Kindle Edition
Amazon
Amazon.ca
Amazon.com
Category:
Horror
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN-10: 1500424420
Type: Fiction
Pages: 300
Copyright: Aug 19, 2014
ISBN-13: 9781500424428
Price: $2.51 (eBook)
Malthorpe had been a coal mining town. It had slid into a small, dark place verging on extinction and despair. It was a place of grey buildings, grey people, grey skies, unemployment and a lot of rain. It was a place of near terminal boredom . . .
. . . at least, that was how Malthorpe looked before hell was relocated there.
The devil’s lieutenant in the person of Damian Gaye arrives in a small northern town and decides to make it the horror story of the century.
Seen from Mal Fell, Malthorpe’s main street snaked along the banks of the River Mal, crossed it once via a narrow stone bridge, passed the abandoned slag-heaps and buildings of Malthorpe Colliery and disappeared down the valley.
The road and the river ran parallel, separated by a lichen-covered dry stone wall and stunted willows that drooped over the shallow stream with the same tired air of defeat that pervaded the serpentine main street.
In summer there was a certain almost almost-discernable charm to the place, if the sun was shining. There were a few bright window boxes, brave attempts at combating the drab greyness of granite and slate, and the fronts of a couple of houses near where the main street widened slightly to accommodate the obelisk of the war memorial, were partially covered with struggling wisteria, the purple bunches of flowers a tired afterthought.
As the eye travelled down the main street from its northern extremity where the unimaginative, blocky, Presbyterian church hunched beside the manse under a protective canopy of towering elms Malthorpe was unexceptional and predictable. The semi-aerial view picked out the school-cum-library surrounded by its wrought iron fence, one public house - inevitably called the Miners Arms, and equally predictable close juxtaposition to the church - the hardware store that smelled nostalgically of tarred twine and paraffin, the garage with a lone petrol pump and collection of rusting motor carcasses, a women’s clothing store with dresses in the window that hinted that the owner had succumbed to the inevitable and given up trying to be chic sometime in the nineteen-seventies, a small supermarket, a café which sold tea sandwiches and scones of questionable freshness, and finally, a secondhand store with a collection of rubbish on display and a hand-drawn sign which loudly proclaimed that it sold antiques. Malthorpe was edging from what had been a kind of working class prosperity towards seedy squalor.
Malthorpe had a sepia quality to it, as if time had stopped in the mid nineteen-eighties when the union lost its power. The pit had slowed production, unemployment had risen, and with it the will to try. Nothing mattered anymore, and it was fading into an historical footnote without relevance.
Malthorpe was in fact typical of so many small towns that had slowly begun to die after the coal mines had closed, but refused to admit to the inevitable. It was dead, but the coffin lid was still open and the grizzly remains on view. Getting to Malthorpe was taking a road to nowhere. There was nothing beyond it but the moors. It was dead and dead-ended. When you reached the end of the only street, Main Street or High Street depending on your inclination, there was only the church, and a track that also dead-ended at the rectory by the burned-out ruin of the old church. You got the feeling that if you did try to go further you’d disappear through a looking glass, a rift in time or space. Of course that might have been better than actually staying in Malthorpe: almost anything would have been better than that. So why did anyone stay? The answer to that was as mystifying as the reason for Malthorpe’s continued occupation. They just did, and it just was. There was no will to do anything else. They were trapped in a time bubble, hermetically sealed from the outside world by the very fact that it was at the end of the road, literally, and no one cared.
Damian Gaye looked down from Mal Fell and saw that it was to his liking. Malthorpe was one of those places in the universe where nothing good ever happened. It was a town that had lost it’s will to live and hence its soul. It existed in a state of limbo, waiting for the Day of Judgment. It was perfect for Damian Gaye. The fruit of the tree that was Malthorpe was ripe for his harvesting.
Excerpt
“Why are you doing this?” Bowles asked.
For the briefest of moments the schoolmaster saw Gaye’s master look out through his servant’s eyes. And he was afraid.
“Because I can. It is a divertissement. Mr. Bowles, I am bored.”
“But why Malthorpe?”
“It is the end of the road, literally. It exists in a societal vacuum. Events can occur in Malthorpe with the outside world being unaware. No one comes to Malthorpe; there is no reason to. It can be therefore my laboratory experiment. Call it a selfish whim. I wanted my very own private hell here on Earth. Other places are splendidly qualified but Malthorpe is, well, special in that it is stultifyingly dull. It has the special qualification of being suitable as a tabula rasa upon which I can write my desires.”
He got up to refill his glass. “My dear chap, Malthorpe is about to go down in history as the most gruesome town this country has ever seen. I’m going to make Malthorpe the horror story of the century.”
|
