Simon Clark is an award-winning author who has penned a good number of novels, short stories and scripts. His novels, include Blood Crazy, which will soon be a trilogy issued by Darkness Visible Publishing, Vampyrrhic, Darkness Demands, Stranger, Whitby Vampyrrhic, Secrets of the Dead, and the British Fantasy award-winning The Night of the Triffids, which was broadcast as a five-part drama series by BBC radio. Weird House Press have recently issued Simon’s new collection, Sherlock Holmes: A Casebook of Nightmares and Monsters, anda novel, Sherlock Holmes: Lord of Damnation. He has also scripted audio dramas for Big Finish.
Simon lives in Yorkshire, England, where he can be seen roaming this legend-haunted landscape with a black and white Border Collie by the name of Mylo.
DV Publishing: https://www.dv-publishing.com/
Twitter: @hotelmidnight
Nailed by the Heart: http://www.nailedbytheheart.com/novels
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Chapter One
The Start of the End of Everything
‘What happened?’
Baz stared at the blood. Fresh and red and wet, it drenched the paving slabs in a slick that looked big enough to paddle your canoe through.
I elbowed him in the ribs.
‘I said, what happened, Baz?’
He looked up at me, his eyes egg-size with shock.
‘I’ve just watched them shovel the poor bastard off the pavement … Christ. What a mess. That cop there puked all over his car … They’ve seen nothing like it, Nick. They can’t handle it.’
Baz talked like he was firing a machine gun at nightmare monsters. If you ask me, he had a psychological need to tell me what happened.
‘They say – they say he’d just walked out of Rothwell’s, crossed the street when – slam! slam! Poor bastard never knew what hit him. He was dead before the ambulance got here.’
All around us Saturday morning shoppers stared at the blood. That mess of red had got them by the short and curlies.
On the balls of their feet, cops ran, directing traffic, cordoning off the street with candy-striped tape or repeating that famous lie that no one ever believes: ‘Move along. There’s nothing to see.’
They sweated in the Spring sunshine. On their faces weren’t the usual expressions of our seen-it-all policemen.
‘An axe, Nick … A bastard axe … Can you believe that? Laid into him with it right there outside the shop.’
‘Who was it?’
‘Jimmy … Jimmy somebody. You’ll have seen him round town plenty.
About seventeen. Went to the art college, had a pony tail. Always swanned round with a green guitar under his arm … Smashed that up, too. Like they wanted to kill both of them … him and his guitar.’
‘You saw it happen?’
‘No. I got here just as they scraped him off the street. I saw the people who’d seen it happen, though. They were flaked out across those seats over there like they’d been neck-shot. Just flat out from shock. I tell you, Nick, it was like a fucking war or something. Blood on the street. People shaking and throwing up. You know, like you see on the news or … or …’
The charge that fired the words like silver bullets from his lips suddenly exhausted itself. His red face turned white and he said no more.
From a hardware store came two old ladies carrying buckets of water. They poured them onto the blood which was setting to jelly in the warm sun. It took four more buckets before the blood slid off the paving slabs and into the drains where it was swallowed with a greedy sucking sound. There were solid chunks of red in there. Like cuts of raw meat.
Eventually only wet pavement reeking of disinfectant was left. Now there really was nothing left to see. But Baz still stared at the wet slabs.
I said, ‘Someone must have really hated the kid to do that to him.’
‘They did. Jesus Christ they did. They unzipped him like a holdall.’
‘Do they know who murdered him?’
‘Yeah.’ Baz looked up. ‘It was his mother.’
The day the world went mad I was on my way to McDonald’s' with two things on my mind.
One. The Big Mac I was going to stuff down my throat.
Two. How was I going to hurt that bastard, Tug Slatter?
Normality oozed through the town as thick as toothpaste through its tube. People shopping; little kids in buggies; big kids hunting down the record and game stores, their pocket money red-hot in their hands. Total, utter, complete small town normality.
That was until I saw the blood on the street.
They tell you this at school.
Every so often in history, there will come this colossal event that splits time in two. You know, like the birth of Jesus Christ. Everything before – BC. Everything after – AD.
On my way to McDonald’s it happened again. After two thousand years the old Age, Anno Domini, had died a death.
Naturally, like everyone else at the time I didn’t know it. Any more than a passer-by seeing that baby squawking in a manger somewhere in suburban Bethlehem would have known that the world was going to change PDQ.
At that moment, as I left Baz watching five slightly moist paving slabs, life – on the surface – was returning to normal. New shoppers flowed into town, kids in buggies got stuck into ice creams, lovers walked hand in hand. And they saw paving slabs wet with nothing more than water.
So, I showed the wet stretch of street my back and I headed toward the building with the golden arches that formed the magic M.
Now I was hungry. All I wanted was that Big Mac, fries and a monster coke rattling with ice.
Of course, I was ignorant as shit. I didn’t know the truth. That before long I’d look back and call this:
DAY 1
YEAR 1.
(C) Simon Clark 2023