Конрад Уильямс - One

Over the years he had tried to project the babyish face of his son on to a fifteen-year-old boy. A manchild. He had never been able to do it. Trying to imagine that face without its remnants of baby fat, the pudgy cheeks and wide eyes, the trim, pouting bow of his mouth, was beyond him. Further, he didn’t like to do it. It was negating who his boy really was for some fantasy that could never even approach the truth. The likelihood, although he baulked whenever he confronted it, was that he would walk straight past Stanley in the street. The difference between the baby and the five-year-old was greater than he perceived. Add another ten years and you had a new person, in effect. Maybe the shape of the eyes remained, but there was a change in the bone structure, a moving away from the infant that made you strangers, no matter how tight these factions of the family.

Movement now, up ahead. A shifting of shadow around the edges of a stoved-in cottage, window frames gone, door blown in by the wolf that was the wind.

A whimper turned his head. He saw someone duck out of sight beyond the dry gardens and their blasted configurations of sea kale and yellow horned poppy, santolinas and crambes. Starfish lay around his feet as if the heavens had turned to stone at the insult to the world and had fallen on this spot. He had to step over a wreckage of railway sleepers and shattered floorboards, downed telegraph poles and great cairns of bleached crab carapaces. It was like walking a moonscape infected by dreams of violence and perversion.

There was a slight incline up ahead, a dip that exposed the rear of the cottage and a hole dug into it, leading to deep shadow beneath the building itself. He saw the figure hunker down and wriggle into the hole. He felt a jerk in his chest at the sight of blue and white striped pyjamas, his son’s favourite pyjamas. He was sure of it.

I luff these jim-jams, Daddy, they’re all warm and soft and make me look like toofpaste…

‘Stan?’ he called out, and he ignored the thickening pain in his jaw, the fresh seep of blood from his ruined gums. The swelling had puffed his left eye almost completely shut. He could still see through the right, just, a blurred, splintered view. He supposed he would have to cut into an eyelid to reduce the swelling if it blinded him completely.

‘Stanley?’ He strode towards the house, ignoring any pretence he’d made at caution. ‘It’s me,mate. It’s Dad. Don’t be scared.’

He slithered down the shingle into the dip and leant close to the hole. He could see nothing in there but the pure black of childhood nightmares. But then there was a flurry of movement. The grimy striped swatch of his pyjamas shifting back and forth beyond the edge of the hole, settling now, his back to Jane. The whimpering continued. Cold, afraid, alone for so long.

‘Hey,’ Jane said. Tears were forming. He could almost feel the slender bones under his fingers, the shivering of his boy. ‘I’ll make you warm. I’m here, Stan. Dad’s here. I never left you, you know. I’d never let you go. Come on.’ He was finding it hard to keep his voice level.

He bent to the hole, resting one hand on the cold shingle, reaching his other towards his boy.

‘Stanley, it’s time to go.’ His fingers touched the cotton. It did not feel right.

The whimpering stopped. The shivering of his boy stopped.

The tiger turned around within the black circle of the hole and showed Jane what properly rotten jaws ought to look like.

‘Stan,’ Jane said, and his voice was nothing but an old man’s breath, tired, played out, defeated. He kicked back against the shingle but managed only to dig his heels deeper into the loose stones. He was going nowhere. The strength was gone from him. The tiger clawed a path towards him, muscling out of the hole like something born of darkness. Its ragged, matted cloak stank of death. It placed one massive paw on the centre of Jane’s chest, pinning him back against the cold ground. The pitted box of its muzzle wrinkled as it bared its black fangs. The shrivelled tubes of its eye sockets told of distances that Jane could never comprehend. How many millennia had these things drifted through the stars, waiting to find food? How many dead planets had they impacted upon, waiting for an atmosphere, a primordial scenario, an evolution that would never come?

He was thinking this as the tiger almost nonchalantly swatted a claw across his throat. Jane felt an instant numbing chill there and found that he could not swallow. He tried to say something, but his mouth only filled with blood. He jerked against the weight of the rotting animal but it did not budge. Jane couldn’t breathe. He was vaguely aware of footsteps in the shingle slowing. He couldn’t see who it was.

Light.

A gap as the clouds parted. The moon appeared, gibbous; osteal white. The tiger raised its great head towards it, growling, unsure. Jane put his hand to his own shoulder and withdrew the long shard of shrapnel. He didn’t feel a thing. He drove it deep into the tiger’s eye. The tiger made no sound but slumped against him, like Stanley used to as a baby when he was tired. His sweet, warm head on Jane’s chest. The passage to sleep, so swift as to be almost seamless.

Jane felt like that now. He could close his eyes and drift into oblivion and it would not be any effort. He placed a hand against his throat and there was nothing but pumping wetness.

A snuffling noise.

But he felt no pain. He saw the girl and behind her, coming up the beach, Loke with his arm around Becky, who was steadfastly looking out to sea. The girl raised her hand. Protection. He knew the baby would be cared for. He knew there could be a future.

That snuffling noise.

Jane turned his head and Stanley was standing there in his pyjamas, at the edge of the dip, Walter dangling from his hand.

‘Hiya, Dad,’ his boy said. ‘Where’ve you been? I’m freezing.’

Jane struggled free of the tiger’s dead weight and stood up. He moved slowly towards his son. He was cautious, unsure. He didn’t want to be tricked again. He clambered up to level ground and Stanley reached out a hand, slid it through the gap between Jane’s thumb and forefinger.

‘Makeme warm, Dad. I’ve been cold for such a long time. Waiting for you.’

Jane wiped away tears, eager after all this time to have Stanley clear in his sight. ‘I’m here. I’ve always been here.’

‘Me too, Dad. Come on, it’s this way.’

Jane allowed himself to be led. He did not look back. After a while, he reached down and picked his boy up. He closed his eyes to his magical, unique smell, the soft measure of his breath, his strong, regular heartbeat. He closed his eyes and it was as if nothing had changed.

‘His carefully crafted descriptions of horrific images, along with the ability to suggest they are even worse than words can tell, is reminiscent of Poe and the early stories of Clive Barker. Not for the squeamish, but no fan of literary horror should miss it.’ The Times

‘ The Unblemished , winner of the International Horror Guild’s Best Novel award, is cleverly constructed, building relentlessly from intense, intimate terror to something on another scale altogether… the ruined London in the closing chapters of this stark gripping novel will stay with you a long time.’ Guardian

‘Top-notch writing skills, poetic vision and beautiful prose raise this way above your Hammer House of Horror… unusual as well as highly accomplished terror.’ Sunday Express

‘Williams is so good at what he does that he probably shouldn’t be allowed to do it any more, for the sake of everyone’s sanity.’ Publishers Weekly (starred review)