Before You Sleep (7 page)

At the end of his second week off work, he called the office from the public phone outside Happy Shop to tell them that he wasn’t coming back.

On the Monday of his fourth week in the house, Frank finally went out for tools. Not to renovate the property, but to try and repair the kitchen. That task could not be put off any longer.

The act of leaving the house was excruciating.

Twice the previous week, when he’d been cooking in the wrecked kitchen, he’d looked up because he was convinced that he was being watched from the doorway, as if caught doing something wrong, or eating something he had been told not to. The imagined presence had been seething with a surly disappointment and dark with hostility. That room had become the focus of an intensification of the restlessness growing since the Saturday when he and Marcus had assaulted the cabinets. The kitchen was the heart of the house and he had broken it.

There was no one physically inside the house with him, and there could not possibly have been. But the repeated sounds of small feet padding about the lino, while he napped in the lounge during the afternoons, suggested, to a region of his imagination that he little used, that a bereft presence was repeatedly examining the kitchen. The first time he’d heard the shuffle of feet, he’d actually worried that the former owner of the house had escaped from her retirement community, or worse, and let herself back inside what she believed was still her own home.

Frank recovered quickly from the sudden frights, and within the confines of the comfortable womb of the terraced house he eventually found the supervising presence acceptable, even deserved. Nor could he think of a single reason to doubt his instincts that amends had to be made. Within the house such things were possible.

But navigating his way through the world outside the house, which no longer felt so familiar, defeated him. When he went out for tools, his attempts to move on the Pershore Road wasted him before he’d reached the bus stop in front of the bowling alley.

Unpredictable tides of energy, and the staring eyes of pedestrians and motorists, had seemed to pull his thoughts apart and then compress him into a muttering standstill. He was thinking of too many things at the same time, but then forgetting one train of thought at the same time as another began.

The pressure the city exerted upon him was tangible. Uncomfortable, like a head-slappy wind on a hilltop, or a coat pocket caught on a door handle. Unless he was inside the house, or Happy Shop, he didn’t fit in anywhere and was in everyone’s way. And so his recent life had been reduced to quick forays outside the house, because he was unable to cope with anything else and wasn’t wanted anywhere. Never had been. The house had opened his eyes. And there was now something wrong with one of his legs; a pain that started inside a hip. So he should keep off it.

On the day he went out to buy the tools, the further he ventured from the house, the greater was his physical discomfort and his confusion. Frank lit endless cigarettes for the slight comfort they promised. Silk Cut. He’d started smoking again at the weekend after being driven by an unstoppable urge to light up during the National Lottery. At the bus stop, fat pigeons had scurried around his feet and watched him with amber eyes.

After boarding a bus, he’d made his way upstairs. With his bad hip it had been similar to standing upright in a rowing boat. Sitting by the window as the bus trundled toward Selly Oak, where he knew there was a DIY store, he’d looked down at the streets for women wearing tight skirts and leather boots; such a sight usually made him dizzy with longing. Now the women and their clothes just appeared ordinary, and he felt dead to the previously strong images. This impotence led to an incredulity that such a part of himself had ever existed.

From a seat in front of him, a mobile phone began to ring in a girl’s handbag. The noise distracted Frank from what had seemed like important, meaningful thoughts that he could barely remember a few moments later. He’d groaned aloud. The girl spoke in a loud voice. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he’d said, wanting to take the phone from her hand and drop it out of the window. He’d wanted to hear it smash on the asphalt below.

Muttering under his breath to prevent himself swearing aloud, he was forced to listen to the stranger’s conversation. The girl’s voice was controlled and sounded too much like a prepared speech to be part of a natural discourse. There were no pauses, or repetitions, or silences; just her going
blah
,
blah
,
blah
, and addressing everyone on the bus. It was not a phone that she was holding, but a microphone. Perhaps the most disappointing thing about getting older, he’d mused, was to still be confronted by childish actions and behaviour, these increments of self-importance and vanity that he now observed all about him whenever he left home.

By the time he reached the Bristol Road, Frank had felt sickened by his aversion to everything around him. A hot loathing, but a fascination too, and a pitiful desperation to be included. In one mercifully brief moment, he’d also wished to be burned to ash and to have his name erased from every record in existence. He was rubbish. No one wanted him around. He’d dabbed the corner of one eye with a tissue and had wanted to go home, back to the house.

As the bus brushed the edge of Selly Oak he’d fallen asleep. And awoken to find the vehicle had trundled and wheezed into streets he didn’t recognise. He’d slept through his stop and found himself in a bleak part of Birmingham that he had never seen before. Somewhere behind Longbridge maybe? In a panic, he’d fled down the stairs, alighted and then stood beside a closed factory and a wholesaler of saris.

Everything there was inhospitable. Self-loathing had choked him.
Can I not leave the house without a map?
He’d lived in the city for ten years, but he recognised none of this. It was as if the streets and buildings had actually moved to disorient him while he’d slept on the bus.

He’d followed a main road in the opposite direction the bus had taken, but grown tired and eventually turned his face to a wooden fence surrounding a building site and there suffered a paroxysm of such contained rage that it had left him with a broken tooth and cuts on the palms of his hands. Clenching his jaws together and grinding his teeth, he’d felt the enamel snap on a tooth at the side of his mouth. His cheeks had filled with grit. But when the tooth snapped the tension had passed from his body, leaving him confused and expecting shockwaves of agony. But there was no pain and he’d decided against going to a dentist. He didn’t know where the dentists were in the city. He’d then noticed the little half-moons of blood on the inside of his palms, made by his own nails. It had been so long since he’d bitten them; his nails were like unpleasant, feminine claws. How could they have grown so much and he not noticed?

Trying to retrace the bus route and find a landmark, Frank became hopelessly disoriented. He went into a tacky women’s hairdressers, which was the only place that he’d been able to find that offered him any sense of familiarity, to ask for directions. Girls in heavy make-up had exchanged glances when he found himself unable to speak. He’d just stood and trembled before them. After throwing his arms into the air in silent exasperation, he’d left the shop, crimson with shame. Speech only returned to him at the kerb where he’d stood muttering. Some people had stared. A taxi had taken him home.

These things never used to happen to him, but he had a notion that the potential for such a slide had always been in place. In the back of the taxi he’d hidden his face inside the lapel of his overcoat and bitten his bottom lip until his eyes had brimmed with water.

Two days later, or it might have been three or even four, someone knocked on the front door, and for a long time too. So Frank had hidden by lying on the floor of the spare room. He’d heard voices outside, talking in the neighbour’s garden, and he’d known that they were trying to look through the back windows of the house.

For the rest of that afternoon he’d chain-smoked Silk Cut cigarettes and didn’t relax until it was dark outside and
Coronation Street’s
theme tune was booming through the living room. The thought of going out to buy food had made him feel nauseous, so he’d stopped tormenting himself with the idea of leaving the house.

He tried again to fix the broken cabinets to the kitchen walls, but only succeeded in making his fingers bleed. He’d gone upstairs to wash them, but when he arrived on the landing he couldn’t remember why he had gone upstairs. He went and lay down on the bed instead. And around him clouded the smell of perfume, old furniture, stale carpets and chip fat. The radiators had come on with a gurgle. He’d felt safe and closed his eyes.

Sometime in the night, Florrie came into the room on all fours and climbed onto the bed. She sat on Frank’s chest and pushed a thin, cold hand inside his mouth.

Available in print and eBook at major book retailers.

Some Will Not Sleep

Selected Horrors

A bestial face appears at windows in the night.

In the big white house on the hill angels are said to appear.

A forgotten tenant in an isolated building becomes addicted to milk.

A strange goddess is worshipped by a home-invading disciple.

The least remembered gods still haunt the oldest forests.

Cannibalism occurs in high society at the end of the world.

The sainted undead follow their prophet to the Great Dead Sea.

A confused and vengeful presence occupies the home of a first-time buyer . . .

In ghastly harmony with the nightmarish visions of the award-winning writer’s novels, these stories blend a lifelong appreciation of horror culture with the grotesque fascinations and childlike terrors that are the author’s own.

Adam L. G. Nevill’s best early horror stories are collected here for the first time.

Limited edition signed hardback bundle, including the Ritual Limited Black Metal T Shirt, is available from www.adamlgnevill.com - ISBN: 978-0-9954630-0-4

Novels

Banquet for the Damned

Few believed Professor Coldwell could commune with spirits. But in Scot-land’s oldest university town something has passed from darkness into light. Now, the young are being haunted by night terrors and those who are visited disappear. This is certainly not a place for outsiders, especially at night. So what chance do a rootless musician and burned-out explorer have of surviv-ing their entanglement with an ageless supernatural evil and the ruthless cult that worships it? A chilling occult thriller from award-winning author Adam Nevill,
Banquet for the Damned
is both a homage to the great age of British ghost stories and a pacey modern thriller.

ISBN: 978-1447240921

Apartment 16

Some doors are better left closed . . .

In Barrington House, an upmarket block in London, there is an empty apartment. No one goes in, no one comes out. And it has been that way for 50 years. Until the night-watchman hears a disturbance after midnight and investigates. What he experiences is enough to change his life for ever.

A young American woman, Apryl, arrives at Barrington House. She’s been left an apartment by her mysterious Great Aunt Lillian, who died in strange circumstances. Rumours claim Lillian was mad. But her diary sug-gests she was implicated in a horrific and inexplicable event decades before.

Determined to learn something of this eccentric woman, Apryl begins to unravel the hidden story of Barrington House. She discovers that a transforming force still inhabits the building. And the doorway to Apartment 16 is a gateway to something altogether more terrifying . . .

ISBN: 978-1447263395

The Ritual

When four old university friends set off into the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle, they aim to briefly escape the problems of their lives and reconnect with one another. But when Luke, the only man still single and living a precarious existence, finds he has little left in common with his well-heeled friends, tensions rise. With limited experience between them, a shortcut meant to ease their hike turns into a nightmare scenario that could cost them their lives. Lost, hungry and surrounded by forest untouched for millennia, Luke figures things couldn’t possibly get any worse. But then they stumble across an old habitation. Ancient artefacts decorate the walls and there are bones scattered upon the floors. The residue of old rites and pagan sacrifice for something that still exists in the forest. Something responsible for the bestial presence that follows their every step. And as the four friends stagger in the direction of salvation, they learn that death doesn’t come easy among these ancient trees . . .

Winner of the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel and voted Best in Category: Horror by R.U.S.A.

ISBN: 978-1447263418

Last Days

Last Days
is a
Blair Witch
style novel in which a documentary film-maker undertakes the investigation of a dangerous cult―with creepy consequences.

When guerrilla documentary maker Kyle Freeman is asked to shoot a film on the notorious cult known as the Temple of the Last Days, it appears his prayers have been answered. The cult became a worldwide phenomenon in 1975 when there was a massacre including the death of its infamous leader, Sister Katherine. Kyle’s brief is to explore the paranormal myths surrounding an organisation that became a testament to paranoia, murderous rage and occult rituals. The shoot’s locations take him to the cult’s first temple in London, an abandoned farm in France and a derelict copper mine in the Arizonan desert where the Temple of the Last Days met its bloody end. But when he interviews those involved in the case, those who haven’t broken silence in decades, a series of uncanny events plague the shoots. Troubling out-of-body experiences, nocturnal visitations, the sudden demise of their interviewees and the discovery of ghastly artefacts in their room make Kyle question what exactly it is the cult managed to awaken – and what is its interest in him?

Winner of the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel and voted Best in Category: Horror by R.U.S.A.

ISBN: 978-1447263401

House of Small Shadows

Catherine’s last job ended badly. Corporate bullying at a top TV network saw her fired and forced to leave London, but she was determined to get her life back. A new job and a few therapists later, things look much brighter. Especially when a challenging new project presents itself – to catalogue the late M. H. Mason’s wildly eccentric cache of antique dolls and puppets. Rarest of all, she’ll get to examine his elaborate displays of posed, costumed and preserved animals, depicting bloody scenes from the Great War. Catherine can’t believe her luck when Mason’s elderly niece invites her to stay at Red House itself, where she maintains the collection until his niece exposes her to the dark message behind her uncle’s ‘art’. Catherine tries to concentrate on the job, but Mason’s damaged visions begin to raise dark shadows from her own past. Shadows she’d hoped therapy had finally erased. Soon the barriers between reality, sanity and memory start to merge and some truths seem too terrible to be real . . .

ISBN: 978-0330544245

No One Gets Out Alive

Darkness lives within . . .

Cash-strapped, working for agencies and living in shared accommodation, Stephanie Booth feels she can fall no further. So when she takes a new room at the right price, she believes her luck has finally turned. But 82 Edgware Road is not what it appears to be.

It’s not only the eerie atmosphere of the vast, neglected house, or the disturbing attitude of her new landlord, Knacker McGuire, that makes her un-easy – it’s the whispers behind the fireplace, the scratching beneath floors, the footsteps in the dark and the young women weeping in neighbouring rooms. And when Knacker’s cousin Fergal arrives, the danger goes vertical. It’s clear that something very bad has happened in this house. And something even worse is happening now. Stephanie has to find a way out, before whatever’s going on in the house finds her first.

Winner of the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel.

ISBN: 978-1447240907