Authors: Craig Saunders
Craig Saunders
is the author of over thirty novels and novellas, including 'Masters of Blood
and Bone', 'RAIN' and 'Deadlift'. He writes across many genres, but horror,
humour (the 'Spiggot' series) and fantasy (the 'Rythe' tales) are his
favourites.
Craig
lives in Norfolk, England, with his wife and children, likes nice people and
good coffee. Find out more on Amazon, or visit:
www.craigrsaunders.blogspot.com
www.facebook.com/craigrsaundersauthor
@Grumblesprout
Novels
The Dead Boy
Left to Darkness
Masters of Blood and Bone
Damned to Cold Fire (previously published as 'The Estate')
A Home by the Sea
RAIN
Vigil
The Noose and Gibbet
A Stranger's Grave
The Love of the Dead
Spiggot
Spiggot, Too
The Gold Ring
Novellas
Death by a Mother's Hand
Days of Christmas
Flesh
and Coin
Bloodeye
Deadlift
A Scarecrow to Watch over Her
The Walls of Madness
Insulation
Short Story Collections
Dead in the Trunk
Angels in Black and White
Dark Words
Writing as Craig R. Saunders:
The Outlaw King (The Line of Kings Trilogy Book One)
The Thief King (The Line of Kings Trilogy Book Two)
The Queen of Thieves (The Line of Kings Trilogy Book Three)
Rythe Awakes (The Rythe Quadrilogy Book One)
The Tides of Rythe (The Rythe Quadrilogy Book Two)
Rythe Falls (The Rythe Quadrilogy Book Three)
Coming
Soon:
Unit
731
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead mean naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
- From ‘And Death Shall Have no Dominion’ - Dylan Thomas
In Prison Still
There’s
a cemetery in a small Norfolk market town. It’s a peaceful place, a haven for
the dead and the bereaved. There is birdsong in the trees no matter the time of
year. Surrounded by hedgerow, the cemetery is hemmed in with roads running east
and west to either side. The roads were there before cars, when people
travelled in carriages, and before.
It’s an old place. The earliest
headstone dates back to the year 1756. The trees are much, much older.
Nobody knows how far the trees go back,
but in 1956 a great oak that overhung the small chapel was cut down, and should
any have had a mind to look there were a hundred and seven circles around that
stump, that fat stump that wasn’t anywhere near the fattest grown among the
dead.
The chapel is old, too. The stone, brick
and flint and granite, is long tarnished, occasionally cleaned, but not often
enough.
The shine has gone from the marble
headstones. The sandstone, the granite, the limestone, long illegible.
Trees grow from forgotten graves and
roots crack the pathways and tunnel through the old dead.
But something older than all of this
came in 2007. A trio of angels carved from basalt and polished to a black
sheen.
The evil those angels brought was the
oldest of all.
*
1.
The
big gates shut behind Elton Burlock and for the first time in twenty-six years
he breathed free air under a free sun.
The sun that shone back in 1985 was the
same sun. The air he breathed back then, the same. The clouds drifting through
the sky were no different.
But time brings subtle changes. The sun
didn’t seem as bright. The air didn’t smell as clear.
This road, before the gate, was only
twenty-six years old. Probably once fresh and wet when he’d left the world, it
was now potted and cracked and repaired time and time again.
Clouds drifted across the sun and the
air was instantly chilled.
When he’d gone into prison he’d brought
a coat and a bag with the things he might need again on the outside. He hadn’t
planned on staying so long, though. It wasn’t that his coat wasn’t warm enough
for a mild spring day – though it seemed out of fashion now – nor was it that
the day was especially chilly.
He shivered because prison was always
warm. Now he was sixty-one and he was cold because age had somehow caught him
out, too.
Elton turned his face up to the sun,
taking what warmth he could. It felt good, his skin tightening, his eyes
burning behind his eyelids.
Was the memory of the sun worth it?
He was still a powerful man, still
strong enough when it mattered. His hair might be grey, a little thinner, and
his stomach a little thicker. Maybe his skin was paler, too. He’d missed
sunshine. You didn’t see a lot of the sun in prison.
He stroked his stubble, thick and rough.
He saw his face most days in jail, but somehow it felt new, puckered and tight,
even though he’d only stood in the glare of the sun for a few minutes at best.
Hard time done, then soft time. Once
he’d hit fifty and transferred to Wayland prison it seemed like he was set, all
hope of freedom gone, an educated man with no other purpose in life than to
live.
Now, shifting his weight on feet that
were once spry, once used to a boxer’s stance, shifting his bag in strong
scarred knuckles, he set out on the road into town to meet the bus.
He wasn’t the same man out that went in.
Back then, at thirty-five, he’d done what he thought was his share of fighting,
in the ring and out. Maybe he’d have been wary, then, walking down the street
on his own in the night, past pubs kicking out piss heads and druggies and
punks.
Thirty-five, he’d been married. Settled.
Comfortable. His first degree earned, a teaching position, and his baby...
Thirty-five years old with a wife and a
child on the way he might have been worried by these young people passing,
wearing hoods and walking like hard men, even though they looked like they were
made of twigs. Once, back when. Now?
He wouldn’t even touch them. He’d been
down that road. Twenty-six years worth of it.
Prison didn’t take your pride. It didn’t
take your strength. It didn’t take your will.
The thing of prison was...
The thing of prison...
He stopped walking. The bus pulled up in
town and he watched people get off, get on while he thought about what it was
that was niggling away at him.
What had prison given him? A second
degree that would never get him a job. Eyes in the back of his head. A stomach
like cast iron from eating shit food and arms like steel from curls and bench
presses for the last twenty years. A broken hand, a once broken knee that ached
all day long and a shit shoulder since he took a wild stab with a sharpened
toothbrush for his trouble.
But what had prison taken?
He’d been fed. He’d been happy enough,
late on.
Maybe not back in the early days, when
he’d fought it, railed against it, but late on, when he’d all but given up on
getting out? Yeah, he’d been happy then.
Soon enough now he’d be on a state
pension, living out an empty life, somewhere he didn’t know with strange people
all around him. Nothing to do all day. Food he didn’t recognise.
He blinked at the receding bus, unable
to make out the number.
He looked at the directions to the doss
house on the print-out he’d been given. Hoped it wasn’t his bus he’d just
missed.
It wasn’t dying he was worried about,
either. Prison didn’t make you afraid of dying, not at all.
He was afraid of living.
Prison didn’t hurt you when you were in.
It was when you got out. It was only then that you knew you were in prison
still, and you always would be.
He pulled his coat tighter as he sat at
the bus stop and stared at the sun for a while, until it hurt his eyes. It felt
good - like it was worth the wait.
*
2.
Two
fat policemen sucked their lips and looked down at the grave. Dirt was thrown
up on one side, grassy clods still wet with spring dew. That alone and it would
have been down to the gravekeeper, or maybe the council, at best, but whoever
desecrated the child’s grave had also sprayed a swastika on the headstone and
kicked it over.
That was why two fat policemen stood
beside the grave.
‘Was he a Jewish kid?’
‘Don’t know for sure. Not, like, a
hundred percent,’ said his partner.
Local policemen didn’t really have
partners. Mostly it was just plodding, keeping the old ladies happy. PC James
didn’t like the cemetery, though, so he’d persuaded his mate to come with him.
‘Don’t think so, though.’
‘Samuel. That’s Jewish, right?’
‘Biblical, maybe. Jewish? Don’t know,’
said PC James, biting his tongue.
‘What about Smith?’
‘Samuel Smith.’
‘Yeah. Samuel Smith,’ said PC Davis.
‘Sam Smith,’ said PC James.
‘Could be.’
‘Sam Smith, Ewan? Sam fucking Smith?’
‘What?’
‘No, Ewan. I’m not a hundred percent,
but no,’ said PC James. ‘I don’t think he was Jewish.’
What PC James thought was that someone
with roughly the same IQ as Davis had thought Sam Smith was Jewish. Some kind
of neo-nazi idiot, listened to death metal in his mum’s basement kind of idiot.
But he didn’t say that, because he didn’t want to make work for himself if he
didn’t have to.
‘Well, I don’t fucking know, do I? It’s
fucking Norfolk, alright? What do I know about Jewish people, or anyone else?
Apart from the eastern European immigrants in the carrot packers, maybe. Or
that fella runs the Portuguese shop with all them weird sausages...’
PC James sighed.
‘Bump it up?’
PC Davis kicked at a clump of grass and
dirt. Made out like he was seriously considering it.
‘OK?’
‘Pub?’
‘OK?’
PC James liked PC Davis. You knew where
you were with PC Davis. Generally in the pub.
He clicked his radio and called it in.
*
3.
Henry
Harrison watched the two policemen at the grave. He didn’t want anything to do
with it, and they didn’t want anything to do with him. They didn’t stop to ask
him any questions, and that suited him fine. He’d been walking round the
cemetery for two hours, trying to keep Emily asleep. The last thing he needed
was someone waking her up.
Emily was his beautiful daughter, tucked
up tight in an all-in-one suit against the chill, bundled into an old Silver
Cross buggy. It had a small place to store baby stuff underneath. The space was
filled with nappies, wipes, bottles – already sterilised – and a change of
clothes, because babies’ doings had a way of getting out.
Henry Harrison liked things orderly.
Baby stuff in the buggy, none in his pockets.
His pockets were full of pipe and pipe
tobacco, a penknife for clearing the bowl, and a box of matches. He always used
a match to tamp down his tobacco and a match to light his pipe. It tasted
better that way.
He pushed Emily away a little, now she
was sound asleep.
People thought maybe the most beautiful
sound in the world was the deep roar of an expensive sports car, or a woman’s
orgasm, or a symphony. It wasn’t. It was a baby snoring.
He filled his pipe, already clean, and
pushed the tobacco down into the bowl. He flicked the match alight on the rough
old arm of the bench, puffed a while to get it going, and sighed in satisfaction
as he sat on the same bench.
Now he was down he didn’t plan on
getting up for a good while, either.
It was his favourite bench. It was
dedicated to the memory of Lily Anne and Frank Holt, whom he’d known, way back
when. That wasn’t why it was his favourite bench. It was because it was smack
in the middle of the cemetery, out of the way of the roads that ran parallel
either side, at the east and west entrances. It was the quietest. You could
barely hear the traffic, and the birdsong was clear.
It had the best view, too. The cherry
blossom was out, spring in bloom. The trees were green again. Seemed like the
older you got, the more you appreciated making another spring.
He would have been what, now? He would
have been...?
Christ,
he thought.
Time flies. How many years had he been coming to this cemetery? Since he’d
known the Holts, for sure. Since his wife had passed? Maybe that was when he’d
started using the cemetery like his own personal park. Maybe that was when.
There was something comforting, being
surrounded by the quiet dead, because at home his wife was with him all the
time, no matter that she’d been gone for so many years.
Henry puffed his pipe for a while.
Quiet, peaceful. Birds singing in the spring, baby snoring softly, with a
slight snuffle from a little spring cold, but nothing drastic, and a pipe on
the go.
For an old man with a young baby in tow,
life didn’t get much sweeter.
- Sample End -
Thank you for
reading.