for in his voice. ‘I’ll tell. I’ll tell Mum.’

‘No, you won’t. Not after your last stepfather. I know all about it. She told me. You really want to tell your mother she picked another wrong-un? Maybe she’ll start to wonder: Is it her? Is it you?’

James hopped up the last few stairs to the landing, trying to get himself above Rob and out of reach.

‘Yeah,’ Rob carried on. ‘Maybe it’s you. Maybe . . . it’s always been you.’

James scrambled around and ran to his room, tripping as he went. Tears were rolling down his face and the last thing he wanted was for to Rob to see his makeup running.

‘That’s it, off to bed!’ called Rob mockingly from the bottom of the stairs. ‘Nighty-night, Nightshade!’

James slammed his bedroom door and collapsed face-first onto his bed. This room was his only sanctuary, the one place he was really allowed to be himself. His posters on the wall, his music playing. His books, his clothes, his things. It measured only slightly larger than a prison cell, a fact he’d once used to make his mother cry and his stepfather turn the colour of an under ripe aubergine.

Like a prisoner, James had to hide things and he’d got pretty good at it. He knew Rob came into his room sometimes, sniffing around, looking for drugs or porn or God knows what, looking for anything that he could have used against James in yet another confrontation. The whole house was a battlefield and this room was the only territory that James had left.

Under the bed, he’d constructed an ingenious hiding place, a cardboard box to which he had glued the outsides of old board games. From the side, it looked just like a pile of board games that James had forgotten about but was too childish or sentimental to throw away. Inside, however, was where he kept his most treasured possessions.

James got off the bed, dabbed his eyes, and checked his makeup in the mirror by his bed. He’d asked for a dressing table, but Rob had put his foot down on that one and James’ mum had, for once, given way. There probably wasn’t space for it anyway. James made sure his door was closed and then pushed his chair against it before getting down on the floor and reaching under the bed to pull out his specially disguised box.

He opened it reverently, removing the fake Monopoly box top to reveal the contents inside. Packed in bubble wrap were some candles, a bell, a large block of chalk, and a book. With the exception of the book, all of it had been liberated from Rob’s shop. The book, however, had come into James’ possession entirely by accident. Neverbury’s postal service was reliable only in its consistent unreliability, a fact that Rob would complain about at length as the primary reason his online sales were terrible. When the parcel had come through the door with the wrong name and address on it nobody had been in the least bit surprised, and James had been tasked with walking the parcel back to the Post Office on his way to catch the bus to college. It was a chance tear in the packing that had caught his eye, an exposed corner of gilt-edged black leather binding that called to him. Sitting at the bus stop, James had offered a whispered apology to ‘Danielle Preston,’ whoever she was, and ripped open the parcel.

He hadn’t made it to college that day. Or the day after that.

James lifted the book from the box and opened it reverently. For some reason, it always felt warm, like a seat that someone else had been sitting in. The pages were stiff and crackled as he turned them. He didn’t know what they were made from, but it didn’t feel like paper. James carefully worked his way through the book, past the pages of spidery hand-written text, past the diagrams and illustrations, past pages that seemed to show something different every time he read them. Finally, he found the page he was looking for. It was a simple diagram and the instructions were simple enough that James had been able to translate the Latin on the internet.

James rolled back the rug that covered most of his floor and, taking the wedge of chalk in hand, began to draw out the diagram on the floor. Through the floor, he could hear Rob thumping about in the kitchen, the only man in the world who could make a cup of coffee self-righteously, while his mum laughed and joked on her conference call. Rob would take her a coffee in a minute, rolling his eyes and looking up at the ceiling in silent admonishment of James. Mum would shake her head and mouth something like ‘leave him be’ or ‘he’ll come around.’ She lived in ignorance of what Rob was really like, even though to James every ounce of his thuggish, piggish nature oozed from every greasy pore of his sweaty face.

James stood up, dusting the chalk from his hands. He checked the shape on the floor against the shape in the book. It looked correct. More than correct, it looked . . . right. James smiled as he started to arrange the candles on the floor, lighting them one by one with a lighter that neither Rob nor his mother knew he had. Finally, after one more check that the door was securely wedged shut, James knelt down in the middle of the symbol he had marked out on the floor and rang his bell.

Nothing happened.

James frowned and rang the bell again.

Downstairs, mum stopped talking, and stopped laughing. Could she hear him upstairs? James pictured Rob, thundering up the stairs on his fat legs, thumping on the door and asking him what was going on in there. The candles were starting to make his head spin and he wondered if using stolen scented candles from his stepfather’s shop was part of the problem. James didn’t know the Latin for Patchouli and Vanilla, but he had the sinking feeling that if the ritual required either of those things then it would have been in the instructions.

James swallowed and picked up the bell again.

Idiot, he thought to himself. Of course, it’s not real. It’s probably merchandise for a movie, a replica prop, or something. You can wear all the black you want, but you can’t just summon up the powers of darkness with some chalk, candles, and a bell.

And that’s when the ringing started.

James turned around. His mobile phone was on his bed, lit up and playing a ringtone he’d never heard before. It sounded like church bells being smashed apart with hammers. James scrambled up from the floor and grabbed his phone.

The caller ID said ‘UNKNOWN CALLER.’

James tapped the green ‘Pick Up’ icon.

‘Hello?’

‘Thank you for calling the powers of darkness; please hold while we direct your call.’

James hung up and tossed the phone across the room. It bounced off the wall and lay, face down, on the floor. James could feel his heart pounding in his chest, the acid taste of vomit rising up inside him.

‘Not a prop . . .’ he whispered to himself, carefully closing the book. He got down on all fours and started to wipe the symbols off the floor, spreading the chalk around as much as he could.

His phone rang again. James ignored it, blowing out the candles and smearing away more of the symbol. The phone kept ringing and vibrating, creeping across the floor like some horrible limbless insect. It juddered and jittered its way towards James, ringing and ringing, begging to be answered.

James snatched the phone up. There was no red icon to hang up as there normally would have been, just the green icon to take the call.

‘What the hell?’ breathed James.

The call connected.

‘Thank you for calling the powers of darkness; please hold while we direct your call.’

James put the phone into speakerphone mode and placed it on the bed, backing away from it as if it might leap up and bite him at any moment. The voice on the other end, a bored and languid voice that felt somehow familiar to James, kept talking: ‘For sales, please press 6. For customer services, please press 6. For all other enquiries, please press 6.’

The keypad appeared on James’s phone screen. Every number was a 6.

James took a deep breath and, reaching over with a trembling hand, pressed 6.

‘Sales,’ said the voice on the phone. ‘Can I confirm your name, please?’

‘Err . . . James,’ replied James. ‘I mean it’s . . . er . . . James.’

‘Okay, James,’ said the voice on the phone. ‘I’m just pulling up your file here and . . . okay, you’re in Neverbury? James from Neverbury?’

‘Yes, that’s me.’

James jumped as a pounding shook his bedroom door.

‘Who are you talking to?’ shouted Rob from the other side of the door.

James snatched up the phone from the bed and covered the microphone with his hand.

‘Nobody!’ said James. ‘I’m . . . er . . . talking to myself?’

‘Weirdo,’ grumbled Rob. ‘Your mother says to come downstairs; she wants to have a family meeting.’

James waited for Rob’s heavy footsteps to retreat down the stairs before he took the phone off speaker and placed it gingerly to his ear.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello, James.’

‘Who . . . who are you?’

‘I’m calling on behalf of the powers of darkness. We received your details after a routine summoning ritual was completed at your location?’

‘Holy shit,’ muttered James.

‘Excuse me,’ said the caller snippily. ‘We don’t tolerate the use of that sort of language to our operators. Just “shit” will suffice.’

‘Sorry,’ said James awkwardly. ‘I’ve . . . er . . . never done this before.’

‘Don’t worry, James, no one we speak to ever has.’

James sat down on the edge of his bed, his knees trembling, his stomach twisting in knots. Sweat was running down the back of his neck, but he felt freezing cold. He tried to get his breathing under control, to slow down his heart as it beat out a frantic SOS inside his chest.

‘Now, what can we do for you, James?’ asked the voice on the phone.

‘I . . . er . . . well, it’s my stepfather,’ stammered James. ‘I want him . . .’

‘Dead?’ interjected the voice. ‘That’s a very common request. Patricide, matricide, we have a full range of services available for any and every need. How soon would you like it to happen?’

‘Er . . . today?’

‘All right, let me see,’ said the voice. James could hear typing. He dreaded to think what kind of infernal devices Hell’s call centre used. ‘Oh yes, of course. Neverbury. We actually have a local representative in that area; we can certainly fit you in today.’

‘How will it happen?’ asked James. He’d fantasised about life without Rob and, naturally, had fantasised about how it might happen as well but now, in the moment, he found himself curiously devoid of ideas.

‘We find it best when things look like a normal medical event,’ replied the voice. ‘Heart attack and aneurysm are both popular. Of course, we do offer more elaborate options for more discerning customers.’

James pictured Rob, his fatty sausage frame, clutching at his chest and keeling over. Nobody would question that he was a candidate for a heart attack. The man was probably at least ten percent pure bacon.

‘Heart attack,’ said James decisively. ‘That makes sense.’

Keys tippy-tapped at the other end of the line.

‘Heart attack it is, an excellent choice,’ said the voice. ‘Now, how would you like to pay?’

‘P . . . Pay?’ said James. His brief surge decisiveness evaporated suddenly, a familiar cloud of anxiety and fear filling his throat and lungs instead. ‘I don’t know. I . . . er . . . what are the options?’

‘Let me see,’ said the voice. ‘Oh, Okay. Well, it appears that your stepfather’s business is in rather a lot of debt.’

‘Is that a problem?’ asked James.

‘Oh no, quite the opposite. Let me see . . . yes . . . yes . . . all right. Oh, good news. Your stepfather cashed out several insurance policies and pensions recently. His death will leave your mother in quite a bit of debt. Significant debt.’

‘Oh,’ said James. He began to feel uncomfortably hot, as if the walls of his small room were closing in on him. ‘It can’t work then, can it? He’s got us trapped. Trapped in his stupid, stupid—’

The voice on the phone cleared its throat. Some part of James’ brain made a note that, whoever or whatever he was talking to, it had a throat. Somehow, this was reassuring.

‘Actually, it’s rather beneficial in your situation,’ said the voice. ‘Your file has you down as a student at the moment?’

‘Yeah,’ said James, ‘I’m doing my A-Levels and then—’

‘Oh yes, it’s all mapped out at this end.’

‘Is it?’ asked James nervously.

‘Oh yes. Quite the bright future. Glittering even. Or it could be. One cannot engage with the powers of darkness without sacrifice and so that will be our price. You will leave college and work in your late stepfather’s awful little shop to help clear his debts and keep a roof over your dear mother’s head.’

‘Mum’s got a good job though; can’t she cover it?’

‘I’m afraid the strain of losing Robert will be more than she can cope with. We have her down for a nervous breakdown in six months’ time. Unless you take on the shop, that is.’

James pictured the shop. He pictured the stock, the endless twee sentimentality of it, as hollow as the heart of the man who’d bought it. He pictured the endless parade of browsers, picking things up, putting things down, and nodding politely as they left. In his head, the endlessly banal conversations with the passers-through ran, one on top of the other, an endless white noise of meaningless chit-chat. He saw himself opening up, cashing up, closing up, day after day, for the rest of his life. He felt his throat tighten up, the thoughts choking him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he squeaked. ‘I can’t. I can’t do it. I’d rather . . . see how things go. You said I had a bright future, right? I’ve just got to keep my head down.’

‘You could do that,’ said the voice, clearly a little disappointed. ‘Although, the predictions for your mother are not as . . . glittering as they are for you. Things look rather dark for her, I’m afraid.’

James covered his mouth to stifle a noise that welled up unexpectedly inside of him.

‘I’ll be stuck . . . with him?’ whispered James.

‘We’re the powers of darkness,’ said the voice on the phone. ‘I’m afraid we’re not in the good news business. Unless . . .’

‘Unless?’

‘Well,’ continued the voice. ‘I should make you aware of our sell now, pay later option.’

‘Sell now, pay later?’

‘Yes, it’s a new thing,’ said the voice. ‘You sell your soul to us, reap the benefits for a lifetime, and then pay the price in the hereafter.’

‘Sell my soul?’

‘You’ll barely notice it’s gone, I promise. And the wonderful bit? You even won’t remember this conversation or anything about our deal. You will just go through your long life experiencing the most remarkable luck and good fortune until the day you die.’

‘And . . . my mum?’

‘A bright future. Guaranteed. It really is our best package. You’d be astonished if I told you who some of our clients are—if you know what I mean.’

James rocked back and forth on the edge of his bed. Beneath him, he heard his mother sign off from her conference call. Then, there were footsteps on the stairs. Heavy footsteps. A sudden fist against the door.

‘Lampshade? Get downstairs. Your mother’s waiting. And if you say a thing about what happened earlier, you know what’ll happen.’

‘I’ll be right down,’ said James, covering the microphone of his phone.

He waited until he was sure Rob had gone before he spoke again.

‘The hereafter,’ he said. ‘Is that forever?’

‘I shouldn’t tell you this,’ said the voice quietly. ‘But time works rather differently here. It will be over before you even know it has begun.’

‘All right,’ said James. ‘Sold.’

In the bowels of hell’s third-best performing call centre, the owner of the voice on the other end of the phone clicked its mouse (which was an actual mouse with a long and impressive list of crimes it was atoning for in its afterlife) and closed James’ file. ‘How did I do?’ they asked.

The supervisor, a nine-dimensional demon, rotated itself into a form that its new employee could understand before it replied. ‘You did very well,’ it said, ‘I particularly liked the bit about the shop.’

‘Working in retail. It’s most teenagers’ idea of hell.’

The supervisor reconfigured seven of its nineteen mouths into shapes that approximated smiles. ‘You’re going to do very well here, I think. Let me make a note of your name.’

‘Blackheart,’ replied the owner of the voice on the end of the phone. ‘Nightshade Blackheart’

It’s Not Life or Death

Neverbury Town Fliers had reached the quarter-finals of the FA Cup once. People were still talking about it. Whilst most people supported United or City as well, they only did that for the glory and something to talk about with friends from outside of town. In their heart of hearts, in their very souls, every football fan in Neverbury supported the Fliers.

The ground was not much to speak of. Just a covered stand suitable for less than five hundred people, a single wagon that sold tea and meat pies at halftime, and changing rooms that leaked rusty water onto the cracked concrete floors and into the showers. Neverbury Town Fliers were a Kraken in the footballing world, a dark and mysterious creature that existed many leagues below what anyone thought were habitable conditions and yet still, somehow, had the ability to occasionally rise up from the depths to cause mayhem.

Ted had been the manager at the Fliers for many years. He’d been a player before that, getting a run out every Saturday to represent the town he loved. But as much as he loved playing, it was managing the Fliers that had always been his dream. That, and to beat City.

City was everything that was wrong with the modern game. Ted’s grandmother had said so for years. Too much money, too many superstars, not a single player from the city that City claimed to represent. ‘Grassroots,’ she would say. ‘That’s the real game. That’s where the real magic is.’

Ted believed his grandmother and even after she’d passed away, he held true to those beliefs. He had kept Neverbury Town Fliers going through thick and thin and his chance came when Neverbury Town Fliers drew City in the first round of the cup. A once-in-a-lifetime chance for Ted to prove his grandmother right and he was determined not to waste it. They were going to win. They were going to do it for the Fliers, for Neverbury, for real football . . . and for her. At least, that’s what he told the team in the pub on the night of the draw. Some of them might even have been sober enough to remember.

Since then, preparations had been feverish. Television cameras had surrounded the ground for weeks, one-eyed sentinels standing in a silent vigil, recording every moment, just in case the Fliers pulled off the kind of David and Goliath victory that would light up the back pages of every newspaper in the country. Ted gave his exclusive interview to the Neverbury Town Post, which had faithfully supported the Fliers for even longer than Ted. Geoff, the editor, managed to dig out the front page of the last time the Fliers had won the cup. There had been a mining accident the same day so it wasn’t actually the headline but Ted accepted it anyway. Other than participation certificates, good conduct awards, and one first-aid certificate, he didn’t have anything else to hang on the walls of his dingy home office.

City requested sole use of the dressing room, which Ted happily agreed to. The Fliers didn’t even have a team bus, unless you counted Don’s Ford Transit, and most of them drove themselves to games and turned up in their full kit to save time. Big Nev had the late shift in the chip shop on Friday nights as well, so he was always touch-and-go on timing. There were other managers who wouldn’t put up with that sort of thing, or keep players on who took part of their salary in pickled eggs and battered sausages, but not Ted. To Ted, what mattered most was the players’ hearts. If you believed in the club, then the club believed in you. And besides, Nev was a big unit and filled more of a regulation goalmouth than most keepers. That had to count for something.

Ted was at the ground bright and early on the day of the game. He’d picked up a new suit earlier in the week and stood proudly in his new finery at the gates to the ground. The untimely demise of Tony, the local car salesman, had led to a glut of suits in Neverbury’s two warring charity shops and a collapse in the value of polyester/wool blends, but nobody from City needed to know that. At this moment, Ted represented all of Neverbury and he was determined to put his blood, sweat, and tears into winning this game.

City arrived later than planned.

The bus stopped with a loud hydraulic hiss. It was almost too big for the car park and Ted made a mental note to text the players and make sure they parked in the pub up the road. They drank in there every other Saturday after home games so nobody would complain.

Paulo Grek, the City manager, was the first out of the bus. He was tanned and polished, cast from the European metropolitan mould that novelists used for exotic foreign lovers in cheap romances, and wearing a suit that definitely didn’t still have the smell of another man on it. He smiled and extended a manicured hand to Ted.

‘Theodore!’ he said, beaming. ‘Pleasure to meet you!’

He had a thick European accent that Ted suspected he put on. The City manager had lived in England for over ten years; it said so in Ted’s football sticker book and, since his Grandmother had died, there was no better source of football information in Ted’s opinion. Nobody stayed that tanned and that European after a decade in the UK without effort.

‘Just Ted is fine,’ he replied, shaking his opponent’s hand vigorously. ‘Welcome to Neverbury.’

‘Is nice place, very quaint,’ continued Grek. ‘Our driver, he say he cannot find it on the satnav?’

‘Ah yes, people do find that,’ said Ted. ‘Funny story to do with our town charter. Neverbury can never be listed on any map. To get here, you have to follow the signs.’

‘Ah well, we put you on the map today, eh?’ said Grek, slapping Ted on the shoulder with excessive jocularity. ‘Is a big day for you, eh?’

‘And for you,’ said Ted coldly. ‘Could be the end of you.’

Grek looked puzzled. Behind him, the players and their entourage had started to disembark. Support staff were unloading bags from the bus like some great beast being gutted for its eggs all over Ted’s little car park.

‘In the cup, I mean,’ explained Ted. ‘Funny old game, football, isn’t it? Anything might happen.’

‘Ah!’ said Grek laughing. ‘I get it! So sorry, your English and your sense of humour!’

‘Would you like to see the dressing room?’ asked Ted icily. ‘Have the tour?’

Grek’s eyes flicked to the TV cameras. The red lights on top of each were on, the watchful eyes of the sentinels already recording this pre-game skirmish.

‘Of course!’ said Grek, slapping Ted’s arm again. ‘Lead the way!’

As he turned, he made some sort of hand signal to one of his three assistants, a tanned bald man who seemed to be wearing a permanent, industrial-strength scowl. The assistant nodded back and began pointing and shouting at the others in something that wasn’t English.

‘This way, ‘ said Ted, picking up a heavy sports bag from the floor and wishing he had a scowling assistant to do that for him.

‘Lot of people,’ said Ted, nodding at the crowd by the van as he and Grek headed towards the single-storey concrete slug that was the changing rooms and head office of Neverbury Fliers.

‘Who are Scouts?’ asked Grek, pointing at a faded purple sign on the side of the building. ‘I thought you were the . . . er . . . Flies?’

‘Fliers,’ corrected Ted. ‘The Scouts use the building on a Tuesday night. We’re at home on Saturdays.’

‘You have training ground then?’

‘We go to the park, sometimes,’ answered Ted. ‘Neville got stuck on the slide once. Classic Fliers story. We have a kickabout with the Scouts sometimes as well. Some of those lads have got a future, I can tell you.’

Two people got out of a battered hatchback car as Grek and Ted were about to walk through the rusting metal door of the changing rooms-cum-office-cum-Scout-Hall.

‘Ted!’ called one of them, a harassed-looking man with thinning hair and a grey look about him.

‘Ah, here we go!’ said Ted coyly. ‘You know how this works eh? We’re getting papped!’

‘Ted, we put this in the diary six weeks ago. You’re not getting papped,’ said the man sardonically.

‘Who is this?’ asked Grek warily.

‘Geoff Danbury, Neverbury and District Post,’ explained the balding man. ‘This is my reporter, Penny Child.’

‘Ah, local press!’ Grek switched his smile back on, an impressive row of strikers in perfect formation and brilliant white kit. ‘I’m afraid the rules are very strict and I can only give interviews at the officially agreed times.’

He rattled off the phrase parrot fashion, word perfect and well-practised.

‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ said Ted. ‘You see, it’s a big day for us, as a town. The local children have even made gifts for the City players, a lot of them are big supporters, and we just wanted to hand them on to you.’

Ted lifted the heavy sports bag up and tried to hand it to Grek, making sure he was in full view of the TV cameras and slowly enough that Penny could snap off plenty of pictures on her digital camera.

‘You like taking sports bags off people, don’t you, Mr. Grek? I saw some pictures in the paper of you taking bags just like this off people before a match. I can’t remember what the headline was, can you, Geoff?’

‘Football bribery scandal, I think,’ replied Geoff.

Grek snatched the bag from Ted and threw it on the ground. The polished veneer that was his face cracked, revealing something snarling and angry underneath.

‘I am innocent man! Journalists try to frame me once already. It not happen again!’

Ted smirked to himself as he picked the bag up from the floor. He may not have the best ground, he may not have the best players, he may not have a budget to speak of, he may get his suits from the charity shop and have to wash the players’ kits in his washing machine at home, but he did have something. He had his man marked.

‘Shall we carry on with the tour? I’ve still got a lot to show you,’ said Ted. He led the way into the changing rooms, swinging the bag at his side. Grek looked at Geoff and Penny, at the door, and at the TV cameras. He took a step away, back towards the tour bus, as Ted’s head popped back out of the door.

‘Come on!’

Grek took one more look at his tour bus and his entourage, but they were all engrossed in their unpacking and prepping and none of them noticed their manager, isolated away from the rest of them. He muttered a swear word under his breath and followed Ted into the changing rooms, the beep and snap of the camera following him.

A more imaginative man than Grek might have convinced himself that the door to the changing rooms was a portal through time, depositing him somewhere in the 1970s. The unimaginable truth, however, was that the changing rooms were simply very old, very tired, and very much in need of repair.

The floor was a solid concrete pour that had cracked and lifted, grass and weeds pushing themselves up from deep underground. The mortar between the bricks of the breeze block walls was crumbling, leaving dusty white trails around. Dirty red water, rich with rust from the metal roof, ran down the walls in places and pooled on the floor. In the one dry patch, a framed photo of an elderly woman had been hung up. Other than the door out to the ground at the other end of the changing room, the only other exit was into the showers, a cramped space tiled with dark green tiles creeping with crusty black mould.

A single row of tired metal lockers had been pushed up against one wall, a slatted wooden bench underneath. One slat was broken, leaving a splintered gap behind. Arranged on the bench, neatly spaced out, were little dolls made of rags and sticks. Sixteen in all, each and every one of them had the face of one of the City players stuck to it.

‘What is this?’ blurted Grek.

Ted was crouched down, adjusting the final doll. He got up slowly, moaning as he did.

‘Football, eh?’ he grumbled. ‘Hell on the body.’

The door slammed shut behind Grek and he flinched involuntarily.

‘Your friends, they are not joining us?’ he asked. His smooth, cultured European voice had become a little reedy, a little nervous.

‘I think they’ve got what they wanted,’ replied Ted. He zipped his sports bag closed and slid it under the bench. One of the dolls began to drift and Ted adjusted it back into an upright position. ‘I suppose you’re wondering what these are?’ he asked.

Grek nodded silently.

‘Do you like our patron?’ asked Ted, changing the topic. He pointed up at the picture of the elderly lady that was hanging on the wall. She was a stout-looking woman with a crooked nose and wiry grey hair tied up in a large bun. She had a cat in her lap, a plump tabby with a missing eye.

‘I have a Madonna in my office,’ replied Grek.

‘We just have granny,’ said Ted, placing his hand on the glass affectionately. The picture wobbled on the wall. ‘My grandmother, actually. She raised me after my parents passed away. Brought me down to the football ground for every home game, took me all over the country to see them play once I was old enough for away games. She taught me the game as well.’

‘Your grandmother is footballer?’ asked Grek incredulously.

‘Oh no, not with her knees. No, my grandmother was a witch.’

‘A witch? You mean . . . ah . . . strega? Ha! Another one of your English jokes, eh?’

‘Witchcraft is no joke,’ said Ted gravely. ‘There was a time when people respected the Witches of Neverbury. They respected and feared them. That was before people forgot the old ways, of course. Forgot the rules.’

Ted picked up one of the stick-and-rag dolls from the bench. The face of one of the City players beamed up at him, all haircut and teeth and bravado. Ted stroked it gently, whispering something that Grek could not hear.

‘Do you know what this is?’ Ted asked.

‘I have seen before is . . . er . . . voodoo doll, correct?’

‘Voodoo is for amateurs,’ laughed Ted. He put the doll back down gently and picked up another. ‘These are poppets. Old English magic, the proper kind. Apologies for the stickers but I didn’t have a lot of time after the draw came through and I knew we were playing you in the cup.’

Ted took hold of the doll’s leg and began to slowly twist it, his eyes on Grek.

‘The principle is the same though. Whatever I do to the doll, happens to the person.’

Ted began to bend the leg backwards. In the quiet of the changing room, Grek could hear the twig creaking, about to break. He failed to contain his laughter.

‘Oh, very good, very good!’ Grek brought his hands together in a slow hand clap. ‘Most original, Ted, most original.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I am Italian,’ explained Grek. ‘We invented the shakedown. And we love our Nonnas and have our superstitions too. All very clever. So, you’ve, how do you say it, shown me the stick? So, now you show me the carrot, yes?’

Ted stopped bending the doll, looking at Grek curiously.

‘Come now,’ continued Grek. ‘Outside, you try to give me money with your convenient reporter friends there, but I refuse. Everyone sees me say no to the bribe. If it comes out, nobody would blame you, small-time manager of part-time team, for trying, eh? I give interview, say is misunderstanding, blame press for my terrible reputation, and everyone forgives.’

‘And then?’ asked Ted.

‘And then we come in here and you give me your shakedown. Very clever, as I say, most original. But your dolls do nothing. So, next you offer me the real bribe and we agree that my team will let yours win. Shall we say, two to one? We go back to focusing on league, you go to next round as giant killers. Who knows, maybe you even win next match. Maybe next manager is scared of your puppets.’

‘Poppets,’ corrected Ted.

‘Whatever,’ said Grek. ‘English is stupid language, nothing but contradictions.’

‘Hmm,’ said Ted, picking up a fresh poppet. ‘If you say so.’

Without another word Ted snapped the arm of the poppet. He looked up at the picture of his grandmother on the wall and smiled. He placed the poppet down and picked up another.

‘See?’ said Grek, ‘Nothing—’

He stopped speaking as a loud crash emanated from outside, rattling the metal door. Somewhere, someone started screaming. Grek turned, his eyes wide, as the door crashed open and one of his assistants burst in. His face was pale and sweaty and his City colours tracksuit was splattered with blood.

‘Boss,’ he said breathlessly. ‘There’s been an accident.’

‘What?’ asked Grek, his eyes fixed on Ted as Ted began to stroke the leg of his fresh poppet.

‘It’s Lee,’ said the assistant. ‘God knows how but he’s got his arm trapped in the storage compartment of the bus. I think . . . I think he’s going to lose it.’

Grek muttered something under his breath. Perhaps a prayer, perhaps a curse, Ted couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter either way.

‘Leave us!’ barked Grek.

‘Boss, you need to—’

‘Out!’

The assistant backed away, pulling the door shut behind him. Grek rounded on Ted, his face a mix of fear and rage. His hands were shaking as he reached for the nearest poppet, picking it up to inspect for himself.

‘What did you do?’ he asked, his voice trembling. ‘Fix our bus someway? Pay someone to . . . I don’t know . . .’

‘People have forgotten,’ mused Ted quietly. ‘They’ve forgotten the rules. Forgotten the game. They’ve forgotten taking a run out for the town on a Saturday, taking pride in the badge. Oranges at half time, a cold sponge in a bucket instead of a first aid kit and physio. All kids want these days is to play for the big clubs, to make their millions and marry a supermodel. Nobody teaches them what football really means, why it matters.’

Ted snapped the leg of the poppet he was holding and dropped it on the floor into a puddle of dirty water. Outside there was another crash and the sounds of distant screaming grew louder.

‘Nobody screams like a premiership footballer, do they?’ said Ted. ‘Those boys go down at the drop of a hat, rolling around on the floor. Play acting, that’s all it is. You know Neville once got run over before a game? Car went straight into him. He got up and played the full ninety minutes. That’s a proper footballer.’

Ted picked up another poppet and, with a look of disgust, threw it down on the floor next to the other before stepping on it, crushing the sticks and twigs inside with a loud crack. Grek spun around as, outside, he heard something like an explosion.

‘We do . . . whatever you want . . . ’ said Grek breathlessly, edging away from Ted towards the door. ‘Any score you want.’

‘How dare you. This is Neverbury,’ said Ted. ‘We do things the old way here. And tomorrow, it will be us in the papers. We’ll be the giant killers.’

Open House

Tim was woken by a rhythmic banging, like a drum beat. He rolled over, eyes struggling to focus on the clock by the bed.

‘What time is it?’ asked Helen, stirring next to Tim.

‘Three-thirty, dead on.’

Tim felt Helen stiffen in the bed next to him. He rested his hand on hers reassuringly. ‘It’s all right; it’s probably just kids, hazing the incomers.’

The banging came again, louder and more insistent.

‘I’m going down,’ said Helen angrily. ‘I’m not having this.’

Tim moved his hand up to Helen’s shoulder and pushed her gently back onto the bed.

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ he said firmly. ‘You’ll pop your stitches. Also, you sleep in the nude so, you know, there’s that.’

Helen pulled the covers up over herself as Tim got out of bed. He slid out the metal baseball bat he kept under the bed and rested it on his shoulder. He was only wearing a pair of shorts and Helen would be the first to admit, Tim had reached the contented ‘Dad bod’ stage a little earlier in life than she’d expected. But who could blame him, she thought, for enjoying a little comfort food? After all, they were both lucky to be alive.

Helen unplugged her phone as Tim headed out of the bedroom.

‘I’m dialling 999, just in case,’ she whispered, her face illuminated by the phone screen.

‘I’ll be fine,’ said Tim, disappearing out of view. ‘I’m telling you, it’ll just be kids.’

‘It was kids last time,’ said Helen, sadly, keeping her voice down so that Tim didn’t hear.

The banging came again as Tim descended the cottage stairs and again before he reached the front door. He would have been quicker, but the boxes left over from moving in earlier that week were still choking the hallway.

There was a light outside, someone shining a torch in through the little coloured glass panels in the top half of the door.

‘Hello?’ called Tim, his voice quavering slightly. ‘Who’s there?’

The light snapped off and the banging started again. It was quieter this time but the rhythm was the same and it was definitely coming from the front door. It vibrated in the frame as if it might pop open of its own accord.

‘Fuck this,’ growled Tim. He slammed the bolt across and yanked the door open. His bat was already raised, although he didn’t realise it.

In the doorway was a woman of no more than four feet tall and no less, in Tim’s later estimate, of one hundred years old.

She looked up and smiled, showing off a sum total of four teeth in her mouth.

‘Hello,’ she said politely, ‘I’m Mabel, your neighbourhood watcher. I’m sorry to wake you dear, but your door was locked?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘That’s all right, dear. It’s an easy mistake to make . . . if you’re an incomer.’

‘No,’ said Tim, shaking his head, trying to kick-start his consciousness into full working order. ‘I meant, I didn’t hear you properly. You were checking if my door was locked?’

Mabel rolled her eyes and tutted, then took a pamphlet out of her handbag and handed it to Tim.

‘This is Neverbury, dear. We don’t lock our doors here.’

Tim crumpled the pamphlet up and tossed it in amongst the empty boxes. He bent forward, bringing his face close to Mabel’s. She smelt of humbugs and lavender. Tim didn’t like either.

‘Listen, he said quietly. ‘My wife and I are new here and we don’t know who you are or what your deal is. But where we come from, we lock our doors. And they stay locked.’

Tim stepped back and closed the door hard in Mabel’s face before throwing the bolt across and stomping back up to bed. He found Helen sitting up, the duvet pulled up to her chin, shaking.

‘Who was it?’

‘Some crazy old cow,’ said Tim bitterly. ‘Thinks she’s neighbourhood watch or something.’

‘Had something happened?’

‘I think she was trying the door,’ said Tim. ‘Forget it, it’s nothing. She’s probably just got dementia or something.’

‘So, you just left an old lady with dementia outside our front door at three thirty in the morning?’ asked Helen. She started the awkward process of getting out of bed, keeping her hand on her side over her stitches.

‘Technically, I did it at about three-forty,’ said Tim, resting his head back on his pillow. ‘And you’re not going anywhere. She’s already gone.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I saw her go.’

Helen gave Tim the look she gave him when she knew that he was lying but wanted to believe the lie anyway. He’d got that look a lot lately. She lay back down next to him, wide awake and as tense as a violin string. Tim was asleep before she could ask any more questions.

The next day, Mabel reappeared.

Tim was screwing in an electric doorbell, the type with a camera that can show you who is at your front door. He joked to Helen that it was a Mabel-detector, but she hadn’t seen the funny side. He couldn’t blame her. Humour had been in short supply around Tim and Helen for a little while.

The old woman was wearing the same clothes as the day before but today was carrying a large biscuit tin. She moved so quietly that it wasn’t until she loomed out of Tim’s blind spot that he even realised she was there. He let out a yelp and jumped inside the house, his hands raised.

‘Oh, I’m sorry to have startled you,’ said Mabel kindly. ‘I felt that we might have got off on the wrong foot last night, dear, and that’s not the Neverbury way. I brought you this to apologise.’

Mabel held out the biscuit tin. It looked even older than she was, rusted around the rim and with a faded scene of a circus on the lid.

‘Biscuits?’ asked Tim hopefully.

‘Lemon drizzle cake,’ said Mabel. ‘I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve come in the top three for the past few years in the Village Fair with that recipe. You’ll not get better.’

‘Well, I can probably get two that are better,’ said Tim under his breath. In his experience, nobody who came first or second mentioned being in the top three. Only people who were third did that.

‘Sorry, dear?’

‘I didn’t say anything,’ lied Tim. He popped the lid of the biscuit tin and a waft of sugary, lemony sweetness wafted out. It was powerful enough to draw Helen out from the kitchen, like a cartoon character following a visible odour through the air. She was in her painting clothes, which was code for stealing one of Tim’s t-shirts, and had a fine speckling of the soft apple green that they’d picked for the kitchen all over her.

‘Redecorating?’ said Mabel sharply. ‘Didn’t you like it how it was?’

‘This is Helen, my wife,’ said Tim, trying to take control of the conversation. ‘Helen, this is Mabel.’

‘Ah,’ said Helen, limping down the hallway between the various boxes and offering her hand to Mabel. ‘Our midnight caller.’

‘Oh dear, my reputation precedes me,’ said Mabel, offering an embarrassed shrug. ‘I’m afraid I can get a little . . . overzealous in my duties sometimes.’

Mabel took Helen’s outstretched hand and shook it. The old lady had a surprisingly firm grip, Helen noticed, a strength and a hardness in contradiction to Mabel’s fragile, birdlike frame. It was like shaking hands with a statue.

‘Would you like to come in?’ asked Helen. ‘I can put the kettle on.’

‘Are you sure, dear? Once you get me sat down, you might not get me back out again!’

‘It’s no trouble,’ said Helen with a broad smile. She kept hold of Mabel’s hand and guided her into the house and through the maze of boxes. Once they reached the living room door, Helen let Mabel go ahead of her into the room.

‘Take any seat you like,’ said Helen. ‘We might even be bold and take the plastic wrapping off the new sofa soon.’

‘Not until we’ve finished painting,’ Tim chimed in.

Mabel started to talk about a friend of hers who kept the wrapping on his sofa, but Tim cut her off when he closed the door into the living room on her, trapping Helen in the hallway with him.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ he hissed through his teeth.

‘Finding out what’s going on,’ replied Helen. ‘A little bit of community work, know what I mean?’

Tim sighed and turned away. He did know what it meant. The last time Helen had done ‘a little bit of community work,’ it had meant trouble. A lot of trouble.

In the lounge, Tim and Helen found that Mabel had made herself comfortable in an old chair that had been left behind by the previous owners. It was a wingback and absolutely dwarfed Mabel’s diminutive frame. Despite this, she looked remarkably settled and comfortable.

Tim was carrying a tray from the kitchen loaded with an assortment of mugs, a bag of sugar, and a mismatched collection of spoons.

‘I’m afraid we don’t have our good china unpacked yet,’ lied Tim, as he knew only too well that the best crockery he and Helen had was currently sitting on the tin tray he had just carried in.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Mabel. She grabbed the sugar and milk from the tray before anyone else had the opportunity. ‘Shall I be mother?’

Tim and Helen sat on their new sofa together, the plastic squeaking underneath them and Mabel added sugar and milk to the tea. She didn’t ask them if they wanted either.

‘So, Tim tells me you’re on the neighbourhood watch?’ said Helen. She sipped her tea, which was too strong and too sweet for her tastes, and let silence do her interrogating for her. In her experience, there were very few tactics as effective in extracting information as just waiting quietly for people to spill their guts. Over tea, wherever possible.

‘I certainly am,’ said Mabel. ‘But we do things a little differently here in Neverbury compared to what you might expect coming from . . .?’

‘London,’ said Tim, leaping into the silence left by Mabel. ‘We moved from London.’

Helen shot Tim a sideward glance.

‘And how exactly is it different, Mabel?’ asked Helen. ‘Tim said something about people not locking their doors?’

‘That’s right, we don’t. There’s no need. Neverbury is a very safe community.’

‘It won’t be if people find out you’re leaving your doors unlocked,’ muttered Tim.

Mabel brought her tea up to her lips and then put it down again without drinking anything.

‘That’s why neighbourhood watchers are important,’ said Mabel, as if she were explaining something very simple to a very stupid child. ‘We come around every night and make sure everything’s okay.’

‘Who’s your police liaison?’ asked Helen.

‘Our what, dear?’

‘Police liaison, a police officer who makes sure you have the help and support you need to be effective, to work inside the law, discuss health and safety issues, someone you can escalate queries and concerns to? It’s actually what I—’

Tim put his hand on Helen’s shoulder and she stopped talking.

‘Ah, police,’ said Mabel, looking pointedly at Helen. ‘Them. Well, that’s an interesting Neverbury fact I’m sure you won’t know. We have no police here.’

‘Well, a lot of local stations have closed and been centralised into—’ started Helen, before Mabel interrupted her.

‘No, no, you’re not listening, dear. We have no police. It’s a funny thing but Neverbury sits at the intersection between three different counties. Nobody knows who we belong to. Technically, we don’t fall under any one jurisdiction. It’s been that way for centuries. We’re just this funny little outcrop, sticking out into the sea. Nobody wants us.’

‘There can’t be no police,’ said Helen. ‘That’s just not how it works.’

‘It’s all in the pamphlet I gave your husband. Everything you need to know. Still, if you really want to get into the detail of it then you should talk to Harold. He’s our local historian, he knows all about it. He’s a bit of an old dodderer but he’s never forgotten a single thing that’s happened in this town.’

Helen and Tim looked at each other, sharing the unspoken question of how old someone had to be before Mabel would consider them a ‘dodderer.’

‘Look,’ said Tim, feigning as much kindness and interest as he could manage. ‘That’s all very interesting and I’m sure we’ll cross paths with Harold at some point but there can’t be no police. That’s just . . .’

Tim looked at the old woman, at her almost empty mouth and her wild mass of hair, at her shabby and unkempt clothes, stained with grass and mud and God only knew what else. He thought about the cake, and the tin, and just where it might have been that Mabel went after he’d turned her away last night. As he looked at her, she picked a rogue leaf off her shoulder, inspected it, and then tucked it away in her pocket.

‘Save that for later,’ she said to nobody in particular.

‘Would you excuse us for just a moment?’ asked Tim. He put his arm inside Helen’s and eased her up out of the seat. She winced as her stitches pulled and Mabel’s eyes suddenly shot to Helen’s abdomen.

‘Are you hurt, dear?’ she asked.

‘Long story,’ said Tim abruptly, manhandling Helen out of the room, through the small hallway, and into the kitchen. He closed the door and waited for a moment, listening for any movement from the lounge.

‘What?’ said Helen.

‘You don’t think this is weird?’

‘Well, yes, I mean, it is a bit odd but I’m sure she’s harmless.’

‘I think she’s homeless.’

‘Really?’ replied Helen. She eyed the door, as if she could see through it with some sort of x-ray vision to inspect their mysterious visitor.

‘She’s in the same clothes as yesterday. She certainly looks like she’s slept outside. And what’s going on with that cake?’

‘She’s eccentric, I’ll say that,’ said Helen. ‘But if she is homeless, we can’t just throw her out, can we?’

‘God, maybe that’s what the open-door thing’s all about,’ said Tim. ‘You think they’re all leaving food and stuff out, the neighbours?’

‘You’re thinking of stray cats,’ said Helen judgementally.

Before Tim could answer, there was a loud bang from the lounge that shook the whole cottage.

‘Bloody hell,’ chuntered Tim, pushing his way past Helen. ‘I’m getting her out of here now.’

In the lounge, Tim found Mabel sitting exactly where they had left her.

‘Everything all right, dear?’ asked Mabel sweetly.

Helen trailed in behind Tim, holding her side. Her wound had been tingling and her stitches pulling ever since Mabel had noticed it, as the flesh was creeping back apart.

‘What was that bang?’ asked Tim, looking at Mabel suspiciously.

‘Oh, these old cottages make all sorts of noises. So much personality. They get to be just like friends, after a while. Probably just the old place saying hello.’

Tim helped Helen sit back down, but stayed standing, holding open the door to the hallway.

‘Well, Mabel, it’s been nice getting to know you but we’ve got a lot to be getting on with so . . .’

Mabel showed no signs of moving.

‘Oh, don’t mind me, dear. You get on. I’ll be fine just here. I’ll finish the cup of tea and then see myself out.’

‘Er, I’d rather you made a move, to be honest. We really do need to get on.’

‘I see,’ replied Mabel frostily. ‘Well, that’s all right, dear. I’ll see you tonight.’

Mabel struggled to her feet and began hobbling towards the door.

‘Tonight?’ asked Helen.

‘Yes, of course, dear,’ said Mabel. She stopped by the door and patted Helen on the hand affectionately. ‘I’ll pop in and make sure everything’s as it should be. After you’ve gone to bed. Don’t forget to leave the door unlocked!’

Tim made to put his hand across the door and stop Mabel, but she slipped under it easily and hobbled quickly down the hallway, weaving through the boxes and disappearing through the front door with a wave. She moved fast when she wanted to, Tim noticed.

‘What the hell was that?’ asked Tim.

‘I don’t know,’ said Helen. Tim didn’t notice, but Helen was holding her side tightly now, blood staining her fingers where she held onto her wound.

It was three-thirty when the banging started again. The whole cottage shook, the same rhythmic banging as before.

Tim rolled over in bed, half asleep, groping for his phone. Helen was sitting up, her eyes wide and staring.

‘Were you awake?’ Tim asked groggily.

‘Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t sleep at all,’ said Helen numbly.

Tim fumbled with his phone as the banging continued around them. The screen sprang into life and he accessed the app that would let him see what was happening through the doorbell camera.

‘I don’t bloody believe it,’ he cursed. ‘It’s her. It’s bloody Mabel.’

Tim jumped out of bed, slamming his phone down on the bedside unit.

‘I’m putting a stop to this,’ he said firmly, stomping out of the bedroom.

‘Wait—’ called Helen, but it was too late. Tim was already rocketing down the cottage stairs, two at a time. She heard him crash into a box, swear loudly, then throw back the bolts on the door.

‘What?’ he spat. ‘What is it, Mabel?’

‘Your door was locked,’ said Mabel indignantly. ‘I thought after my little visit earlier today you’d understand; we don’t lock our doors in Neverbury.’

Tim looked behind him, checking that Helen hadn’t followed him out of the bedroom. When he was sure she wasn’t there, he stepped outside, forcing Mabel to back up, and pulled the door behind him.

‘Listen,’ he growled. ‘Two months ago, my wife and I were attacked in our home. They beat me, they stabbed her, and . . . look, you just don’t want to hear the rest, okay? We moved here to get away from that sort of thing and I’m glad that you feel so safe in Neverbury that you can wander around at three-thirty in the morning. I’m glad that there are some people who leave their doors open for you, but we’re not. Our door stays closed, stays locked, and you stay the hell away! Is that clear?’

Mabel held her chin out proudly, even though her eyes twinkled with moisture in the moonlight.

‘You only needed to say,’ she said, her voice shaky. ‘I’m sorry for your trouble, dear. I’m sure you’ll be very happy here.’

The old lady turned and began to limp down the path towards the gate.

‘Normally, I’m round a bit earlier than this but it’s my hip, you see,’ she said. Tim didn’t know if she was talking to him or just to the night air. ‘I’ve been going to salsa with Beryl and I tried to say to her that we’re too old for it but you really can’t tell that woman anything.’

‘Just go, please,’ said Tim firmly.

Mabel stopped just at the gate and turned. She looked bigger, somehow, in the darkness, away from the light of the house.

‘Are you sure you want me to go, dear?’ she asked. ‘You’d be amazed at the things that can go wrong in an old place like this. Mrs Grimshaw, three doors up? She had a gas leak. The whole house could have gone up, but I stopped it. Then there was Harold, remember I told you about him? Left one of those fancy scented candles they sell in town burning, got all woozy off it and fell down the stairs. One of his cats was just about to eat his eyeball when I got there. Saved his life.’

Tim wrinkled his nose in disgust. He didn’t believe the old woman’s stories of heroism or eyeball-eating cats.

‘I’m sure we can manage.’

‘Hmm. If you say so. And you’re confident you know where you are with the boiler?’ asked Mabel.

‘What?’

‘You’ve not needed the heating yet then?’

‘It’s June, so . . . no,’ said Tim tersely. He thought he could hear Helen coming down the stairs. He moved down the path, hoping to pressure Mabel into moving on.

‘Ah, well then, you won’t know. I’m not surprised the estate agent didn’t mention it. Might have put you off.’

‘What’s wrong with the boiler?’ asked Helen nervously, peeping her head around the front door.

‘Go back to bed. I’m handling this,’ said Tim irritably.

‘Oh, it’s nothing really. You just need to make sure to vent it, about once a month. Otherwise, the carbon monoxide builds up and the next thing you know you’ve gone and died in your sleep. Or maybe you don’t know, do you, if you’re dead? Either way, it’s best to be aware of these things.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Tim sarcastically. ‘You’re also the local gas fitter?’

‘No, dear,’ said Mabel, chuckling quietly as she finally set off again into the darkness. ‘But that did used to be my house.’

Tim and Helen sat up until morning. Tim was supposed to be heading back to work, his first day on the nearly two-hour commute to the closest office his company had been able to offer him when he told them he wanted to transfer out of London.

He phoned in sick.

‘We should never have come here,’ he said spitefully. ‘It was a stupid idea. Places like this, they hate people who come in from outside.’

‘We couldn’t stay in London,’ said Helen wearily. She’d cried out the last of her exhaustion an hour or so ago and now seemed to exist in a sort of semi-occupied state, as if Helen had moved out of her body and a lackadaisical caretaker had moved in.

‘Of course, we could,’ spat Tim. He came through carrying two cups of tea and carelessly dumped one down next to Helen. ‘They caught them, didn’t they? They got ten years each.’

‘They didn’t catch all of them. And gangs like that, they have a reach, Tim. They have connections. People owe people. They have their own codes, their own systems of honour and . . . well, it’s a lot to explain.’

‘Yeah well, you’re the expert,’ said Tim. ‘Such an expert that you nearly got us both killed.’

The day that followed passed awkwardly. The engineer from the telephone company turned up a day early and installed the broadband and WiFi, grumbling the entire time that he’d got lost on the way here because Neverbury wasn’t on his sat nav. Tim had set his laptop up in the dining room using an unpacked box for a desk and caught up on his emails whilst Helen established her own territory upstairs, unpacking clothes as noisily as if she’d been forging plate armour.

Tim sent a diplomatic envoy, in the form of a cheese sandwich, upstairs mid-afternoon. It was not rejected. A summit was called early evening when Helen was drawn downstairs by the smell of Tim heating up soup on the hob.

‘What’s that?’

‘Chicken.’

‘My favourite.’

‘I know.’

‘You’ve got two mugs out.’

Tim turned and grinned.

‘You can take the girl out of the force, but you can’t turn off those copper’s instincts, eh?’

‘Don’t.’

Tim’s grin flickered and faded out like a broken neon sign. He turned back to his pan, in which the soup suddenly needed intense stirring and careful monitoring.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Me too.’

Tim poured the soup into mugs and they stood in a warm and cosy silence in the kitchen, sipping soup and allowing the last of the hostilities to be drowned in the creamy, chickeny broth. There were few things in life, in Tim’s opinion, that could not be resolved by the application of sufficient tea and chicken soup.

Helen broke the silence just as Tim was reaching the end of his mug.

‘I put a call into the station today,’ she said quietly.

Tim frowned. ‘Why?’

‘I wanted to find out if what Mabel said about Neverbury was true, you know, about there being no police here.’

‘I thought we were off the grid,’ said Tim cautiously. ‘You didn’t want any of your old squad to know where you were.’

Helen looked at the floor, shuffling her feet.

‘I couldn’t just do nothing. Don’t be angry.’

Tim took Helen’s mug from her and wrapped his arms around her. ‘I’m not angry. I’m worried. You thought someone in your old unit was bent, that’s what you told me, isn’t it? You said you thought they’d set you up. That’s why we hid all the way out here, isn’t it? That’s why we put the house and the bills only in my name, that’s—’

‘I know,’ said Helen. She pushed her face into the nape of Tim’s neck, as if she could breathe him in and hold him inside herself forever. ‘I’m just being stupid.’

‘You’re not stupid; you’re just exhausted. We both are. I think we need an early night.’

‘I’ve still got stitches,’ warned Helen.

‘You also still sleep in the nude.’

Nobody knocked that night, the night after that, or the night after that. Tim stopped counting the nights and when the batteries in his Mabel detector ran out he didn’t bother to replace them. Helen stopped waking up in the night and whilst Tim still kept his baseball bat under the bed, he stopped checking it was there and within reach before closing his eyes.

They slipped into a new, but comfortable, routine of Helen decorating and Tim being decorated around as he alternately answered emails on his laptop or complained that the broadband wasn’t working properly and that he couldn’t answer his email. Helen offered him a quiet desk and a chair near the wireless router, but he seemed happiest to be wherever she was.

Together they tried the local pubs, the local cafes, and the local shops. The outside world, the world beyond Neverbury, slowly retreated and became a place that they talked about less and less. The world beyond Neverbury was where their past was and they were happy to leave it behind.

Tim got used to working from home but started talking about finding a job locally, something inside of Neverbury. Helen’s wounds faded and she had her stitches taken out by the local GP, where she was given a clean bill of health and a number of health pamphlets that she thought might be useful if she ever accidentally found herself in the late nineteen-fifties.

Their lives fell into harmony with the life of the town, measured out in weekly craft fairs and farmers’ markets. Helen learnt the joys of local Neverbury produce and Tim succumbed to a twenty-four hour bout of what he would later refer to as ‘the meat sweats’ caused by a farmers’ market pie of dubious provenance.

Helen also discovered the local library, where she began to read up on Neverbury and its history. The spare room, which Tim had started to call silently in his head ‘the nursery’ was unexpectedly transformed into a small museum, the walls covered alternately with maps and photographs of the town.

Tim waited a few weeks before he commented on it, finally breaking cover shortly after Helen bought a second ball of red wool from the craft market with which to extend the woollen spider web that had begun to grow in the spare room, connecting together seemingly random map points, photographs, and post-it notes.

‘This . . . isn’t quite how I expected this room to turn out,’ he said softly, handing Helen a well-timed cup of tea. Helen was sat crossed-legged on the floor, sorting through some old photographs she’d bought in one of the antique shops in town. Neverbury had a disproportionately large number of antique shops, in Tim’s opinion.

‘It’s just so . . . fascinating,’ said Helen dreamily. ‘There are just so many things that don’t quite add up. The local land laws are crazy, totally ancient and they all seem to be controlled by one family. Do you know that Neverbury has had the same MP for almost fifty years? And before that, his father was the MP.’

‘Hmm,’ said Tim, which was his standard semi-verbal response to Helen’s increasingly frequent, and increasingly lengthy, monologues about Neverbury. He’d come to the conclusion that she often didn’t really need him to respond, just to confirm that he was still alive, which was a testament to just how long some of the monologues had become.

‘And you remember that thing about the police?’

‘Hmm.’

‘Mabel wasn’t wrong. There is no official constabulary covering Neverbury. There’s this weird set of byelaws and some crazy links to the Village Council, if you can believe that.’

‘I thought we’d banned the P word,’ interrupted Tim, lifting his semi-verbal sanctions against Neverbury talk.

‘Parish?’

‘Police.’

Helen looked up and did her best don’t-be-mad-at-me face.

‘Do we still have Mabel’s leaflet?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I mean . . . why the hell would we still have that?’ said Tim. ‘If I need a crazy old lady, I’d just order one on the Internet like a normal person.’

‘I’m serious,’ replied Helen. ‘I need to make sense of this. She mentioned that historian, Harold? Well, I’ve been trying to track him down and everyone I’ve asked knows him, but doesn’t seem to know where he lives or how to get hold of him.’

‘So?’

‘Mabel said she’d helped him. She must have been in his house.’

‘So?’

‘So, she’ll know how to find him,’ said Helen.

Tim sighed. Banning the ‘P word’ didn’t make Helen any less police. She couldn’t abide a mystery and, without having meant to, she’d somehow bought them a cottage in what was turning out to be the mystery capital of the UK.

‘It’s in the kitchen, in the drawer,’ said Tim. ‘You know it, the one where we put stuff that we don’t know what else to do with.’

Helen jumped up from the floor, shoved her still-full mug of tea into Tim’s hand and disappeared past him and down the stairs. By the time he’d reached the kitchen, Mabel’s crumpled Neighbourhood Watch flier was proudly attached to the front of their fridge.

‘I’ll call in the morning,’ said Helen. ‘There’s no rush.’

‘You’re already holding the phone,’ said Tim.

‘Guess I’m not the only one with detective instincts, eh?’ joked Helen.

Tim rolled his eyes and kissed Helen on the forehead.

‘I’m going to the shops,’ he said. ‘And I’m coming back with a takeaway, wine, and batteries for my Mabel detector. Promise me, no Tales of Neverbury after I get home, okay?’

Helen gave a mock salute. ‘You have my word.’

Helen was already dialling the phone number from the flier as Tim closed the front door. He offered up a silent prayer that Mysterious Mabel would be able to tell Helen where to find Harold and that he would either have the answers that Helen wanted or, if not, simply be so boring that it would put Helen off this whole thing and Tim could go back to planning what sort of nursery they might have.

True to her word, Helen didn’t once mention any of Neverbury’s more unusual geographic, historic, or legal features after Tim got back. Instead, they ate their takeaway, drank too much wine, and headed to bed to make a start on what Tim hoped was the first step towards them converting Helen’s branch of the Neverbury Historical Society into a nursery.

It was three-thirty when Tim was woken by a noise from downstairs.

Three-thirty, dead on.

Helen was awake too, sitting up in bed next to Tim.

Tim shook his head, trying to gauge if he was still drunk or already into his hangover. Another bang came from downstairs, then voices. Voices with accents that Tim recognised. Accents from another life, in the world beyond Neverbury.

‘Fuck,’ muttered Tim, reaching under the bed for his baseball bat. ‘Did you lock up?’

Helen looked at Tim, fear bleaching her face of colour.

‘It’s . . . Neverbury,’ she said weakly. ‘I didn’t think . . . I . . .’

‘Fuck!’ hissed Tim. He scrambled out of bed and disappeared, rummaging under the bed for his bat. When he reappeared, bat in hand, Helen had pulled on a t-shirt and a pair of shorts and was creeping towards the bedroom door. She had her phone in her hand, the screen alight.

‘What are you doing?’ hissed Tim.

‘Listening,’ she whispered back, holding up a hand to silence Tim.

‘Come away from the door.’

‘Shh.’

Tim snatched his own phone from the bedside and accessed the doorbell camera. Silent notifications sat judgementally on the screen, informing him of their unexpected arrivals. Tim watched aghast as three large, dark figures approached the door. None of them were obviously armed, but one of them had something in his hand, something small that gleamed and that he used to open their front door.

‘There’s three of them,’ said Tim, his voice catching in his throat.

He got up, feeling his knees weak underneath him. His stomach became a hard, toxic knot and he felt bile rise up his throat. There had been six of them last time, that he knew of. After last time, they obviously didn’t think they’d need as many people to get the job done.

The bottom step gave a tell-tale groan.

Tim gripped the bat, his palms sweaty against it, and crept over to where Helen was still listening through a crack in the door, her phone held up to her ear.

‘How long?’ asked Tim.

‘What?’ said Helen, covering the mouthpiece of her phone.

‘How long until the police get here?’

‘There are no police, Tim,’ replied Helen firmly.

More noise on the stairs now. Two more groans after the first, all three of the intruders heading up. Heading towards them.

‘Then who are you on the phone to?’ asked Tim weakly, fearing that he already knew the answer, fearing that the only help that was coming was small, and dirty, and one of Neverbury’s top three bakers.

‘Mabel,’ replied Helen. ‘I called Mabel.’

Tim closed his eyes and swallowed. Footsteps on the landing now. Footsteps coming past the bathroom, past the nursery that wasn’t a nursery.

‘Screw it,’ said Tim, yanking the door open and pushing past Helen.

She watched as he ran at the first of them, the bat held high over his head. Some part of Helen’s brain, a part that was somehow detached from the immediate danger in front of her, spoke up and admonished her for not teaching Tim how to fight properly. She should have done it, after last time.

‘Not to worry, dear,’ said a voice in Helen’s ear. ‘We’re on our way.’

Helen smiled and tossed her phone onto the bed as the man dressed all in black burst in. His face was covered with a balaclava and he had a knife in his hand, a knife already stained with blood. Behind him, Tim lay on the floor as the other two kicked and stamped at him, his body only moving in response to the impact of their boots.

Helen backed up, backing away from the intruder, until her legs hit the bed behind her. She flexed her shoulders, bent her legs and lowered her body weight. She’d been asleep last time, the knife going into her stomach before she’d even opened her eyes. She wouldn’t make it that easy on them this time.

‘You dumb bitch,’ said the intruder. ‘We’d never have found you if you hadn’t phoned in and left your number. Took us bloody weeks to find this place though. What kind of place isn’t on the fucking sat nav?’

Helen didn’t answer. The other two entered, two more masked men crowding up behind the first. Helen tried to steal a glimpse of Tim, but all she could see was something that looked like a rag doll wearing Tim’s pyjamas, twisted and left broken on the cottage landing.

Helen didn’t hear the creak at the bottom of the stairs. Maybe Mabel was too light to bend the floorboards, or maybe she knew the bottom step creaked and stepped over it. All Helen did know was that Mabel wasn’t there and then she was, a small dark shape that moved too fast down the landing and pulled one of the men back out through the bedroom door without a word. The door slammed shut and there was the sound of something heavy falling down the stairs.

The man in front of Helen, the one with the knife, turned and Helen took her opportunity to lunge at him, grabbing his arm and trying to take control of the knife. As they wrestled, she saw the bedroom door fly open again and something, a shape that moved too fast to be Mabel, hauled the second intruder out through the door.

Helen didn’t see what hit her. A punch, or maybe an elbow, it didn’t matter. Whatever it was, it connected with her temple and sent her sprawling giddily across the room. She lost her footing and fell, hitting her head on the dressing table. The man with the knife was walking towards her when her world went black.

Time and Tide

Kano had vomited over the side of the boat three times before Neverbury was halfway to the horizon, a narrow strip of lights climbing from the beach up to the zenith of the black cliff face. The sky above them was ink-black and moonless, the stars hidden behind an oppressive blanket of cloud. Wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his hoodie, Kano staggered towards the back of the boat where the Captain manned the wheel.

‘Why did we have to come out in the middle of the night?’ Kano grumbled, his stomach beginning to wind itself into a fresh knot having unwound just moments before.

The Captain kept his eyes on the horizon, the ominously blank horizon that lay, in Kano’s opinion, in entirely the wrong direction. He was a land-based teenage scumbag, not the sea-faring kind.

‘Because at night, the fishes can’t see us coming,’ answered the Captain. His dog, a mangy-looking thing with a tongue that didn’t seem to fit in its mouth, sat on the chair behind him. Kano didn’t know much about dogs, but the thing looked like a cocktail of at least twelve different breeds to him. A cocktail spaniel.

‘And,’ continued the Captain, ‘Because you stole a car and you hit a kid and so now you have to do what I say.’

‘It’s not like he died.’

‘There are worse things than dying,’ said the Captain grimly, his eyes never leaving the horizon. ‘You’re lucky the Village Council decided to send you to me.’

‘Yeah, real lucky.’

‘There was an alternative, you know.’

Kano shrugged and wandered up to the front of the boat where the hoped the old man’s judgement couldn’t reach. His stomach started to unwind again, this time without ejecting its contents. He guessed that was what people meant by ‘getting his sea legs.’ Piled up at the front of the boat were fishing nets and ropes, lobster and crab pots, wooden boxes and crates, and dirty tarps. Kano found a gap between two boxes and sat down, the wet deck of the boat soaking through his jeans.

The car had been nothing special, a piece-of-shit, mid-blue hatchback with a bad radio, a lock that was easy to bump and no engine immobiliser. After that, it had been less than an hour of haring around the town, showing off for his mates, before the accident. A kid who should never have been there, walking home from a friend’s house in the dark, then bouncing off the bonnet of the car whilst Kano was leaning into the back to get a cigarette from one of his mates.

The others had run. Kano hadn’t. And for that, it had been him who had been there when the ambulance came, him who’d been hauled in front of the Village Council and that arsehole who called himself the Magistrate.

Kano hated Neverbury and now there was a good chance he’d be here forever.

That wasn’t the plan.

He looked up as the Captain’s shadow fell over him. He was around Kano’s height, but much thicker set. His skin was leathery from years outdoors, his face hidden behind a huge, bristly, white beard. He wore a bright-yellow rain hat and oilskin over dark-green waterproof dungarees and heavy rubber boots.

‘Come on, lad,’ he said gruffly. ‘Time to fish.’

Kano hadn’t realised the boat had stopped moving. He struggled to his feet, leaning on the hull to steady himself.

‘This is stupid.’

The Captain picked up one end of a fishing net and waited for Kano to take the hint and pick up the other end and help him toss it out into the sea. It sank slowly underneath the black, choppy surface. The Captain’s dog put its paws up on the hull and watched.

‘What’s stupid?’ asked the Captain, readying another net. ‘Fishing? Or nicking cars?’

‘It was one car.’

Together, they tossed another net out into the sea.

‘It only takes one,’ replied the Captain. ‘Like I said, you’re lucky. You won’t see it now, but you will one day.’

‘How do you figure that out?’ asked Kano.

‘You’re not the first kid I’ve brought out here,’ replied the Captain. ‘I know you better than you know yourself.’

They tossed the third and final net out into the water. Kano watched this one sink as well, the ropes struggling like weak swimmers against the sea.

‘You don’t know anything about me, old man,’ said Kano sourly.

‘Huh,’ said the Captain. ‘Son, I used to be you.’

Without another word, he grabbed his dog by the hind legs and tossed it overboard.

‘What the hell?’ gasped Kano. He leant over the edge, reaching down to try and get a hold of the dog as it thrashed and barked in the water. The Captain grabbed Kano by the scruff of the neck and pulled him back.

‘Leave him,’ snapped the Captain. ‘It’s his time.’

Kano twisted free and tripped backwards, knocking over a loose box and getting himself tangled in a length of rope coiled up on the deck.

‘You’re crazy,’ he spat. ‘You’re bloody crazy.’

‘I’ve got lots of dogs,’ said the Captain calmly. ‘House is overrun with them. I breed them, for the sea.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘Watch,’ said the Captain, pointing out into the water.

The dog had recovered from the initial shock of finding itself in the water now and was keeping its head above the waves with a steady doggy paddle. Its paws thumped and scratched against the hull as it yelped in plaintive distress.

‘This is sick,’ said Kano.

‘Watch.’

Around the dog, the sea began to bubble and froth, making the animal panic again. Suddenly, a warty green tentacle as thick as Kano’s thigh burst up from beneath the surface, wrapped itself around the dog’s neck, and dragged him yelping and yowling below the waves. The sea grew silent a moment later.

‘What . . . the hell . . . was that?’ asked Kano breathlessly.

‘It has a lot of names,’ said the Captain calmly. ‘The Beast, the Giant Below, the Lurker, Old Alan. I call it The Thing That Must Be Fed.’

‘You feed it dogs?’

‘Amongst other things. I tried other things in the early days but dogs is what it likes best. You want to pay attention to that.’

Growing up in Neverbury, Kano was used to weird stuff. Most of his mates had a story about something that had happened to them, or their parents, or an uncle or aunt. They talked about them in whispers, slang and euphemisms masking the true horror of it all. That was the weird thing about Neverbury; it was a place where nothing ever happened, except for all the weird and terrible things that did. Absolute boredom, except for the absolute creeping horror of it all.

‘I’m not going to be here forever,’ said Kano belligerently. ‘Magistrate said I had to do six trips, one a month. I’ll be gone before you know it.’

The old sea dog looked wistfully at Kano.

‘Yeah, you will be. Assuming I sign you off.’

The sea began bubbling again, the waves becoming frothy. Kano found himself in the middle of the deck, scared to be too close to any one side. As he watched the water, fish started to burst up from the surface, landing dead on the surface. One, then another, then another, until the sea seemed to be almost full.

‘Help me haul the nets in,’ said the Captain, grabbing one of the ropes that were hanging over the edge of the hull.

Kano grabbed a rope and began to haul, arm over arm, bringing the net back up from below. As it surfaced, it scooped up the fish that were floating on the surface and Kano found himself bringing in the haul alongside the Captain. They fell into a strange rhythm, their movements mirroring each other so that Kano would have looked to an observer as if he had been born and brought up on that very boat.

They dragged in the last net, the largest of the three, each of them hauling on a rope, arm over arm, in a perfect simpatico. They stood together, looking proudly at the huge mound of fish that they’d brought in.

‘Does it matter?’ asked Kano. ‘That they’re dead?’

‘No,’ said the Captain. ‘If we brought them up alive they don’t last long out of the water. Fish are normally dead by landfall, no matter what. The easiest way to kill a thing, that is. Just take it out of where it’s supposed to be.’

Kano rolled his eyes.

‘Oh, I get it, I’m supposed to learn something out here, am I? Something about knowing my place? Fitting in? The wise-old-man-of-the-sea routine, is that it?’

The Captain shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know about that.’

‘Bollocks.’

The Captain turned around and headed towards the little cabin at the stern of the boat, his shoulders hunched and his head down. Kano felt rain hit the back of his neck and pulled up his hood before he followed the Captain.

Inside the little cabin, the Captain was starting up the engine and beginning to turn the boat back towards Neverbury.

‘Is that it?’ asked Kano.

‘Yep.’

‘I thought fishing was supposed to be slow.’

‘Not the way I do it.’

Rain was hitting the deck outside hard now, puddles forming on the uneven surface. Kano wondered if any of the fish could feel it, if any of them weren’t quite dead and were watching the rainfall in the same way a drowning man might pray for a single breath of air. The thought summoned up the memory of the kid again, lying broken in the road, Kano kneeling over him and breathing air into his lungs. Kano shivered, shaking himself free from the memory that had occupied his mind unbidden.

‘So, you going to sign me off for tonight or what?’ he asked the Captain.

The Captain tossed a clipboard with a pen attached into Kano’s arms. A thick wedge of crinkled, weathered paper was clipped to it,

‘Help yourself,’ he said.

Kano looked down at the clipboard. On the top sheet of paper, there were six boxes arranged in a neat row down the page with his name printed at the top. Next to each was a space for the date and the Captain’s signature.

‘This is stupid. I could just tick them all.’

‘Sign it as well if you like,’ said the Captain gruffly. They won’t know the difference.’

Kano put the pen against the paper but stopped short of making a mark.

‘Problem?’ asked the Captain.

Kano didn’t answer.

The Captain pulled a battered flask and two enamel mugs out of a bag under his chair. He unscrewed the lid and poured steaming black coffee into the mugs. He passed Kano’s drink to him without asking how he took it.

‘Black, no sugar?’ asked Kano, taking the drink suspiciously.

‘That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah.’

The Captain sipped his coffee, the dark liquid staining his white beard. He coughed, a wet and throaty cough of a kind that Kano had heard before. It wasn’t a good cough. It wasn’t the kind that went away.

‘Don’t worry about me, son. I’ll live forever.’

‘I don’t care,’ shrugged Kano, taking a sip of his own coffee. It was good, to be fair. He kept it a secret from his mates, but Kano was a secret coffee snob.

They didn’t speak for a while and the only sounds in the cabin were the steady chugging of the old boat’s engine and the occasional rattling cough from the Captain. Neither one sounded like they were likely to reach the shore.

‘I know why you did it, by the way,’ said the Captain, breaking the silence. ‘Why you took the car. Why you didn’t run, like all your mates did.’

‘I was on my own,’ said Kano defensively. ‘Nobody else was in the car.’

‘Liar.’

‘What would you know about it?’

‘Maybe more than you think,’ said the Captain. ‘You don’t get to be the wise old man of the sea without making a few mistakes.’

Kano laughed.

‘What did you do? Nick a dinghy and run over an octopus?’

The Captain frowned and Kano stopped talking.

‘Sorry,’ he muttered under his breath.

‘You didn’t mean to run that kid down,’ said the Captain. ‘I know that. I know you weren’t surprised when your so-called mates all left you to it either. I know you’ve spent the last few months blaming anyone else but you; blaming the kid for not watching the road, blaming his parents for letting him out late at night.’

‘I get it,’ interrupted Kano. ‘But I’m the one to blame. You think I don’t know that?’

‘Oh, I think you do,’ said the Captain. ‘You just don’t know what to do about it.’

‘Isn’t it your job to tell me though?’ spat Kano. ‘That’s what you do, ain’t it? Bring kids out here, show them your monster, or whatever it is? You think you can scare us straight, is that it?’

‘I’ve never shown anyone what I showed you tonight,’ replied the Captain. ‘Normally, it’s just a lot of work, a lot of moaning, and after a few trips out most lads your age will do anything not to have to come back out to sea.’

‘Then why show me?’

The Captain shrugged. ‘Because that’s what happened. Not everything has to have a reason, you know? Not everything ties up at the end. I don’t think there’s some grand plan. Life isn’t like that.’

‘So, that’s it? That’s your big lesson?’

‘Sure.’

‘Sounds stupid.’

They were getting close to shore now, the lights of Neverbury getting brighter. The arcade on the Esplanade was lit up. Kano knew his mates would be there, hanging around under the flickering lights. A lot of Neverbury wasn’t safe after dark.

‘You know what karma is, kid?’ asked the Captain.

‘Yeah, kinda. We did Buddhism in school.’

‘That’s right,’ said the Captain, as if Kano had told him this already. He drifted off for a moment, lost in his own thoughts.

‘And?’

‘Well,’ said the Captain, coming back to the present moment. ‘The Buddhists, they have this thing called Samsara, you know what that is?’

‘No,’ grunted Kano.

‘The endless cycle of birth, suffering, death, and rebirth,’ said the Captain, as if he were quoting from something he’d committed to memory. ‘They reckon we all go around and around, trying to learn, trying to evolve.’

‘We don’t though, do we?’

‘No,’ said the Captain, a sad smile peeping out from inside his beard. ‘No, we don’t. Life just goes on. Things happen. One thing after another, all linked together but with no real pattern. There’s no great design, no grand plan, no end in sight. At least, not for us.’

The Captain reached over and eased back on the boat’s throttle. ‘Speaking of which . . .’

The boat coasted towards the narrow jetty they had cast off from. A van was waiting, the local fishmonger eager to collect the night’s catch.

‘Well, this has been . . . whatever, but I guess I’m off,’ said Kano. ‘See you next month.’

‘Aren’t you going to tick your sheet off?’

Kano picked up the clipboard. He felt the thick wedge of paper under his fingers. Each sheet was another kid, sent out with the Captain to pay off their debt, earn their redemption, to learn something out there on the sea. Kano wondered who they had been. He lifted the sheet of paper that had his name on it and began flicking through the names. Some of them he knew as names in the stories he’d heard around Neverbury, their legends living on long after they had faded away. The Captain watched Kano as he flicked through, looking at dates and the names, taking a tour back through Neverbury’s most wanted.

It was on the last sheet that he froze, his face wrinkled in confusion. He looked at the Captain.

‘What’s this?’ he asked, holding up the sheet. It was old and faded, decades of salty sea air eating at the paper and ink, but the name was still clear.

‘Paul Kane,’ said Kano. ‘That’s my name.’

‘Mine too,’ said the Captain, bringing the boat to a stop. He turned off the engine, took out the key, and hung it up over the wheel.

‘What do you mean, it’s your name too?’

The Captain shrugged off his oilskin. Underneath, he was wearing a faded hoodie identical to Kano’s.

‘Samsara,’ he whispered. ‘The endless cycle. It’s just like I said, son. I used to be you.’

The Thing Below

Sir Algernon Neverbury had always hated the desert. He hated the heat, he hated the sand, he hated the insects, the burning winds and the freezing nights. He wouldn’t be here if he didn’t have to be, but he did have to be. Featherstone claimed that his dig had discovered something that would change the course of history. As Featherstones’ most significant backer, it was natural that Sir Algernon be invited to see the mysterious discovery. For his own part, Sir Algernon was also very keen on history. He liked it just the way it was.

Featherstone had done his best to turn the interior of his tent into a replica of an Englishman’s study, heavy campaign furniture sitting on thick rugs that fought valiantly against sinking into the sands, all surrounding a large table that was piled up with maps, documents, books, and various small finds from the dig. Two wing-backed leather chairs sat on either side of a small drinks table, Featherstone comfortably ensconced in one, bedecked in his safari suit and pith helmet, a brandy and cigar in hand. Sir Algernon chose to stand but didn’t turn down a snifter of brandy. It was his money paying for it, after all.

‘Quite the set-up, don’t you think?’ boasted Featherstone. ‘My own slice of good old England out here in the godless desert. Have you ever been out here before, Neverbury?’

‘Once,’ replied Sir Algernon. ‘And the last thing I’d call it is godless.’

‘Poppycock!’ scoffed Featherstone. ‘Don’t tell me you subscribe to all this heathen nonsense about curses and what-not? I’ve got enough trouble keeping the labourers under control.’

Sir Algernon strode across the tent and helped himself to a glass of brandy.

‘To the gods above and the thing below,’ he said, raising his glass to Featherstone.

Featherstone raised his glass in return and drained it. ‘What sort of a toast is that?’ he asked, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his jacket. ‘Something you learnt out here?’

‘Something from back home, actually. Old family tradition’ replied Algernon.

A heavy-set man in work clothes and boots lifted up the flap of the tent and poked in his bald head before Featherstone could ask any more questions. He was burnt from the sun and sweating like a bag of overripe fruit going bad. Sir Algernon noted his wide, flat nose and cauliflower ears, a legacy of violence written on the man’s face. ‘Doctor Featherstone? It’s ready,’ grunted the man before disappearing back outside the tent.

‘Capital!’ exclaimed Featherstone, hopping up from his seat.

‘Come along, my dear Neverbury. Come and see.’

The dig site itself was spread over a wide area, a confusing hotchpotch of tents and campfires. The fresh white canvas and linens of the imported British tents mingled with the hessian tents of the local workers. Torches burned everywhere, fighting a losing battle against the pitch darkness of the desert. The smell of spiced meats and strong coffee was everywhere, barely masking the stink of sweat and blood that were the critical lubricants of manual labour in Sir Algernon’s experience.

The bald-headed man led the way, clearing a path for Featherstone and Sir Algernon, pushing and shoving anyone who was in his way. A thick, brutal-looking whip was looped at his hip and Neverbury suspected it had been well used during the course of the dig.

‘Doctor?’ asked Neverbury quietly. ‘I didn’t know you’d qualified.’

‘Academics,’ grumbled Featherstone. ‘Don’t trust anyone without the right letters after their name. Had to get father to write a letter, pull a few strings.’

‘I see.’

‘What was your school, Neverbury?’ asked Featherstone. ‘Eton? Harrow?’

‘Overseas,’ answered Neverbury, in a tone that made it clear that a more fulsome answer would not be forthcoming. ‘I was educated overseas.’

They began to follow the bald man up an incline that had been boarded with wooden steps every few feet. At the top, a circle of torches was burning, illuminating the central dig site. Neverbury felt eyes on him as he climbed, whispers between the dig workers as he passed.

‘Superstitious heathens,’ scoffed Featherstone. ‘They think every foreigner’s the devil.’

‘Well, they’ll be right eventually, I suppose,’ replied Neverbury. ‘Somebody has to be him.’

They reached the top, a wide circular void dropping away from them into the earth. Sand tumbled from the edges as carpenters worked to shore up the sides of the shaft. A ramshackle series of platforms joined by ladders and rickety staircases spiralled downwards into the darkness, more torches lighting the way. In the centre of the shaft, tens of feet down from the rim, the head and shoulders of an enormous statue rose up from the ground. Carved from dark stone, the head was at least twelve feet in height. A small group of workers were chiselling at the statue, breaking away rock and sand that was encrusted onto its face.

A worker looked up from the nearest platform as Neverbury and Featherstone peered down into the darkness and gasped. Pointing, he tugged at the man working next to him, jabbering unintelligibly. The second man looked up and, upon seeing Neverbury and Featherstone, made an elaborate sign with his hands across his face and chest before hurrying away, scrambling up a ladder out of the dig shaft and scurrying down the slope away from them. The first man followed, never taking his eyes off Neverbury and Featherstone.

‘Bloody hell,’ muttered Featherstone. ‘There go another two!’

The bald man unhooked his whip from his belt and let the cruel leather unfurl itself.

‘You want me to bring them back, Doctor Featherstone?’

Sir Algernon shifted, putting out his arm to block the man’s path.

‘Leave them,’ he said firmly.

‘Right you are, sir,’ the bald man grunted and began to wind his whip up.

‘You’ll do yourself no good by showing them kindness,’ said Featherstone bitterly. ‘That’s your money running off down that hill, you know. Better they get a taste of Bernard’s whip than they spread their insubordinate ways to the rest of them.’

Sir Algernon headed for the ladder, striding confidently over the shifting sands.

‘Sir Algernon?’ enquired Featherstone. ‘Where are you going? You can see the colossus quite well from here.’

‘But much better from down there,’ replied Sir Algernon, as his foot found the first rung of the wooden ladder and he began to climb down. Featherstone hurried after him, muttering under his breath.

‘I had a carriage once,’ said Sir Algernon as he climbed down, ‘Frightful thing, damned uncomfortable, always late, never got me to where I needed to be on time. The driver was a man named Savage, and he was the most horrendous brute. Whipped the horses like a man possessed but never got an ounce more speed out of them.’

He reached the first platform and waited patiently as Featherstone climbed awkwardly down after him. The man’s hands trembled on every rung, his legs rubbery and weak. Sir Algernon wondered if Featherstone ever came down into the dig itself like this or if he simply waited in his well-appointed tent for finds to be brought to him.

‘Your point being?’ asked Featherstone as he arrived, his pallor sickly in the torchlight.

‘One day, I took his crop from him and gave him the kind of thrashing he’d been giving the horses,’ replied Sir Algernon. ‘After that, my carriage was never late again.’

Sir Algernon started his next descent, his grip and footing firm.

‘I don’t quite get what you’re driving at?’ called Featherstone, looking nervously down.

‘Perhaps you will later, if you give it some more thought,’ replied Neverbury. ‘In the meantime, be sure to have your man follow us down, would you? Wouldn’t want the whip-hand idle, would we?’

Neverbury reached the bottom of the shaft a few minutes later, his boots sinking into the sand as he dropped the final few feet to the ground. It was dark, darker than it should have been, as if the walls of the shaft were somehow leeching the warmth and light from the torches that were scattered plentifully around. Above, the circle of night sky that was visible from the bottom of the shaft was blank, devoid of moon or stars, just an expanse of ebon emptiness. It was disorienting, as if you were standing upside down on solid ground and the sky was its own bottomless pit that you might tumble headlong into and fall forever.

Sir Algernon watched the three workers who were chipping away the stone that had encrusted itself on the colossus, painstakingly removing it piece by piece. The carved stone beneath was as black as the void above, etched in places with inscriptions in silver and gold. The hands of the workers trembled as they worked. Neverbury recognised their fear. They weren’t afraid of damaging the statue. They were afraid of the statue itself.

Featherstone arrived, his legs quivering as he descended the final ladder. His man was behind him, the rungs creaking under his weight.

‘How good of you to join me,’ said Sir Algernon icily.

‘It doesn’t pay to trust these platforms,’ griped Featherstone. ‘More than a few of the diggers have fallen. Shoddy workmanship.’

‘The lucky ones die when they hit the bottom,’ grunted Featherstone’s man. ‘The unlucky ones survive. For a while, anyway.’

Sir Algernon didn’t reply, turning his attention instead to the head of the colossus. He approached it slowly, not fearfully but with a reverence that not even the trembling workers exhibited. They shuffled sideways, making space for him as he reached out to touch it, running his fingers along the smooth surface, feeling the gentle undulations of the engravings. It was exquisite work, craftsmanship the like of which, perhaps, the world was no longer capable.

‘I’ve had the best academics down here,’ bragged Featherstone. ‘Had to blindfold them, of course, make sure we don’t wake up to find ourselves besieged on all sides by rival digs.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Sir Algernon. ‘One tends to forget that the pursuit of knowledge is not for the benefit of all mankind.’

‘Not that it matters,’ griped Featherstone. ‘None of them have a clue what it says.’

‘Fear the man with sand for blood. Fear his shadow, cast without light.’

‘What?’ blurted Featherstone.

‘That’s what it says,’ said Sir Algernon, tracing a finger down a line of symbols that ran down the side of the statue’s head. ‘Fear him more than the gods above. Fear him more than the thing below.’

As Sir Algernon spoke, the stone that was encrusted on the face of the colossus cracked and fell away, crumbling into sand. Beneath, the face revealed was not that of any god but of a man. One particular man.

The workers dropped their tools and backed away, falling to their knees in supplication, babbling prayers and incantations.

‘Impossible!’ gasped Featherstone. ‘How?’

‘Benefits of an overseas education,’ said Sir Algernon, admiring the face of the colossus.

Featherstone drew his revolver but his hand was shaking too much to hold it, his fingers twisting like restless vipers. The firearm tumbled from his grasp and landed in the sand.

‘Stay away from me!’ screeched Featherstone, scrambling backwards and climbing the first ladder out of the pit. He climbed quickly, arm over arm, far more afraid of what was in the bottom of the shaft now than of the fall into it. Sir Algernon watched calmly as Featherstone reached the first platform and began scaling up to the next.

The bald man, Featherstone’s man, unfurled his whip from his belt.

‘Is it time, Sir?’ he asked.

‘Yes, Savage, I believe it is.’

The bald man, Featherstone’s man who was Neverbury’s man, cracked the whip upwards. The cruel leather reached out, wrapping itself around Featherstone’s ankle. With a harsh tug, Savage hauled Featherstone off the platform and out over the pit. He grasped desperately for the platform, his hands clawing at the air, before he came crashing down. His body collided with the forehead of the colossus with a sickening wet crack, then bounced and rolled onto the sand.

Sir Algernon stood over him, watching as he gasped for breath.

‘What happens now?’ asked Savage, joining Sir Algernon to look down at his former employer.

‘I believe the lucky ones die when they hit the bottom,’ replied Sir Algernon.

‘I meant with the dig, Sir?’

Sir Algernon smiled. What Savage lacked in a sense of humour he more than made up for in ruthless efficiency these days.

‘Close it down,’ replied Sir Algernon. ‘Fill in the hole and bury it all again. Bury Featherstone with it and pay the workers for their silence. Make it as if we were never here.’

‘First part’s easy enough,’ replied Savage. ‘The workers will be glad to be away from here, they never wanted to come out here anyway. But what about the academics? He’s had a lot of them down here. They’ve seen it.’

‘Was it true what he said, that he’d blindfolded them?’

‘Yeah, that’s true enough.’

‘Then the good so-called Doctor Featherstone has done our work for us. Let them talk. The story of the curse will become bigger than the facts of the dig. Let it become a legend.’

Sir Algernon turned and looked at the colossus as Savage headed up the ladder and out of the pit. The likeness really was remarkable.

Return to Neverbury

Helen woke up in her own bed, but not in the cottage that she knew.

The bedroom had the same dimensions, the same windows in the same place, the same door, and the same crack through the ceiling plaster that would have worried her in the night if she hadn’t had so many other things to worry about. She knew it was the same room, but it would also never be the same room. Just like before, this would now be the place where ‘it’ happened. For the second time, Helen and Tim’s home was a crime scene.

But that wasn’t the only difference.

The rug was gone, and the curtains had been changed. Helen’s brain painted in ghost images of her, struggling with her attackers, replaying the last moments of memory she had. Something hitting her. Her fall. Her head hitting the dressing table.

No rug, new curtains. Blood spatter on the wall, painted over but leaving a patch of brighter, cleaner wall than before. Marks on the door, scratches in the wood. Someone was dragged out of here. Someone big.

Helen’s mind started to paint in other details, things that she had seen but that she knew weren’t possible. A dark shape, fast moving, taking her attackers one by one, dragging them out to the landing.

The landing where Tim was.

She shook her head, blinked, tried to clear the cotton wool and marshmallow out of her brain as it wallowed in the remnants of unconsciousness.

How long had she been out?

Who had put her into bed?

And why was the room full of flowers?

Strangest of all were the flowers, not the usual type that you find by a bed when someone is convalescing, but ragged bunches of heather and bramble, tied crudely and shoved into vases and glasses and jugs and the only two decent tea mugs that Helen and Tim owned. The room was heady with the scent of them—the smell of lavender and aniseed and wet wood. Helen felt her eyes droop as the scent almost overwhelmed her.

‘Tim,’ she said. She had expected her voice to cry out, clear and strong, but there was only a croak, the sound of an instrument that hadn’t been played in some time. She licked her parched lips, felt something like dry leaves in her throat as she swallowed.

Out on the landing, there was a rattle of crockery. Helen tensed in the bed as Mabel bumped the door open and tottered in, a heavily laden tray in her hands. A proper teapot, small cups on saucers with birds painted on the sides, slices of sticky lemon drizzle cake, and a wobbling plastic IV bag.

Helen flexed her arm and felt the IV in the back of her hand. There was a numbness that ran from it into her. She traced the line up to a shrivelled bag hanging from a rusty frame next to the bed. Startled, she tried to sit up, but found she didn’t have the strength to lift herself up in the bed.

‘Typical,’ grumbled Mabel playfully. ‘I’ve barely left your bedside and you wake up the moment I turn my back!’

‘What happened?’ asked Helen weakly. ‘Where’s Tim?’

‘Take your time,’ cooed Mabel. ‘You had quite a big bump on the head, dear, amongst other things. You’re lucky I was here.’

Mabel pushed the tray onto Helen’s bedside table, forcing various vases and jugs aside. She picked up the IV bag and expertly swapped it over, putting the drained one onto the tray. ‘They said it’s important to keep you hydrated,’ she said. ‘Although, personally, I prefer a good cup of tea. A proper brew and a slice of cake—that will put you back on your feet.’

Helen tried to sit up again, gritting her teeth as she forced her sleeping muscles awake and back into service. Her body felt as if it were receiving her messages with a satellite delay, then putting all of her requests before a committee to be thoroughly discussed before being acted upon. It didn’t matter. She knew what she had to do. She had to get up. She had to find Tim.

Mabel tutted. ‘Fine, if you’re going to insist.’

The old woman slid her arms underneath Helen and lifted her up. They were strangely hard, like being lifted up in the arms of a statue. Mabel plumped up the pillows behind Helen and, before she could ask any other questions, picked up a cup of tea from the tray and held it to Helen’s lips.

‘Drink,’ said Mabel, tipping the liquid forward and nodding encouragingly.

Helen’s nose wrinkled and she tightened her jaw instinctively. Whatever was in the cup didn’t smell like anything she’d normally drink. It smelt of earth, and spice, and something else that Helen couldn’t quite place but that tickled the fringes of her memory.

‘It’s none of your bag rubbish,’ said Mabel defensively. ‘It’s proper bramble tea. Picked and dried the brambles myself, just like my mother taught me. This will get you up and about, just you wait and see.’

Mabel tipped the cup again and Helen had no choice but to drink. The hot, bitter liquid filled her mouth and, true to Mabel’s word, she did feel herself start to come back to life. Something in the tea warmed her numb extremities and sent a fizzing message to her brain that sharpened her focus. She began to move, small movements that sought out the aches and pains in her body. The satellite delay seemed to diminish, allowing the reports to come in from across the territory of Helen’s body of various injuries slowly healing. She knew this feeling. She’d been here before, but in a hospital bed in an ICU, armed police outside her door.

No police now. Just Mabel.

‘Now,’ said Mabel, putting the cup down. ‘You’re going to have a lot of questions; about what happened, about your young man, and about what happens next.’

‘Next?’

Mabel smiled, her jagged teeth the colour of bramble tea.

‘It’s good that you’re focussed on the future. That’s sure to help. The Village Council aren’t as backwards as some people might say, you know. In lots of ways, they’re actually very progressive. Always looking forward. Always thinking about the future. About what’s coming . . .’

‘What do the Village Council want with me?’ asked Helen. ‘We were attacked, we need the police. There has to be—’

‘Well,’ interrupted Mabel, placing a hand on Helen’s forearm, her grip cold and hard. ‘After . . . what happened, they had to reconsider their position on us having no police in Neverbury. There was some resistance, let me tell you, but . . . they made the right decision in the end.’

Mabel smiled again and looked expectantly at Helen, like a parent waiting for a child to open a long-awaited Christmas present.

‘And?’

‘It’s you, dear!’ said Mabel, beaming. ‘You’re going to be our new sheriff!’

Thanks for Reading

I hope you enjoyed reading ‘Welcome to Neverbury’. I had a huge amount of fun writing it.

Now, the begging starts… if you could find the time to leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads, that would mean a lot. Reviews are the fuel behind the algorithms that control which books you see on Amazon, so if you liked this book then I’d really appreciate you giving it a boost with a review. Plus, being an author can be a solitary business and hearing from readers is always welcome. (Unless you hated this book but somehow made it to the end anyway, in which case maybe let’s just part with an awkward silence at this stage, okay?)

You can also catch up with me on social media or join my mailing list. Mailing list subscribers get access to free books, very occasional news, and the odd joke. (By which I mean that is strange, as well as being infrequent)

Everything you need to contact me is on my website – https://www.chrislynch.link

You can also find links to all of my other published books on my website at https://www.chrislynch.link/out-now or on my Amazon author page https://www.amazon.co.uk/~/e/B071KQF876

About the Author

Chris Lynch writes novels and short stories, including a number of Doctor Who spin-offs featuring Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and characters from the “Haisman Universe”, reaching #1 on Amazon in multiple categories.

His book “Curse of the Mirror Clowns” was nominated for a Scribe award in 2019.

Chris has also co-written a feature film, “Offworld: Alien Planet”, currently attached to a major US distributor, as well as TV pilots, comic books, audio dramas, and a best-selling book on digital marketing.

He lives in Cardiff, South Wales with his wife and their twin sons. They continue to tolerate him.

You can connect with me on:

https://www.chrislynch.link

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https://chrislynchwords.substack.com

Also by Chris Lynch

The Best Christmas Ever

Christmas is the busiest time of the year, but this never seems to be a problem for the monsters and aliens that visit Lucy Wilson over the festive period!

Alongside her best friend Hobo, Lucy discovers one of her grandad’s old secrets, investigates a creepy haunted mansion, and gets a visit from a mysterious goatman called Krampus, who takes bad children away.

A collection of three stories set over the Christmases of 2018, 2019, and 2020. Defending Earth doesn’t stop for anything, not even Christmas!

But which Christmas is the best one ever?

The Lucy Wilson Mysteries is a Lethbridge-Stewart spin-off adventure and features licensed characters created for Doctor Who by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln.

The George Kostinen Mystery

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08JH951QC

With the fate of every reality hanging in the balance, the Accord sends Lethbridge-Stewart to a brand-new version of Earth.

His mission: to find Lucy Wilson. She is the final agent the Accord needs to fix the damage done to the quantum realm, but the world Lethbridge-Stewart finds himself in is quite unlike anything he’s ever seen before.

A dystopian nightmare, the UK is caught in a power struggle between the Clown Tithe, the deadly Kruge and the ever-mysterious Volpertinger.

Lethbridge-Stewart’s only ally in this nightmare world is a sixteen-year-old boy from Ogmore-by-Sea called George Kostinen. A boy who, in the real world, should be best friends with Lucy Wilson. Only is this reality – he’s barely heard of her!

How can Lethbridge-Stewart’s mission succeed when Lucy Wilson is a nobody? A girl who’s never even heard the name Lethbridge-Stewart before…

The George Kostinen Mystery will be followed by Foreword to the Past, which wraps up the Bloodlines saga, and then the final book of series seven which will see a return to the Schizoid Earth in I, Alastair.

Lucy Wilson: Curse of the Mirror Clowns

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07QV2WTS5

Lucy Wilson is just about getting used to life in Ogmore-by-Sea, but when a mysterious circus opens for one night only, the town suddenly finds itself overrun with invisible clowns and the gang are faced with their biggest mystery yet – the disappearance of Lucy Wilson herself.

Thankfully, they’ve got help – a mysterious stranger from another world with a special box that moves in time and space.

Curse of the Mirror Clowns was my first foray into the Haisman Universe and the world of Doctor Who, the completion of a childhood dream. I was delighted to find out that the book had been short-listed for a Scribe Award in 2019.