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    Spook City
    Spook City
    Spook City
    Ebook423 pages4 hours

    Spook City

    By Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker, Peter Atkins and

    ()

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    About this ebook

    If, as Carl Jung said, Liverpool is "the pool of life" then here are things from the darkest depths of that pool, brought to the surface to terrify and startle you...

    Liverpool has long been known as a city of dreamers. But not all those dreams are as beautiful as a Beatles melody or as funny as a Paul O'Grady punchline. Here are the darker dreams of the Merseyside imagination, the macabre imaginings of Liverpool's Princes of Nightmare. Along with an introduction by native son Doug Bradley—world-famous as Pinhead, the iconic demon of the Hellraiser movies—this book collects together the Liverpool-based fictions of Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker, and Peter Atkins, three of horror literature's most celebrated talents.

    Think it's grim up North? You don't know the half of it. Welcome to Liverpool After Midnight. Welcome to the dark side Welcome to...SPOOK CITY!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEncyclopocalypse Publications
    Release dateSep 4, 2024
    ISBN9798227452498
    Spook City
    Author

    Ramsey Campbell

    Ramsey Campbell is the author of numerous novels and short story collections. He has been described, by the Oxford Companion to English Literature, as ‘Britain’s most respected living horror writer’. He is the President of both the British Fantasy Society and the Society of Fantastic Films. He lives on Merseyside.

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      Book preview

      Spook City - Ramsey Campbell

      Spook City

      Spook City © 2024 by Angus Mackenzie

      All Rights Reserved.

      First U.S edition, 2024

      This work was previously published in the United Kingdom

      by PS Publishing, 2009

      Individual story copyrights and permissions appear on page 359

      Cover Artwork by Chad Lutzke

      Cover Layout by Sean Duregger

      Interior design and formatting by Mark Alan Miller and Sean Duregger

      The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living, dead or undead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

      No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

      CONTENTS

      Foreword

      Angus Mackenzie

      Introduction

      Doug Bradley

      Peter Atkins

      Eternal Delight

      Peter Atkins

      Here Comes a Candle

      Peter Atkins

      Between the Cold Moon and the Earth

      Peter Atkins

      The Mystery

      Peter Atkins

      Clive Barker

      The Forbidden

      Clive Barker

      Dread

      Clive Barker

      Coming to Grief

      Clive Barker

      Ramsey Campbell

      Coming to Liverpool

      Ramsey Campbell

      The Man in the Underpass

      Ramsey Campbell

      Mackintosh Willy

      Ramsey Campbell

      Concussion

      Ramsey Campbell

      Through the Walls

      Ramsey Campbell

      Calling Card

      Ramsey Campbell

      Acknowledgments

      Copyright Notice

      FOREWORD

      ANGUS MACKENZIE

      This book of horror stories was conceived in Amsterdam, realized in Los Angeles, Nottingham and London and exists solely because of another city: Liverpool.

      That city, spreading from the deep cut that is the river Mersey, was, for the dreaming Carl Jung, ‘the pool of life,’ and if this city dreams unto itself, then not all of its dreams are easy. The collective unconscious of its people is as much marked with a dark filigree as the city is itself marked by the dark waters of the Mersey.

      From its leafy Georgian avenues, oppressive terraced streets, and now-pulled-down developments has come an overwhelming tidal force of talent: cutting humor in a procession of comedians, passion in the energy of footballers, music that has ‘shook the world’, captivation in the disguise of actors on worn wooden stages and smoke stained screens and fear and dread, anxiety and panic, horror and dark, dark wonder in the form of Peter Atkins, Clive Barker and Ramsey Campbell. Along with Doug Bradley, they make up The Ceno-Beatles; four lads who ‘spooked the world’.

      A horror writer, just like everyone, must come from somewhere and that somewhere will leave its mark on you if you see enough sunsets there. This, in itself, is probably not worthy of much remark when everyone is formed by an incalculable number of factors of which environment is but one. So, if a writer of horror fiction could be conceived anywhere, then why not in a river city at the end of a railway line in the North West of England? What is a little remarkable however is that from this city we have not one horror writer, nor two, but three; all born within the space of ten years of each other and as many miles.

      Everyone comes from somewhere and these writers come from Liverpool (all, in fact, from the same southern suburb of Wavertree) and each has in turn written about their city: Peter Atkins in Morningstar (1992) and Big Thunder (1997); Clive Barker in Weaveworld (1987) and Everville (1994) and Ramsey Campbell—well Ramsey, who still looks out at the Mersey from the windows of his haunted house, has, from The Doll Who Ate his Mother (1976) through to The Creatures of the Pool (2008) brought human madness, supernatural malevolence and such a saturating fog of horror down onto the place that there is barely a visible corner of it left untouched by the cold hand of his imagination.

      This book brings together for the first time the work of all three of these writers and those of their stories specifically set in or inspired by Liverpool. Some are familiar modern classics; some have been written specifically for this collection; and, in the case of ‘Coming to Liverpool’, we have Ramsey Campbell’s new non-fiction companion piece to ‘At the Back of My Mind: A Guided Tour’. As that piece, published as the introduction to the restored edition of The Face That Must Die (1983), dealt with brutal honesty about the traumas of his childhood and the subsequent death of his parents, this new work covers the early happier life of his family in Liverpool and is all the more poignant and melancholic as a foreshadow of the disintegration that was to come.

      I too, like the writers and like Doug Bradley (the actor who portrayed the iconic character of Pinhead in the Hellraiser movies and who provides the introduction to this book), was born in Liverpool and spent my formative years there. I knew the streets that John Horridge, the blade wielding sociopath from Ramsey Campbell’s The Face That Must Die (1979), limped down. The Scourge from Clive Barker’s Weaveworld (1987) was hit head-on by a train on a railway line that I took journeys on. The bowdlerizing protagonist from Peter Atkins’ Here Comes a Candle (1988) meets his end in a house Pete told me was much like the one that Ramsey lives in overlooking the river. The horror in these stories was therefore personal to me and occurring in the very place in which I was living. In the same way that Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane— evocatively known throughout the world through the music of The Beatles—were just locations in Liverpool that I knew from living there, so too was the work of these writers familiar to me in a way that it could only be to someone from Liverpool. Only through meeting people from other faraway places did I come to realize the magic and significance of the Beatles’ music to so many people and that not everyone can take for granted such an artistically explored hometown.

      For me, as a fan of the horror genre growing up in Liverpool, it had another greater significance in that I also grew up knowing the people that created this work, as this shared passion invariably brings you to the same dusty bookshops, film societies and circle of friends.

      In Ramsey we have a prodigiously gifted writer who has given his creative life to the horror genre. In a career that now casts a very long shadow he has learnt how to precision engineer selected words into sentences that have been meticulously designed to achieve disquiet. And yet he is such a cheery chappie, with a mischievous sense of humor, garrulous laugh and neat line in offensive t-shirts. Even in the most innocuous of settings, though, I’ve seen him quietly take out his notebook and scribble something onto the page in his quick and fluid handwriting. These notes can become elements of stories that have won him more awards than anyone else working in the field.

      The movies Hellraiser II: Hellbound and Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth were written in the back room of a terraced house in Wavertree (which had a big imposing black front door) and which some critics thought came from a sick mind. Peter Atkins doesn’t live in this house anymore (and it now has a nice white glass front door) and I wonder what the current owners would think if they knew what horrors of desire and rendered flesh were hammered out from a manual typewriter in their back room (it was only after the success of Hellbound that Pete could afford to buy a computer). It was during the filming of Hellraiser III in North Carolina that Pete, strolling past the outdoor pool and wearing shades, glanced down to see Doug Bradley swimming in the warm sunlit water wearing shades. They both realized that they were a long way away from their days in Liverpool and burst out laughing at the absurdity of it.

      Given that Clive began to achieve significant success with a series of sometimes autoptical stories in The Books of Blood (1984), he was never that comfortable with the ol’ claret stuff in Liverpool, nigh on fainting in the cinema at the sight of it spurting one memorable time. He also had a bad episode after giving blood once and was saved from falling out of a window by a quick thinking nurse who pulled him back after he opened a window to get some fresh air after feeling faint at the sight of the coagulating glue sitting in bowls under the donors’ beds. He subsequently—in the company of a similarly overwhelmed Pete Atkins— was to feel a little unsteady on his feet browsing through the pages of forensic pathology books in a medical bookstore, and it is therefore only to his credit that he could produce such harrowing, visceral horror in such beautifully executed prose.

      As I mentioned, this book exists because of Liverpool: the introduction was written by an actor whose performances as the Pinhead Cenobite from the Hellraiser series have given this character an unquestionable iconic status in the history of horror cinema; the stories, written over the course of four decades, come from writers who have all breathed its air, walked its beautiful and frightening streets and slept under its night skies. They know their way around this place and if you are ready to go with them they’ll be happy to show you around.

      Angus Mackenzie, Amsterdam, August 2008

      (revised for this edition in May 2024)

      INTRODUCTION

      DOUG BRADLEY

      Wonsuponatime⁠ ¹ on the banks of a dirty great river, there was a small fishing village where not a lot happened. There were some monks with a boat, but not much else. But the people ate so much fish from the dirty great river⁠ ² that they grew and grew and the King was forced to give them a city which grew and grew and became dirty and great like the river.

      People dreamed dreams in and of this city. Some said it was the pool of life and calculated that it was the center of the known or unknown universe: others had more disturbing dreams about the deep dark mud on the shores of its river.

      Dirty great ships sailed up and down the dirty great river to and from far away places with strange sounding names like New Brighton and New York. Many people sailed away from the city to lead new lives in New Worlds. Some were forced to leave and it made them very sad. Many people sailed into the city to lead new lives in Old Worlds. Some were forced to come and sold for money which made some people very rich and it makes us sad to think about it.

      Lots of things came into the city on the ships, like cotton and spices and tea, which made more people very rich. Other things arrived by accident. Rats, probably, but also strange new musics which made people in caverns tap their feet and rock and roll. Lots of rock was dug out of the ground, too. Much of it from a quarry near where John met Paul and Eleanor was laid to rest, and it was used to build dirty great buildings, including a cathedral. In fact, the city got two of those, and three graces, too.

      Occasionally, strange things happened in this city. Sometimes people fell out of the sky, sometimes on flaming pies, and that made some people do extraordinary things. One of them was called Clive and he wrote plays and stories and painted pictures and made films with puppets and people. I met him, and he became my friend. Inspired by him, I tried to write and draw things, too, but that wasn’t how my brain worked. I spoke a lot of his words instead in far away places with strange sounding names like Redditch and Spokane and Cricklewood.

      And we had a friend called Sue who had a brother called Graham who had a mate called Peter. And Graham said to Peter: you should meet my sister’s friend, Clive. And, in a library, they did, and that made Peter write things too, and I spoke lots of his words, too, in far away places with strange sounding names like Pinewood and Hollywood and High Point. And all this time there was a Proper Writer called Ramsey and he met Clive and they became friends and I spoke some of his words too, about a ghost train in New Brighton, in the basement of a radio station in another dirty great city on the banks of a different dirty great river.

      I’ve lived in the other dirty great city for more than thirty years now. I regard London as my home, but the old adage about taking the boy out of a place but not the place out of the boy has always been true. Liverpool is in the marrow of my bones and, while I can’t imagine myself ever living there again, I don’t ever expect it to—or want it to—let me go. Between the twin loyalties of family and Liverpool Football Club, there has not been a single year in those thirty when I haven’t returned at least a couple of times.

      It’s changed dramatically in that time, of course. Probably the most obvious is that now, like Paul McCartney’s granddad in A Hard Day’s Night, it is ‘very clean’. It’s difficult to remember it, but the photographs confirm it: where now St George’s Hall and the Liver Buildings, along with Liverpool’s other civic buildings (and few cities can boast better), positively gleam in the sunshine, they used to wear a dark black coat of soot.

      Football crowds seem to have undergone the same transformation over time. On my first visit to Anfield in 1964, the Kop appeared to be a mass of disembodied pink faces, floating on a black sea. Fast forward to today and the Kop is a mass of replica shirts and the whole scene is awash with color, including many of the faces, but in the forty year old snapshots in my memory even the grass and the players’ shirts are rendered in black and white. No doubt this apparent monochromatic perception, coupled with a child’s focus on a big city, goes a long way to inform my feelings about Liverpool four decades ago. I’m sure factors as mundane as improved street lighting play their part, too, but that city in my head seems an altogether more forbidding, grander, darker and more dangerous place than does the city that lies at the end of the M62 motorway today.

      Now, for example, the Albert Dock is a beautiful sight, even if it has been reduced to yet another playground for the modern human whose life seems to revolve entirely around shopping and eating (and, I hope, a visit to the Tate or one of its museums), but it was not like that when I was growing up. Rumors always swirled about its fate (demolition, University halls of residence, hotel etc.) but it remained defiantly empty and enticing, filled with seafaring and laboring ghosts and Mersey mud. I seem to recall a bunch of us on a winter’s night (who knows when? 1970 would be some kind of marker) down at the Pier Head, rain and wind whipping in off the river, gazing towards its mournfully elegant, deserted warehouses with Clive in full imaginative flow, spinning fantasies through its dereliction. I have, I should warn you, learned not to trust my memories over time and distance, but I’m so sure about this one that as I write I have a vague sense of annoyance that, to the best of my knowledge, Clive never featured Liverpool’s abandoned docks in any of his fiction.

      The travails and woes that afflicted Liverpool through the seventies and eighties have been too often chronicled for me to wade through them again. Suffice to say that the sense of abandonment and decay that afflicted the Albert Dock seemed at times to be a microcosm of the whole city. I have no intention of suggesting any psycho/socio/politico/ economico/any-otherico basis for the dark fires that burn in these pages (and Clive for one would probably never speak to me again if I were to try), but it might also be invidious not to see some connection. Liverpool’s genii loci are a varied bunch, it seems to me, and while those detailed to look after Wit and Sheer Downright Determination To Have A Good Time No Matter What are clearly pulling 24/7 shifts, there are darker gods moving among them whose voices will be heard. So, while Lennon & McCartney brought a psychedelic whimsy to the Liverpool of their childhoods, and writers such as Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale chronicled in harsh and humorous detail the realities of life in the city at that time, Messrs. Atkins, Barker & Campbell—the ABC of Liverpool horror writers (can I copyright that?)—while no less faithful to the city they lived in, found the landscape of their city as mythological as it was real.

      Take a walk through the Spector Street Estate with Clive and you will have no doubt that you are in a real, decaying urban landscape. While I was still at school and Clive was at Liverpool University, I recall him talking about going on long lunchtime walks that took him into Gerrard Gardens, the Bullring: tenement flats built in the 1930s to replace ‘slums’ and hailed in their day as Art Deco gems and the face of The City Of The Future but condemned as slums in their turn by the time Clive was visiting and finally falling foul of the wrecker’s ball in the late 1980s (the flats, not Clive). Had Clive chosen to merely chronicle the urban environment he found himself in (he, like me, was a child of the suburbs of South Liverpool and so brought the eye of the proverbial ‘anthropologist on Mars’ to these places) I have no doubt he would have done so memorably. In fact, he did exactly that. And had it stopped there, his writing might have been admired by a small circle of interested souls. But Clive did a great deal more than that. Here he encountered, in his head if not in fact, the figure of The Candyman, who fired one of the most powerful stories in his Books Of Blood anthology and who has (albeit relocated from Inner-City Liverpool to South Side Chicago), through the medium of cinema and the person of actor Tony Todd, touched people in every corner of the globe.

      The dark gods prowled the leafy, well-heeled suburbs as well. I recently revisited the path along the side of Woolton’s disused quarry— the ‘Bogey-Walk’ of Clive’s Coming To Grief—for the first time in more than thirty years. It is a far more managed and manicured place than it used to be—and I had the benefit of a perfect summer morning of warm sun and dazzlingly clear light rather than the wintry wind and rain of Miriam’s re-encounter—but I was surprised by how it still retained its powerful and unsettling atmosphere. There are no gaps in crumbling brick walls giving way to dizzying prospects of the rubbish and rainwater-filled quarry below these days. A high, solidly maintained breeze-block wall surmounted by an impressive array of twisted, barbed metalwork keeps the vertigo at bay and ensures that no latter-day equivalents of Marjorie Elliot’s widower could step off the path to an inevitable fate below, but that same wall promotes a sense of claustrophobia and ensured that on my visit the path remained in deep, cool shade: the ferns rooting themselves in the sandstone testimony to that.

      It’s a place of baffling Escheresque geometry. You leave a broad suburban street, make your way along the path and emerge onto a broad suburban street having apparently travelled on the level. You could be forgiven for being unaware that for a considerable part of your journey, there was a drop of some one hundred feet to one side of you. That becomes evident when you walk around and enter the site of the quarry itself. Not that it serves as a rubbish dump anymore (I recall it being a tire dump: on one memorable occasion, a fire started and a thick, black, acrid pall of smoke hung over the area): now It’s a small estate of proudly and neatly kept houses. Like any other modern suburban street were it not for the sheer slabs of ancient sea—or river—bed rising high above the roof tops: still a distinctly atmospheric place. An ideal setting for another sequel to Stephen Spielberg’s Poltergeist, perhaps, or maybe, just maybe, still a place of ‘a dozen rumored atrocities’ or where ‘tales of hook-handed men and secret lovers slaughtered in the act of love’ might still be whispered on cold, dark nights halfway along the Bogey-Walk.

      Sandstone is everywhere in this part of Liverpool. Its walls ring Sefton Park, the setting for Michael’s fateful encounter with Carol on his late night walk home. I was amused to see that Liverpool City Council are currently undertaking ‘improvements’ in the park which include draining and clearing the old boating lake. I just hope that they won’t have disturbed things better left untouched among the prams and shopping trolleys.

      I’m afraid It’s time for me to state the obvious. I’ve been trying to find some way to avoid it, but in vain. Liverpool is a city of spooks. There it is. I found a website that tells me so. At 44 Penny Lane there’s a recurring manifestation of footsteps pacing in the house. At 82 Wimborne Road in Huyton, a family were terrified by the shade of an old lady with a shriveled skull for a head, bent over a walking stick. ‘George’ has been seen standing by beds on the fifth floor of the Adelphi Hotel on many occasions. Shoppers in Bold Street have at various times reported finding themselves briefly back in the 1940s. A phantom peers through the windows of parked cars on the corner of Argyle and Canning Streets. The Sixth Earl of Sefton is keen on visiting the tea-room at Croxteth Hall. An ill-advised hitch-hiker, hit by a car in the Mersey Tunnel, is apparently still trying to get out. Etcetera. And so on.

      That’s not the obvious bit. The obvious bit is that this makes Liverpool no different to any other city, town or village anywhere else in the country or, indeed, the world. I could, for example, tell you about Spring-Heeled Jack, the extraordinary diabolic gentleman possessed of a supernatural ability to leap prodigious heights, sometimes breathing flames as he went, who terrified inhabitants of the Everton area of Liverpool in the nineteenth century. The trouble is that if I did, I’d have to also tell you how he similarly troubled the good citizenry of Sheffield and London, the Midlands and Scotland. And I wouldn’t bet against discovering Jack—or someone very like him—turning up in other countries as well.

      I could take more time to share the specific places referenced in these pages: the bus stops and journeys in Eternal Delight, perhaps. I could take you on a tour through Ramsey’s Calling Card, but by the time we’d made the walk from Lark Lane to Otterspool Prom, taken the ferry ’cross the Mersey from the Pier Head to Woodside and taken in the aquarium and the museum, you’d be fairly exhausted and possibly not much the wiser, depending on my abilities as a guide.

      Because the really obvious bit is that these stories are, as I think somebody else once put it, tales of mystery and imagination, of human fears and terrors. They are therefore universal: here to be enjoyed whether you’ve lived your whole life in Liverpool or have never—and are unlikely ever to—set foot in the place. There, I did it.

      But—at the risk of contradicting myself—these are also very much stories rooted in a relatively small number of square miles of land to be found at the end of the M62 motorway. So I’m going to leave you now in the most excellent company of Messrs. Atkins, Barker and Campbell and invite them to lead you into the dark heart of Spook City.

      Actually, I’m jealous. Do you mind if I tag along?

      -Doug Bradley

      1 Deliberately and shamelessly nicked: don’t write in.

      2 Which was probably quite clean back then, but don’t write in.

      For my mother, Johanna

      You know what some people are calling Liverpool these days?

      No.

      Spook City.

      Spook City?

      And with good reason, believe me.

      —Clive Barker, Weaveworld

      Title Page 2

      PETER ATKINS

      …was born in Liverpool in 1955. He was educated at Heygreen Road County Primary, the Liverpool Bluecoat School, and Liverpool University. In 1974, between grammar school and university, he joined a Liverpool theatre collective that would eventually be known as The Dog Company and which included Clive Barker and Doug Bradley. Over the next several years they performed in many Liverpool venues including the Everyman and the Eleanor Rathbone theatres and the parking lots of council estates. Alan Bleasdale did them out of a grant for a mime oratorio to be performed in the Anglican Cathedral by describing the proposed work as ‘a prime candidate for Pseud’s Corner’. He was doubtless right but they still think he’s a twat. In 1980, Atkins founded the pop/rock band The Chase with whom he played most of the much-missed venues of the early ’eighties such as The Warehouse, The Masonic, and Brady’s and the group achieved the dizzy heights of hearing two tracks from their cassette EP played on Janice Long’s show on Radio Merseyside while driving back from a gig in New Brighton. Their final performance was at a lunchtime show at The Cavern. Atkins newest book is the story collection All Our Hearts Are Ghosts. His previous collection, Rumours of the Marvelous, was a finalist for the British Fantasy Award. He is the author of the novels Morningstar, Big Thunder and Moontown and the screenplays Hellraiser II, Hellraiser III, Hellraiser IV and Wishmaster. He can be found on Facebook under his own name and on Twitter and Instagram as @limeybastard55.

      ETERNAL DELIGHT

      PETER ATKINS

      Energy is eternal delight.

      —William Blake

      A Wop Bop a Loo Bop a Lop Bam Boom!

      —Little Richard

      Liverpool, 1985

      It was only when all his friends had betrayed him that David Holloway became an unusual person.

      The signs of this collective betrayal had been various but invariably vicious, had been sometimes subtle but mostly ruthlessly overt: Andy selling his guitar; Paul’s conversation turning inexorably from boxing and blowjobs to babies and bathroom extensions; Tracy marrying a confectionery representative; Maurice—a man obsessed with style from the age of fourteen—allowing his girlfriend to take over the cutting of his hair; and so on, and so on.

      What happened in the face of all this sociological reconstruction was that David too found his life remade.

      What happened was that he saw such visions and did such things that, had he lived in less civilized times, he would have been hung by the neck until he was dead.

      What happened was this.

      1.

      MYSTERY TRAIN

      The plate shattered.

      David blamed the fancy washing up liquid. He was accustomed to cheaper brands but there'd been a special at the Tesco's on Picton Road, so he'd indulged. And now look. Fucking stuff was so slick that the dishes had needed a good tight grip, much tighter than he was used to, and his Elvis Presley commemorative plate had slid out from his fingers, cracked against the side of the sink, fallen to the floor, and smashed into five pieces.

      Shit, said David. The King had only been dead seven and a half years. This was disrespectful. He slapped at the detergent bottle to teach it some manners and, gathering the broken pieces of the plate, turned to the pedal bin at his side.

      The bin, the fragments, and David himself were in the relatively large kitchen of the relatively small Housing Association flat that took up half of the ground floor of an early 20th century terrace house at the Smithdown Road end of Wavertree.

      The flat had been home to David for the last three years, ever since he dropped out of the Poly. Well, not dropped out so much as just stopped fucking going and not bothering to tell anyone. The combination of his DHSS rent allowance and the occasional income from his freelance journalism (of which the DHSS were ignorant) would actually have allowed him to find a slightly larger living space by now, but his position here at the back of the ground floor gave him access to what amounted to a private garden—theoretically, his fellow tenants could knock on his flat door and ask to be allowed through to the garden but fortunately no one was that much of a knobhead—and, in the summer months at least, he found this sufficient compensation for having dominion over only a bed-sitting room and a kitchen.

      But this was not summer. David was into the autumn of his twenty-third year, in the literal sense, and, in the metaphoric, deep into the autumn of his youth. His perception of his life as something for which ripeness was a memory colored his perception of everything else around him: The view through his kitchen window of the garden in the afternoon light seemed to him neither mellow nor fruitful but merely dull and brown, a conscious entropic insult by a nature grown not merely senile but malicious with it; the fragments in his hand seemed evidence not of a simple domestic accident, but of a continuing campaign to confirm the willful transience of life and its pleasures.

      David shook his head to free it from the gathering of depression and, at a touch from his left foot on the pedal, the lid of the bin flew back. Without bothering to bend down, David dropped the shards of Elvis onto the yielding mass of yesterday's excess prawn curry.

      There you go, mate, he said. One more for the mystery train.

      And then he froze, standing very still as a small and speedy rush of fear jetted through his system, leaving his arms and legs tingling and paralyzed.

      Something had slithered.

      Something was in the bin.

      It had been the tiniest of movements and David couldn't be sure what he had seen exactly—indeed, couldn't be sure that he had actually seen anything. Perhaps, in fact, had seen effect only, not cause at all; just the rising and subsiding of the trash as something unseen had probed and retreated. But the path of that rise and fall had nevertheless managed to suggest a shape, and a quite specific one. Something long and thin and pliable. Something like a tail. Something like a rat’s tail. Jesus Christ, there was a rat in his fucking bin!

      With an involuntary cry of terror and disgust, David threw himself back towards his kitchen door as the lid of the bin snapped shut. For a long and bowel-loosening five seconds, David simply stood quite still by his door and stared at the stained steel tube of his bin. If you'd asked him what he was waiting for, he might have said that he was waiting for a rattle or squeak or some other sound from within the bin to confirm the problem. Or he might have said that he was waiting for inspiration as to how to deal with the matter. But the truth is that he wasn't waiting for either of those things. He was simply waiting for it not to be true anymore.

      And after these five seconds, after this silence and this immobility, the notion of a rat actually being in there—though not empirically proven to be untrue—nevertheless began to seem farfetched enough for David to feel he could perhaps try a little test or two. He seized the long-handled brush which rested against the fridge and, from the safety of the other end of its four foot length, he struck it against the side of the bin.

      Irritatingly, the dull thud of wood on metal awoke his ears not just to any new aural evidence of an unwanted inhabitant of the bin but to the entire sonic life of the kitchen, which he had previously managed to tune out. The rhythmic dripping of water from the tap, the low humming of the fridge, the high-pitched keening of the wind in the ventilator above the cooker; across the entire range of his hearing swelled an orchestra of conspiracy that almost succeeded in blocking out the other noise he'd heard. Thought he'd heard. Wondered if he'd heard. Knew damn well he’d heard.

      Tiny, ungraspable, a third-generation analog recording of an echo of a whisper, but there it had been.

      And there, therefore, it was.

      Something in the bin.

      This time David acted on instinct and slapped the far end of the brush onto the closed lid of the bin. A rat in a bin was considerably better, in the confines of David Holloway's kitchen, then a rat being given the opportunity to get out of a bin should it so desire and circumstance permit. Indeed, a monster contained is almost pleasurable. David remembered pressing his nine-year-old palm against the thick museum glass that had, by an all-important quarter of an inch, separated his flesh from that of a very black, very hairy, and very large bird-eating spider.

      The sensation had been, if not exactly nice, then not exactly nasty. The fear had been there

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