Pinprick Read online

  Pinprick

  Matthew Cash

  Great British Horror Books

  www.GreatBritishHorror.com

  First published in the UK by KnightWatch Press,

  an imprint of Great British Horror Books, 2016

  The right of Matthew Cash to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known of hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Acknowledgements

  I'm dedicating this book to my friends and family both past and present; you have all helped in your own ways to get me to where I am today, so I thank you for the lessons learned.

  The people and village of Brantham; although a semi-fictional version of this happy hamlet appears in this book, it holds many happy childhood memories, and a few rather crappy young adult ones too.

  To the ex who mocked me and told me my writing was shit, I thank you but simultaneously raise my middle finger. I have always been a bit rebellious so perhaps your words helped after all.

  To Raven Taylor, a firm believer in this story, ever since its first, very different, draft almost ten years ago. This story came back to me a few years ago begging to be rewritten, so I did; the characters had grown up somewhat though and I never even thought about consecutive installments until the big rewrite. But Raven's words of encouragement and shock at its new version have helped inspire me to carry on.

  To Christina Cooper of Fans of Modern Horror, and Elizabeth Bryson and all of my online friends for believing in me, encouraging me and telling me when I'm not up to scratch.

  To Theresa Derwin, for the big break, and Steve Shaw of Great British Horror Books, the lucky guy who gets to publish my legendary debut novel. “My life for you.”

  To my wife Amanda, I thank you for visiting my home village with me twice in 2008/9 and giving me plenty of happy memories to think about the place. Midnight duck feeding, wandering around drinking booze, muddy field walks, romantic pond side cuddles, and the experience of the darkness of the countryside, so impenetrable that even the tiniest pinprick of light would shine so bright.

  To my daughter for showing enthusiasm into my background and being proud of my books, and to my little dude for giving me numerous long bus journeys to sit, plot and think as streets and houses pass us by.

  Thank you, I love almost all of you.

  Matty-Bob

  Prologue

  July 1986

  One second the downpour was nothing but a faint smell on the hot night air; the next a torrent of bitterly cold rain had soaked them to the bone. At first, the contrast between the downpour and the stifling heat had been welcomed, but now, they were still three miles from the nearest village and the rain had penetrated their slight summer t-shirts. The winding country roads held no hope for shelter. They had no choice but to run for it.

  Shane’s shirt stuck to his skin and his jeans hung drenched and heavy. He was the gang’s only punk rocker and the green Mohawk he usually sported rested on his nose like a limp lizard tail. He shivered as he watched as Malcolm paused to fasten the buttons on his trademark brown leather jacket. He was the only one of them with a coat.

  He knew they were close to salvation when they heard Brantham’s House of Oddities’ hanging sign squeaking like a sound effect from a cheap horror film.

  He saw Malcolm run under the porch of the nearest building and followed. The Tudor-style three storey building was one of the first in the village and the site of a local, somewhat tacky, tourist attraction. Brantham’s House of Oddities. Part hobby, part business enterprise, it was a museum of local history and folklore run by the present owner, Richard Dury. His family had owned the property since the seventeenth century when they built it as a farm house. He had turned the house into a museum of the strange and slightly macabre in the late Fifties as a money maker and to exploit the losses of the locality’s frequent and unusual livestock.

  Shane and the others joined Malcolm beneath the wooden porch, swearing and laughing at the unexpected deluge of rain. Malcolm pulled a damp packet of cigarettes from his jacket and, ever the generous type, he stuck one in his mouth and thrust the packet away again.

  “What a night, eh boys?” he said as he swiped his dripping brown hair from his eyes.

  “You can bloody well say that again!” came the high-pitched voice of Freddy. Freddy was eighteen and was often mocked by his mates about the way he spoke. The reason for his speech impediment was a cleft palate, which, with his completely shaved head and protruding ears, completed his a bat-like appearance. His arms were covered in crude, rude DIY tattoos and he had several piercings in both ears.

  Johnny, a scrawny rat-faced seventeen year old stood huddled in the corner as close to the building as he could, his bony arms wrapped around himself for warmth. His usually greasy blonde hair was plastered to his acne-ridden forehead.

  “I just want to get home now,” he said with a yawn.

  “You going to ring Daria?” asked Shane.

  “Yeah, and then I’m going to bed for the rest of the weekend.”

  “With Daria?” Freddy grinned.

  “No. Cut it out,” said Johnny, too tired to rise to the bait.

  It was their Friday night routine; go to The Drum in Ipswich, watch the bands, get well and truly legless on what little wages they had, and then walk home. The public transport was dire where they lived in rural Suffolk, so they would walk. Sometimes it was a pain in the arse, but at least the walk sobered them up by the time they got home.

  Karl was the oldest and biggest of them all at twenty-one. He was the son of a farmer and had spent most of his life working on the land. Mentally, he was a bit slow, but physically, he was built like The Incredible Hulk. Unlike the hulk however, he was a gentle giant and was always willing to help anyone. Freddy and Malcolm continuously took the piss out of him but Shane and Johnny stood by him loyally.

  A few years back Karl had been in the local newspaper for a heroic deed he had performed and neither boy would let him forget it. Whenever they praised him, he would shuffle his feet, smile his crooked, goofy grin and say, “Thanks boys”.

  Malcolm sucked hard on his cigarette, almost all of it smoked away.

  Shane cupped his hands over his eyes and tried to peer in through the pitch-black windows.

  “Let’s go inside and dry off!” Malcolm said, ever the reckless type.

  “Yeah, that’d be excellent! Know a way in?” Freddy, Malcolm’s sidekick, whooped with joy at the suggestion.

  Malcolm flicked his cigarette butt at Karl and nodded.

  “Come on.”

  “Wait. Hang on a minute,” Johnny said worriedly, “What if we get caught?”

  “Don’t worry about it Johnny-Boy, my old man’s a mate of old man Dury. He’ll not mind as long as we don’t break anything.”

  Malcolm led the four young men back out into the rain and down the side of the building. When they came to a flaking green door Malcolm simply turned the handle and walked in.

  “I can’t believe they just leave it unlocked,” Shane said, surprised as he stepped over the dark threshold.

  “Yeah mate, he always does. Come on, who’s going to come in here anyway? I mean, he hardly gets anyone in here during the opening hours, let alone burglars!” Malcolm said patting the walls to find a light switch. He managed to find one and a naked orange bulb blinked on overhead. They were in an old-fa
shioned kitchen where sparkling pots and pans hung over the vast wooden worktops. Karl reached up to touch one.

  “Don’t touch anything!” Malcolm snapped.

  They passed through the kitchen and into a long dark hallway. Malcolm found another switch and turned off the kitchen light. The hallway ran down the side of the house with various doors branching off to the right, and a big staircase. They moved up the hallway towards the door at the end.

  “The Dury’s use this half of the house for their private quarters,” Malcolm said adopting an upper class accent as his hand poised on the door handle.

  “Of the ten rooms upstairs only five are used privately, housing the Dury family.”

  “Shit, does that mean they’re here?” Karl asked with a genuine look of concern.

  Shane nudged him with his shoulder.

  “Come on, you of all people should know they’ve got that new house near the Hammond’s.”

  Hammond was another farmer in the village. The village’s farmland was divided into three parts, the Hammond’s, the Feltham’s and the Dury’s.

  The Dury’s owned the largest part. Over the years, however, the families had sold off large chunks to the Hammond family.

  “Youre old man goes shooting with Dave Hammond and Frank Dury.”

  “Oh yeah!” Karl said laughing a little.

  They entered the reception area where people came into the house and purchased their tickets, and took ten minutes or so to look at the old black and white photographs and read the old stories that accompanied them. The majority of the photos consisted of various pieces of farmland and the countryside of Brantham. The stories, some true, some legend, told of ghostly appearances in the village over the last three hundred years, of rare and strange happenings. The boys didn’t linger as Malcolm led them through yet another door. As they entered the new room Malcolm switched the light on and said, “Now this is fucking excellent!”

  All around them were glass cases filled with stuffed animals. From a distance they appeared to be average farm animals, but when they peered a little closer, they realised each one of them had some kind of an abnormality. Malcolm waved a theatrical hand and boomed, “Behold, the freaks!”

  A two-beaked pheasant was immortalised posing in long ears of fake corn. The bird stood proud, its neck stretched long, head held high, breast puffed out as if calling for a mate. Beneath its perfectly preserved beak a partially-formed upper half of a second beak jutted out. It made Shane think of a peanut, which for some reason churned the contents of his stomach.

  In the next case, a five-legged deer stood poised in a snippet of woodland, its big black eyes seemed to retain the fear as it saw the hunter. A fifth leg protruded from a joint in one of its hind legs.

  There was a small brown and white patched calf born with two fully formed heads which had lived for just two days and now rested its legs on a hay bed.

  Curled up beside the calf was a horse foal born dead with no mouth, just an elongated face, its eyes never opened, remaining forever closed.

  There were shelves with glass jars full of smaller, similar items, suspended in whatever liquid preserved them; two headed toads and distorted animal foetuses with thin pink membranes over bulging black eyes that never knew sight. This bizarre array of the freaks of nature and the collection of birth deformities were all supposedly genuine and sourced locally.

  Malcolm and Freddy hooted with laughter as they pointed at a featherless pink rooster captured artistically mid-crow. Its wattle and comb looked like rare slithers of meat.

  Shane was looking at a sorrowful little fox cub, born with no legs, when he heard Karl gasp. He was staring into the glassy dead eyes of a black Labrador which sat on its legless hind quarters. His face was pale and his bottom lip quivered.

  As Shane watched, Karl looked up at him.

  “It looks like Sally,” he said.

  Sally had been Karl’s pet dog for years. She had been perfect in every way, a loyal friend right up until her bitter end.

  Karl fought back the memory of her death with all his will but it came regardless; him lying by her basket sobbing as her painfully laboured breathing ceased.

  “Hey Karl.”

  “What?” he snapped.

  “You enjoying yourself? Found a new friend?” It was Malcolm.

  “Malcolm,” warned Shane.

  “What? I’m not doing anything.”

  “Can we go? I’m tired,” Karl asked, ignoring Malcolm’s question and casting a pleading look at Shane.

  “Aww poor baby is you tired?” Malcolm grinned and put on a high-pitched voice.

  Johnny and Freddy laughed at this, and Shane couldn’t help himself but smirk a little. Karl was used to people making fun and laughing at him. Still, he looked from Malcolm to Shane and back again.

  “Yeah well fuck the lot of you, I’m going!” Karl shouted and marched off through the door behind him.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake, he’s going the wrong bloody way!” Malcolm said as he ran after Karl. Freddy, ever Malcolm’s shadow, wasn’t far behind.

  “Wait!” Shane called as he followed them. He felt instantly guilty for laughing. He hadn’t even been laughing at Karl, just the funny voice Malcolm had done. It sounded just like Freddy.

  Shane knew that if Karl was as upset as he seemed there was no way on Earth he would talk to Malcolm or Freddy.

  Johnny was slumped against the wall with his eyes closed.

  “Come on John,” Shane said. He grabbed his best friend’s arm and chased after the others.

  The room they followed the others into was dark; the only light came from a door the other side of the room. The threshold was tiny, like the secret door of a priest hole he’d seen once. It was about four feet high by three feet wide.

  “Where the fuck’s he gone now?” he heard Malcolm say in the dark and watched as his dark silhouette disappeared through the doorway followed by Freddy’s skinhead. Shane let Johnny pass him and saw that, for once, he was at an advantage for being so small. Getting through the doorway wasn’t a big deal for him. Shane had to stoop down low as he walked through the doorway, which led to a narrow flight of stone steps.

  He’s gone down to the cellar the silly git, Shane said to himself, mentally picturing Karl sulking in the corner of some dank room. As he descended the steps an intense wave of foul stench hit him.

  “Jesus!” he called out and slapped a hand across his nose and mouth.

  He could hear a moaning coming from the bottom of the steps. It didn’t sound like anything human, just a deep baritone protraction. The rancid smell was so strong it made his eyes stream. He had to squint through his blurred vision; he took the last few steps carefully. It must be some sort of chemical leak or something. The odour clung to him; it was disgusting like the sickly sweet smell of spoilt meat. Shane reluctantly stepped off the last step and onto the floor, which to his surprise was cobble-stoned. Who the hell has cobble-stones in their cellar? He wiped his eyes on his sleeves and looked around his surroundings. Wherever he was, it was no cellar.

  Chapter One

  July 2006

  As memories of his childhood came back to him, Shane tried to ignore them and focus his attention on reading the paper. Eventually, he sighed, carefully folded the Financial Times newspaper twice and placed it on the seat beside him. He couldn’t focus on the stock market today so he thought he’d leave it for some other lucky reader to browse.

  He looked out of the train window to his right and made out the squat green tower of Jumbo, one of the city’s major landmarks, a gigantic Victorian red brick water tower that had been standing since 1883. He always looked out for that when he was coming from London. There was a time where he knew Colchester’s skyline intimately, but after all the travelling he’d done, all the skylines tended to blur. But he was glad to see Jumbo looming over the cityscape. Years ago, his mother had sat him on her knee and pointed it out to him, from a carriage similar to this one.

  A friend of his had
told him recently that someone had paid £330,000 for it and were planning to turn it into a luxury penthouse for him- or herself. Even though he loved the building he was okay with the idea, just as long as the person who owned it did not change its outward appearance.

  He stood and picked up his black jacket, umbrella and briefcase from the seat beside him. He hooked the umbrella onto his case as he walked along the carriage. The train pulled in at Colchester train station.

  The sun reflected off Shane’s bald head. In his punk rock days, he had had a green Mohawk but his hair had receded rapidly in his early twenties and now he kept it shaved. His mother had always hated the mohawk. She often begged him to let her shave it off and even teased him that she might take her scissors to it while he slept.

  As he strolled through the crowd, he became one with all the other commuters in their business suits as they rushed up and down the busy cold grey platform.

  The one thing that he liked about Colchester train station, even though it contradicted his beliefs, was the fact that they had not done much modernisation to the railway station. Normally, he was all for modernisation and improvements but it was still the same as it had been when he was a child: red bricked with little nooks and locked doorways that still captivated his mind as to what dwelled behind them.

  Walking towards him, against the tide of the suited crowd, was a small blonde boy who was holding his mother’s hand. Something about the way she moved reminded him of his own mother. Perhaps it was the way her handbag swung from the nook of her arm, or the way her hips swayed as she trotted along on her heels. He averted his gaze as they passed.

  Shane strolled out of the station, headed straight for the taxi rank and got in to the back of the first cab. The driver, a white haired man with a ruddy complexion turned round and said, “Where to, mate?”