Mammoth Books presents Messing With Your Head

Book 278: Mammoth Books

by Brian Hodge, Joel Lane, Kirstyn McDermott, Mark Valentine, Steve Rasnic Tem

Genres: Horror

Synopsis

Black Country - Joel Lane"'Black Country' is one of a sequence of weird crime stories set in the West Midlands that I've been working on for years," says Joel Lane. "A collection of them is forthcoming with the title Where Furnaces Burn. 'Black Country' is also a sequel to my earlier story 'The Lost District', which describes another narrator's experience of Clayheath."I'd like to thank The Nightingales and Gul Y. Davis, whose words influenced this story. It was originally published as a chapbook by Nightjar Press, with an enigmatic cover illustration by Birmingham photographer Trav28." We All Fall Down - Kirstyn McDermott"I carried the bones of this story around for quite a few years before I finally stumbled upon its beating heart," explains the author. "In my head was the image of a doll house, huge and not quite right, and a woman searching desperately for something concealed inside. But I could never work a story around it that didn't seem twee. Doll houses, you know?"But then Emma and Holly appeared - trapped within their own fractured, futile relationship - and everything just, well, fell together. Beautifully. Awfully. And now I have a doll house story. Of a kind." Telling - Steve Rasnic Tem"As for the following story," reveals Steve Rasnic Tem, "it began with a dreadful image at the end of a dream. I couldn't remember the other details of that dream, but I was determined to find out where that image might have come from." A Revelation of Cormorants - Mark Valentine"'A Revelation of Cormorants' first appeared in the excellent series of chapbooks published by Nicholas Royle's Nightjar Press," explains Valentine, "and I first encountered the dark grace of the cormorant while visiting Galloway with Jo." Just Outside Our Windows, Deep Inside Our Walls - Brian Hodge"I hardly ever write extended fragments of things and then leave them indefinitely," Brian Hodge reveals, "but that's how 'Just Outside Our Windows, Deep Inside Our Walls' got started."I first wrote the part about the fantasised magic show, plus the earliest bit about Roni moving in, after rereading a Thomas Ligotti collection. It may not be apparent to anyone else, but some flavour of his lingered in me for a little while and wanted to come out, and the magic show was the result."Then it sat idle for three years or so before I knew what more to do with it. Maybe because I had to forget about how it had begun and get back to being myself again."

Release date: July 26, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 160

Sample

JOEL LANE LIVES IN Birmingham, England, and works as a journalist. His contributions to the supernatural horror genre includes three collections of short stories, The Earth Wire, The Lost District and The Terrible Changes; a novella, The Witnesses are Gone, and a chapbook, Black Country. He has also written two mainstream novels, From Blue to Black and The Blue Mask, and three collections of poetry, The Edge of the Screen, Trouble in the Heartland and The Autumn Myth. Forthcoming projects include a short booklet of crime stories, Do Not Pass Go.

Lane has also edited an anthology of subterranean horror stories, Beneath the Ground, co-edited (with Steve Bishop) the crime fiction anthology Birmingham Noir, and co-edited (with Allyson Bird) an anthology of anti-fascist and anti-racist stories in the weird and speculative fiction genres, Never Again.

“‘Black Country’ is one of a sequence of weird crime stories set in the West Midlands that I’ve been working on for years,” says the author. “A collection of them is forthcoming with the title Where Furnaces Burn. ‘Black Country’ is also a sequel to my earlier story ‘The Lost District’, which describes another narrator’s experience of Clayheath.

“I’d like to thank The Nightingales and Gul Y. Davis, whose words influenced this story. It was originally published as a chapbook by Nightjar Press, with an enigmatic cover illustration by Birmingham photographer Trav28.”

And time would prove the weapon

His crime would be to breathe the air

He would stain the sheets of the Black Country

—The Nightingales

CLAYHEATH, THE TOWN I was born in, is no longer on the map. We moved to Walsall when I was nine, and I never felt like going back. I vaguely knew that it had become a district, and that its boundaries had changed. Then it just ceased to exist as a distinct place, so that by the early 1990s it had been absorbed into the Black Country landscape somewhere between Netherton and Lye. The mixture of redevelopment and dereliction had gradually erased it. Even local people I knew seemed to disagree about where it was. Perhaps they weren’t local enough.

In the late 1990s, my superintendent at the Acocks Green station passed on to me some case notes about an outbreak of juvenile crime in a part of Dudley. Perhaps he thought the stranger aspects of the case would interest me; I was already getting a reputation as the Fox Mulder of the West Midlands police force. A mention of the waste ground near the swimming baths struck a chord in my memory, and I found a couple of the streets named in the report in the A–Z map. Another street wasn’t there, however, and it was hard to relate the map to the place I half-remembered. Perhaps it only sounded like Clayheath because I wanted it to.

Something’s got into the children was the best the DS at the Netherton station could manage by way of an explanation, while the only adult witness to any of the crimes had offered the comment “Must be something in the water round here making them yampy.” To which the helpful DS had appended a note: This means insane, unpredictable or violent. I remembered the word from my childhood – in fact, it had probably been applied to me on a few occasions. I couldn’t remember much about those days, which was fine by me.

To start with, the local primary school had reported a series of unexplained injuries to children: facial bruises, a dislocated arm, a broken finger. The children claimed nothing had happened: they’d fallen asleep in bed or on the bus, and woken up having somehow hurt themselves. The school nurse had reported the injuries to the police, who’d made discreet enquiries and learned nothing. The possibility of parental abuse didn’t explain the pattern of similar injuries in children from around the area. One eight-year-old girl had offered the confusing comment: “They all hate me, the others, it was all of them. All of them in one.” Asked to draw her attacker, she’d gone on drawing one face over another until the image was impossible to make out. She’d been referred for psychiatric assessment.

The local toyshop had been broken into via a back window, too small for a normal adult. The cat burglar had escaped before the police could respond to the automatic alarm, taking a random sample of items: toy soldiers, plastic musical instruments, model aircraft, dinosaurs, monsters. A newsagent had been burgled by the unusual process of making a narrow gap in the felt roof, perhaps over several nights. All that had gone was a shelf of comics. Someone had smashed the front window of a hairdresser’s simply in order to spray black paint over a displayed photo of a cute smiling child. The discarded spray-can had the small fingerprints of several individuals, all apparently children.

The name Clayheath didn’t appear in the report, but one of the episodes detailed brought back strong images of place for me. Someone had gone into the swimming baths early on a Sunday morning and dropped a litter of new-born kittens into the water. Around the same time, their mother had been garrotted and hung from a fence at the back of the waste ground nearby. She was the pet of a local family, and had been missing for a week. The murdered cat was seen and reported by a teenage couple on the Sunday evening. During the day, children had been playing football on the same patch of waste ground. They hadn’t bothered to tell anyone about the cat. An autopsy found four small metal objects in the cat’s throat: a car, a boot, an iron and a dog, playing pieces from a Monopoly board.

Finally, the same primary school that had seen an epidemic of injuries to pupils was broken into in the early hours of a Monday morning. All the pieces of children’s artwork on the walls had been viciously slashed with a knife. All the mirrors in the school toilets had been smashed. The caretaker, who’d come into the school at seven a.m., claimed to have seen a “scraggy-looking” child of nine or so, moving so fast his face was a blur. “Shaking like he was in a fit, all over, had to keep moving not to collapse. And laughing, or pretending to laugh, like when a kid’s trying to upset another kid. There must have been a few of them because the laughing was everywhere.” The caretaker had since been dismissed for drinking at work, which cast some doubt over the reliability of his account.

I contacted the Netherton station and offered to help out with the investigation, telling them I knew the school and other local places from my own childhood, and might be able to shed some light on what was happening. They agreed to put me up in a local hotel for a couple of days while I looked around. But the more I thought about going back to Clayheath, the less it appealed to me. It felt like going back to nothing. . .