Wild Spaces E-Book

S. L. Coney

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 108

Beschreibung

A young boy's life is upended after the arrival of his grandfather, who is hiding a terrifying secret in this sweltering southern gothic horror, perfect for fans of Cassandra Khaw and T. Kingfisher. An eleven-year-old boy lives an idyllic childhood exploring the remote coastal plains and wetlands of South Carolina alongside his parents and his dog Teach. But when the boy's eerie and estranged grandfather shows up one day with no warning, cracks begin to form as hidden secrets resurface that his parents refuse to explain. The longer his grandfather outstays his welcome and the greater the tension between the adults grows, the more the boy feels something within him changing—physically—into something his grandfather welcomes and his mother fears. Something abyssal. Something monstrous.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

I

II

III

IV

V

Acknowledgements

About the Author

“Can a horror story be beautiful? Wild Spaces tells a terrible truth in the most achingly beautiful way.” Alma Katsu, author of The Fervor

“Wild Spaces is an eldritch coming-of-age-story done right. It’s lyrical, emotionally complex, creepy, and there’s not a drop of poisonous nostalgia. I loved it and I can’t stop thinking about it.” Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World and The Pallbearers Club

“If you mix Flannery O’Connor’s sense of Southern grotesquerie with Shirley Jackson’s tales of everyday horror, you get Shaw Coney. What a stellar debut.” Sara Paretsky, New York Times bestselling writer and creator of the V.I. Warshawski crime novels

“Wildly imaginative and gorgeously written. I was hooked from the first word to the last.” Kelley Armstrong, New York Times bestselling author

“Compulsive. Once I started, I couldn’t put it down. Wild Spaces is reminiscent of Ray Bradbury and Robert McCammon, full of equal parts wonder and horror. Tense, atmospheric and visceral.” A.C. Wise, Stoker and World Fantasy Award finalist

“S.L. Coney’s innate understanding of both people and monsters makes Wild Spaces a sublime read.” Priya Sharma, author of Ormeshadow and the award-winning collection All the Fabulous Beasts

“Wild Spaces is a visceral, haunting, original story that takes the best of cosmic horror and pairs it with familial love in a way that tugs at your heartstrings as it continuously raises the levels of horror. It’s Hereditary meets The Fisherman with a dash of The Dark Tower. One of my favorite authors writing today.” Richard Thomas, Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, and Thriller Award nominee

“Atmospheric, humming with menace, heartbreaking, beautifully written, S.L. Coney’s Wild Spaces is a glass-bottomed boat ride across waters and into caves teeming with monsters we shouldn’t want to see, and do … at least until we see them, and realize we already know them, and recognize them for what they are. What a thrilling discovery.” Glen Hirshberg, author of Infinity Dreams and the Motherless Children trilogy

“Wild Spaces is a horrifying fever-dream that captures all the intensity and power of youth.” Kelly Robson, Nebula Award-winning author

“A coming-of-age story, but the change in store for the boy is wonderfully unpredictable and so originally weird. Pacing is key to this piece, and the author is brilliant at it.” Jeffrey Ford, author of Ahab’s Return

“Painfully human in the way that only the best fiction manages, and beautifully written with not a wasted word.” Brian Evenson, author of Last Days

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Wild Spaces

Hardback edition ISBN: 9781803365497

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803365503

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: August 2023

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© S.L. Coney 2023

S.L. Coney asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Ishy, the very best good boy

I

THE DOG shows up at the mint-green house on the edge of the woods a month before the monster arrives, his coat shiny as a new copper penny. Right away, the boy knows he’s special, even though his mother says all dogs make you feel that way. She stands back, an arm crossed over her chest, chewing a thumbnail as she watches the boy and his father both kneeling in the grass of the front yard, petting the animal. He runs his fingers through the dog’s long fur and rubs his soft ears, the shape and size of him reminding the boy of a friend’s golden retriever. The dog’s tail beats the ground as he pants and smiles, eyes half-closed like this is the most blissful thing ever.

“He probably belongs to someone,” she says, speaking around the tip of her thumb.

“He doesn’t have a collar,” his father says, “and he’s pretty skinny.” He leaves the boy and dog in the grass and wraps his arms around his wife from behind, hugging her close. “You’re eating your nail polish again.” His father begins swaying side to side just a little, murmuring into her hair, and his mother shrugs. He smirks and walks two fingers up her arm. She catches his hand before he can tickle her and turns her head, trying not to smile.

“We’ll put an ad in the paper,” his father says.

They wait a week, then two. But no one claims the dog, and finally his mother acquiesces. They name him Teach—after the boy’s favorite pirate—because his father says they can’t call him Blackbeard on account of his red fur, and those weeks before life upends are nearly perfect.

The boy and Teach spend early summer evenings playing baseball in the field by the waterway—the boy always playing third base just like his dad on the Charleston RiverDogs—and being pirates down by the cave on the beach, burying treasure and avoiding the dark where they’re not allowed.

At home, they lie stretched underneath the table, the smell of chicken and pineapple wafting from the oven. His father and mother dance around the kitchen to Glenn Miller on his father’s record player. His mother smiles open-mouthed, lips scarlet red, her curling hair black and shiny. His father, slim and angular with a cleft in his chin and bright, intelligent eyes, brushes his hand over her back as he crosses behind her, resting it on her shoulder as he stirs one of the pots and she slices the bread. They’re movie stars in black and white, a full-orchestra-in-the-background kind of pretty.

At night, the boy’s mother tucks him into bed beneath the Jolly Roger hanging on his wall. He can smell Ivory soap on her hands—crisp and clean as she smooths the covers around him. She tells him she’s writing a new book, about the pirate Madame Cheng, and he pictures his mother leading the Red Flag Fleet against the Portuguese, refusing to stand down.

And in the night, before they sleep, he presses his lips to Teach’s silken ear and tells him secrets—like the bottle rocket hidden under his bed—knowing they’re safe. And Teach, sometimes, tells him some back.

*   *   *

When the boy’s grandfather rolls down the gravel drive in the station wagon, its wooden side panels rattling, he brings something with him. It’s in his mother’s odd, closed-mouth smile and his father’s confused glances. It’s in the shaking under his fingers when Teach growls at the man who climbs out of the car.

The family leaves the porch with the hollow thwack of wood against wood, the screen door bouncing shut behind them. In the gray area between the electric light at the edge of the house and the dark of night, the raccoon sneaking into the outdoor shower retreats, back hunched as he runs.

The old man stands, tall and barrel-chested, his shoulders straight and strong, his unlined face topped by a shiny bald head. He looks less like a grandfather and more like the man on the bottle of cleaner the boy’s mother uses to mop the floor. But the old man’s eyes, those are unmistakable—they’re the same deep, turbulent blue as his mother’s, as his own.

They stand in an uneven huddle, the cicadas’ song swelling around them as the insects devour their way down the coast.

It’s the old man’s shoes that catch the boy’s attention.

The black dress shoes are caked with sand, their hard edges digging into the naked, fleshy roll around the old man’s ankle. They don’t match the board shorts and faded Ron Jon T-shirt he’s wearing. He reminds the boy of the men and women they see along King Street with their knapsacks and cardboard signs, the ones his mother hurries him past.

The old man’s smile is brilliant, eyes bright as the South Carolina sun.

“Dad?” the boy’s mother asks.

The old man pulls her into a hug, chin resting on her shoulder. His mother’s hands flutter over the old man’s back before landing and she wrinkles her nose. The boy has seen this look on her face before, mostly in the kitchen when she peels back a corn husk to find a worm inside, but also when she’s bent over her books, notes scattered around her as she looks for something she needs.

The hug runs long, and his mother’s hands keep lifting from his back as she stands, bent into the hug, the old man’s arms crumpling her into a new and uncomfortable shape. As soon as she puts her hands on his shoulders and starts pushing away, the boy’s father slips an arm around her waist, pulling her back as he sticks his other hand out.

“It’s nice to meet you.”

His father’s words drawl smooth and elegant in a way his mother calls genteel. She tries to emulate it sometimes, making the boy laugh and his father groan and try to hide his smile.

“Stop,” he’ll say. “That’s awful.” And then she laughs too.

But the old man ignores the offered hand, staring at the boy instead. There’s a looseness to his eyes that bothers the boy, the way they push up against his eyelids.

“Married a Southern boy, I see,” his grandfather says.

The summer night feels heavy, and the boy fidgets under his long gaze, searching for a bit of air to dry the dampness from his skin. “Where are you from?”

The old man laughs, a full belly laugh with his mouth wide open. The boy stares. He’s never seen anyone with a tongue and throat so white.

“Oh I like you,” the old man says.

His father drops his hand to his side. “Mr. Franklin—”

His grandfather’s gaze snaps to the boy’s father. “That’s not my name.” He nods his head at the boy’s mother. “Not her name either.”

Teach grumbles at the boy’s side.

There’s a long moment, the boy’s fingers caught in Teach’s fur, and then the old man finally sticks his hand out. “Sorry about that. Getting old and my eyesight’s not so good in the dark.”

His father hesitates before taking the old man’s hand, the muscle in his jaw twitching.

“Sure. Yeah, sure. Nice to meet you, Mr. . . .”

The old man’s smile makes the boy uneasy, though he doesn’t know why.

The conversation comes like the stirring of thick marsh water when something ancient and slow moves at its bottom. The boy slips away, skimming his hand along the side of the station wagon until he gets to the back. The car is dirty, like someone raced it up and down the back roads between the cotton and peanut fields. The boy drags his finger through the dust on the window, first drawing his name and then sketching a picture of Teach. The light shines through the window into the back and the boy catches sight of a surfboard fin, the board stretching across the top of the back seat.

Pressing his nose to the glass, hands cupped around his eyes, he peers inside, looking for a suitcase or maybe a duffel like his father carries on field trips, but there’s no luggage. Just the surfboard and a short wet suit. There’s a large irregular lump beneath the neoprene, the board’s Velcro ankle strap stuck to a patch of carpet. He continues around the car, brushing the edge of darkness as he tries to get a better angle, but from there he can only see a baby’s car seat. The front of the car is littered with fast-food bags, the passenger seat full of those little salt packs they give you at the drive-through.

He takes Teach’s collar, pulling gently as he starts back toward his parents, but draws up short as the old man steps in front of him.

“Hey there. Give your grandfather a hug.”

The boy has the same nose wrinkle as his mother, though it has less to do with worms and more to do with hugging.