Gary McMahon - Silent Voices

“Depends on who’s asking,” says the man, grinning.

Marty decides that he likes this man. He can see already why he was Simon’s best — only — friend. “I’m Marty. We spoke on the phone.”

The grin falls away. “Shit, yeah. Fuck… Marty. Good to meet you.” He sticks out his hand and Marty takes it, gives it a quick shake.

“I’m sorry I had to break the news to you that way. How’s Natasha taking it?”

Mike shrugs his narrow shoulders. “Not good. I’ll go and get her. Like I said on the phone, she’s been staying upstairs, in my spare room, for a few days. She hasn’t had any visitors, or even spoken to anyone she works with. She needs to get her head together before the funeral. We both do.”

Marty sits at a table and looks at his hands. His scars are livid today; his knuckles look like conkers in a bag.

“Hello…”

When he glances up from the table, she is there, standing at his side. He was not even aware of her as she moved across the room. Perhaps it is part of her training as a model, that ability to glide rather than walk.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. It is something he finds himself saying a lot lately. “I tried to help him… but… but he died.”

“In your arms.” Her face is thin and pale, the skin of her cheeks as delicate as paper, fluttering as she speaks. Her pronunciation is slow and deliberate, as if she is trying desperately not to stumble over the words. Marty likes her accent.

“In my arms,” he says, trying not to cry. “This is why I came here. To tell you face-to-face that… that I tried to save him. And that he saved me.”

He stares at her impassive face for a little while longer, and then his gaze wanders down to her belly. She isn’t showing, not yet; but Mike told him the news when Marty telephoned the previous day and arranged to come over and see her.

“How many months are you gone?” He nods at her stomach.

“Not long. Just eight weeks. I was going to tell him when he got back. I could not tell him something like that over the phone. That’s why I was so desperate to see him. I almost came up there, to the northeast. I nearly came to see him before… well, you know.” Her eyes are shining. Tears look good on her; she wears her grief well. Natasha is a true model; a natural.

Marty doesn’t know what else to say, so he falls back on small talk, hoping that some day he can speak to this woman properly, tell her the truth — or at least as much of it as he can understand. “Do you know what you’re having?” He flexes his hands on the table. They’re stiff; his fingers ache. “I mean, would he have been the father of a boy or a girl?”

Natasha licks her lips. Her left eye twitches slightly. Not much, but it is a crack in the façade, a gap through which the depth of her grief can be glimpsed, like fire, if only briefly.

“Both,” she says, her voice as low as a whisper. “I’m having twins. There are twins on my mother’s side of the family, and it seems I got them, too.”

Marty closes his eyes. Darkness floods in, drowning him.

Now, at last, he realises what Captain Clickety must have sniffed out on Simon, and what had happened right at the end, when a deal was struck.

He knows why the sacrifice was accepted, and how it might now be claimed.

“Twins,” he whispers, and in that black moment the word becomes forever associated with absolute horror.

Hungry Hearts

Pretty Little Dead Things

The Concrete Grove

Dead Bad Things

Thanks always to Emily and Charlie for giving me a reason to fight; to Ross and Katarzyna Warren for checking and correcting my pitiful attempts at the Polish language; to John Probert for the medical advice regarding stab wounds; to Michael Wilson, Jim McLeod, Jason Baki, Colin Leslie and many other kind reviewers and bloggers who supported the first Concrete Grove book; to Mark West (again) for his interest and enthusiasm; and finally huge thanks must go to John Roome for some sound advice given at a time when it mattered.

IT KNOWS WHERE YOU LIVE…

Imagine a place where all your nightmares become real. Dark urban streets where crime, debt and violence are not the only things to fear. Picture a housing project that is a gateway to somewhere else; a realm where ghosts and monsters stir hungrily in the shadows. Welcome to the Concrete Grove.

This deprived area is Hailey’s new home, but when an ancient entity notices her, it becomes something much more threatening. She is the only one who can help her mother as she joins in a dangerous dance with loanshark Monty Bright. Only Hailey can see the truth of Tom’s darkest desires as he tries to become part of their family. And only Hailey can lead them all to the heart of the estate where something older than this land stirs and begins to wake…

‘ The Concrete Grove is McMahon’s most accomplished work to date. A compelling novel of extremes.’

‘There’s a new wave of brilliant horror writers, and McMahon’s right there at the top of them.’

‘McMahon’s visionary sense of the supernatural makes The Concrete Grove one exciting read.’

HOME IS WHERE THE HORROR IS…

The tread on the landing outside the door when you know you are the only one in the house. The wind whistling through the eves, carrying the voices of the dead. The figure glimpsed briefly through the cracked window of a derelict house.

Critically-acclaimed editor Jonathan Oliver brings horror home with a collection of haunted house stories by Lisa Tuttle, Stephen Volk, Terry Lamsley, Adam L. G. Nevill, Weston Ochse, Rebecca Levene, Garry Kilworth, Chaz Brenchley, Robert Shearman, Nina Allan, Christopher Fowler, Sarah Pinborough, Paul Meloy, Christopher Priest, Jonathan Green, Nicholas Royle, Eric Bown, Tim Lebbon and Joe R. Lansdale.

“Jonathan Oliver is the hottest new horror editor to come out of the UK since Stephen Jones, and I have high hopes for House of Fear .”

Imagine there was a supernatural chiller that Hammer Films never made. A grand epic produced at the studio’s peak, which played like a cross between the Dracula and Frankenstein films and Dr Terror’s House Of Horrors…

Four passengers meet on a train journey through Eastern Europe during the First World War, and face a mystery that must be solved if they are to survive. As the ‘Arkangel’ races through the war-torn countryside, they must find out: