For Rye Gavin Gardiner (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

Copyright © 2021 Gavin Gardiner

Content compiled for publication by Richard Mayers of Burton Mayers Books.

 Cover design by ebooklaunch.com

First published by Burton Mayers Books 2021.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

The right of Gavin Gardiner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.  A print version is also available to buy:

ISBN: 1-8383459-0-7

ISBN-13: 978-1-8383459-0-7

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

www.BurtonMayersBooks.com

Dear reader, unto you I present the acknowledgements section, the part of the book every author expects to be immediately skipped. I’ll make you a deal: grant me this one, hasty indulgence, and I’ll tell you a killer joke afterwards.

I’d like to thank Richard Mayers, for believing in this nightmare; George, for your peat, flotsam, and Aga expertise; Barbara, for the tomato and rice soup; and Heather, for more than I could possibly say. Further: Dad, Jamie, Hannah, John, Rayner, Angus, Kyle, Derek, Mai, Michelle, Brandi, Casey, Han, Matt, and everyone in between – I thank you all.

Finally, Mum. For better or worse, this is as much yours as it is mine. For the endless phone calls debating everything from the placement of a comma to the volume of gore required, you have my undying gratitude.

And the joke, ladies and gentlemen, is that any undertaking such as this can possibly be conquered by just one person. Without those who inspire, guide, endure, and care for the writer, the pursuit is doomed.

To everyone who’s inspired, guided, endured, and cared for this writer: this one’s for you.

A brutal and distressing strain of horror has been poured into the pages of this novel. Anyone reading should take a moment to consider whether this is a depth into which they should dive.

I believe it is.

To my favourite.

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About the Author

Also from Gavin Gardiner…

1

Knives.

‘Madam?’

Everywhere, knives.

‘Are you all right?’

Knives in the eyes of every onlooker, each glance carving red-hot rivulets of pain through her flesh.

‘You’ll need your ticket.’

Everywhere, knives; everywhere, eyes.

She plunged trembling fingers into her worn leather satchel. Damned thing must be in here somewhere, she thought in the moment before her bag fell to the concrete flooring of Stonemount Central. The ticket collector’s eyes converged with her own upon the sacred square slip, tangled amongst the only other occupant of the fallen satchel: a coil of hemp rope.

They stared at the noose.

The moment lingered like an uninvited ghost. The woman fumbled the rope back into the bag and sprang to her feet, before shoving the ticket into his hand, grabbing her small suitcase, and lurching into the knives, into the eyes.

The crowd knocked past. A flickering departure board passed overhead as she wrestled through the profusion of faces, every eye a poised blade. The stare of a school uniformed boy trailing by his mother’s hand fell upon her, boiling water on skin. She jerked back, failing to contain a shriek of pain. Swarms of eyes turned to look. The boy

sniggered. She pulled her duffle coat tight and pushed onward.

The hordes obscured her line of sight; the exit had to be nearby, somewhere through these eyes of agony. She prayed the detective – no, no more praying – she hoped the detective would be waiting outside to drive her, as promised. One last leg of the journey, out of the city of Stonemount and back to her childhood home after nearly thirty years.

Back to Millbury Peak.

She stumbled into a standing suitcase. The eyes of its owner tore at her flesh as she knocked it over and scrambled to regain her footing. She dared not look back as she struggled away, silently cursing the letter to have dragged her back to this unfamiliar hell, to have ripped her from her haven hundreds of miles away, forcing her to trade her cottage on that bleak, storm-soaked island for a town she hadn’t called home for decades. Not since the accident. Not since the seventeen-year-old had found in white corridors and hospital beds a new home. But this wasn’t about her. No, this was about an elderly lady, butchered. She was returning to Millbury Peak for her mother, her sweet, slaughtered mother. She slipped a hand into the leather satchel—

It would have held.

—and felt the coarse hemp of the noose against her fingers. She shouldn’t be here. She would have been gone—

It was strong, solid.

—had it not been for the detective’s letter. Gone to nowhere, forever. No more knives, no more eyes. She’d planned to be gone. She should have been gone.

The beam would have held. It was strong, solid. It would have held.

With desperation she glanced around, the exit to this damned train station still hidden from view. She spotted a gap in the bodies. Through this gap she spied solitude: the open door of a bookshop, deserted. She went to it.

The woman lunged through the door, the teenage cashier behind the counter glancing up momentarily before returning to her magazine, uninterested. She shuffled between the rows of bookcases and backed into an obscured, shadowy corner to calm herself. She passed