Best British Horror 2014 E-Book

• Herausgeber: Salt
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: Best British Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 660

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Welcome To The New Home Of Horror 'Johnny Mains is the go-to man for horror in the UK. His extensive knowledge of and unbound passion for the genre is amazing. If there was a government Ministry of Horror (which there should be), Johnny would be in charge. He is the Minister for Horror. He has extraordinary energy and is fighting a one-man battle to preserve and revitalise the noble tradition of the horror anthology. Oh, and he is a nice bloke as well.' —Charlie Higson 'Mercy stands before her, wielding a mud-caked pickaxe in both hands ...' —When Charlie Sleeps, Laura Mauro 'Too much Semtex was an obvious, beginner's mistake, and I noted I needed to remove more brain in future ...' —Exploding Raphaelesque Heads, Ian Hunter 'There isn't much time. Blood is already spattering the paper on which I am writing ...' —The Secondary Host, John Probert 'It appeared to be an insect of some kind, perhaps a beetle or a spider with a bloated body ...' —Come Into My Parlour, Reggie Oliver Best British Horror is a new anthology series dedicated to showcasing and proving, without doubt, that when it comes to horror and supernatural fiction, Britain is its obvious and natural home. This new anthology includes stories by: Ramsey Campbell, Kate Farrell, Gary Fry, Muriel Gray, Ian Hunter, Joel Lane, Tanith Lee, V.H. Leslie, John Llewellyn Probert, Michael Marshall Smith, Laura Mauro, Mark Morris, Adam Nevill, Thana Niveau, Reggie Oliver, Marie O'Regan, Robert Shearman, Elizabeth Stott, Anna Taborska, Stephen Volk and D.P. Watt.

Leseprobe

THE BEST BRITISH HORROR 2014

Welcome To The New Home Of Horror

‘Johnny Mains is the go-to man for horror in the UK. His extensive knowledge of and unbound passion for the genre is amazing. If there was a government Ministry of Horror (which there should be), Johnny would be in charge. He is the Minister for Horror. He has extraordinary energy and is fighting a one-man battle to preserve and revitalise the noble tradition of the horror anthology. Oh, and he is a nice bloke as well.’ —Charlie Higson

‘Mercy stands before her, wielding a mud-caked pickaxe in both hands ...’ —When Charlie Sleeps, Laura Mauro

‘Too much Semtex was an obvious, beginner’s mistake, and I noted I needed to remove more brain in future ...’ —Exploding Raphaelesque Heads, Ian Hunter

‘There isn’t much time. Blood is already spattering the paper on which I am writing ...’ —The Secondary Host, John Probert

‘It appeared to be an insect of some kind, perhaps a beetle or a spider with a bloated body ...’ —Come Into My Parlour, Reggie Oliver

Best British Horror is a new anthology series dedicated to showcasing and proving, without doubt, that when it comes to horror and supernatural fiction, Britain is its obvious and natural home.

This new anthology includes stories by: Simon Bestwick, Ramsey Campbell, Kate Farrell, Gary Fry, Muriel Gray, Ian Hunter, Joel Lane, Tanith Lee, V.H. Leslie, John Llewellyn Probert, Michael Marshall Smith, Laura Mauro, Mark Morris, Adam Nevill, Thana Niveau, Reggie Oliver, Marie O’Regan, Robert Shearman, Elizabeth Stott, Anna Taborska, Stephen Volk and D.P. Watt. 

Praise for Johnny Mains

‘Johnny Mains is the go to man for horror in the UK. His extensive knowledge of and unbound passion for the genre is amazing. If there was a government ministry of horror (which there should be) Johnny would be in charge. He is the Minister For Horror. He has extraordinary energy and is fighting a one man battle to preserve and revitalise the noble tradition of the horror anthology. Oh, and he is a nice bloke as well. ‘ —CHARLIE HIGSON

‘Johnny Mains not only carries a flame for the old horrors, but wants to cause a bit of a conflagration of his own.’ —STEPHEN VOLK

‘Johnny Mains is one of these people, his encyclopaedic knowledge and private collection of books and memorabilia is stunning. Seriously Johnny should lay on some catering and provide guided tours round his house. I et excited when I get a personalised book, this guy probably has the authors soul locked up in a mason jar in his cellar.’ — JIM McLEOD

‘Johnny Mains’ brain is a dank but vast cellar, an alexandrian library designed by MR James. His knowledge of fantastical fiction is enormous and his instinct with narrative as powerful as a James Herbert rat propelling itself to an injured tube traveller.’ — ROBIN INCE

Best

British

Horror

2014

JOHNNY MAINS is an award-winning editor, author and horror historian. He has written for Illustrators Quarterly, SFX and The Paperback Fanatic. He was project editor to Pan Macmillan’s critically acclaimed 2010 re-issue of The Pan Book of Horror and is currently co-editing Dead Funny with multi-award winning comedian Robin Ince. Mains has also written the introduction to Stephen King’s 30th Anniversary edition of Thinner. He is the author of two short story collections and editor of five anthologies.

Also by Johnny Mains:

EDITED

Back From The Dead: The Legacy of the Pan Book of Horror Stories

The Pan Book of Horror Stories (2010 re-issue, Project Editor)

The Mask and Other Stories by Herbert van Thal

Bite-Sized Horror

Party Pieces: The Horror Fiction of Mary Danby

The Screaming Book of Horror

The Burning Circus

The Sorcerers: The Original Screenplay by John Burke

WRITTEN

With Deepest Sympathy

Lest You Should Suffer Nightmares: A Biography of Herbert van Thal

Frightfully Cosy and Mild Stories For Nervous Types

Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

All rights reserved

Selection and introduction © Johnny Mains, 2014

Individual contributions © the contributors, 2014

The right of Johnny Mains to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

Salt Publishing 2014

Created by Salt Publishing Ltd

This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978-1-78463-007-2 electronic

This book would not have happened without

Charles Birkin, Christine Campbell Thompson, Dennis Wheatley, Herbert van Thal, Christine Bernard, Mary Danby, Ronald Chetwynd Hayes, Robert Aickman, John Burke, Peter Haining, James Dickie, Hugh Lamb, Michel Parry, Rosemary Timperley, Cynthia Asquith, Richard Dalby, David Sutton, Mike Ashley, Ramsey Campbell, Nicholas Royle and Stephen Jones.

I am honoured to be following in the footsteps of these great editors.

Contents

Credits

Introduction

When Charlie Sleeps

Exploding Raphaelesque Heads

The Bloody Tower

Behind the Doors

The Secondary Host

The Garscube Creative Writing Group

Biofeedback

Doll Hands

Guinea Pig Girl

Touch Me With Your Cold, Hard Fingers

Dad Dancing

The Arse-Licker

Doll Re Mi

Laudate Dominum

Someone To Watch Over You

Namesake

Come Into My Parlour

The Red Door

Author of the Death

The Magician Kelso Dennett

That Tiny Flutter of the Heart I Used to Call Love

Remembering Joel Lane (1963–2013)

Joel Lane and ‘Without a Mind’

Without a Mind

Contributors

Acknowledgements

Credits

All stories are copyright their respective author

‘When Charlie Sleeps’ by Laura Mauro was originally published in Black Static (Issue 37)

‘Exploding Raphaelesque Heads’ by Ian Hunter was originally published in The Tenth Black Book of Horror

The Bloody Tower by Anna Taborska was originally published in Terror Tales of London

‘Behind the Doors’ by Ramsey Campbell was originally published in Holes for Faces

‘The Secondary Host’ by John Llewellyn Probert was originally published in Exotic Gothic Volume 5, Part 2

‘The Garscube Creative Writing Group’ by Muriel Gray was originally published in The Burning Circus

‘Biofeedback’ by Gary Fry was originally published in Shades of Nothingness

‘Doll Hands’ by Adam Nevill was originally published in The Burning Circus

‘Guinea Pig Girl’ by Thana Niveau was originally published in The Tenth Black Book of Horror

‘Touch Me With Your Cold, Hard Fingers’ by Elizabeth Stott was originally published as a stand alone chapbook.

‘Dad Dancing’ by Kate Farrell was originally published in The Tenth Black Book of Horror

‘The Arse-Licker’ by Stephen Volk was originally published in Anatomy of Death

‘Doll Re Mi’ by Tanith Lee was originally published in NightmareMagazine

‘Laudate Dominum (For Many Voices)’ by D.P. Watt was originally published in Shadows and Tall Trees (Issue 5)

‘Someone To Watch Over You’ by Marie O’Regan originally published in Terror Tales of London

‘Namesake’ by V.H. Leslie was originally published in Black Static (Issue 31)

‘Come into my Parlour’ by Reggie Oliver was originally published in Dark World: Ghost Stories

‘The Red Door’ by Mark Morris was originally published in Terror Tales of London

‘Author of the Death’ by Michael Marshall Smith was originally published in Everything You Need

‘The Magician Kelso Dennett’ by Stephen Volk was originally published in Terror Tales of the Seaside

‘That Tiny Flutter Of The Heart I Used To Call Love’ by Robert Shearman was originally published in Psycho-mania!

Introduction

horror

Pronunciation: //

noun

[mass noun] an intense feeling of fear, shock, or disgust.

Origin:

Middle English: via Old French from Latin horror, from horrere: ‘tremble, shudder’.

Welcome to a new strand (or should that be strain?) of Salt’s ‘Best’ series. It’s always nice to be asked to do things, rather than ask to do them, so when the people who run Salt approached and broached the idea of me becoming the series editor of ‘Best British Horror’, it wasn’t a request taken lightly. Of all the genres out there at the moment, I think that fans of the horror genre are the most passionate and are not scared to wear hearts on sleeves. And they deserve to be treated with respect, not to be taken for fools. So from one passionate fan to another, this book is for you. Yes, it’s a completely subjective list and your idea or definition of horror may be wildly different to mine, but I think the following stories will slake your thirst, whether you like your horror bloody, psychological, tied to the everyday, quiet, or hidden under a layer or two of obscurity.

I’m also excited by the prospect of bringing to you names you may not have heard of before and setting you on the path to discovering other works by them. And that was part of my selection process; I was adamant in wanting a book in which there were authors I was unfamiliar with, and ‘discovering’ Laura Mauro, Ian Hunter, Elizabeth Stott, and D.P. Watt’s work were amongst the true highlights of 2013.

We must not, of course, forget names who are familiar on the high street bookshelves or in popular culture and it is indeed an honour to use stories from Ramsey Campbell, Muriel Gray, Adam Nevill, Michael Marshall Smith, Mark Morris and Robert Shearman. The depth and range of stories, not just from these authors, but from everyone in the book have blown me away; 2013 was indeed an embarrassment of riches.

Sadly, 2013 also saw the untimely death of Joel Lane, a fellow editor and author whose body of work will be talked about in the same breath as Robert Aickman and M.R. James. Joel’s legacy is honoured at the end of this gathering of stories.

I am incredibly proud of this selection, I think it’s a strong and challenging one, and would love to hear what you think. We now live in the days where social media is king, so leave your reviews (good and bad) on Amazon and Goodreads, spread the word on Facebook and Twitter; it helps other fans discover the book and its authors, and the more people this volume reaches the better. There are not enough horror stories on the high street, but if we all shout loud enough, we might be able to change that for the good.

JOHNNY MAINS

When Charlie Sleeps

LAURA MAURO

Propped against the bathroom door, clutching an old guitar, Hanna sings Charlie another lullaby.

Go to sleep, Charlie.

He’s awake in there, still. The black beetles that come from under the bathroom door are his messengers. They walk ponderous circuits, antennae trembling, moving jerkily like windup toys.

Sleep, Charlie, sleep.

The guitar is held together by duct-tape and willpower. It belongs to Mercy, who can coax delicate music from the four remaining strings. Hanna strums nonsense chords and sings old pop songs, though she is not much good at either of these things. Charlie doesn’t seem to mind.

The flickering of the lights is slow now, the blinking of a single sleepy eye. It’s a good sign. An agitated Charlie is quite a thing to behold; every light in the squat flashes wildly, though they were disconnected years ago. Stella says Charlie creates his own energy. As she sits in the hall, breathing white in the dark, Hanna wishes he’d channel a little of it into the central heating.

Even more than that, she wishes he’d go to fucking sleep.

So Hanna sings. And when the song finishes, after what feels like hours, Hanna holds her breath, and her heart sinks when she hears Charlie’s insectile nonsense-chatter emanate from the keyhole. She knows, by now, what this means: Another.

She starts anew. The back of her skull beats a steady rhythm against the door and outside, as the sun struggles over the horizon, London stirs.

The previous night – the night Mercy brought her to the squat – Hanna woke with a violent start. She sat up, heart hammering, tongue thick in her dry mouth. She searched in the dark but Steve wasn’t there, his space in the bed was cold as a bone, and Hanna wanted to scream for him but then she remembered. She wasn’t at home anymore. There was no home, at least not one she could go back to. No doubt there’d be another woman in their bed tonight. Stupid girl, Hanna thought, fingers trailing up her forearms, tracing old bruises in the shape of Steve’s fingers. Her swollen nose throbbed in the dark.

She needed the toilet. She got up, wrapping the sleeping bag around her like a shawl. She wore only an old T-shirt, one Mercy lent her, several sizes too large. The bathroom was next door. When Mercy first showed her around, she’d mentioned in passing that the upstairs bathroom was off-limits. Something about rotten floorboards, but Hanna was disorientated and rattled and by the time she remembered, the door was already open and the black expanse of the bathroom revealed. For a moment, Hanna thought she’d opened the wrong door; that this was no room but a void, and then something had risen above the rim of the bath, slowly, eyes glowing like embers in the dark.

It wasn’t as if Hanna woke Charlie on purpose. She hadn’t even known he was there. She tells Mercy this, over and over until Mercy is sick with it, threatening to lock her in with Charlie and throw away the key. That shuts Hanna up. Subdued, she stares at Mercy, wanting to ask how she could have let her sleep next door to a monster.

Stella comes down the stairs, finger pressed to her lips. She has accomplished what Hanna could not. It stands to reason; she has had prior experience with Charlie, has spent long, sleepless nights reading him stories and coaxing him to sleep. She and Mercy, working shifts.

Neither of them seems outwardly angry at her, although Hanna thinks they’d have a right to be; she is an accidental guest, after all. She’s here only out of kindness. The squat is theirs. Actually, it’s his: an Edwardian townhouse in the heart of Lambeth, imposing even in its neglect. The windows are scabbed over with sun-bleached newspaper. The front garden is a snarl of bindweed. The neighbours don’t notice them. Nobody knocks at the door. Hanna suspects that this is not a coincidence.

‘He’s napping. He’ll be awake again soon,’ Mercy says. She’s a stout Filipina, an ex-nurse; she had found Hanna dazed and bleeding in a Southwark underpass, clinging desperately to a tattered rucksack as if her entire life were within it and begging to be taken home to the man who’d relieved her of several teeth. Mercy had brought Hanna back to the squat instead, let her sleep next door to Charlie. Just for one night, supposedly.

‘You’ll have to change his water when he wakes up again,’ Stella tells Hanna. She doesn’t bother to hide how put-out she is by it all. She piles her thick hair beneath a bandana in lieu of washing it, rubs her tired eyes with the back of her hand. ‘You woke him up. You do your bit.’

Nobody shows Hanna what to do, but it seems like common sense. She takes the bucket into the back garden and, hidden by snarls of overgrown foliage, quietly siphons water from the neighbour’s hosepipe. Like changing a litter tray, or cleaning a fish tank, except Charlie’s no pet. Hanna pushes the back door open with one foot, clutching the full bucket to her chest. Who’d want a pet like Charlie?

It’s hot in the bathroom. A thick, tropical heat like the inside of a vivarium. Hanna closes the door behind her with a click. Across the room is a cast-iron bathtub, the enamel stained yellow like old bones. The tiles are furry with black mildew, the windows obscured by newspaper. She breathes deep, easing her nerves, and heaves the bucket onto the counter.

‘Hello, Charlie,’ she says.

The tinkle of displaced water indicates his acknowledgement. She sees him as she approaches, a dark smudge beneath the surface. His form is distorted but recognisable. Red eyes stare up at her, unblinking. She doesn’t know if he’s holding his breath under there; Charlie, neither man nor frog but something else, something other. It wouldn’t surprise Hanna if he didn’t breathe at all.

Hanna sits on the lip of the bath and Charlie rises with slow grace; his skin is the glossy grey of a wet paving slab. He smells like an underpass, the ammoniac stench of week-old piss and gutter mulch. Clubbed fingers splay towards her, grasping. She leaps to her feet, backing quickly away. He is ugly, and alien, and although she senses nothing but benign curiosity, she keeps her distance.

‘I’ve come to change your water,’ she says, trying to hide the quiver in her voice. Charlie regards her with what she interprets as disappointment. His features are primitive; dull, Neanderthal jaw, empty black slit-mouth, heavy brow. Clicks and whirrs emanate from the depths of his pulsating throat. The glut of mucus obstructing the plughole comes away with a thick sucking sound. Clots of stinking matter streak the bathtub as the water drains. He stares up at her, awaiting her approach.

Hanna fetches the bucket from the counter. Her sweat-damp hair sticks to the back of her neck.

‘Ready?’ she asks – why is she talking to him? If he understands, he doesn’t care to answer. As the water spatters against his skin the clogged-sewer stink of him rolls up into the air. Hanna presses her sleeve to her mouth until the water settles, already stained a pale sepia. Charlie chitters in what might be joy. It’s so unexpected, such an innocent sound that Hanna almost smiles. Almost forgets he’s a monster.

The water is barely enough to cover his feet. She’ll have to make several more trips. Charlie reclines in his puddle, heavy skull resting against the slope of the bath. The fleshy rope of his umbilical cord floats in the shallow water. Hanna follows its trajectory. One end joins seamlessly with the concavity of his abdomen, coiling up and around and sinking once again, pallid as a cave fish, into the open black mouth of the plug hole. Down into the sewers, the guts of the city off which Charlie feeds.

When she returns, Mercy and Stella sit Hanna down and explain, as well as they can, what Charlie is.

‘Stella named it Charlie,’ Mercy says. ‘It’s been here longer than we have. Possibly even longer than this house. We think it’s taken several forms over its lifetime. It keeps us off the radar here, which gives us a safe place to stay. I suppose we’re meant to be his caretakers, but we mostly try to keep him asleep. It’s safer when he is.’

‘What happens when he’s awake?’ Hanna asks.

Stella indicates the squat with a sweep of her arm. The water has calmed Charlie temporarily, but it’s not enough; the lights still flicker like a faulty flashbulb. The taps in the downstairs bathroom gush brown water in sudden bursts. Hanna sits, cross-legged, sleeping bag wrapped around her shoulders. It is imperative, Mercy explains, that they return Charlie to a state of hibernation, because the longer he stays awake the greater his agitation will grow, and the more extreme the manifestations will become.

‘There was a time, two years ago, when we couldn’t get him back to sleep for over two weeks,’ Stella says. ‘By the time we wore him down, almost the entire borough was in a blackout, and a massive hole opened up just off the high street. Nothing but black all the way down. The Imperial War Museum was infested with giant rats. There was an outbreak of leptospirosis. They shut it down for months.’

‘Maybe it was a coincidence?’ Hanna suggests, although she’s not convinced. Mercy shoots Stella a wry look and it occurs to Hanna that they must have had this conversation many times over. And the more Hanna thinks about it, the more ridiculous it seems; how can she even try to apply an idea as quaint as ‘coincidence’ to a sexless grey monster living in a bathtub in an abandoned London townhouse?

‘It’s a parasite,’ Mercy says, like they’re discussing someone’s problematic cousin. ‘A malignancy. It feeds off the city. You saw the plughole, right? That’s how it communicates with London. It’s a two-way thing: if Charlie’s unhappy, the city suffers. The worse its temper, the worse things get. It’s only when Charlie’s asleep that London becomes autonomous again. When he’s awake, it’s chaos. And that’s why Stella and I try to keep him asleep.’ Implicit in her glance is the accusation – you fucked this up. I never should’ve brought you here. She’s probably too polite to say it out loud.

Hanna looks away. ‘How do you know all this?’ she asks.

‘She doesn’t,’ Stella says. ‘We don’t know a bloody thing. What Mercy’s telling you, she learned from the people before us. The rest is educated guesswork.’ She pauses, rifling through a pile of mouldering books to find Charlie a bedtime story. ‘This goes back longer than you can imagine. We won’t be the last of his keepers.’

It’s nonsense, the stuff of feverish fantasy. And yet, as Hanna looks from Mercy to Stella, at the grim lines of their mouths, a cold sensation creeps into the pit of her stomach and coils there, tight; maybe it is nonsense, but it’s happening all the same.

The next day, a swarm of beetles pour from the rotten space inside the walls and take up residence in the dark spaces. Hanna has spent her second night acting parent to their communal monster-child, and she is heavy-limbed with exhaustion. She comes into the living room, sinks into the futon. Already, this is too much. She hadn’t wanted to be a part of this. She didn’t choose to come here. When she tells Stella this the other woman just smiles, a mirthless flash of teeth.

‘Nobody wants to be here,’ Stella says. ‘But someone has to take care of him. Mercy and I have no family, no life to go back to. We might as well do what we can.’

‘You could kill him,’ Hanna says.

Stella regards her silently for a while.

‘Charlie didn’t choose to be the way he is,’ Stella says – Mercy calls Charlie ‘it’, but with Stella, it’s always ‘he’ – I don’t know much about him, but I know he was here before London was even a little twinkle in man’s eye. By accident or design, the city was built around him, and now he’s a part of it, and it’s part of him. You say we could kill him.’ She shakes her head. ‘The truth is, we’re afraid of what will happen if we do. Charlie’s bond with this city is strong. In a sense, Charlie is London. If Mercy’s right about him transmitting his moods – if there is some weird psychic bond – what kind of chaos would killing him create?’

‘You’ve thought about it,’ Hanna says.

‘Mercy has.’ A beetle crawls up her thigh, coming to rest in the crook of her knee. She doesn’t seem bothered. It’s probably not the first time. ‘We’ve always managed to calm him down. But yes, she’s talked about it more than once, when things get bad.’

‘And you?’

Stella plucks the beetle from her leg and holds it between her thumb and forefinger. Black eyelash legs skitter frantically in mid-air. She lifts the struggling insect slowly up until it’s level with her mouth.

‘You have to understand,’ she says. ‘When Charlie sleeps, his dreams stay in his head. But he never stops dreaming. And when he’s awake, the visions leak out. That’s what you see here. All of it. This is what’s in Charlie’s head.’

Hanna’s stomach twists into a knot as Stella’s lips part, a slow, thoughtful motion, and Hanna desperately tries not to retch, but Stella purses her lips and blows, gently, as if extinguishing a birthday candle. The beetle disintegrates, scattering gently outwards in a shower of black dust.

‘He didn’t choose to be this way,’ she says, brushing the dust from her hands. ‘He doesn’t mean any harm. I know you think he’s a monster, and you’re probably right. But this is the only life he knows.’

Hanna thinks of Steve. She thinks of the rage bright in his eyes, the scrape of his knuckles against her cheek. She hadn’t been able to change him, or even warn the next girl. Not that she’d have listened. She can’t change Charlie either, but maybe she can make things better. Maybe she can stop him doing any harm.

Besides. It’s her fault he’s awake to begin with.

She talks to Charlie a little more after that. Not much. Day to day things, the kind she’d usually talk to Steve about. Things she can’t tell the others, because they don’t seem to want to know anything about her. So she talks to Charlie, and although he doesn’t seem to understand, she swears he’s listening.

It seems fitting to Hanna that when Mercy finally cracks, it’s during Stella’s shift.

The back door slams; every other door in the squat rattles on its hinges. Hanna is pulled violently from sleep, legs tangled in her sleeping bag. There is a thunder of boots as someone storms upstairs. It’s Steve, she thinks, huddling beneath the blanket. It’s Steve and he’s angry about something and he’s coming up the stairs, towards her. It’s only when Stella starts screaming that she remembers where she is.

She rolls over. Someone is in the bathroom, stomping hard on the rotting floorboards. Hanna scrambles to her feet, shedding the sleeping bag as she goes. Stella stands at the bathroom door, blocking the way with arms outstretched. Her book lies forgotten at her feet, her torch a black shape on the periphery. Mercy stands before her, wielding a mud-caked pickaxe in both hands like a spear.

‘Riots,’ she says. ‘There’ve been riots up in London. It’s all over the papers. Buildings burnt to the ground. People cracking each other’s heads open. It’s fucking insane out there. Nobody knows what’s sparked it.’ Her fingers tighten around the pickaxe. ‘But we know, don’t we Stella?’

‘You can’t be sure,’ Stella says, but she’s shaking, and before she can react Mercy bulldozes through her, shoving her aside. Stella stumbles out onto the landing. She stares at Hanna for a moment, looking small and powerless. Hanna dashes into the bathroom. Mercy stands over Charlie, the pickaxe raised. It would be comical were it not for Charlie’s high, keening cries, and Hanna feels a sharp pain somewhere in the vicinity of her heart at the sound. She hadn’t been convinced he was capable of emotion, but his fear is unmistakable.

‘People are hurting one another,’ Mercy says, indicating Charlie with a jut of her chin. ‘Don’t tell me it’s coincidence. Don’t you dare insult my intelligence like that. This has gone as far as I’m going to let it.’

‘Mercy,’ Hanna says, and the woman turns for a moment; there is doubt in her eyes, and Hanna realises she has a choice. For the first time in a long time, she has a choice. ‘Calm down. Let’s talk about it. That’s how you get things done here, isn’t it?’ She raises both hands, a placating gesture. ‘You’ve got him to sleep so many times before. You can do it again. We’ll work together.’ She swallows hard. ‘This is my fault, Mercy. Not his. I should never have gone into the bathroom. I’m so sorry.’

Mercy looks uncertain, but she steels herself all the same, raises the pickaxe high in both hands like a wooden stake.

‘Mercy, please,’ Hanna says.

The axe-head is clotted with old earth, but it glints in the guttering light, and Hanna barely has time to wonder what Charlie sees when Mercy brings it down hard. The blunt metal pierces Charlie’s skull like a knife through paper. Black spills out into the bath water. Charlie chokes, gurgles. The axe descends again, faster this time, cracking brittle bones, and the stink rising from the bathtub is rich and thick and rotten. Mercy raises her weapon again, but looks up at the bathroom light, dead at last. Her T-shirt is spattered with black. Charlie floats in the dark water.

Hanna looks over her shoulder, away from Charlie’s ruined body. His fearful wailing still echoes in her ears. Charlie is dead, and she’s too stunned to feel anything. Stella sits against the bathroom door, knees drawn to her chest, staring numbly at her.

‘There,’ Mercy says, wiping sweat from her cheeks. ‘He’s gone. You fucking cowards.’ The shovel clatters to the floor. For a long moment, the only sounds are Mercy’s ragged breathing and the slow drip of spilled water over the edge of the bath. ‘It’s over,’ she says, after a time. She wipes her hands on her T-shirt.

‘For both our sakes,’ Stella replies, ‘I hope you’re right.’

Stella and Hanna wrap Charlie’s body in black bags and haul it into the boot of Stella’s old Ford Mondeo. The neighbours peer at them through a gap in the curtain as they leave the squat, narrow-eyed and suspicious. Charlie is gone; the dreamlike ignorance with which the neighbours had previously regarded them is gone too. They are exposed.

Hanna goes with Stella because it feels like the right thing to do. To see that Charlie’s death does not go unremarked. Helpless Charlie, the heart of a city, though he never had a say in the matter. Who asked for nothing but a safe space. Hanna understands that longing perhaps better than any of them. Mercy had called him a malignancy. As they wrestled his sad little body from the bathtub and onto the floor, severing the umbilical cord, Mercy told them she’d saved the city, cut it free from Charlie’s greedy, suckling influence. Neither of them had argued. Mercy wouldn’t have understood.

Mercy’s door was shut when they left the squat. ‘She got what she wanted,’ Stella says bitterly, staring out of the window at the passing houses, the skyline still shrouded in early morning mist. Everything is calm. Debris from last night’s rioting lies in the gutter, undisturbed. Nothing is burning. Nothing is crumbling. ‘Give it time,’ Stella tells her, adamant, although there is doubt in her eyes, and the frown lines around her mouth speak volumes. Whatever Stella had been afraid of should have happened by now. The idea that Mercy might have been right all along must stick in her throat.

They drive to the dump (‘Recycling Centre’, the sign insists) and hide his body among a sea of broken furniture and wet, yellowing weeds. Hanna looks to Stella, and she shakes her head. There’s nothing to be said. Charlie is dead, and the city carries on without him, at least for now. Hanna wonders what they’ll make of his body, if anyone ever finds it; if they’ll think him a strange, awful sculpture abandoned by its creator. She knows nobody ever will.

They get back into the car. The lush, rotten smell of Charlie still lingers. There is a heaviness in Hanna’s chest. Without Charlie’s protection, the squat is no longer a safe haven. She will have to move on. Perhaps back to Birmingham, where her mother will undoubtedly greet this new failure with glee. If Stella is right – and Hanna is increasingly uncertain of this – then it’s probably best to leave London altogether, before the last of Charlie’s influence dissipates and the cracks start to show. If they start to show.

They pull up to the squat. The neighbours’ curtains are wide open, their windows empty. Perhaps they’ve given up watching for now. Stella pushes the door open. A scattering of tiny black beetles emerge, pouring out into the sunlight where they disintegrate. Hanna looks sharply at Stella, who shakes her head. ‘Remnants of a dream,’ she says. ‘I don’t know. This is new to me, too.’

‘Maybe.’ They haven’t spoken much since Charlie was killed. Neither of them quite know what to make of it. There’s a sense that an injustice has been done – Stella still won’t accept Charlie’s part in the rioting, although the streets are ominously quiet this morning. Still, though, Hanna can’t help but blame herself. If only she’d never woken him. If only she’d calmed him in time . . .

Inside, everything is as they left it. The squat has not yet fallen apart without Charlie’s protection. The smell of damp plaster and lemongrass incense still presides. They mill at the bottom of the stairs, uneasy, none of them willing to be the first to ascend into the black hallway above. What lurks there now Charlie is gone? Finally, Hanna takes the lead, hoping her nerves don’t show. Stella brings up the rear. Hanna suspects she might have gone first if she hadn’t been trying to make a point. Better the devil you know, even when that devil is a grey-skinned, bathtub-dwelling parasite.

Stella strides past Mercy’s open door and is about to ascend the stairs to her attic room when there is a sudden pulse of light from the overhead bulb. A momentary flicker, gone almost as soon as it appears. Hanna looks from Stella to Mercy and waits for one of them to comment, but neither does. For a moment, she wonders if she saw anything at all.

She waits for Stella to disappear into the attic and veers sharply towards the bathroom. It takes everything in her power to stop her from running, and yet as she approaches the bathtub in the centre of the room, she’s filled with equal parts joy and trepidation; what if there’s nothing? Remnants of a dream, Stella said, traces of Charlie lingering like old blood at a crime scene. As she leans over the rim of the bath, she hears her own sharp intake of breath, her wide eyes reflected in the shallow pool at the bottom of the bath.

The bathroom light buzzes.

There he is. Charlie in miniature, a grey bud bursting from the remains of the discarded umbilical cord. Of course. They should have destroyed it, but in their haste, they simply severed it and left the remainder to rot. He is tiny, this new Charlie, the size of a child’s fist, a glistening grey maquette wallowing in a stagnant puddle still stained with his predecessor’s black blood. His eyes are tiny rubies. She slips her hand into the water, cups the newborn Charlie in her palm. He stares up at her, unblinking, chittering faintly like a faraway insect. Talking to her in whatever primitive language he speaks. Like he’s telling her it’ll be different this time. And maybe it will.

‘I’m sorry about what happened,’ she says. ‘But we’re going to do it properly this time. No more bad dreams. No more riots. I’ll keep you safe.’ His skin is leathery, and not unpleasant. ‘Go back to sleep, Charlie.’

His eyes slip shut. And as he rests there in the warm concavity of her hand, Hanna swears she sees the black slit of his mouth contort into a smile.

Exploding Raphaelesque Heads

IAN HUNTER

It was in Scotland of all places that I saw the painting; those few months when I was rattling around Europe, cramming in as much culture as I could as if it was about to be rationed to us Americans, or the world was coming to an end and this would all be rubble, while we were dust. It was in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, a big grey, temple-like building with imposing pillars, which sat at the bottom of a small hill they called the Mound, below the old houses that stretched up and down the Royal Mile from the castle to the palace down at the other end.

I came round the corner, eyes drifting between the brochure in my hand and the paintings on the wall, when suddenly there it was, a section devoted to Salvador Dali. Although they didn’t have much in the way of exhibits and things started with various black and white photographs of the man himself taken at different times during his life, but all seemed to show him with wide eyes and eyebrows raised, either in a questioning or condescending pose. In many his moustache was tapered to two deadly points. One photograph showed those points skewering two flowers, in another they were curled upwards, climbing over his cheeks, ready to impale his eyes. In some photographs, he was standing beside famous people. I recognised Harpo Marx, Alfred Hitchcock, Sonny Bono, John Lennon, even Raquel Welch, and Alice Cooper. It was obviously a bit of a thing to have your picture taken with Dali, but I have to confess that I didn’t recognise Coco Chanel, although the little card below the photograph told me her name anyway. Sadly, the rhino Dali was almost kissing in one photo seemed to go unnamed, like the headless manikin he carried in another shot, as if the jointed dummy was his dead, robot bride from a bad 50’s B-movie. My kind of stuff.

Walking on, the blizzard of photographs ended and the small exhibition started with his painting Oiseau,or Birdto you and me. What was it about? It looked like the skeletal remains of a dead bird, almost prehistoric, decaying on a beach, with part of the body missing to reveal the corpse of a young bird inside. Then there were a couple of sketches of things that looked like skeletons adorned with various pieces of meat.

Entrails and sausages, steaks and cuts. Next came a storyboard for a proposed film on surrealism and a proper painting called Le Signal de l’angoisee – The Signal of Anguish – depicting a woman who was naked, except for a pair of stockings, standing in a strange landscape being watched by someone you couldn’t really see through the square window of the building behind her. It was disconcerting, it was creepy, it made you stop and look back at the painting to see if the watcher had stepped forward, revealing themselves, but, no, they always stayed in the shadows. And that was good, that was something out of left field, which couldn’t be topped, or so I thought, but I was wrong. They had kept the best for last. Kept it for me, because it changed my life forever.

Tête Raphaëlesque éclatée.

Exploding Raphaelesque Head.

If you don’t know it, Dali’s painting was inspired by the bombing of Hiroshima and uses a classic Madonna-like pose typical of the Renaissance artist, Raphael, but has the head fragmenting. Some of these fragments looked like pieces of twisted silver. Flesh turned to metal, possibly transformed by the alchemy of nuclear forces, while the splitting parts around her neck are darker, almost stone-like, but in strange, sharp, conical, wriggling shapes that resemble shapes seen in some of Dali’s other work. This may be a painting depicting the instant after the explosion, still head-like before it shatters in a thousand different directions, as the woman looks down, demurely, almost in prayer.

I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I stood staring, oblivious to the other people who flowed behind me, tried to get in front of me for a better look, but I denied them with my closeness to the canvas. Eventually, after several minutes had passed and my eyes had finished taking in every square centimetre of the canvas, I snapped out of my reverie and spoke to a member of the gallery staff. I made some vague, rambling enquiries about buying the painting, which were instantly laughed off, until I insisted that I had the money to buy it if they named their price. That received a more hesitant, less certain laugh, which attracted the attention of some security staff who stood in the corners, hands behind their backs, watching my every move until I went to the shop in the Gallery. There I bought all the books I could find with Dali’s work in them. They even had a few tacky products inspired by the very painting that dominated my thoughts. A jigsaw, a tea towel, various notebooks, a shopping bag. I’ve added a few tacky products of my own over the years, all with a production run of one. Some I’ve commissioned from other artists, some I’ve made myself. If you ever come to my house, which is admittedly highly unlikely, you will see two walls covered in a reproduction of that exploding head. It also adorns my bedroom ceiling. I try to make it the last thing I see at night and the first thing I see in the morning keeping my eyes firmly closed until I am in position to gaze up at it.

But all of these things, they are never enough.

After I had made my mind up, after I had foolishly thought I was ready, my first subject was male, in his thirties, found sleeping rough beneath the pier – what was I thinking about? I almost died. He spat at me as soon as I took the tape off his mouth, struggling violently in the chair I had tied him to, trying to rock from side to side before he fell over. I’ve seen enough movies to know if that happened he would break the chair and be on me. I thought I could get the grenade into his mouth when he was shouting. It wouldn’t fit, and I had already pulled the pin. We both had about five seconds. I dropped the grenade under his chair and dived behind one of the blast walls I had constructed in my special studio. There wasn’t much left of him, and what was left, wasn’t pretty, and was, well, everywhere. Wrong, wrong, wrong and I thought my ear drums had burst with the noise.

My second subject was a homeless man and this time things went slightly better. I drugged him and took out all his teeth with the help of a hammer and some pliers, and managed to squeeze the grenade into his ruined mouth in plenty of time, especially with the pin protruding outwards. Still, what a mess. Grenades were clearly not the answer, but at least the money I splashed on state of the art earplugs, connected to a digital processor, was money well spent.

My third subject was a male hitchhiker. I killed him first – how? Well, that doesn’t matter, but it was better he was dead as I had started to experiment with different kinds of explosives and wanted to make things as simple as possible.

This time I used ammonia gelatine, placed in the mouth. Again, messy, but not without potential.

The fourth subject was an old beggar, and an old boozer too. I used Semtex this time, obtained from shadowy contacts of a guerrilla artist I know. This time I tried a different, more ambitious place to put the explosive, namely inside the skull. I should have been a surgeon, instead of the third waster son of a logging tycoon. I’m good at this. I shaved some of the old man’s hair off, before peeling back the scalp, and sawing through the bone, and then again and again at different angles until I was able to pull out a rough circle of skull before removing part of the brain. Too much Semtex was an obvious, beginner’s mistake and I also noted that I needed to remove more of the brain in future.

By now, I’d learned all I could from the men. I didn’t need them anyway; they were just practice. Dali’s painting is the fragmenting head of a woman. Killing these male subjects first had made things easier from a planning and preparation point of view, but from now on, it was going to be women only, and they would all be dead if possible. At peace, serene. Madonna-like.

The fifth subject was my first female, and my brilliant idea was to try and take the top of her skull out from inside her head, and make it easier to explode and come apart. It took hours to achieve anything like the desired effect, leaving me exhausted with another mess on my bloody, gloved hands. What was there before the explosion didn’t even resemble a head very much, so you can imagine what was left afterwards.

From now on, the skull would have to stay.

My sixth subject was a drug addict, and I went back to basics with the hole in the top of her head and a slightly lower amount of plastic explosive. Not enough for the desired effect, but getting there.

A woman possibly in her early thirties was my seventh subject. It was hard to tell her age. She’d clearly had it tough by the state of her, so in a way I was doing her a favour. I picked her up by the old bus station. Sadly, I over compensated with the explosive charge, and her head sort of imploded, collapsed in on itself, totally the wrong result, possibly due to where I placed it within her skull, I would need to do much better next time.

Now it was time to go up a gear, time to find a different sort of woman. Three at most, I hoped. Two to practise on and the third would be the charm. Sad, but true, and I’m not being insincere, not really, but none of my female test subjects so far could be classified as ‘lookers’, not after the drugs and the booze and the abuse have worn them down. Two out of three have had broken noses and all have cheeks riddled with broken blood vessels.

Victim number eight was a high-school beauty and a real test of my mettle. Her youth and good looks gave her some of the qualities of the subject in the Dali Painting, which was strangely off-putting. What a set of lungs she had as well, constantly screaming the place down. Even though my place is out in the country and my studio well hidden within the depths of the estate, I still kept her drugged at the end. Glued her eyes shut, and puffed up her lips slightly with collagen filler. She was almost perfect, almost.

Ninth victim was me being really stupid and acting on impulse after finding a woman at the side of the road, trying to get her car to start. Anyone could have come along and seen me. Seen us. Anyone. What an idiot I can be at times, although I did take care to push her car down one of the old forest tracks and saw it tumbling between the trees towards the old lake where it should be rusting at the bottom. I was also pleased to note the similarities to the Dali painting when I slowed down the film I have been taking of all my explosions, slowed it down to almost frame by frame, the incandescent Hiroshima moment.

For my tenth victim I scoured a lot of online model agencies until I found the ideal woman to hire, being very careful to cover my tracks for when she was inevitably reported as missing. That face. That nose. Those lips, they hardly needed filler at all. As for the curve of her eyebrows? Well it was divine. The hair wasn’t, of course, but still, you can’t have everything. Crucially, her hair was longer than I needed it to be, but I still had to be very careful when I cut it, very careful when I styled it. I wasn’t even really sure if she needed to be alive when I did all that. Not being sure, I thought it better to drug her then wash and cut her hair. Shame I had to cut into her scalp to plant my little charges.

Now it is perfect. She is perfect. Head and neck severed from her body and carefully mounted. Drained of blood. Lips perfectly full. Eyes closed, head angled downwards, Hole cut out of the top of the head with an angled light source shining down from above. I know the angle isn’t going to mirror Dali’s exactly, but I don’t want anyone to see the Semtex placed inside her. Now there are six cameras pointing at the head. One from each side. One from above. One slightly below, looking up as she looks down.

Dali would be proud of me.

The Bloody Tower

ANNA TABORSKA

Shakil had more in common with Jim Morrison than Osama bin Laden, so it came as something of a surprise to his family when the front door splintered with an ear-rending crash at four o’clock one Sunday morning, and a naked Shakil was dragged out of bed, handcuffed and pulled out into the darkness.

It was a year since the Prime Minister had given his speech in Parliament to accompany his new anti-terrorism legislation, and a year since the ravens had flown the Tower.

The birds had been restless all morning. The Raven Master tried in vain to persuade Thor the talking raven to say ‘good morning’. At around midday, about the time that the Prime Minister sat down amidst a deathly silence a little over two miles away, Thor croaked something that might have been construed as sounding rather like ‘Nevermore!’ and took off – half flying, half hopping, taking the other ravens with him.

‘Thor! Thor, come back!’ The Raven Master ran as far as he could after the departing birds. Another Yeoman Warder joined him, disturbed by the desperation in the older man’s voice.

‘Don’t worry mate, you know they won’t get far with their feathers clipped’. But the Raven Master wasn’t convinced.

A year later and the ravens weren’t back, the Crown Jewels had been removed, the tourist attractions ousted, the Yeoman Warders sacked, and the Prime Minister had his own little Guantanamo right here on British soil – in the heart of the capital.

The Tower – in reality a collection of twenty-four towers and various other structures – was nothing if not perfect for the job at hand. It was as if the ancient buildings had been waiting for seventy-five years for blood to flow down their walls once more. The Tower’s last victim had been shot on 15th August 1941: a hapless German spy who broke his right ankle while parachuting into Ramsey Hollow, Huntingdonshire, and was duly court-martialled and executed before he had managed to do any spying. Josef Jacobs’s executioners had been considerate enough to allow him to sit before the eight-man firing squad – made up of members of the Holding Battalion, Scots Guards – as his injured leg made standing difficult. The coroner noted during the autopsy that Josef had been shot once in the head and seven times around the white lint target that had been pinned over his heart. The poor man was buried in an unmarked grave at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green, Northwest London, and, to add insult to injury, earth was later thrown over his grave, allowing for the cadavers of total strangers to be buried on top of him.

Shakil had enjoyed history at school, and under different circumstances would perhaps have been interested to know that he was being driven into the Tower of London complex, but by the time the tear-stained blindfold was removed from the eighteen-year-old’s eyes, he was already in a damp, dark cell, and his only thought was one of fear for his life.

He spent his first half hour shouting for help and looking for a way out, then footsteps resounded and three guards appeared.

‘Shut up, you piece of shit! And stand up for The Warden.’

The Warden was dressed in an Armani suit and very shiny shoes. His accent was an uneasy fusion of public school and East End wide boy, explainable by the fact that his daddy had paid for him to go to public school, but the boy had not been bright enough to get into university, and had instead used his financial leverage to hang out with bankers, gangsters and aspiring politicians. His money and dubious connections had finally landed him his current position, and he intended to abuse every inch of his power.

‘Congratulations,’ the Warden intoned sarcastically to the frightened teenager on the other side of the bars. ‘It is my duty as Warden to welcome you here. You are officially the first detainee of the Tower of London Detention and Concentration Facility.’

‘I didn’t do nothing!’

‘Shut up when the Warden’s speaking!’

The Warden continued by assuring Shakil that during his stay he would not only give up his terror cell, but would also help them to fine-tune the system they were creating.

‘But I didn’t do nothing!’

‘I am referring, of course, to the Government’s new anti-terror system.’

‘But I didn’t do nothing.’

The Warden laughed. ‘Get him scrubbed up,’ he told the guards.

Even as Shakil was told where he was, his family had no idea whatsoever. It was seven in the morning and they had already been waiting two hours at the local police station to speak to someone who might know something. The duty officer told them to come back at nine, when the chief superintendent would be in, but they refused to leave. It took all of Mr Malik’s diplomatic skills to stop his wife and daughter ending up in the holding cells, as panic for Shakil made it impossible for the women to sit still and wait in silence.

When the chief superintendent finally turned up at half past nine, he tried to go straight into a meeting, and this time it was Mr Malik whose nerves gave way.

‘What have you done with my son?’ he shouted repeatedly at the top of his voice. The police station was filling up with other distressed members of the public by now, and the chief superintendent decided that in the interests of public relations it would be best to assist the Malik family rather than incarcerate them. He made a couple of phone calls, and finally informed the Maliks that their son was being held on terrorist charges at an undisclosed location.

‘Terrorist charges! Shakil? Do you even know what you’re talking about?’ Shakil’s sixteen-year-old sister Adara yelled at the chief superintendent, while Mrs Malik suddenly felt faint and her husband had to hold her up.

‘Calm down, Miss Malik.’ The chief was starting to seriously consider locking up the lot of them – public relations or not. If the son was a terrorist, then there was a good chance that the rest of the family were as well.

‘Shakil – a terrorist? Look, my brother’s greatest ambition is to strip at hen parties. How on earth could he be a terrorist?’ Adara was hysterical, and Mr Malik tried to calm her down, while holding onto her sobbing mother.

‘Mr Malik,’ the chief superintendent put on his most professional smile. ‘Why don’t you all go home and once we know something more about your son, we’ll contact you.’

Eventually Mr Malik decided to take the remains of his family home, to regroup and think where to appeal for help. On the way home, Adara replayed the events of the previous night in her mind, and tried to think of anything that could have contributed to her brother’s abduction by the Met’s Anti-Terror Squad.

Shakil and Adara had been invited to a party. There had been a long discussion with their dad, who hadn’t wanted Adara to go. Shakil argued that if his father trusted him with the keys to his car and to his explosives warehouse, then surely he could trust him to bring his sister home safely.

‘Your sister’s not a car.’ But Mr Malik lost the argument, as his wife joined in on the side of the children, and the siblings went to their friend’s party.

After about half an hour of chatting to each other and the hostess, a blonde girl had come up to Shakil and asked him where he was from.

‘East End,’ Shakil gave the girl his sexy smile.

‘No, I mean, where’s your family from? You’re not English.’

‘I’m Pakistani.’

‘Oh . . . Are you a terrorist?’

‘Maddy!’ Their hostess’s embarrassment was painful to see.

‘My dad says that all Pakis are terrorists,’ explained Maddy. Adara and the hostess exchanged glances, wondering which one of them was going to deck her first, but Shakil merely thought hard for a moment, then said, ‘I don’t know about anyone else, but I am a terrorist – a terrorist of the heart.’

The girl processed the information for a while, then laughed. Adara rolled her eyes, while Shakil explained to Maddy that his name meant ‘sexy’ in Arabic. Adara caught Shakil’s eye and put her finger in her mouth, making like she was about to vomit. Shakil got that mischievous glint in his eye, and added, ‘Lots of Pakistani names have Arabic origins, and most of them mean something. For example, “Adara” means “virgin”.’ Everyone looked at Adara and laughed.

‘Does not!’ Adara stuck her middle finger up at Shakil, eliciting more hilarity. The blonde whispered something in Shakil’s ear, ‘Let’s see what you got then, Mr Terrorist,’ and went to kiss him, her hand straying downwards towards the boy’s crotch. But just then Shakil’s favourite Doors song came on the stereo. ‘I love that song!’ and he was off – leaving Maddy to wonder whether her low-cut top was showing enough cleavage.

As Adara recalled her brother dancing to ‘Light My Fire’ in front of a room of admiring girls and jealous boys, his shoulder-length black hair glistening under the dim lighting, Shakil was hosed down with freezing water and his fine locks were shaved off by a brute of a guard who doubled as the prison’s ‘hairdresser’. Shakil had been very proud of his hair, and the sight of it falling on the stone floor, and the bald, bleeding reflection staring out at him from a mirror that was shoved in front of his face with the words ‘Who’s a pretty boy, then?’, broke him. What with the fluorescent yellow jumpsuit he’d been forced to don after his ‘shower’, in place of his customary jeans, Nirvana T-shirt and leather jacket, the old Shakil was no more.

Then Adara remembered that a couple of the boys at the party had started a conversation about making bombs. One of the boys said that it would be easy to make a home-made bomb, while the other disagreed. Shakil had piped up, saying that you could make a detonator really easily out of just about anything – even a mobile phone. Shakil knew a lot about explosives, as his father was an engineer, specialising in demolitions, who was often asked by the council to demolish traditional areas of the East End so that developers could turn them into car parks or high-rise hell holes for the underprivileged.

‘You see, son,’ Adara had heard her father say to Shakil more than once, ‘You could be blowing things up too, just like your old man, if you just went to college and studied engineering, instead of playing guitar and thinking about girls all day.’

Maybe someone had reported Shakil’s stupid teenage conversation to the authorities. How sick would that be? What kind of a world were they living in if you couldn’t even chat at a party without being kidnapped by the police several hours later?

‘Mum, we gotta go back . . . Dad . . .’

‘What is it, sweetheart?’

‘There was some stupid conversation at the party last night about making bombs.’

‘Oh God.’ Mrs Malik was starting to feel light-headed again.

‘We have to go back and explain that no way would Shakil make a bomb; he just knows about explosives because of Dad’s job.’

‘Okay, sweetheart, we’ll go back and tell them,’ said her father.

‘But what if they take your father away as well?’ Mrs Malik had aged ten years in the last few hours. ‘What if they don’t give us Shakil back, but take away your father too?’

‘We have to try,’ Mr Malik was adamant.

So Adara and her parents went back to the police station – that day, as they would every day in the weeks that followed.

The interrogation had not lasted long, as after several pelts around the back, chest, face and head, Shakil was already unconscious.

‘We’ll have to do something about your technique,’ the Warden told the interrogating officer. ‘This isn’t going to work. I’m seriously thinking we need to look at the equipment we have at our disposal, starting with that weird looking thing in the basement.’