Ken Preston's Blog, page 8

Guilty Pleasures #1: Grizzly

When it comes to films, we all have our guilty pleasures.

Yeah, those films you know are rubbish that should not have passed the scriptwriting stage let alone gone into production. And I’m not talking here about loving a bad film because it’s bad, you know, that ‘it’s so bad it’s good’ type attitude. Some films are cool to like and having seen that particular film can be seen as a badge of honour. You’re part of a club.

But some films? Or that one particular guilty pleasure? That one you struggle to find anybody else who’s even heard of it, let alone seen it? That film you have to work hard explaining to other people that, yes, admittedly, it’s a crappy movie, but it does have some redeeming features?

It can be lonely loving and defending that kind of film.

That’s what I’m talking about when I talk about guilty pleasures.

I’ve got a whole closet full of them.

Right.

So.

Time to man up and show you the first one.

Grizzly.

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Now, I really shouldn’t like Grizzly. After all, it is a shameless rip off of my favourite film of all time.

Nuns On The Run.

Nope, that was a joke, obviously.

 

Jaws.

 

If you know me, or have followed my blog even sporadically, you will have realised a long time ago that I absolutely love Jaws and still consider it not only to be Steven Spielberg’s best film (sorry, Mr Spielberg) but also the greatest film ever made.

Now, I know you probably want to argue with me about this, and you have some other pick for title of THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER MADE, but no, we’re not going to discuss that today.

Why?

Because I’m right, and you’re wrong.

So you just need to get over it.

Anyway, back to Grizzly.

Rushed into production to cash in on the popularity of Jaws, Grizzly tells the story of a man-eating shark—no, sorry, grizzly bear—terrorising the popular holiday destination of Amity Island—nope, sorry again—a national state park. The Chief of police—wait, no, the national park’s chief ranger—wants the park to be closed but the mayor—apologies once more—the park supervisor, refuses. The chief ranger then teams up with an ichthyologist—nope, wrong again—naturalist to investigate the killings and head out onto the sea—sorry, I meant into the forest—with a tough old fisherman—wrong again—park guide in his battered old boat—nope, sorry—helicopter.

As you can see, the scriptwriter didn’t deviate much from the template he was working from. I have a sneaking suspicion he simply found himself a copy of the Jaws script and where it said shark he crossed it out and wrote grizzly bear instead.

I saw this film on its 1976 release, and I loved it. I think that’s understandable, when you consider that I was eleven or twelve years old and still riding high on the thrill that had been watching Jaws the previous year. You kids these days, with your streaming and films on demand, with your multi-channel TVs and your DVDs, you’ve got it easy. Back in the olden days, when a film finished its run at the cinema that was it, there was no other way of seeing it again until it was sold to a TV broadcaster. And the gap between a film being released at the cinema and then debuting on TV was up to five years!

So I was growing desperate for some more people-chomping monster type action.

Even as young as I was, even before I set foot in the cinema and planted my skinny backside in the seat and waited for the lights to go down and the curtains to open and reveal the screen, I suspected Grizzly would be a terrible film. There were two reasons for this.

One, it was an obvious rip off of Jaws.

Two, this was the 1970s, era of the exploitation movie. And we were loving it. In fact, I’m pretty sure it was that same summer we also saw that great double bill Carquake and The Giant Spider Invasion.

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You’re probably unfamiliar with Carquake (original title Cannonball) but you will recognise some names attached to it: David Carradine, Sylvester Stallone and Martin Scorsese amongst others.

The less said about The Giant Spider Invasion the better.

Carquake though, that deserves its own post, so we will leave it there and head back to that National Park being terrorised by a grizzly bear.

Christopher George played the part of Kelly, the park ranger. No Roy Scheider, he was still a craggy faced, decent actor who knew he was starring in a big pile of steaming grizzly shit but, hey, it was work. And he was reunited with Richard Jaeckel, who was probably best known for his role in Baywatch, and Andrew Prine who is probably best known for, erm, Grizzly. These three actors had previously worked together on Chisum, a John Wayne film.

Christopher George also went on to star in The Exterminator, and this movie’s tagline was then taken by James Cameron and used in his 1984 breakthrough film, The Terminator.

‘I’ll be back,’ Schwarzenegger famously says, in The Terminator.[image error]‘If you’re lying, I’ll be back,’ The Exterminator’s Robert Ginty tells his victim, as said victim dangles over an industrial mincing machine.

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Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ‘I’ll be back’ was then referenced again a fair few years later by Arnie in Twins, only this time Ginty’s line was repeated almost exactly word for word, ‘If you’re lying to me, I’ll be back.’

Honestly, I could (and do) spend hours of my life disappearing down these rabbit holes.

The cinema I saw Grizzly in was packed, mostly with children. When I had seen Jaws the theatre had been packed then too, but that was where the resemblance between the two experiences ended.

When watching Jaws the audience had sat enthralled in a communal silence, interrupted only by gasps, screams, nervous laughter and finishing with a mighty roar and thunderous applause at the end.

The Grizzly screening was a much more riotous affair. Things were thrown at the screen, popcorn went flying as did fountains of fizzy drinks, and I’m amazed we heard any of the film’s dialogue over the talking, laughing and yelling that went on.

It wasn’t a cinema screening, but more of a wild party which happened to have a film playing in the background.

But somehow, despite all the noise and the distractions, I still managed to see enough of that film I sort of fell in love with it.

Yes, it’s dreadful.

And yes, the eleven foot Kodiak bear nicknamed Teddy that performed as the killer grizzly actually looks rather cute when he gets his first reveal. In the early scenes the film’s director, William Girdler, who also directed Three on a Meathook, Asylum of Satan, Project Kill starring Leslie Nielsen and The Manitou with Tony Curtis, was obviously trying the Spielberg trick of hiding the monster to heighten the tension. Unfortunately it doesn’t work, and that paw that swings out from the side of the camera frame to strike at the beautiful young woman who is screaming her head off looks laughably fake.

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Besides, the film’s trailer did away with any subtlety there might have been and fully revealed Teddy the Kodiak bear from the get-go.

Even so, as bad as it is, Grizzly did tremendous box office, earning over fifty times its production costs and raking in $39,000,000.

With Grizzly making so much money a sequel was inevitable, starring John Rhys-Davies, Louise Fletcher, and the teenage George Clooney, Charlie Sheen and Laura Dern. Due to a legal wrangle and the producer running off with the production money Grizzly 2: The Concert never got released, but you can catch clips of it online if you really feel the need to punish yourself in this way.

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Grizzly remains a tiny blip in the history of movies, an independent feature that made big money in 1976 but was destined to be forgotten quickly, unlike the classic it slavishly impersonated.

I still sort of love it though.

And yes, I own a copy on DVD.

The post Guilty Pleasures #1: Grizzly appeared first on Ken Preston.

Why I Love The Hate U Give (and Why U Will Too)

My reading tastes are all over the place, much the same as my writing to be honest. Most of you coming here will know me through my Joe Coffin horror books, and some of you will know me through my Young Adult books. I bet not many of you read my romance books, though. Well, my reading covers wider ground than my writing, taking in not just horror and crime, but memoir, biography, comedy, and drama amongst others. But it’s Young Adult I wanted to talk about with you today, particularly The Hate U Give.

I picked this book up purely on the title, cover and blurb alone. I hadn’t heard of it before, I didn’t know it was being turned into a film, I had no preconceptions whatsoever.

All I can really pinpoint as part of my initial desire to read it was an intention to broaden my reading, and discover books by more diverse authors.

Yes, I’ll admit, I typically read books by middle aged white guys.

Reading a novel with a teenage black girl as the protagonist appealed to me, and seemed like a good place to start.

And then it sat on my shelf for a long time.

At some point I started borrowing books off Thing Two (age eleven when I started borrowing his books, but now twelve). I started with The Boy in the Tower, a story about Triffid like creatures destroying a city, all the while watched by a young boy trapped in his apartment in a tower block.

Then it was Time Travelling with a Hamster, which I enjoyed for its loopy storyline, its humour and its serious themes of life and death.

After finishing that I read The Goldfish Boy, about another boy trapped in his room, this time by inner monsters (OCD), not physical external threats, who believes he is the best person to solve the mystery of a missing toddler.

And then I read The Hate U Give.

Honestly, this middle aged white guy hasn’t read a better book so far this year.

Starr Carter is a 16-year-old who lives in two worlds: the poor black neighbourhood, Garden Heights, where she has grown up with her family and the fancy suburban, and mostly white, prep school she attends. In Garden Heights Starr is herself, but at Williamson Prep, the majority white school her parents send her to, she is Starr ‘Version Two’, determined to not draw attention to herself or be the ‘token’ black girl.

One night, Starr goes to a party in Garden Heights and she meets her childhood best friend, Khalil. When he drives her home after the party, they are stopped by a policeman. Khalil is forced to get out of the car and the police officer shoots him, even though he is unarmed. Soon afterwards, his murder becomes a national headline. He’s called a thug, a drug dealer, and a gangbanger.

Starr now has to find not only the courage to speak up, but find her own voice to speak up with.

I love Starr. She has one of the most distinct fictional voices I have ever come across, she’s bright, intelligent, funny and conflicted.

As a middle aged white guy, how did I relate to this black, teenage girl? Surprisingly well, actually. Many of Starr’s concerns, such as peer pressure, searching for an identity of one’s own when turning from a child into an adult, issues around sex and image, are universal and mostly timeless.

I could relate to much of what she goes through in this story.

But then there is the issue of race, of being a minority, of having to explicitly say, ‘Black Lives Matter’ when, actually, it shouldn’t need saying at all.

Even on the issue of race I can relate a little to Starr. Growing up in a working class town in the north of England where the norm was hard drinking, smoking, football and betting on horse racing I felt like an alien creature abandoned on earth with my sensitive artistic ways, always reading or writing or drawing.

And yet everyone was so white.

There was a casual racism around at the time. I remember a black man walking past our house and my father muttering something about how he should go back home where he belonged. Or the single ethnic minority pupil at our primary school, a tiny Pakistani girl, who was told by one of the other children that God had left her under the grill too long.

Thinking back on that now reminds me of the headmistress of that school, who told this boy off for what he had said. I can remember sitting in a darkened room, the class silent as she showed us slides of her travels around the world.

At least someone tried to educate us, give us a broader world view.

There have been a few times when I had an inkling of how it must feel to be in a minority through the colour of my skin.

The first was at a friend’s wedding. There were two of us pale skinned people, and everybody else was as black as midnight. Then there was the Sikh wedding I attended with my wife and two boys.

Another time was a visit to Uganda. Six white guys in a village of black people.

For once we were the object of attention, of curiosity. The children followed us around, the teenage girls ran their fingers down my white forearms, giggling, and I felt like an exhibit at a zoo.

But of course those experiences were fun and brief. They only gave me a glimpse into what the minority experience is like, because I came home again.

And while we were there no one told us we couldn’t use that toilet like everyone else, that we had to use the one around the back.

No one told us we had to stand up and make room for the black man.

We didn’t have to tell anyone that ‘White Lives Matter’.

And no one got shot.
For being white.

(In fact, to digress for a moment, we were treated incredibly well in all those situations. At both weddings we were warmly welcomed in and in Uganda we were treated like royalty, down to having had their goat slaughtered for the meal they served us and buying toilet paper specifically for our visit. Think about that for a moment. This village had pit latrines in sheds for toilets, and cleaned up by washing with soap and water, but the family we visited went and bought a roll of toilet paper for us to use.)

It’s not easy, having been born into a the power base of a culture (in this case male and white) to put yourself in the shoes of the ‘minority’. It takes work to imagine how it must feel to be on the other side.

And yet, with The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas manages to pull off an amazing feat of literary magic by putting us in Starr’s skin, letting us share in that experience of ‘otherness’, but without being condemnatory or strident, without judging. Partly she manages this by keeping the cop who pulls the trigger on Khalil anonymous. We know him mainly by his number, as Starr memorises it as he stands before her, pointing his gun at her in the aftermath of the killing.

Police in South Carolina have protested at the inclusion of The Hate U Give in a school’s summer reading list.

“Everybody is trying to make the law enforcement out to be a bad guy,” said John Blackmon, president of the local police union. “We’re not the bad guys. We’re trying to help.”

But that isn’t what the book is doing, it is far more nuanced than that. There is in fact a very good, and black, policeman in the book who is trying to do the right thing.

The Hate U Give was also banned at a school in Texas, although the school claimed that this was due to the use of profanity, drug use and offensive language, not anti-police sentiment.

Ironically, the book’s central theme (or one of them) is about Starr finding her own voice and speaking up, being heard, and being allowed to be heard.

The book was partly inspired by Tupac Shakur’s Thug Life, the meaning of which is open to interpretation but is widely seen as The Hate U Give Little Children Fucks Everybody.

In one scene Starr and her father, Mav, discuss this.

“You know ‘bout that?”
“Yeah. Khalil told me what he thought it means. We were listening to Tupac right before…you know.”
“A’ight, so what do you think it means?”
“You don’t know?” I ask.
“I know. I wanna hear what you think.”
Here he goes. Picking my brain. “Khalil said it’s about what society feeds us as youth and how it comes back and bites them later,” I say. “I think it’s about more than youth though. I think it’s about us, period.”
“Us who?” he asks.
“Black people, minorities, poor people. Everybody at the bottom in society.”
“The oppressed,” says Daddy.

I love The Hate U Give.

Thoughtful, intelligent, entertaining, distinctive.

Relevant.

You will also be able to go and see the film later this year, but I recommend you read the book first.

The post Why I Love The Hate U Give (and Why U Will Too) appeared first on Ken Preston.

Why Do We Enjoy Horror?

Aren’t there enough horrors in the real world? Why do we feel the need to go and experience even more through reading scary books or watching horror films? It’s a question I sometimes still ask myself every so often. A reality check, in a way.

 

I know some people who abhor horror movies and books.

In fact, I’m married to one of them.

 

And I can understand that aversion.

People get pleasure out of reading about and watching the most horrific and violent crimes being committed in front of them? Or monsters and zombies chewing people up, dismembering them, all for our entertainment?

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I’m not sure I would get on this train – You might never get off again!

It sounds a little strange when you put it like that.

A little disturbing, maybe.

And yet, the need is there. If it wasn’t, how do we explain away the billion dollar horror industry, dedicated to scaring us and grossing us out? It’s not just books and films, but computer games and comics and theme park rides and TV shows. In the series Dexter we even had a serial killer who was the good guy!

I have always been attracted to scares. I still remember my sister’s boyfriend, on a night when they were babysitting me, telling me a spooky story about an old woman who rises from her grave to get revenge. Scared the hell out of me, and this just before I was due to go to bed. This nasty little tale designed to have me cowering wide eyed beneath the bedsheets all night has stuck with me so much over the years I finally turned it into a story of my own.

Then, at secondary school, there was my fascination with Dracula, and after that my premature exposure to the books of Stephen King and James Herbert.

Guy N Smith reduced to me a blubbering wreck with Night of the Crabs, Stephen King induced in me an aversion to looking in bathroom mirrors and James Herbert simply had my mouth hanging open in disbelief at the violence and sex he threw my way.

With the arrival of a VHS player into our house I had access to all those films I had been hearing about but been unable to see before now. Alien, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exterminator (If you’re lying, I’ll be back), Suspiria and others that I had never even heard of before.

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Unbelievable I know, but this was a serious bit of hi tech kit when I was a teenager!

I revelled in it. I loved horror, tearing my way through James Herbert’s back catalogue in no time and staying up late at night to watch horror films.

In 1985, going through a tough time mentally and emotionally, I became a Christian, of the Born Again type.

And there was no room for horror in those circles. You had to be careful what you watched and read generally, and there was a form of unofficial and unspoken censorship that informed my life for the next fifteen years.

I missed out on a lot of good books and films during that period.

Did it do any good?

Was I a better person for staying away from all that ‘unedifying’ material?

Looking back now on that period of my life I think I can safely say it didn’t make any difference whatsoever. I met a lot of wonderful people who supported me through some tough times, but that imposed censorship on what I could read or watch? Ultimately, in terms of a broader world outlook, it did more harm than good.

Censorship is used to force a blinkered view upon a person by others in a higher authority.

Not something I support in any way.

Back to having a broader world view and free to read and watch whatever I wanted, I was curious to see what I had missed, particularly by Stephen King. By this point in my life I felt I had outgrown James Herbert, but King remained with me, and still does to this day.

But having been away from the horror scene for a while I came back a little more, I don’t know, wary perhaps? And questioning, why was I, even though part of a much larger community, attracted to horror?

Chris Nialls, founder of The London Horror Society, explains it this way,

To me, being frightened in a controlled way is almost like an extreme sport or roller coaster ride.

Chris watched Halloween aged eleven, and has been hooked on horror films ever since.

Do we get addicted to the thrills and the scares? Although we now very rarely find ourselves in positions of danger and genuine fear, there is a lot to worry about. Climate change, terrorism, and the economy, amongst many other issues.

Reading a book or watching a film is a form of escapism, but particularly so with horror. Once we emerge from the experience, the story completed, we are brought back to our own, familiar world. We have experienced the thrills of a scary situation, and yet we are safe, unharmed.

And for me it is not just a parade of blood and guts that makes a film scary (just the opposite in fact as those parades of gore can be very boring) but it is the emotional investment in the characters, and the depth of the story that make for a satisfyingly thrilling experience.

After going through hell with Louis Gage From King’s Pet Sematary, and even shouting at the pages as he began another cycle of the same bad decisions by the end of the novel I was emotionally wrung out and at my weakest as King delivered the book’s final line:

Okay, I’m not going to spoil it for you, but if you’ve read it you’ll know the line I mean.

This simple line sent a shiver of unease through me and brought the novel to a satisfyingly bleak ending. I was left thinking about that book for days, if not weeks, after finishing it. I was back in my relatively safe world, but a part of my consciousness was still abroad in King’s nightmarish world of reanimated animals. A story that achieves so much emotional resonance is a story worth telling.

Even if it is a horror story.

Or perhaps especially if it is a horror story.

 

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Steve Ditko, 1927 – 2018

I first met Spider-Man in the early 1970s. I would have been six or seven, and our next door neighbour, who worked at a newsagent’s shop, brought home a Spider-Man comic that hadn’t sold that week and gave it to me. Considering my life long love affair with Spidey ever since, I should imagine I was smitten as soon as I saw the cover.

Back in those days, when my mother still used a mangle to squeeze water out of washed clothes and the rag and bone man on his horse drawn cart was still a regular visitor on our street, getting your hands on an American, full colour comic was only slightly less difficult than finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

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What we British kids had to make do with were black and white reprints, the story lines several years behind their American counterparts.

But I loved those comics and so my father put in an order for The Amazing Spider-Man, and every Friday when I got home from school, there it was, the latest issue. And I would devour it in minutes.

At this stage in Spider-Man’s career John Romita Sr, or simply John Romita as he was known back then because John Romita Jr was still a kid and had yet to make his own mark on the world of comic book illustration, had been illustrating the Webslinger’s adventures for a couple of years. With a background in working for romance comics, Romita had at first seemed an unusual choice for a super hero book, but he soon became a fan favourite.

It was only when I started going back, looking for those adventures that I had missed, that I discovered Steve Ditko.

To be honest, at first I wasn’t that impressed.

Ditko gave Spider-Man’s action scenes a certain awkwardness in the way he posed them, whereas Romita’s drawings were much more fluid and naturalistic.

But as I worked my way through the Steve Ditko era back catalogue I gradually warmed to his illustrative style and came to appreciate it.

Ultimately I became a fan.

Since hearing the sad news about his death I have been looking through Ditko’s work again.

And I think some of his work should be hanging in art galleries.

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Adventures at Open Mics

I attended the National Writers’ Conference yesterday, one of my favourite bookish events of the year. Held in the Bramall Music Building at the University of Birmingham, the conference is a wonderful day of panels and talks and the chance to meet old friends and make new ones in the creative writing sector.

One of my favourite sessions of the day was Performing Writing, chaired by Antonia Beck, Birmingham Literature Festival Director, with poets Jo Bell, Bohdan Piasecki and poet and author Luke Kennard on the panel.

Having performed a fair few times at local open mic nights, and also being the co-host of Tilt Open Mic along with Rick Sanders, I was keen to hear what others more experienced than myself had to say on this subject.

What a brilliant session this turned out to be, my favourite of the three I attended. The panelists peppered their discussion with anecdotes and humour, and they worked well together. I don’t know if they had met before today but there was a lovely chemistry between them.

Anyway, this all got me thinking about my own adventures at open mic nights.

My very first performance was at Southcart Books, in Walsall. A tiny venue with me sitting and reading to a small group of people, I was nervous as hell. I can’t even remember what I read now, but I do remember thinking as I continued to read out loud, Everybody’s bored, I could just get up now and leave and nobody would notice because they have all tuned out.

Of course I didn’t, and I received a polite round of applause at the end which at least meant that no one had fallen asleep, or if they had they had woken up in time to clap.

Anyway, refusing to be put off, I continued to perform at Southcart until, about six months later, I performed for the first time on a stage and behind a microphone at Permission to Speak in Stourbridge, run by the wonderful Rob Francis.

Not knowing the crowd that well, having only been once before, I took the slightly risky decision to read How to Eat a Car, an outrageous, profanity laden, politically incorrect tale of a man attempting to eat a car.

You can read it yourself here if you haven’t come across it before.

Well, I got up there behind that mic and launched straight into my story. I might have told them the title, but I’m not sure.

When I got my first laugh I started to relax.

When I got my first eurghh of disgust I started enjoying myself.

When I got to the end and heard the gasps of horror, followed by riotous applause, well, I felt like a rock star.

That was it.

I was, and remain, addicted to performing at open mic nights.

But I don’t always get the reception I received for How to Eat a Car.

Take the night at Waterstones when I read a scene from my book, Joe Coffin Season Two.

The scene in question is a story within the novel’s story, and is narrated by one of the characters, which makes it nice and neat and self-enclosed, ideal for performing.

The problem was, with its (again) politically incorrect language and casual racism and sexism on the part of the narrator, it didn’t exactly fit comfortably with the beautiful, lyrical poetry that had been performed that evening.

In fact, I started off well by illustrating how out of place I felt with an anecdote involving my wife, her friends, dressing up, broom handles, a castle, the You’re a Pink Toothbrush, I’m a Blue Toothbrush song and a prayer meeting. I had the audience in the palm of my hand as they laughed helplessly, singer/songwriter Jessica Law almost falling off her chair she laughed so hard.

And then I read from Joe Coffin.

Well.

The room soon went quiet.

I do think there are a couple of funny passages in that scene. And I have got laughs before, especially the moment when the three men argue over the difference between a lightning bolt and a thunder bolt.

But the passage of writing does highlight the inherent racist attitudes of Danny ‘The Butcher’ Hanrahan in particular and with a couple of members of the audience being black I certainly felt uncomfortable when I took my seat again.

So, I received a polite round of applause and the evening continued and no one complained.

But I still think about that evening and my performance.

And how we separate the art from the artist, and what is suitable for performing and what isn’t, and how far should my choice of material to perform be dictated by the cultural makeup of the audience.

Well, there’s a whole new blog post to be written there, but not now.

What I do know is I will continue performing my work, looking for new audiences and venues and seeking more . . . what?

Validation?

I mentioned earlier that I was and remain addicted to performing at open mic nights.

And yes, there’s another whole new blog post waiting to be written about why that should be so.

But not today.

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Le Grandiose Michel Mysterieux

Over the last couple of weeks I have been sharing my abandoned children with you. Those novels I started but could not bring myself to finish, for whatever reason.

You’ve had Moonlight, my Victorian werewolf novel, and WT Stead and the Ripper, my Jack the Ripper novel (although, to be honest, it’s not really about Jack the Ripper) and I’ve had encouraging words about both. And demands that I pick up my pen (or computer keyboard, no wait, that doesn’t work, does it?) and finish both books off.

Which is very nice.

Anyway, before I do that, for the very final time (for the moment at least) I am going to parade one of my ill begotten, shunned children in front of all the world. Hopefully she will receive as lovely a reception as the other two.

Le Grandiose Michel Mysterieux is another of my Victorian set, supernatural tales. I only ever wrote the first chapter, which is down there below this rather lengthy introduction, but I worked on the characters and an outline. And for those Joe Coffin fans out there (yes, all two of you) Le Grandiose Michel Mysterieux is important because, whilst outlining this book, Stump and Corpse made their very first appearence.

They were both men, and they were grave robbers.

It was another seven years before those two surfaced from my unconscious mind, and became the Stump and Corpse we know and love in the Joe Coffin books.

You know what? I’ve waffled on long enough. Why don’t I just let you read the darn thing?

So here we are, Chapter One of Le Grandiose Michel Mysterieux.

Oh, some adult content by the way!

“But Tom, if you are going to write your novel about London life,” said Henri Ledentac, clouds of blue smoke billowing from his mouth and adding to the already malodorous atmosphere, “then surely you need to experience all the city has to offer, its underbelly as well as its refined mask of civilité, oui?”

“Yes, I suppose you are right,” Tom Nichols said, staring at the heaving mass of repellent bodies jostling past their corner table.

Ledentac had suggested their nocturnal visit to The Blue Dog, a mean, dilapidated public house occupying a cramped alleyway off the Ratcliffe Highway, earlier in the evening as a way of stimulating creative thought. Approached at night down a dimly lit street, one’s first sight of this most notorious of East End drinking dens is its tiny, cobwebbed windows. Resembling some ancient monster roused from a deep slumber its aged, yellow eyes glower fitfully from the darkness. A cracked, filthy sign hangs over the low doorway, its crude illustration of the mythical Greek beast Cerberus almost obliterated by the ravages of time. Only one of the dog’s three heads remains to scowl at any poor soul brave enough to walk beneath it and through the open doorway into an undoubted representation of hell.

Newcomers are met at the pubs’ threshold by suspicious glances and muttered oaths. Swarthy men in stained, dirty work clothes huddle a little closer together at their tables, and the painted prostitutes examine the outsiders for possible trade. The brown walls run with sweat and the mephitic atmosphere stings the lungs and the eyes. Warped beams run across the low ceiling, and behind the wainscoting and underneath the floors rats can be heard scuttling to and fro. A crabby, ancient fishwife sits by the blackened hearth, tending a miserable little fire. It is said she is the sister of the former landlord, who was deported to Australia after being convicted of murdering his wife. The man strangled the poor woman in her sleep and cut her body up in the bath. He placed her limbless and headless torso in a packing case in the bedroom, and her limbs in the cellar. The landlord’s sister opened the trunk and, discovering its gruesome contents, screamed loud and long, alerting the neighbourhood and the police to the murder. A search of the house by the police revealed its gruesome contents. No one ever found the head. Ask the old crone about the murder and she will open wide her stinking mouth, revealing her few remaining teeth sitting in her gums like blackened old tombstones, and cackle dementedly.

Tom and his good friend Ledentac sat in a corner of the smoky parlour at a small, rickety table, huddled over their pots of warm beer. Ledentac puffed languid clouds of smoke from his clay pipe, an ironic curl to his thin lips, and his heavy eyelids almost obscuring his dark pupils. “You must not be so timid, you have lived too long beneath the protective wings of your mother hen, non? It is time for you to spread your wings, to experience the world and all it has to offer you, and then you may write your novel, then you will write with passion and fire in your breast, with honesty and candour. Remember Tom, you are more than just a spectator in this world, you are a philosopher, an artist, and to make art you must immerse yourself in the object of your study.”

Tom took a sip of his warm beer, averting his face from Ledentac that he might not see the grimace of disgust he could not hide as the beer slid down his gullet and gathered in a heavy, sickening lump in his stomach.

“Look at these men and women, at their lives etched onto their faces. What stories they could tell, what tales of dangerous exploits and hard lives lived in the belly of this cité extraordinaire. I tell you my friend, your novel would write itself, you would need only to place pencil tip to paper for the inspiration to flow, for the words to tumble one over the other onto the page and become living, breathing things. You will be the literary sensation of London.”

“But for you it is so easy,” Tom said, glancing at his friend. “You have travelled already, you are comfortable with unfamiliar places and strange people. I, on the other hand…”

Ledentac waved a hand in a sign of languid dismissal. “Oui, this is true, yet you have only to prise open le coquille d’huître and partake of its delights and you will become a man. Be brave my friend, for the world has much to offer you, and you have much to tell the world.”

“But what do you suggest I do?” Tom said. He was a slim young man, his face long but handsome in an odd sort of way. His mother had told him he would be a pianist when he grew up, on account of his long fingers, but although he could play the piano passably well his passion lay only with the written word. Tom had arrived in London only a month ago, having been brought up in the quiet village of Wattleborough all his young life, and had no experience of the colourful city and its strange, exotic ways. The West End with its magnificent shops and gaudy advertisements, the streets blazing at night with gas lamps, and the hullabaloo of people of different nationalities, Jewish, Chinese Lascar, Indian, the Negroes, all bustling through the streets stinking one moment of effluence, the next of aromatic spices and cooking, all this intimidated him. Beside his world-weary friend, Tom looked gauche and uncomfortable.

Ledentac shrugged his shoulders, the corner of his mouth curling in an ironic smile, and said, “What must you do? You must follow your instinct. You must go with your heart, for every man has his own life to live, and it is not for any other to tell him what he must do, or how he must live it.”

Tom took another sip of the warm beer. His head had begun to spin, and yet he felt comfortable here in the presence of this unusual French man he hardly knew, in an East End pub drinking beer and surrounded by cutthroats and thieves, beggars and prostitutes. He ran his fingers through his dark hair and stretched his long, thin legs under the table.

He sat up straight again when he saw the woman with the white hair enter the public house. She wandered amongst The Blue Dog’s customers with a fluid grace, hardly seeming to touch the dirty, foul smelling bodies as she passed between them despite the crush of the crowd. Tom watched her entranced as she drew closer to the two young men. She wore a thin dress and a threadbare gown thrown over her shoulders. Her white hair, not grey but as white as pure, freshly fallen snow, framed her face and cascaded across her shoulders. She was young, and yet her hair gave her the disconcerting appearance of old age. But Tom could see the firm bust and the slim belly beneath her plain dress, her ample hips and her slender legs.

Ledentac noticed her too, and gripped Tom’s arm as he watched her pass.

“C’est une belle femme, oui?” he whispered, blue smoke dribbling from his lips. She was beautiful, yes, and yet Tom felt a stirring within him of deep offensiveness, as though the very essence of his being was repulsed in some indefinable way by this strikingly beautiful creature.

As he watched her open mouthed, hardly aware any more of his surroundings, the woman turned and fixed him in her gaze. Ledentac tightened his grip on Tom’s arm.

“Elle vous désire, mon ami. Le regard, ses yeux vous attirent, vous invitez à prendre de son corps.”

The woman turned and walked into the depths of the smoky parlour, disappearing between the costermongers, the sailors and the dockworkers. Tom stood up, his chair scraping along the floor strewn with hay. The beer and the gin he had consumed that evening took its toll on him, and he disregarded his natural caution and fear of the unknown. A small, still sober part of his mind remembered Dora, and protested weakly at this gross act of infidelity he was certain to commit. But the greater part of his consciousness, dull through excess of beer and noxious atmosphere, and hypnotised by that beautiful vision in white, smothered this small, feeble cry. Tom pushed through the crowd of drinkers, and behind him Ledentac slapped the table as he roared with laughter.

Tom quickened his pace, scared that he had lost her as soon as he had found her. Sweat sprung from his brow, and his clothes suddenly felt dirty and clammy. But deep in the pit of his stomach a fierce need clawed and pulled at him, a desire he had never felt before and consumed him above all else. He stumbled through a warped door and into a darkened passageway. At the end of the passage a solitary gas lamp illuminated a man pinning a woman against the damp brick wall, grunting with each animalistic thrust against her feeble frame. The woman whimpered, turning her head and looking at Tom. The young man ignored her. Before him an open door revealed a steep set of stone steps descending into darkness.

Standing at the top step he peered into the inky blackness, and held his breath. A flash of warm, yellow light rewarded his patience a moment later and, holding his hands out to run his fingertips along the damp, mildewed walls, he began his descent.

In the cellar he found a room. The girl with white hair crouched with her back facing him, the ridges of her spine clearly visible through the thin dress, and a soft glow haloed her body. She moved sideways and lit another candle, heedless of her visitor. Many candles decorated the small cellar, across the floor and over a brick built shelf, above which sat the open coal chute. The light grew in a soft intensity as more of the candles began burning, a flickering, shifting luminosity reminiscent of his dreams.

Tom remained standing at the bottom of the steps, watching this vision of disconcerting beauty as his desire grew. The candles gave off a scent, a mixture of exotic fragrances and spices. The scent seeped its way into his brain, lightening his body and his alcohol heavy limbs. Tom felt like he could float across the dank cellar to the white haired girl, his feet tripping across the lighted candles and barely disturbing the flames.

The girl turned and saw him. Her long hair fell across her face, her blue eyes gazing at him from behind tresses of pure white. She reached out a slender, pale arm and grasped his jacket, her fingers curling around the lapel, and drew him close. Behind her, in the flickering shadows cast by the smoking candles, Tom saw a dirty mattress lying on the floor. A cockroach scurried off the torn sheet and disappeared into a darkened corner. One of the candles burnt out with a sizzle.

The girl nuzzled her lips against his throat, one hand floating over the nape of his neck as her soft, warm breath goose bumped the flesh down his back. He felt her other hand running down his belly, over his shirt and down into his trousers. Her fingers found his erection, already wet with excitement. Moist lips found his, hot breath invading his mouth and her tongue darting across his, the taste of cinnamon and spices flooding his taste buds. He wrapped his arms around her, clutching her body tight, her small breasts pressing against his chest. As his desire drew to an uncontrollable climax she pulled away from the breathless young man and regarded him through hooded lids. In one smooth, swift movement she let her dress fall to the floor.

Tom drew in his breath, his chest contracting at the sight of her perfectly naked body. From her breasts and running down her flat belly and into the triangle of hair between her legs ran a series of symbols. Tom stepped closer and ran his trembling fingers over the unfamiliar shapes and letters. If this was an alphabet it came from no language he knew of, and the shapes bore no resemblance to natural geometry. Somehow their lines and curves, the corners and angles, obeyed an otherworldly rule, defying this world’s logic.

The girl had perfect skin, the pale, unmarked flesh of youth. She took Tom’s hand and ran it over her breasts and down the flat curve of her stomach. Taking him by the shoulders she lowered him onto the filthy mattress, pushing him down until he lay unresisting on his back. Hands tugged at his belt, pulling at his trousers until they were wrapped around his thighs. Slowly she mounted him, that white hair hanging over her bent head, obscuring her face. Tom began to pant, a pulse pounding in the back of his skull and threatening to give him a headache. The girl’s rhythmic movements grew in intensity and Tom reached up shaking hands to brush aside the curtain of white hair, that he could see the face of this vision.

For the first time he saw her eyes. She had the eyes of an old woman, grown old beyond all measure. An infinity of horror and grief lay behind those pupils, untold aeons of misery and pain.

Tom snapped his eyes shut, and clamped shut his jaws that he might not let free the scream building in his chest.

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W.T. Stead and the Ripper

Another week, another abandoned novel. I told you I had a fair few of these, didn’t I?

At the time I was writing this particular novel I was fascinated by anything to do with the Victorian period and had ambitions to write a story in which I weaved fiction with facts. There are a host of real, historical figures in W.T. Stead and the Ripper.

W.T. Stead was the editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, a crusading journalist who wasn’t above making the story as much as discovering it, a pacifist, a spiritualist and was last seen escorting children and women onto lifeboats on the Titanic.

I wrote forty thousand words on this book before giving up in frustration. Now that I look back on it some years later I can see that it needed a lot more work, yes, but I shouldn’t have abandoned it. In fact it was shaping up quite nicely.

I’m not going to bore you with any details of the plot but instead let you read Chapter Two, in all its unedited, unspellchecked glory.

And what do you think? Should I return to this one and finish it? Or the werewolf novel from last week?

Or both?

Chapter Two

6 August 1888

Charlie Hands sucked hard on his cigarette one final time before throwing it carelessly to the ground amidst a shower of sparks. Behind him the Hansom Cab rejoined the late evening West End traffic. He took the girl’s arm and pulled her with him into the Alhambra Theatre, through the decorative entrance and straight for the stairs, hardly pausing for breath.

“Ouch, you’re hurting me!” the girl squealed.

“Well, get a move on, we’re late,” Charlie said, but relinquishing his grip on her arm ever so slightly. He was beginning to regret bringing her along already, and the night hadn’t even started yet. He took the carpeted steps two at a time, the girl tripping along behind him, and hiccupping tiny little giggles at each step she missed.

They entered the hall just as the last act, ‘Cyrus and Maud, Musical Grotesques, and their Performing Donkey, Bess’, was departing the stage to desultory claps. Spotting two seats together near the front of the stage, but in the middle of a row, Charlie pulled Eliza along with him and began pushing his way past the seated audience members.

“Sorry, excuse me, excuse me,” he said.

A few of the ladies tutted and sighed, and some of the men grumbled, but they finally pushed their way past everyone and took their seats.

“I don’t know why we couldn’t have come for the beginning of the show,” whispered Eliza, adjusting her skirt and petticoats.

“Because I didn’t want to waste the whole night watching the likes of Professor Emalius and his fucking Dancing Cockatees, that’s why,” Charlie hissed back.

“Then why come at all? We could be down The White Hart right now.”

Someone shushed them from behind, and Charlie looked up at the stage as the chairman finished his lengthy introduction to the next act.

“Because I came to see her that’s why,” he whispered.

On stage a beautiful young woman stood facing the audience, apparently having materialized from nowhere. She wore a long dress of purest black, only her hands and her face visible beneath the yellow glow of the theatre’s lamps. Her long black hair was tied back, and with her dress contrasted sharply with her white skin, so white it seemed almost translucent. She was thin, almost emaciated, and her eyes were large, round orbs within her delicate skull.

A board mounted beside her proclaimed her act in black lettering on a white background; ‘Ms Le Caron, Medium Extroardinaire’.

An assistant brought a simple wooden chair onto the stage, and Ms Le Caron sat down. For the first time that evening a complete hush had fallen across the audience. The silence continued for a few more seconds, and then a young man stepped onto the stage and walked over to the seated Ms Le Caron, standing behind her chair and surveying the audience contemptuously.

“I must insist on complete silence from the audience for the duration of Ms Le Caron’s communication with the spirit world,” the man said. “Any small noise, whispering, talking, sudden movement, anything at all may be highly dangerous to her in the trance state that she will be in at the time of her communications with her spirit guide.”

“Yeah, right,” breathed Charlie softly.

“The spirit guide Parzuph,” continued the man, “will answer only the questions he wishes to answer, and no more. Ms Le Caron has no control over her spirit guide, and no influence over his actions. If he wishes not to answer the questions put to him, then alas he will not, and nothing will induce him to do so. But fear not, Parzuph is a contrary spirit and may change his mind at a moment’s notice.”

The man stepped back into the deep shadows cloaking the stage background, just visible behind Ms Le Caron, his hand on her shoulder. The medium had seemingly fallen into a deep slumber, though her body still sat completely rigid in the hard backed chair. Suddenly she began taking deep, ragged lungfuls of breath, a soft, low, jagged moan escaping her slightly parted lips each time she breathed in. This continued for a full minute, her fractured voice the only sound in the packed hall. Even Charlie realized that he was holding his breath, and exhaled softly, making as little noise as possible.

Suddenly Ms Le Caron spoke, but spoke in a voice that could not be hers, so deep and savage were the tones it spoke in. Her lips moved, and the sounds seemingly came from that beautiful mouth, but surely a creature so delicate could not make those harsh, brutal guttural noises?

“So, what do you want of Parzuph, now, eh?” it said. “Why don’t you leave me alone and let me tend to my business, for I have much to occupy me here.”

“But we have need of you, Parzuph,” said the girl, her voice suddenly soft and sweet. “There are people here who grieve, people who have lost loved ones, and their hearts cry out for comfort, and knowledge of where their loved ones have gone.”

“And what is that to me?” the guttural voice replied. “What business is it of mine, why should I concern myself with your miserable affairs? What do I receive from the bargain between us, eh? Nothing, that’s what. I should leave you now, never to return, leave you to your pathetic little lives, your miserable existence full of ignorance and want.”

“But there is someone out here in this audience who has lost a close one recently, a relative I believe,” said Ms Le Caron, here eyes open now, and searching the audience, scanning the faces in the dim light of the gas lamps. She held a trembling, bare arm out before her, and pointed into the sea of faces before her. Charlie resisted the urge to twist in his seat to see who she was pointing at. “You, it’s you, you’ve lost your parents, I believe, and very recently too.”

Unable to stay still any longer, Charlie twisted in his seat, to discover most of the rest of the audience doing the same, and saw a young girl, in her early twenties at the most, standing shyly, twisting her fingers together anxiously. A look of confusion contorted her plain features, and she glanced about her for reassurance.

“You may speak,” said the man on the stage. “Speak softly and slowly, and only in answer to questions put to you by Ms Le Caron or her spirit guide, Parzuph, and you will do nothing to endanger the delicate link that has been created between this world and the next.”

“My mother died, last week,” said the girl, her voice trembling, and barely audible.

“And your father?” said Ms Le Caron, but before the girl had chance to answer Parzuph spoke, and said, “Don’t talk to her of her father! She has no father, she never has had a father, not in her eyes. You talk nonsense to these people, and do nothing but show your own ignorance. Why don’t you be quiet, and leave me to do the talking?”

The girl in the audience bowed her head, a single sob convulsing her body for a second. Not looking up, she whispered, “My father left us many years ago.”

“With the family fortune, too, eh?” the guttural tones of the spirit Parzuph said, Ms Le Caron’s delicate lips contorting to frame the words and the grunts with which the spirit punctuated his sentences. “He left your mother to shoulder the debts of his failed business, and drove her to an early grave.”

Charlie twisted in his seat to look at the girl again. She nodded her head, still bowed, but said nothing. Silence filled the hall.

“Would you like to ask Parzuph anything?” the man behind Ms Le Caron said.

“She wants to know what will become of her, she wants to know that her mother is safe and well. She wants to know that they all want to know, she wants to know what the future holds. As if I could predict the future, like a cheap fortune-teller in a circus sideshow. Let me be, release me from this tedium, and your petty affairs.”

The girl looked up now, as though about to speak, but the man held up a hand, silencing her. The medium took a few deep breaths, and then the spirit Parzuph spoke through her once more. “Your mother was called Emma, and she was 38 when she died. She is concerned that you will pine away without her now, that the cares of your life and the loss of your mother will weigh too deeply upon you, until you suffocate beneath them. But you must be brave. You must look to your family for solace, and for a reversal of your fortunes.”

Emitting a deep, mournful sigh, Ms Le Caron’s slumped in the chair, as though all her strength had suddenly left her. The man bent down to whisper to her, his shadow falling across her face. They spoke together for a few seconds, Charlie just able to catch their inaudible voices, and then the man straightened up to face the audience again.

“I am afraid we must finish here, tonight, as Ms Le Caron is exhausted by the terrible strain of allowing her spirit guide to speak through her,” he said. “There will be a further opportunity to…”

“Oh shut up you mindless fool,” grunted the voice of Parzuph as Ms Le Caron straightened up in the chair again. “You seek to cut short the evening’s entertainment when the entertainment is only just about to begin.”

Charlie started a little in his chair as Eliza took hold of his hand, and gripped tight. He looked across at her and was surprised to see her staring fixedly at Ms Le Caron, a mixture of fear and anticipation wrought on her face.

Looking back at the stage he was even more surprised to see Ms Le Caron pointing at Eliza.

“You, young lady,” said Parzuph. “Yes you. You have secrets, do you not? You have a private life, a life of shame and secrecy that no-one knows of, but Parzuph knows everything, Parzuph knows all the secrets and the things that are hidden away.”

“What’s she talking about?” Charlie hissed.

Eliza shook her head, but she said nothing, and her eyes never left Ms Le Caron.

“Your mother is a well kept secret, isn’t she?” grunted Parzuph. “Why don’t you tell everyone that she is not dead, but lives in a mental asylum in the country?”

Charlie glanced at Eliza again, but she would not look at him, her eyes wide and fixed still on Ms Le Caron.

“And why don’t you tell your boyfriend while you’re at it about your other boyfriend, the one who sends you flowers and gives you money?”

“Is this true?” Charlie hissed. People behind him were beginning to titter. “Tell her it’s not true, tell her she’s talking rubbish.”

Eliza looked at Charlie then, a desperate, fearful look, and Charlie knew everything he had just heard was true. He wrenched his hand free from Eliza’s and stood up. More people were laughing now, craning their heads to look at them. For a second he thought about hitting her, but realizing how many witnesses he would have he decided against it, and pushed his way out of the row of seats, and stalked out of the theatre, his face glowing hot with embarrassment.

Outside the Alhambra Theatre Charlie paused to light a cigarette, sucking in the scorching smoke, letting it hit the back of his throat and fill his lungs. He began walking through the busy West End, his mind racing over what he had just seen and heard.

The embarrassment was fading now as he began to realize what a remarkable performance he had just seen. Most mediums’ shows he attended were full vague mutterings and portents of doom or salves of reassurance. But Ms Le Caron, she had been so specific, and that voice. How could such a slight creature as her have projected such a malign, masculine voice across the theatre like that?

He wasn’t quite prepared yet to say that she was the genuine thing, a medium who really could contact the dead.

But he wasn’t prepared to say that she was a fraud, either.

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The post W.T. Stead and the Ripper appeared first on Ken Preston.

Moonlight

All writers that I know of have a pile, physical or digital, of abandoned, unedited manuscripts loitering around, taunting them with reminders of their failures. I’ve said this before and, you guessed it, I’ll say it again, writing might not be up there with hacking at the coal face deep underground day after day, but it’s still hard work.

And fraught with failure.

I’ve been looking through some of those abandoned manuscripts recently. Novels that I had such high hopes for initially but then left them, betrayed them for another. And it does feel a little like a betrayal. It’s not that the abandoned work failed to live up to expectations, more that I failed to give it the care and attention it needed. And so I moved on to other relationships stories.

Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to post excerpts from some of these abandoned works. Who knows, it might even spur me to pick them up again and finish them.

This week’s is a Victorian werewolf novel. Vampires get all the attention, but werewolves are like the dotty old aunt who gets trotted out in public once in a while but is mostly hidden away in a back room for fear of embarrassing everyone. So I thought, why not try my hand at writing one?

This is the first chapter, unedited, in all it’s rough, first draft glory.

Many remarkable, wonderful, frightening and strange events happen daily in the city of London. Some of them go unnoticed, occurring behind closed doors or even out in the open to be witnessed by all, but missed by the city’s inhabitants as they rush to their next appointment, or important piece of business in the West End. Perhaps they come to light later that day, or the following morning, and the police may become involved, or a story may be conjured for the daily newspapers, competing hotly for the attention of their public. Occasionally the event may begin its life behind closed doors, but explode out into public view, drawing a crowd and an officer of the law. Sometimes it may flower into life, only to die a quick, silent death before attaining any lasting importance or notoriety.

One such remarkable event happened upon the edge of the Thames on a chilly winter’s day towards the end of February and was witnessed by many people. This event then led on to many more remarkable happenings, some of them wonderful, many of them frightening and certainly almost all of them rather strange. But none of the people who gathered around, the chill of the winter’s air forgotten in their amazement at what they saw, would witness the following events. Only one man who saw the young lady he would later name Eve came to be at centre of the strange, horrifying happenings detailed in this narrative.

By the time Henry Palmer inadvertently arrived upon the scene a considerable crowd had already congregated, and it was the sight of so many people gathered together that caused the cab driver to rein in his horse and draw to a halt. Henry had been reading the Pall Mall Gazette, its article on child abduction for the sex trade. The newspaper’s editor, W T Stead, had been campaigning for a change in the law, but in using shock tactics to draw attention to his crusade it very much appeared as though he would end up in jail very soon. Upon realising that his carriage had slowed to a halt Henry looked up, and shouted to his driver.

“What’s the hold up?”

“Don’t rightly know, sir,” came the reply, and then only a moment later Henry heard the driver whistle and say, “Blimey, guv’nor, you ought to take a look out your window.”

Henry shuffled across his seat, laying his newspaper down, and peered at the crowd. They seemed to be in a great state of excitement, gathered around a central point of fascination. But Henry could see nothing other than their backs as they shuffled and backpedalled, moving as one along the Thames mud bank. His interest piqued Henry opened his door and stepped down onto the roadside. He walked close to the edge of the pavement, a small wall separating him from the mud that led down to the murky Thames. The crowd was silent, but for the rustle of clothing and squelch of mud as they walked slowly towards him. Men, ladies and children all congregated together, intent on the object of their curiosity.

Henry was on the point of turning and climbing back into his cab when the crowd parted slightly, and he had his first glimpse of the young, naked woman in their midst. Her pale skin was accentuated by her long, dark hair and the mud splattered across her slim torso and arms and legs. Although he only had a momentary glimpse before the crowd closed around her once again Henry’s breath caught in his chest and his stomach tightened. Despite the mud and her pale skin turning blue with cold it was obvious to him that she was beautiful and, looking back on that first day, he knew he was attracted to her like no other.

Henry reached back into the cab and picked up his walking stick. He had no need of it, other than as a style accessory. Shaped from Canadian oak, with a Latin inscription carved into it and a gold head, he had not been able to resist the sales man’s patter or its deliciously solid feel in its West End home. On first walking out with it he had felt quite self conscious and regretted his extravagance, hut the cane soon grew to be a part of him, and like an amputee he felt its insistent absence on those days he inadvertently left the house without it. As he picked it up now and stepped over the low wall into the wet mud, his Saville Row shoes surely about to be irrevocably ruined, he had no conscious thought of having collected it. And its potential for violence was even further from his mind.

Henry stepped carefully through the slick mud, his shoes slipping out from under him he used his stick to keep his balance. After only a couple of paces he could feel the filthy water seeping through his socks. The crowd of spectators moved slowly towards him, still intent on the spectacle at its centre. Henry waved his stick, and shouted, “Move aside, come on now, move aside!”

No one paid any attention, the object of their fascination drawing all of their faculties inward. They were like deaf, blind people, unaware of the world around them.

“I’m a doctor,” Henry shouted. “You must let me through!”

Now the crowd had reached close to him, and he was presented with the enormous rear of a fine lady in her West End clothes, ruined forever by the stinking, filthy mud of the Thames. Resisting the urge to give her a good thwack across the behind with his cane, (he could see the headlines in the newspapers tomorrow – Respectable Doctor Assaults Lady) he instead pushed his way between the bodies, muttering, “Let me through for God’s sake, I’m a doctor!”

Again Henry’s breath was snatched from his lungs as he came up to close to the young woman. Her hair was lank and dirty, hanging across her mud spattered face in filthy tendrils. Her eyes looked dark and unresponsive as she stared straight through the gaggle of spectators in front of her, as though she was completely blind to their existence, and her flesh appeared white and sickly. Had she been out here all night, in the freezing cold?

And yet despite all this Henry was captivated by her beauty, a lithe, cat like beauty that gripped his chest and squeezed tight. He pulled off his overcoat and draped it over her shoulders. She made no move, either to repel him or accept the covering. It simply hung  limp across her shoulders and he pulled it closed across her chest.

“Let us through,” he said, as he gripped her by the elbows and began guiding her back to his waiting hansom. Some of the children began hurling mud pellets at them, and Henry swore as his shirt was hit by a splodge of thick, oozing mud. Letting go of the young woman for a moment he turned and brandished his stick at the lad, who ran away laughing. Henry took hold of his charge once more and, his feet slipping in the watery dirt, began his treacherous passage to dry, solid land.

“’Old it mister,” said the cabby. “You’re not bringing her in here, an that’s the God honest truth. I ain’t spendin’ the rest o’ my afternoon cleanin’ up her filth and mud.”

“For God’s sake, man!” Henry cried. “I’m paying my fare, aren’t I? Just let us on board.”

“No sir, not in her state she ain’t.” The driver shook his head for emphasis and took up the horse’s reigns as though about to depart that very instant.

“Wait!” Henry shouted. “I’ll pay you double, and I’ll pay you for the trouble of cleaning up your cab too. Just let us on board.”

The driver turned and looked disdainfully down on Henry and the girl. “Just keep her off the seats, all right?”

Henry pulled the woman into the cab and sat her on the floor. Already smeared patterns of mud had gathered on the wooden floor. Henry looked at her as the cab jolted into motion, and he put a hand on her shoulder to steady her. She did not respond, still gazing straight ahead as though she intent on something invisible to everyone else.

“What is your name?” Henry whispered.

A dull thump against the side window startled Henry enough that he let out a small yelp. A clod of dirt had been thrown at the hansom, and the driver swore, yelling that he would come down and take his whip to them if they threw anymore.

Henry turned his attention back to the mystery woman. Her breathing was so shallow He would have had trouble believing she was alive if she had not been sitting up. Her bare legs protruding from beneath Henry’s coat were like sticks, and her bony knees protruded painfully from her white skin.

“When did you last eat?” Henry said, his voice low, almost a whisper, so as not to frighten her. She continued staring ahead and said nothing.

Instinctively Henry squatted down in front of her. His doctor’s training was asserting itself, and the physician side of his brain was beginning to ask questions, needing to perform an examination. Slowly, fingers trembling ever so slightly, he raised his hands to her jaw and felt beneath the bone. Her glands felt normal, not swollen or inflamed, indicating that she had no fever from the fecal matter of the Thames mud. Taking even more care so as not to frighten her, he slid his index finger into her mouth, and another, until he could gently pry open her mouth. The light was too dim and he had no instruments to perform a proper examination, but he was able to run his finger along her teeth and around her gums. He was surprised at how well developed her canines were, but the gums were red and bleeding in places. He could smell stale, rotting meat on her breath.

He slid his fingers from her mouth and began running his fingertips gently over her scalp, searching for any bumps or lesions indicating a bump to the head. Gently Henry pulled back her eyelids and stared into her eyes. Her pupils were tiny and the whites of her eyes bloodshot. Ophthalmology was a fascinating branch of medicine, and Henry could only wish that her eyes would betray what she had seen and what she had experienced to drive her to wander naked on the mudflats of the Thames.

Henry looked at his fingers and saw blood mingled with the mud.

“Here we are mister!” the driver shouted. “An’ I’ll thank you to leave my cab now, and pay me decent money, like you promised.”

Henry pulled the woman up by her hands, and the jacket fell off her shoulders, once again revealing her mud splattered, naked body. He had to squeeze past her in the confined space as he bent down to retrieve the jacket, his head brushing past her thigh. He caught an animal scent about her, an unsettling smell of wildness.

Quickly he picked up the jacket and draped it over her shoulders once more. Taking her by the hand he guided her from the hansom and down the step onto the cobbled street.

“Here,” he said, handing the driver a note. “Take this and forget what you saw today.”

“Not bloody likely,” the driver grunted, snatching the money and hiding it away before spurring his horse into action and driving away. Henry watched him disappear down the street, the woman gazing after him too, although Henry was sure she could not, or did not, see him. Still clasping her hand in his he fished around in his pocket with his free hand for his keys. Opening his front door, the door that lead into his waiting area, he led the woman inside and into his consulting room. Quickly, almost furtively, he locked the front door, making sure the closed sign was displayed, and then closed the consulting room door too.

At last he had privacy.

Kneeling down before her he gently ran his fingers through her dank hair, back off her forehead. Then he noticed the blood, matted into her hairline. Leaning in close he inspected her carefully. Definitely mingled in with the clumps of mud were flecks and droplets of dried blood.

Cursing the poor light in the dreary consulting room he pulled the oil lamp from the wall and lit it, and held it up the woman’s face. Now that he examined her more closely he found what he had been unable to see in the poor light of the rocking hansom cab; more flecks and spatters of blood on her cheeks and in her nostrils, staining her teeth and her lips. He slipped the jacket from her shoulders and held the oil lamp close to her torso. Now he saw, partially hidden by the dried mud, bloodstains down her breasts and on her abdomen. He picked up a hand, listless and cold in his. More blood in the folds and creases of her skin and caked under her filthy fingernails.

Abruptly he stood up and stepped over to the closed door, his breathing now coming in short sharp gasps. He looked over his shoulder at the naked woman, staring ahead at her own internal fixed point in space. Was she reliving whatever nightmare she had witnessed, been a part of, that had driven her naked out onto the mudflats caked in somebody else’s blood? For the blood could not be her own as Henry had found not a single wound upon her.

“Who are you?” he whispered. “And what has happened to you?”

He ran some hot water, filling a tin bath with soapy water. He found some towels in the upstairs room and carried them down to the consulting room. For a long moment he had looked at the clothes in Hannah’s wardrobe, considering what he could take that she would not miss. Finally he had closed the door and settled for the towels and a dressing gown.

Henry carried the clothes into the room and shut the door. He grasped the naked girl by her thin shoulders and said, “Come on, stand up.”

Like a hypnotist’s victim she rose to her feet. He helped her step into the tin bath, and she gasped lightly at the hot water on her feet. Henry took a flannel and soaked it in the water. Using the soap and the flannel he began sponging down her hair and her face, rubbing at the clots of mud and blood until her cheeks were red and her hair dripping clean water. He used the flannel to wipe around the inside of her mouth, probing gently between her tongue and her gums, removing more blood and mud.

To all of this she submitted passively, the small gasp of shock as she stepped into the hot water the only sign of alertness she had shown. Henry washed her neck and shoulders, rivulets of dirty water now running down her flesh and dripping into the bath. He washed her arms, and spent some time cleaning her hands and her fingernails as best he could without a stiff brush to dig out the dirt. He squeezed out the flannel and then began washing her breasts and her abdomen, his breath catching in his chest. He turned her around and washed her to smooth curve of her back and the rounded buttocks, his hands now trembling almost uncontrollably as he fought with the desires in his head.

He soaped down her slim legs and then patted her dry with a towel, and wrapped the second towel around her torso. Helping her step out of the bath he sat her on the mattress and finished washing and drying her feet. He draped his wife’s dressing gown across her shoulders, and pulled her wet hair out from underneath it, letting it fall down her back. It lay in a tangled heap across her shoulder blades, still dirty. Henry had not washed her hair, or brushed it.

“Come with me,” he said, taking her by both arms and leading her out of the consulting room and up the stairs. They had a guest bedroom, although they rarely had guests now, and it was here he took his mysterious visitor. He laid her gently beneath the covers of the guest bed. She stared sightlessly up at the plaster ceiling, her eyes dark, the pupils wide and unresponsive.

Henry felt as though he was involved in a ritual, and that he was leaving an important part of the ritual out. Perhaps he should pray with, or over, her, or read her a story, or wish her a peaceful sleep. But this was not his daughter he was putting to bed, nor even his lover, but a stranger.

Henry spent the night sitting up in his bedroom, alternately attempting to read, or gazing at the photograph of his family, a studio portrait of Hannah and their daughter Rachel. Three more nights and they were due to return from visiting relatives in the country. Three more nights to decide how to deal with his surprise guest.

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The post Moonlight appeared first on Ken Preston.

The Outsider – Stephen King

The first Stephen King novel I read was The Shining. That wasn’t the first King novel I had been tempted by though. That was `Salem’s Lot.

I was on holiday with my parents. I can’t remember where, but I remember we had stopped at a newsagent, or a typical holiday type shop where they sell buckets and spades and postcards and stuff.

Anyway, whatever this shop was, it also sold paperbacks.

So, I was happy.

And there was this one paperback, and it had this black cover. As in, completely, utterly black. No book title, no author name, no illustration. Nothing.

Well, you bet I was drawn to that book like filings to a magnet.

Now, in my imagination, my memory of that day, this is how it went.

When I picked the book up I realised that although the cover was a featureless black, the author name and book title were there, embossed on the cover. I had to hold the book a certain way, let the light catch those deep black edges, until I could decipher what it said.

Stephen King.

`Salem’s Lot.

Memory is a funny, treacherous companion. When I did my research to find that book cover, this is what I came up with.

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Actually, now that I look at it, this cover is even more terrifying than the one I remembered. See that tiny spot of red blood dripping from the vampire’s fang?

Anyway, I didn’t buy it.

I wanted to, oh yes I surely wanted to.

But I didn’t. I put it back on the shelf and left.

Unknown to me that book had already changed my life.

The name of Stephen King was seared into my consciousness.

What kind of novel was `Salem’s Lot, that the publisher had decided to print it with a BLACK COVER? Something was going on inside that book, (something unpleasant no doubt) and I needed to find out what it was.

And that title! `Salem’s Lot. I just couldn’t get my head around that title. The word `Salem evoked witches, but the Lot part?

I can’t remember where or when I bought The Shining, and neither can I remember why I went for King’s third novel instead of his second (with that black cover constantly calling to me). Maybe I felt that `Salem’s Lot was a bad place to start, that I should lead up to it with another of King’s books. One that could not be as pant wettingly terrifying as `Salem’s Lot obviously was.

Even though my edition of The Shining had that freaky illustration of Danny’s face on the cover.

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Anyway, if that was my reasoning I was wrong.

The Shining terrified me.

And for years afterwards I suffered with a terror of looking in mirrors for fear of what I might see lurking behind me.

Here I am now all these years later, no longer that awkward, lonely, bookish teenager but a bookish adult and I am still reading Stephen King novels.

The Outsider is his latest.

I had popped into town to get some shopping (bananas if you must know) and as I was walking past WHSmith I happened to glance in through the entrance.

The Outsider was on a display near the front of the shop and, just like all those years ago when I spotted that paperback with its black cover, I was drawn to it as if by a magnet.

The cover for The Outsider is good, but it’s nowhere near as good as that deep black, embossed paperback cover for `Salem’s Lot.

But of course, I still had to buy it.

I’ve been reading The Outsider every chance I get, and struggling to put it down. I’m pretty near the end now.

Is it as scary as The Shining?

Well, no, but I’m a much older, battle hardened version of that gawky young teenager who really wasn’t old enough to be reading books like that anyway these days.

Is it a gripping read?

Oh yes.

Would I recommend it?

If you like Stephen King, then yes, absolutely.

Am I going to tell you anything about the plot?

No, because you probably already know the basic premise, and if you don’t you can find that out here.

I’m not sure there is any other author who has stuck with me like King has throughout my life. I read a lot, but he’s the only one.

From that first encounter with him in that shabby little seaside shop that I can remember nothing about except that it sold paperbacks, to this wondrous digital age of marvels, I’m still a fan.

And I’m sure I always will be.

 

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The post The Outsider – Stephen King appeared first on Ken Preston.

The Lonely of the Scharnhorst

Hey, look at that, it’s Sunday again. Where did that week go?

And here I am with another spooky short story for you. Enjoy!

Barry went first. Barry always went first. No reason, that was just the way it always was, always had been.

Barry went first in everything. First girlfriend, first pint, first time having sex, first in a job, first to get married.

First to have an affair.

Greg was a follower, not a leader.

So Barry was always, always the first one in the water.

Using his fins he propelled himself down. The cold of the English Channel bit him even through the wetsuit. He was used to it.

A shadow cutting briefly through the rays of sunlight streaming through the water signaled Greg’s entry into the sea.

Barry was always first, but Greg was never far behind.

The two men dove deeper with practised kicks of their fins. Bubbles streamed past their masks from the tanks strapped to their backs. As they sank deeper into the depths of the Atlantic the two men switched on their head torches. The LEDs cut through the growing gloom like lasers.

The wreck appeared abruptly in their lights. A ghost ship, a relic of the past. A WWII German battleship, jammed upside down in a crevice on the ocean floor. Just visible between the dark green fronds of seaweed waving gently in the current and seeming to bring the ship to life, the hull was encrusted in barnacles. Tiny, silver fish darted around its grey hulking mass.

Barry dutifully snapped off a few photos with his Nikon, the bright flash startling the fish.

The Scharnhorst had been on Barry’s list of wrecks to explore for a long time. But, like everybody else in the diving community, he just never thought he would get the chance.

The problem was, with only its hull visible above the crevasse in the ocean floor, there was no way inside. No way of salvaging whatever might be left inside the battleship. You could swim over and around its hull, raised at an angle from its position on the sea bed, and you could take photographs. But nothing more.

The Scharnhorst had lain undisturbed here since it sank at the end of the Second World War. An ugly memorial to all the dead trapped inside.

And according to anyone you talked to who knew about these things, that was most likely the way it was going to stay.

But then Frank had got into trouble on that last dive he had done here. Barry hadn’t been on that one, but Greg had. And he’d heard Frank’s dying words, whispered into Greg’s ear with his last breath.

Greg told Barry what the dying man had told him.

Turned out there was a way inside the Scharnhorst after all.

If you were brave enough.

Greg said Frank had told him he had been inside. Frank had told him that he had swum through the ship’s corridors and rooms. Frank had told him he had seen the dead sailors. Frank had told him it was good that the ship was so inaccessible.

No one should go inside that monstrosity, Frank had said.

Why? Greg had said.

Because it’s filled with the ghosts of the dead, Frank had said. And they’re lonely. So very lonely.

Barry drew closer to the ship’s hull, Greg at his side. Ran his hand through the fronds of seaweed, his fingers brushing the barnacled hull.

Greg swam up beside him.

Poor Greg.

Barry hadn’t intended to shag Greg’s wife. Lisa wasn’t even that good looking., her doughy white flesh covered in badly inked tattoos. But, in another of Barry’s firsts, his wife had divorced him. On his own, with nothing but his hand and the internet to keep him company, he couldn’t be blamed really, could he?

Greg was away, at a conference. Barry and Lisa, they’d been mates forever. It was Barry who had introduced her to Greg in the first place. On that Saturday night, both of them alone with nothing to do, they’d gone out for a drink. Wound up back at his, in bed.

Turned out Lisa was down and dirty in the bedroom. Inventive. Said she’d been having these fantasies for a while now, but Greg wasn’t interested. He was more of ‘Wham, Bam, Thank you Ma’am’ kind of guy. He got his jollies off, but she was left wanting more.

No, Barry hadn’t planned on sleeping with Lisa. And once they had, he hadn’t intended to continue sleeping with her. Barry, he wasn’t big on morals or anything like that. Having an affair didn’t bother him. But it was Greg, you know? Greg was his mate. You don’t cheat on your mates.

Lisa got to him though, with her doughy, pasty flesh and her badly inked tattoos. Seemed like in bed there wasn’t anything she wasn’t prepared to do.

And Barry couldn’t get enough of her.

The two men swam slowly around the hull of the wreck. The Scharnhorst had been on a daylight dash through the English Channel, away from the port in Brest in occupied France, and back to Germany. The HMS Duke of York had intercepted her and engaged in battle. Two torpedoes had ripped open her hull and she was sunk with all 1,600 men aboard.

And as she disappeared beneath the surface of the water she upended and sank to the ocean floor upside down where she lodged herself into the ravine.

There was no way inside.

But Greg, he said there was a way inside the ship. That’s what Frank had told him, as the nitrogen bubbles in his bloodstream killed him.

You had to swim away from the battleship. You had to follow the line of the crevasse, now a narrow rip in the ocean floor. You had to keep following it, until the wreck disappeared in the underwater gloom and you thought that maybe you should just give up and head back to the surface.

You had to follow that crack in the ocean bed until it grew wider. Wide enough that you could dive down between its walls.

And you had to go down deep enough until you could turn back on yourself because the ravine grew wider down here, forming a tunnel that allowed you access back to the battleship.

But only if you were brave enough to attempt such a thing.

Barry went first, Greg close behind. Down in the ravine the darkness was complete. Barry’s LED cut dark shadows against the rocky outcrops on the crevasse’s sides. Long fronds of kelp attached to the walls shifted in the current, seeming to give the walls a life of their own in the beam of light from Barry’s torch. Reaching out, Barry was able to touch the sides of the ravine. His hands disappeared in between the strands of soft, waving kelp.

The crevasse began closing in on the two divers as they penetrated the gloom. Barry had to trust that Greg was still following him now as the walls were too close for him to be able to turn his head and look back. His tank scraped a rocky outcrop above him and Barry pushed himself a little deeper.

On he went as the gap grew narrower. Now, even with his torch, he could hardly see anything in front of him. He had to push his way through the fronds of kelp, waving in the current like long fingers trying to grasp hold of him. Pulling at his mask and his regulator. Trying to kill him.

Barry was suddenly aware of a pressure building in his chest. He was on the edge of panicking. The walls of the crevasse were too close, hemming him in, restricting his movement. The kelp was becoming like a solid mass he was having to fight his way through. He couldn’t turn around, he couldn’t go up.

He was trapped down here, and he couldn’t even tell if Greg had followed him, if he was behind him still.

The only thing to do was keep pushing forward, even though the walls of the underwater ravine were still closing in.

Barry pushed harder, his tank scraping along the rocky outcrops. He had to use his hands to find handholds and pull himself along. He had to work hard to keep his breathing steady, to keep the rising panic under control.

And then he was out. The ravine opened up and he was under the Scharnhorst. His LED illuminated the upside down deck, a bizarre ceiling of metal covering his underwater world. The giant structure was like an inverted pyramid of jutting funnels, the command deck, the bridge, the gun turrets.

Barry hovered in the water, gazing at the wreck. It was unbelievable. Like an alien superstructure, floating in the sky.

Barry snapped off a couple of photographs.

He felt a disturbance in the water beside him and turned to see Greg emerging from the crack in the sea wall.

He’d forgotten all about his diving buddy.

Greg gave him the OK signal and Barry returned it. Greg looked up at the bizarre structure above him. Barry closed his fist and pointed his thumb upwards, the signal for ascending. Greg gave him the OK signal again.

With graceful kicks of their fins they propelled themselves up to the deck of the battleship Scharnhorst.

At first they simply swam around the superstructure, gazing at the antiaircraft guns and other artillery ranged across the deck. Tiny fish darted around them, and in between the rusted guns and the raised decks. The two men swam upwards, past the bridge, up to the main deck.

Barry found an open doorway and guided himself inside. His torch beam cut through the darkness, illuminating the narrow cabin he had entered.

Greg followed him.

Barry checked his air supply. It would be too easy to forget how long they had been underwater, to lose themselves in exploring the German ship, and suddenly find they had run out of air. Especially when they faced the difficult job of swimming back through the narrow crevasse again before they could return to the surface. Despite his concerns though, Barry’s insides fluttered with excitement. They were inside the Scharnhorst, somewhere that hardly anybody else had been.

Barry went deeper into the gloom.

Greg followed him.

Through open doorways, down cramped passageways, their sub-aqua tanks bumping against the ceilings.

That’s what the dying man had told Greg. Keep going up, right into the bottom of the ship. It was dangerous to dive in there, a person could get lost in that maze of passageways. But if you wanted to see it, you had to take that risk.

It should have been Greg leading, he’d heard what Frank had said.

But it was Barry who went first. Always Barry.

The narrow hall ended at a set of iron stairs. Using the upside down steps as handholds they swam up, going deeper into the belly of the ship.

Another cramped passageway, past doors and hatchways.

They reached another set of steps and glided up along them. Past the ragged, twisted hole in the hull where the British torpedo had found its mark. The ship’s hull here was wedged up against the side of the ravine and so there was no access through the gaping wound.

Barry swam on, followed by Greg, deeper into the ship’s bowels.

When it happened, it happened suddenly, shockingly.

As the beam of light from Barry’s torch suddenly revealed the twisted remains of the engine room he caught a glimmer of refracted light above him. And then his head was out of the water, above the surface. He grasped hold of something, a part of the ship’s structure he didn’t recognise beside him as Greg emerged from the water. The two men pulled the regulators out of their mouths and sucked in deep breaths.

Barry started laughing.

“Can you believe this?” he said. “That bloody bastard Frank, he was telling the truth!”

Greg grinned at him, blinking water from his eyes. “Did you doubt it?”

“Of course I did.” Barry hauled himself out of the water and onto a ledge, slippery and cold with slime. His air tank clanged against the side of the ship’s hull, a dull reverberation echoing all around them.

Greg hauled himself up beside Barry.

“I don’t understand how there is still air down here,” Barry said.

“When the ship sank and overturned, this pocket of air got trapped in here,” Greg said.

“Duh, I know that,” Barry said. “But that was over seventy years ago, there can’t still possibly be air down here.”

“It’s got something to do with that current,” Greg said, his voice echoing in the dark chamber. “As it rushes past the wreck, water rushes through tiny gaps into the ship and bubbles of air escape into here.”

Barry had lost interest in what Greg was saying.

“Look over there,” he said, his LED cutting through the darkness.

At first Greg couldn’t see what Barry was pointing at. The maze of pipes and iron grills, the banks of walls filled with dials and levers, wheels and gang planks, all dripping with moisture and seaweed, obscured what Barry was trying to show him.

And then he saw it.

The skeleton huddled in a small corner beneath part of a huge turbine. Scraps of uniform still clung to its remains.

“Let’s take a closer look,” Barry said.

“Do you think we should?” Greg said.

Barry ignored him. He unstrapped the sub aqua tank and slid it off his back. He pulled the fins off his feet and laid them beside the tank. On his hands and knees, keeping his head low to avoid banging it against the pipes running overhead, he began shuffling along the iron grillwork towards the sailor’s remains.

“What the hell are you doing?” Greg said.

“Come on, if we’re going to explore there’s no way we’re going to fit through these gaps with all this kit on,” Barry said, his voice echoing in the chamber.

Greg pulled his tank off too and placed it beside Barry’s. He followed his friend.

Barry always went first.

They got up close to the skeleton. There wasn’t a scrap of flesh left on it, and the bones were dark and covered in a scummy green. Remnants of its uniform still clung to it, but most of it had rotted away.

“Poor bastard must have starved to death down here,” Barry said.

“What a horrible way to go,” Greg said. “Trapped in here, in the darkness, slowly dying of starvation.”

The ship creaked, a metallic groan seeming to shiver through their bodies.

“You think this thing is still shifting further down into the ravine?” Greg said.

“Can’t be,” Barry said. “Bloody wreck’s been here since nineteen forty-five.”

He shone his torch into a dark passageway behind the skeleton, the floor sloping upwards into the gloom. The steady plink, plink, plink of dripping water echoed down the narrow passage. Bary shone his torch up. The floor, now the ceiling, was a metal grill. He shone his torch down. The ceiling, now the floor, was also metal grillwork. There was another passageway below them, but that one was half filled with seawater.

“Come on, let’s explore,” Barry said.

“Are you sure?” Greg said. “If we get lost, or the wreck shifts and traps us down here—”

“Don’t be a pussy,” Barry said. “I know what’s wrong with you, you’re scared you might meet a ghost, aren’t you?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Gerg said.

Barry dropped his voice low, and said, “The ghosts of the Dead, they’re lonely, so very lonely.”

“Fuck off, Barry,” Greg said.

Laughing, Barry began crawling up the sloping floor. Greg followed him. At regular junctures they had to climb over girders on which the grillwork was attached. The floor was slippery with moisture and green algae.

They came to a door. Barry grabbed the wheel set into the middle of the door and pulled. It opened slowly, a rusty squeal rending the silence.

“Bloody hell,” Greg whispered, and his breath billowed around his face in a cloud.

Suddenly he started to shiver. He hadn’t realised how cold it was.

Barry climbed through the open doorway and Greg followed him.

Doors, many of them open, lined the passage. Barry crawled on, looking through the doorways as he passed them.

“Looks like this might be the living quarters,” he said.

The beds were bolted to the floor above them. Below them on the ceiling were the remains of bedding and clothing.

Barry slipped on the algae and fell on his side. He started sliding back down the slope towards Greg until he grabbed a doorway and stopped himself.

“Oh shit,” he said, looking through the doorway.

He crawled into the box like room and Greg followed him. The ceiling was a soggy mass of rotting mattresses and bedsheets. Something scuttled out from underneath a mattress, all spiny legs and quick, darting movements. Bunk bed frames and lockers hung from the floor above their heads. Water ran down the metal edges and dripped onto the two men.

“Careful where you go,” Barry said. “There are rusty springs sticking out of these mattresses, if you’re not careful you’ll slash open a hand or a knee.”

Placing a hand against a wall, Barry carefully stood up.

Greg did the same.

The two men looked at the scattered bones and crushed skulls lying on the ceiling, along with the soggy mattresses and sheets.

“What the hell do you think happened here?” Greg said.

“Don’t know,” Barry said. “But it’s weird, isn’t it?”

“They must have gone mad with fear and hunger, attacked each other,” Greg said.

“Wonder if this is what Frank saw, panicked him and sent him back out and up to the surface too fast?”

The ship groaned again, almost seeming to protest at the intrusion of these two foreign bodies in its system.

Barry bent down and took a closer look at one of the skulls. He sucked in his breath.

The skull stared back up at Barry, its empty eye sockets dark and filled with squirming life. Barry stood up and turned away. He couldn’t look at it any more.

A metallic screeching echoed through the wreck and the ship shivered slightly.

The two men looked at each other wide eyed.

“I think maybe we should get out of here after all,” Barry said.

Greg was over by the open door, standing with his back to it. He didn’t move.

“Come on, bud,” Barry said. “Let’s get going.”

“No,” Greg said. “Not yet.”

“Not yet? What the hell are you talking about?”

Greg said nothing. Stared at Barry.

“I gotta tell you mate, you’re acting weird all of a sudden,” Barry said. “What the hell’s got into you?”

“Frank,” Greg said, almost shouted at Barry.

“Yeah? What about him.”

“Frank told me everything.”

“Yeah, I know he did,” Barry said. “That’s how we ended up down here, and now we’ve got to get going and get the hell out.”

“No,” Greg shook his head. Now that it had come to it he was having trouble getting his words out. “Not just about the wreck, he told me other stuff too.”

“What are you talking about, Greg?”

The ship creaked and groaned softly. Something banged once, deep below them.

“Frank told me all about you, and Lisa,” Greg said.

Barry felt like he had been punched in the gut. He tried to keep his face passive, show no emotion.

“Greg, I haven’t got a bloody clue what you’re talking about, mate. Can’t we just get out of here first and have a chinwag when we get back on dry land?”

“Frank told me about you and Lisa, shagging each other every chance you got,” Greg said. “Fucking each other’s brains out, is what he said.”

Barry shook his head. “Mate, come on. Frank was off his head with nitrogen poisoning, he didn’t know what he was saying. I mean, think about it. Even if it was true, which it isn’t, how the hell would he know?”

“Because he was shagging her too,” Greg said. “And she used to tell him all about her nights with you, what the two of you got up to, because he got off on it.”

Barry shook his head again. “You’re having me on, right? This is a joke? Frank couldn’t have told you all that, not the state he was in when they pulled him out of the water.”

“No, you’re right, he didn’t. He told me all that shit the night before. We went out, had a skinful of beer. You know what Frank was like, always had to drink one more pint than everybody else. He got shitfaced, spilled his guts, told me everything. I didn’t expect him to turn up for the dive the next day. He must have been hungover something bad. Probably why he came up too fast. Easy to make a mistake like that when you’re groggy headed.”

Barry kept his mouth shut.

The ship creaked and groaned.

“All right, mate, it’s true,” Barry said, softly. “And you’re angry, I can understand that. But I suggest we get out of this bloody deathtrap first, and then when we’re back on the boat, then you can beat the shit out of me. All right?”

Greg said nothing.

Another groan shivered through the wreck.

“Come on, fella, we can’t stay here, I don’t like the way this old thing is making all those noises,” Barry said.

Greg stepped backwards through the doorway. Barry’s eyes widened as he realised what Greg was doing. He ran for the door, skidding on the wet, soft floor and fell over amongst the broken skeletons.

Greg slammed the door shut. He heard the latch click into place. He gripped the wheel and turned it, the rusty levers protesting at the movement. Barry was on the other side of the door now, banging his fist against it.

“Greg, for fuck’s sake, stop dicking about and let me out of here!”

Greg unsheathed his knife and jammed it into one of the metal latches holding the door closed.

“Greg!” Barry roared, pounding even harder at the door.

The lever jiggled in place as Barry tried unlocking the door.

It held.

Greg began making his way back down the passageway. Back to his tank and mask and fins.

“Greg, you shit!” Barry shouted.

Greg kept moving.

Greg thought about Barry fucking Lisa.

Greg thought about what he might do to Lisa when he got back.

By the time he got back to his air tank, and the pool of black water waiting for him to enter it, Greg could hardly hear Barry at all.

He strapped the tank on his back, slipped the fins on his feet, pulled the mask over his face.

He fitted the regulator in his mouth and bit down on it.

The wreck let out another long, anguished groan. Seemed as though Barry and Greg had disturbed it somehow. That it might move, slide deeper into the ravine.

Didn’t matter.

Greg was out of here now.

He slipped into the dark, cold water, his LED lighting his way.

Greg swam down, along the cramped passageways, through doorways and down stairs. He just had to keep going down, through the wreck’s maze of passageways and corridors until he reached the deck. And then swim further down, past the artillery and the bridge, until he found the sliver of a gap in the side of the ravine. Back through the narrow cave beneath the ocean floor until it opened out and he could swim up again.

Back to the surface.

Poor Barry. Greg told him not to attempt getting inside the Scharnhorst. He told him it was dangerous.

But that was the thing about Barry, he wouldn’t listen.

He always wanted to be the first at everything.

Out of the ship’s innards, Greg turned and twisted in the water, his LED cutting a beam of bright light through the darkness. He couldn’t see the narrow gap in the ravine wall. He felt the urge to panic rising in his chest.

He reminded himself to keep his breathing level and calm. Didn’t want to use up his air too quickly.

All he had to do was keep looking.

It was here somewhere.

He had plenty of air in his tanks, there was no rush.

Greg noticed movement beneath him. Down in the darkness of the ravine.

Just a fish of some kind, that was all.

He wondered how far it went down, what things lived in the darkness down there.

Greg swam over to the wall of rock, covered in fronds waving gently in the current.

His torchlight caught the shadow in the rocky outcrop. The entrance to the long cave which led to freedom.

He wondered what Barry was doing right now. If the lonely ghosts had found him. Frank had come down here on his own, hungover. He had always been reckless and stupid. And he had obviously seen the skeletons and imagined the ghosts, and that had sent him into a panic.

Silly bastard.

Greg wondered how long it would take Barry to start imagining things. How long it would take him to die.

Greg noticed a flash of something pale in the gloom. A disturbance on the periphery of his vision.

He turned and looked. Down into the darkness.

More movement. Much more.

Not fish.

Greg screamed when he realised what that disturbance was.

A mass of naked bodies clawing its way up to him. The flesh was dripping off these ghastly corpses, their black eyes fastened on Greg as they swam closer. Their hair drifted like seaweed, and they opened and closed their mouths like fish, lying on the deck of a fishing boat and gasping for breath.

Greg screamed again, the bubbles obscuring his vision for a second before they floated up towards the upside down wreck of the Scharnhorst.

The first of the dead sailors reached him, hands clawing at his legs and torso. More quickly followed and within seconds he was surrounded. They ran their hands over him, their black fingernails tearing holes in his wetsuit, in his flesh. Mouths opening and closing, revealing blackened, pointed teeth. Their skin was wrinkled and soft, some of it ripped into open sores, the rotting flesh waving in the water like the sea kelp on the rock walls.

Greg struggled to escape, but there were too many of them. A hand reached out and grasped his mask, pulling it off his face. He was plunged into darkness as his head torch drifted down into the pit of the ravine, its beam of light swirling around and around. Another one tugged at his regulator, yanking it from his mouth. The rush of air bubbles startled the dead sailors, giving Greg a moment’s freedom. He used the rock face to kick off with and propel himself up to the ship. If he could get back inside, get back to Barry’s kit, he would have another chance at getting out.

At escaping.

He pulled a spare torch from his belt and flicked the switch. The beam, weaker than the head torch, illuminated the upside down ship.

He swam for the wreck’s deck, looming over him like an alien spaceship.

He was almost at the door when he felt the cold hand grasping hold of his ankle. Greg was pulled down with a violent jerk. The bodies enclosed him, hands running over him, open mouths drawing closer.

Greg screamed again, letting all the precious air out of his lungs.

And the crew of the Scharnhorst pulled him deeper and deeper with them, down into the murky depths of the ravine.

Cheery, huh?

And you thought you had it bad!

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