Shiftling Read online

  First Edition

  Shiftling © 2013 by Steven Savile

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  Twitter: @darkfuse

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/darkfuse

  Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/jOH5

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Shiftling is my love song to my youth, and with that in mind this one goes out to the ones I love—those writers from my generation who have been there every step of the way with me: Tim Lebbon, Gary McMahon, Gary Fry, Paul Finch, Gavin Williams, Simon Morden, Mick Sims, Len Maynard, Gary Greenwood, Steve Lockley, Paul Lewis, and Chaz Brenchley. And the older mob who grabbed this reader by the throat and changed my life once and for all: Stephen Laws, Stephen Gallagher, Mark Morris, Peter Crowther, Ramsey Campbell, Christopher Fowler, Mark Chadbourn, Clive Barker, Graham Masterton, and Steve Harris. It’s all your fault.

  Friends one and all. Inspiration, every single day. None of this would have been possible without you guys.

  Acknowledgements

  A few good friends make me look a lot better at this than I am: as ever, this wouldn’t have been possible without Steve Lockley, Darren Pulsford, Adele Wearing, and Dave Thomas, Shane Staley at DarkFuse.

  1

  1985

  The convoy of crudely painted wagons and worn-out rides rolled onto the common. Men walked alongside them, barking orders and slapping the metal bars and wooden sidings of the sideshow hoardings, steering them into place. It was a hive of activity. Everyone knew their job.

  It didn’t matter to us how tired they were, or how badly their paintjobs had flaked. They were a magical sight. The funfair had come to town.

  Spider saw them first.

  He was always the first.

  We had been expecting the funfair for weeks. We knew it was coming. Just not when. So we’d sent look-outs. That day it was Spider’s turn. He had shinned up the big, old sycamore tree where our den perched in the midst of the spinney. You know what a spinney is, right? It’s a clump of maybe twenty trees huddled together in the middle of a stretch of farmland. Spider was the only one of our motley crew who could shin up the big tree without the aid of a rope, hence being called Spider. I’d watched him do it a hundred times, his skinny arms and legs reaching and grasping for footholds and fingers finding boles and knots instinctively. I couldn’t do it. The best I could do was sketch him as he scrambled up the almost sheer trunk. In truth, his movements were so quick that each time I looked up from the paper he had moved on and up, higher and higher, so I had to make up most of the drawing.

  From his vantage point, Spider could see beyond the trees and hedges at the bottom of the field, and out over the row of cottages that lay beyond. The only time you’d be able to get a better view would be from the top of the Big Wheel, and that came once a year, for a week, with the funfair. From the top of the ride, the whole of Ashthorpe stretched out like a model village, each house standing with its own small garden to the rear, all of them neat and tidy with only a single exception, and somehow the wheel never faced in that direction.

  The weather had been hot and dry for days and the grass on the common had been mown by Big Red, the caretaker’s tractor, as if in readiness. The grass wasn’t green, it was more like a light brown stubble, with the dirt dry and cracked with thirst. It hadn’t rained for weeks. It didn’t take a genius to know it was going to be hard work for the fair people, but we all knew, and with absolute certainty, that the rides would be up and running the next day. It was the Law of the Funfair. They came in late in the day, sometimes even under the cover of dark, and come morning had transformed a barren strip of land into something magical.

  This was summer. This was what it was all about back then.

  It was 1985 and like most people our age, knew by heart how old we would be when the year 2000 came around. It seemed so far away and we were young. A day lasted at least a week and a week could drag on for an entire month if we were listening to old Mr. Mendes trying to educate us. But this week, the week the fair came to town, was always over like that, in a heartbeat. After us it would head on to Nottingham and become part of the Goose Fair. And every year we thought about making the trip there. We talked about pooling our money together so we could hire a minibus. Not that we could drive it, but a couple of us had older brothers who could. We’d hatch mad plans to rope them in. But when it came right down to it, it was just talk. We could all talk the talk, sure, but actually doing it, putting our collective money where our mouths were? Nah. Secretly I think we all knew our parents would not let us go until we were older, so we never pushed it. It was better to keep talking about a dream than it was to know there was no hope of it ever happening. Sad but true.

  “We could go and see if they need any help,” Ferret suggested, his freckle-covered face and close-cropped ginger hair made him look as though he were in a state of perpetual meltdown. Even his Live Aid T-shirt couldn’t make him look cool. The heat wasn’t kind to any of us, but poor old Ferret just looked worse than the rest of us. The curse of being a ginge, I guess. “We might be able to earn a few quid.”

  “Give us all yer bloody money,” Gazza said, trying to sound like Bob Geldof. It was a woeful impersonation. Rory Bremner he wasn’t.

  A few others voices joined in, making me realize just how many of us were now squeezing into the den. It wasn’t a big place. It had felt like it was huge when we built it but every year we grew and it didn’t. In the middle of it all, Scotty Nichols sat silently, just staring at his hands. Scotty was one of those kids, blessed. I am sure he didn’t realize these were the best days of his life. Why would he?

  We all looked toward Scotty for his thoughts.

  We were his gang.

  But instead of answering, he turned to me.

  “What do you think, Drew?”

  There was a sudden hushed silence. Boys are pack creatures, especially at our age, so his deferring to me here, even though it was little more than a question, lifted me up the pecking order in the eyes of the others. Suddenly I was somebody. Suddenly I was Scotty Nichols’s go-to guy. I shrugged, but felt I needed to say something. I mean this was a big moment, simply shrugging would slide me straight back down to the bottom of the heap.

  “Do you remember the first time you went to the fair at night?” I offered, thinking carefully about the images I wanted to plant in their minds. I wanted them to go along with me, after all, which meant making them all just as hungry for it as I was. “The smell of hot dogs and candy floss; the loud music, and girls screaming?” I looked around to see that everyone was nodding. They would all have slightly different memories, of course, but the essence would be the same. For me it was Rachel Corcoran, a couple of years older than we were, not the prettiest in her year but the most alive. She owned my heart even then. I remember watching her walk through the rides, candy floss in hand, arms linked with another girl from her class. They were laughing and giggling, the funfair lights transforming them into these heavenly creatures while the music on the dodgems blared out another love song. I don’t remember the words but I remember exactly how she looked. And I knew they’d all have their own Rachels in mind now. “And then do you remember how when you went again the next time, during the day, it wasn’t the same?”

  I glanced at one or two of the faces and saw that even Scotty was nodding. It made sense. When you knew how the magician performed his tricks, there was no fun left in watching his act. “The whole thing would lose its magic if we saw how everything was put together. What’s the fun in that
? We know the rides are held together by nuts and bolts and the inside of the ghost train is painted plywood, but we can forget all that because we’ve never seen it with our own eyes. But watch it being done, nothing will be the same again. It’d be like being five and seeing your dad getting dressed up as Father Christmas.” And that was about as wise as I ever got. I looked at their faces in turn and knew they understood what I was trying to say.

  A couple of the guys looked at Spider. His old man always played Santa for the kids’ party and for months afterward there would be jokes about it. Some people never seemed to know when a joke had run its course.

  “If we want to earn a few quid, I’d rather clean cars or something,” Spider said.

  “Good call,” said Scotty and that was pretty much the end of the discussion. There was no argument. It was decided and we all went with it. Scotty divided up the village to ensure every street was covered. It was a hot day, like so many days before. The tarmac underfoot was soft, spongy, and I’m pretty sure you could have cracked an egg on the pavement and fried it. It was that kind of day.

  So, any way you look at it, this was a better way of raising money than sweating away with the folk from the fair.

  For the rest of the day and most of the next we worked, all of us, including Scotty. And we worked hard. Where cars did not need cleaning, we were given the chance of cutting the grass or cleaning windows. We walked dogs and ran errands. Whatever the offer, we performed the deed with a smile, and not a one of us turned our noses up at any of it. We knew we would only be doing it for a couple of days, but those couple of days were going to pay for all of us, for a week, at the fair. All the rides we could ride, all the toffee apples and candy floss we could stomach, the darts games and the hook-a-duck and ring tosses, all of it. And that made it all worth smiling for.

  * * *

  By the afternoon of the second day we were all exhausted. Every car in the village was shining and every lawn that needed cutting had been cut. With one exception.

  Old Man Harrison’s house stood close to the common. Its overgrown back garden separated from the slowly assembling fairground by a fence that had been patched up over the years and was now no more than a hodgepodge of panels and strips of wood. His car stood on the drive at the side of his house, unwashed and unloved. I’m not sure I ever saw the car leave the drive. I had never understood why he kept it. Maybe no one wanted to buy it off him? It would probably have cost more than it was worth to have it towed away.

  “So who’s going to knock on Harrison’s door?” Scotty asked. He already knew no one would volunteer. He waited, allowing the seconds to pass, inviting someone else to fill the silence.

  “He’s only going to say no,” Gazza said, picking bits of grass from his jeans and trying to avoid making eye contact. It was not unusual for him to be the first to speak out, and he’d been involved in plenty of arguments with Scotty, most of which had led to him storming off and avoiding us for a few days before coming back with his tail between his legs and trying to make out like nothing had happened. I half-expected Scotty to dare him to do it, but he didn’t. Instead he got to his feet and looked at the rest of us in turn.

  “Well there’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?”

  At first no one else moved, but then slowly we all realized what he was planning to do. We couldn’t let him do it alone, so, in silence, we followed him along the edge of the field from the den and out onto the road, all of us keen to see what was going to happen. Scotty did not look back. Not even once.

  The road took us along one edge of the common where a cluster of caravans had been parked up by the fair people. Clotheslines had already been strung up and a haggard old woman with too many layers of clothing—shirt on top of shirt on top of grubby shirt, and on top of all of those shirts a green heavy-knit cardigan—was hanging out sheets. She looked at us for a moment, then spat at the ground and turned her back. A vicious-looking Alsatian growled as we walked closer, then rose up to bark at us, straining on the piece of rope securing it to the caravan steps.

  I took a step closer to the road only to have a car’s horn blare at me as I stumbled into the gutter. A bright red Ford thundered by, going far too fast for such a narrow road.

  A large trailer had already been positioned close to Harrison’s dilapidated fence, and I recognized the cheesy-spooky decorations adorning the front of the ghost train.

  On the other side of the road there was a stretch of scrubby wasteland known locally as the Batters. It separated Ashthorpe and Goseley, the next village over. Ashthorpe and Goseley were, for all intents and purposes, the same: the same kinds of houses, the same kinds of people, with the same kinds of problems. But Goseley didn’t have a fair, and in a couple of days they would make their way over the Batters to us. People would come from another three or four villages in other directions.

  My dad reckoned the fair attracted the best part of a thousand people from miles around every night when he was younger, and even though it was now probably less than half of that number, it was obviously still worth the fair people’s while to come at the end of summer every year.

  I never knew how the Batters had come to be called that, but my dad had told me a coal mine had once stood there. It had always been the Batters, though. Now it was more like a postapocalyptic wasteland, like something out of Mad Max. It wasn’t hard to find the last vestiges of fallen buildings or scraps of twisted iron, and, underground, the whole area was riddled with mine workings that joined up to a much larger colliery a few miles away.

  Old Man Harrison’s home had once been the mine manager’s residence.

  I had expected Scotty to at least pause when he reached the rutted lane that led to Harrison’s house; to take a breath, gather his courage, hell, to at least look around and check on the size of his audience given what he was about to do, but he didn’t. He just cut across the grass verge and into the short lane while we gathered together on the pavement and waited. Had it been Gazza ahead of us, he would have exaggerated his stagger as he approached the door, but not Scotty. He walked straight down the garden path to the blue door, and knocked.

  We couldn’t see the door open. We hadn’t dared go close enough. Then he disappeared inside. I couldn’t quite believe what I had just seen. Scotty had gone inside Old Man Harrison’s house. We looked at one another but no one spoke.

  We just stood there in silence and waited for Scotty to come out.

  And waited.

  * * *

  Old Man Harrison is the archetypal creepy old hermit kids transform into vampires and cannibal child-eaters in their imaginations. It doesn’t take a lot of imagining in his case. He’s got a face like a shar-pei. He keeps to himself most of the time.

  His place isn’t like most of the others in the village either.

  It has clapboard sidings from halfway up to the roof, brick down below. The paint is curling away from the boards to expose the rotting wood beneath. I’m sure it’d look less Amityville if the clapboards were pulled off and the bare stone was given space to breathe. Like I said, it used to be part of the mining company’s property. Old Man H. keeps the curtains drawn even when it’s full sunlight, like maybe the bright light will burn his eyes if he happens to be exposed to it. Who knows, maybe it will?

  His place is a derelict hovel, and, let’s be brutally honest about this, it stinks.

  There’s a reason it stinks, of course—the cats.

  They say he has over a hundred cats.

  I’m not sure I believe that, but we’re not talking one or two either. His place is a sanctuary for all of the lost moggies in Ashthorpe. We’re talking Catvarna. It can’t be hygienic.

  I tried to count them while we waited for Scotty, ticking them off as they crept through long grass, and climbed on and off the car. Some of the less adventurous ones simply basked in sunlight, stretched out on the tarmac of the lane. I counted nineteen before another lorry rumbled up onto the common, towing a caravan. The driver leapt out, ju
mping down, slammed the door, and barked something at his passenger through the closed door. I couldn’t hear what. I didn’t need to. It was all very theatrical. The sudden noise had most of the cats scampering every which way just so long as it was away from the noise.

  Fifteen minutes. Scotty was still inside.

  The cats began to retake their positions. The ginger tom on the bonnet of his beaten-up old Ford Cortina in the drive was the first to settle. It gave me the evil eye from its warm perch, then closed its eyes contemptuously.

  “What do you think he does with the dead ones?” Gazza asked, suddenly. It was a typical Gazza question. You really had to wonder how his mind worked—assuming it worked at all. There were a few mumbles of misunderstanding and suddenly all eyes were on him. “The cats,” he said defensively. “What do you think he does with them when they die? They don’t live forever, do they? And seeing as he’s got so many, surely they’ve got to be popping their, er, paws fairly regularly.”

  “Probably buries them in the back garden,” I suggested, but Gazza was quick to nix that idea.

  “Nah, think about it, if Old Man H. was burying them in the garden, it wouldn’t be a bloody jungle back there, would it?”

  He was right, of course. Percy Thrower this guy was not. Of course, I’d never given the dead-cat-disposal a second thought, but now it was going to gnaw away at me until I came up with a decent explanation for the logistics of it.

  “Maybe he has them all stuffed,” Spider suggested helpfully. “Think about it, all of those dead cats all over the house, their marble eyes watching you all the time. Would explain why he’s flipped.” Spider pulled a face. “Reckon he does it himself?”