Kindle Edition
Category:
Horror
Price: $3.59 (eBook)
A successful horror fantasy writer finds his fictional evils beginning to appear in the real world.
Hugely successful fantasy author Sam Parker has written a dozen terrifying novels about the dark and haunted city of Eldritch, and chronicled in graphic detail the nightmarish, bloody adventure of his city's unfortunate citizens. But when it comes to writing the long-delayed thirteenth book in the series, an inexplicable fear seizes his mind, and he tries to stop - only to find, to his horror, that he cannot.
Sam's addiction to his creation soon draws him back to a story that is too simply good not to tell - and then the nightmare really begins, as his fiction begins to tear bloody holes in reality.
Comeback is a fast-paced horror/fantasy thriller of approximately 89,000 words.
Excerpt
Excerpt from Comeback, an unpublished novel by Sam Parker.
THE PROLOGUE
The woodland is dark, save for isolated beams of moonlight that break through the summer canopy and fall like spotlights on a stage. Moments ago there was only the noise of the bugs and the creatures that feed on them, but now the night is full of human sounds.
Foul curses punctuate laboured breathing. Shoulders snap obstructing branches, and thorns tear at sleeves and cuffs as three men struggle with their burden, stamping the undergrowth flat under shoes caked with drying blood. Between them they carry a body, like pallbearers who have no coffin.
The body is male, naked, and terribly wounded, and although it appears to be dead, they know that it is not. Together they have poisoned the body, beaten and blinded it. They have shot it and stabbed it, and the black plastic bag they used to suffocate it is still taped over its head. Yet even in this incapacitated state they can feel the raw, elemental power thrumming through its limbs.
They know that if they hesitate now, if their resolve weakens, the body will rise.
When the woodland ends, they break out of the tree line and enter a wide field of heather. At the other side of the field is a wide millpond, its gently eddying surface like milk in the moonlight. Away to their right is the mill house with its ever-turning wheel. As the men have arranged, a single light has been left on inside.
They stop at the edge of the pond, and one of the men rips the bag from the body’s head. They see its face and realise that despite their best efforts it has struggled back to a semblance of consciousness. The split lips of its mouth curl into a smile, while the punctured, weeping eyes seem to damn them.
Together they heave the body forward until its head and shoulders are submerged beneath the luminous waters of the millpond. Rosy air bubbles rise to the surface and burst, and the water around the body slowly turns pink. But after five whole minutes, the bubbles have not stopped coming.
Finally, one of the men nods towards the mill house, and the others grunt their assent.
In the mill house, they set the wheel turning, and then begin to feed the body, feet first, between the millstones. Its mouth begins to twitch, its jaw to spasm, as its feet and calves are consumed. Muscles, ligaments and cartilage are ripped to shreds and bones pulverised. Shattered teeth chew up its tongue, but it will not scream.
One of the men, perhaps out of mercy, or perhaps out of a strong desire to not hear anything the body might attempt to say, takes this chance to slit its throat with his cutthroat razor. But the three men imagine that they can hear its voice anyway. Words ring out in their minds. An incantation, a threat, a promise.
A prophecy.
I will come back…
A long wooden stave is found, so that all of the body can be forced into the grinding millstones without the men risking their hands. A can of petrol has been left for them beside the mill house’s small generator, and its contents are used to saturate wooden beams and sacks of grain. They pour the last of the petrol onto the bloody, contorted face, and they start the first of the fires right there.
Moments later, they stand in the field of heather watching the mill house being consumed by fire, the destruction perfectly mirrored in the pond. Sometimes they think they can hear screaming, and sometimes laughter, and when the thick blanket of evil-smelling smoke begins to crawl across the water towards them, the men quickly turn and run…
Part I
THE BEGINNING
1
The auditorium was full and in good spirits, even though the Meet The Authors gig of this fringe Horror, Science Fiction & Fantasy Convention didn’t quite live up to its name. The conventioneers didn’t get to chat with their favourite writers, or see how many hairs were growing out of their noses when they laughed. They got to sit on uncomfortable moulded-plastic seating and peer across at four middle-aged men sitting behind a table set up on a rostrum. They got to sit under the cool, dispassionate gaze of a number of security men, stationed deliberately indiscreetly around the walls.
The thing was, nobody seemed to care.
Applause was still rolling for the short speech and introductions made by the Convention President, but once he reached the short flight of stairs that led down from the rostrum, it quickly faded. This audience knew what it was about. This was probably their only chance to speak to the men who once a year threw a bucket of petrol on the flames of their imaginations. It was the Q&A session organised by the writers’ publishers and the audience had a mere hour to interrogate them.
The writers were, right to left, Charles Beckett, Nigel Cassidy, Nathaniel Longman, and last, but by no means least, Sam Parker.
Charles Beckett was a bear-like man who looked older than he really was, affecting the appearance of a Papa Hemingway-clone. He radiated an air of belligerent self-confidence, and this, together with a tendency for arrogant disdain, repelled most people within seconds of meeting him. He wrote massively-researched, mind-numbingly detailed science fiction novels the size of phonebooks, and had no more idea of human emotion and character than the average railway sleeper.
Acting as human buffers between Beckett and Sam Parker − between whom no love was lost, as was well-known among the fantasy fraternity − Cassidy and Longman chatted quietly as they waited for the audience to settle.
Of the guest authors, only Nigel Cassidy looked as though he belonged in the audience, in that section dominated by nerdish-looking young men who came to such conventions solely to pick holes in authors’ time continuum stories. Cassidy wrote future-shock novels, full of malevolent artificial intelligences and the like, his output fuelled by a very genuine horror of modern technology. Famously, he even wrote on an old manual typewriter, refusing to share house-space with any kind of computer. With his thinning red hair, freckled, pale complexion, black-framed glasses and nervous energy, he looked like a young Woody Allen might have if he’d been really neurotic.
In complete contrast to Cassidy’s uneasy quirkiness, Nathaniel Longman was the very image of smooth, sophisticated urbanity, like a black Cary Grant. He was tall and handsome and out-of-the-closet gay, with the body of a natural athlete and a Savile Row wardrobe. Longman wrote wry and witty fantasy novels in which creatures from different dimensions saved the various worlds from destruction while talking like the characters in an Oscar Wilde play.
At the end of the row, Sam Parker, looking a little younger than his forty years, scratched at his short thatch of brown hair and waited silently for the hammer to fall. He knew full well that the bulk of the audience’s questions would be directed at him alone. Already he could feel hundreds of eyes boring into his face.
Sly Jack Road, the first novel set in his fictional city of Eldritch, had been about a haunted stretch of country road on the city’s outskirts. Its publication had been greeted with massive financial and critical success on both sides of the Atlantic, and he had published a further eleven since. It was a series that had encompassed every aspect of the supernatural genre, all polished off with a hard-boiled noir sheen that had drawn a large and committed following. The more fanatical fans, those who sent Sam bizarre gifts and wrote hundred page letters, sometimes scared him. They believed his fictional city, his alternate reality, actually existed. He called them the Eldritch Obsessives.
How many EOs are there here today, he wondered.
Sam poured some mineral water into a glass, and then took small, nervous sips, as the Convention President, Howard Medak, stepped into the twelve-foot wide strip of no man’s land between the audience and the rostrum and asked who had a question.
Every hand in the auditorium went up immediately, including those belonging to the panel of authors, and everyone laughed. When the laughter had subsided a little, Medak pointed to someone, and the rest of the hands went down.
Here it comes, Sam thought.
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