The Grieving Stones Read online

  Table of Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  THE GRIEVING STONES

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THANK YOU FOR READING

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO FROM HORRIFIC TALES PUBLISHING

  The Grieving Stones by Gary McMahon

  First published in 2016 by

  Horrific Tales Publishing

  http://www.horrifictales.co.uk

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  Copyright © 2015 Gary McMahon

  The moral right of Gary McMahon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  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 any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  eBook Edition

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

  INTRODUCTION

  BY

  NATHAN BALLINGRUD

  Gary McMahon works. There is no pretension about the man. He does not grandstand, he does not wheedle for attention, he does not align himself with movements or spearhead publicity campaigns. He’s a writer, and he does the work of writing. In our Age of the Narcissist, this is something of a miracle. There’s a hint of stoicism about it, and more than just a glimmer of the Puritan work ethic. This contributes to his prodigious output, certainly, but more importantly it informs the nature of the work itself. At least it seems so to me, observing this work from my vantage point across the Atlantic Ocean. The protagonists of McMahon’s stories tend to embody the same principles. They are mostly working class people. Underlying the intrusions of the supernatural are the pedestrian horrors of their everyday lives. They don’t have the luxury of flight. They simply have to tuck their heads down and get on with it.

  The proximity of poverty; the constant drumbeat of personal and psychological loss; the suppressed rage percolating beneath the skin, until it seems the only sane response to the world is to meet it with bloodshed — these comprise the substratum for McMahon’s stories, and whatever ghostly trespasses might lie in store for the characters, you can be sure they will either augment the fear already in place, or they will provide a strange and morbid relief. Let others fret over horrors from the stars; for writers like McMahon, there are depths enough in the black reaches of our own hearts.

  The Grieving Stones, the novella which gathers us here now, is McMahon at the top of his game. He throws all of his own favourite themes into the pot, adding influences from other horror traditions, producing a work that manages to be as humane and tender as it is genuinely chilling.

  Alice, our protagonist, is a widow coming to terms with her husband’s recent death. She has joined — somewhat grudgingly — a community support group; she attends regularly, but does not participate, choosing to draw what comfort she can from listening. The group is run by Clive, and it’s when we meet him for the first time that we get one of our first true glimpses of McMahon’s empathy and kindness as a writer. Listen to how he describes a delicate, fragile emotion for which we do not yet have a word:

  “As she watched Clive coming towards her, she felt a strange pang of something she could only describe as regret. She didn’t understand the feeling, and let it slide by, but knew that she might have to examine it at a later date. It was like an emotional echo of a chance not taken, or a door not opened. She supposed that it was a form of guilt she was experiencing over thinking about his good looks when her husband was dead.”

  If you didn’t already know McMahon’s writing, this would be a clear marker that you have something more than just a paint-by-numbers penny dreadful in your hands. You have something human.

  Something alive.

  And The Grieving Stones is crawling with life, in more ways than one.

  Clive takes a few select members of his support group to an out of the way cabin for a long weekend of work therapy. (Here is this theme of work; if healing is going to be had, Clive maintains, honest labour will help bring it about.) A small distance from the cabin is the eponymous cluster of standing stones, which provides the cabin with its name: Grief House.

  From here the story plays out in a series of surprising and unsettling reveals, paying homage to touchstones like Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House and Richard Matheson’s Hell House, and to the British folk horror tradition commonly treated by Arthur Machen and Ramsey Campbell. McMahon takes these strands and makes of them something entirely his own, however, melding keen psychological insight and empathy for the emotionally wounded with an artisan’s confident hand at conjuring spooks that M.R. James himself would envy.

  (The Backwards Girl gave me a genuine chill — something that doesn’t happen often to a jaded horror reader — and I’m not ashamed to tell you that I actually laughed aloud with happiness because of it.)

  In a McMahon story, the monstrous is as complex and mysterious as the human. Nothing is simple. There are no stark contrasts between hero and villain, if those roles exist at all. There are only gray shadows. Rocks and mannequins, ghosts and witches, even whole houses, all occupy a liminal space between the natural and the supernatural, between right and wrong, trading characteristics and slipping sideways through dreams, until the revelations — when they come — are an eruption of glorious strangeness. They disorient and reorient, reshaping our understanding of the world. Alice is in a liminal place too, and she is uniquely positioned to understand what Grief House has to tell her.

  “She walked out of the room to join the others, wishing that none of them was here, that she was all alone in this house of wonders.”

  That the monstrous is presented with an aura of wonder about it is one of the true joys of this story. There are equal parts beauty and horror, equal parts revelation and desecration. It might be the undoing of them all, or it might be the hinge upon which one might redefine a life which has come uncoupled from its meaning.

  For years, Gary McMahon has been building a consistently excellent, socially relevant body of work, the equal of anyone else working in the field today. The Concrete Grove trilogy, The Bones of You, the Thomas Usher books, all the short stories and novellas published in collections or individually in chapbooks — they all work together to form a sustained exploration of the horror of modern urban life.

  He works, in my opinion, without his due of recognition. One day, some canny publisher will gather these stories and novellas, maybe a short novel or two, into one fat compendium, and the audacity of this lifetime project will be made clear to all. Until that time, though, discerning readers will have to be alert to the vibrant small press scene, snapping them up whenever they appear.

  Pandering to fashion usually wins out over complexity in the short term, but I’m a believer in the unsentimental eye of posterity. Gary McMahon is one of the finest horror writers of our time, and he will have his day. When that day comes, The Grieving Stones will be reckoned among the best of his outstanding body of work.

  Nathan
Ballingrud

  November 30, 2015

  Asheville, NC

  THE GRIEVING STONES

  Gary McMahon

  “It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.”

  The Yellow Wallpaper

  – Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  PART ONE

  GETTING THERE

  CHAPTER ONE

  When Alice woke up she knew she wasn’t alone in the house.

  Passing headlights traced a herringbone pattern against the closed curtains, the beams barely penetrating the room. The shadows twitched, seeming to edge slyly backwards and retreat into the corners. She blinked at the gloom, trying to re-establish her boundaries within the familiar space, and for a moment it all seemed so strange, so alien to her eyes. Then, as reality reasserted itself and her environment once again grew familiar, she took a deep breath and waited for a sound.

  Nothing. The house was quiet – just the usual late-night lullaby of pipes gurgling behind the walls, the boiler sighing, the thermostat clicking softly as it switched on or off.

  Moving slowly, Alice shifted her legs out from under the duvet and lowered her feet to the floor. She sat there for a moment, listening, waiting, all too aware that she was almost naked. She only ever wore a pair of knickers for bed; she usually overheated if she put on much more than underwear.

  After a moment, she stood and walked across the room to the door. The carpet felt soft and comforting underfoot. Raising her hand, she took down her dressing gown from the hook on the back of the door and slipped it on. The door was ajar. She could not remember if she’d shut it tight when she went to bed. She usually did, but not always. She couldn’t be sure.

  Another car passed by on the street outside, its engine loud and erratic. She turned around, and in the brief moment when the curtains shone like a cinema screen, she glimpsed a tall, thin shape at the side of the window.

  Someone was standing there.

  Alice froze. She had no idea what to do. Usually, if she saw this kind of scene in a movie, she would shout at the screen, telling the potential victim to get the hell out of there. Run, just run, and keep on running. But her hands refused to move towards the door handle. Her feet were stuck to the carpet, her gaze locked onto the spot where she had seen the figure.

  This is it, she thought. This is how I leave the world: at night, standing in my own bedroom, and at the hands of a stranger.

  But…

  “No,” she whispered.

  It was not a denial of what might happen, but part of a sudden realisation that bloomed inside her as if she were being filled with a living warmth. There was no intruder; no-one had broken into her home to stand there and watch her sleep.

  Alice felt a stab of relief. But it didn’t completely vanquish the fear she had felt, when she’d been more uncertain.

  Defiantly, she walked back across the room to the window, reached out, and opened one side of the curtains, letting in some ambient street-light. The figure was revealed: it was an antique coat stand with a baseball cap hanging from one of its hooks. It was a long-ago impulse buy. She’d had nowhere else to put the coat stand, so she had left it here, a temporary home, until a better location suggested itself. Then she’d forgotten it was there; the hanger had blended in with the rest of the room.

  The baseball cap had belonged to her late husband. It was one of the items she’d missed when she cleared out Tony’s stuff after the funeral. She remembered putting it on the hat stand, until she could bring herself to throw it away. That moment had never come.

  She waited for the heaviness in her heart to lessen. The sensation never really went away, but it increased whenever she thought of him. The loss: the terrible sense that something had been removed from her body – from inside her body. An organ removed. A bone extracted.

  She glanced again at the coat stand.

  A smile tried to cross her face but it died before it was fully formed, like the memories of happiness she often tried to summon. How could she have forgotten about that cap, and why had she been so convinced that she was not alone? Would this feeling of being watched all the time ever leave her, or was it simply something she was going to have to grow accustomed to, a by-product of Tony’s death? Was it, in fact, the way things would be for the rest of her life?

  Alice closed the curtains and climbed into bed.

  No matter how hard she tried, she could not get back to sleep. Then, an hour before her alarm was due to go off, she slipped into a light doze, thinking of a tall, thin man standing at the side of her bed, his baseball cap tipped at a jaunty angle, his features sharp and unforgiving. The man raised his hands and covered his eyes. “I can still see you,” he said. “I can always see you.”

  When the alarm went off, she felt like screaming.

  But that was nothing new – in the mornings, she always felt like screaming.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Goodnight, everyone, and please drive safely in all that rain.” Clive Munroe’s voice was calm and reassuring, as it always was when the group broke up for the evening. He watched as the people started to leave, the lenses of his outdated John Lennon spectacles flaring in the thin light as he tilted his head when he reached up to scratch his greying goatee beard.

  Alice stood and gathered up her things – her coat and handbag – from the floor at her feet. She paused to put on her coat smiling at familiar faces as the people walked quickly across the church hall towards the exit, their feet clomping on the old bare boards. The open doors let in a chill; the sound of the rain out there was not exactly welcoming. Alice felt cold even though she wasn’t standing directly in the draught.

  “Alice… could you spare a moment?” Clive was heading in her direction from the front of the hall, his unruly brown hair sticking out like forked lightning, his smile big and open. He was a handsome man. She’d noticed this, of course, but it meant little to her. Things like that – the way men looked, or smelled, or acted – might not mean much to her for a long time to come.

  “Yes. Of course.” She finished putting on her coat as she watched Clive approach, feeling a strange pang of something she could only describe as regret. She didn’t understand her reaction, and let it slide by, but knew that she might have to examine it at a later date. It was like an emotional echo of a chance not taken, or a door not opened.

  “Sorry to keep you.”

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I’ve nothing to rush home for. Not these days.”

  The attempt at humour fell flat. His smile became awkward, but just for a second. “I’ll keep this brief. I’m not sure if you’ve heard this mentioned, but I’m running a special therapy session over the weekend. It’s invite-only, I’m afraid. There’s only enough space for five of us. So, this is your official invite.”

  “Me?” She was caught off-guard, hadn’t expected this. She knew about Clive’s private group sessions – everyone did – but she had never been invited to one in the past. If she were honest, she hadn’t thought Clive paid much attention to her during the weekly meetings. She always sat at the back of the room and rarely spoke up during the often heated discussions.

  “Yes, you… I think this could help you. I’ve noticed that you don’t get involved much in the group talks, and you tend to drift on the periphery, hiding.” Alice couldn’t help but think that he was reading her thoughts. “Perhaps this might help to bring you closer to the rest of us.” He smiled again, shrugged. His goatee twitched. “You don’t have to come, of course. It’s just that I think the trip might be beneficial. Here…” he thrust an A4-size sheet of paper into her hand. “This will give you more details. You don’t have to decide immediately. Just let me know before Thursday night. You have my number, or you can text or email me.”

  She folded up the paper without looking at it, flattening the creases with her fingers. “Thank you. I will – I’ll think about it.”

  Clive placed a hand on her arm. “I wouldn’t invite you
if I didn’t think it would help. You know that, don’t you?”

  She felt herself go rigid, a block of ice. She sometimes found this happening when men touched her, even if it was just someone brushing up against her in the street. She wasn’t ready for that kind of contact. Clive seemed to pick up on this, and he took his hand away, but casually, as if he’d always been going to move it at that exact moment. He possessed a great deal of empathy. It was what made him such a good counsellor.

  “Just let me know, yeah?” His eyes sparkled when he smiled. He had a nice face, a face you could trust. Eyes that saw right inside you, if only you’d let them.

  “I will,” said Alice, and she turned away, walked to the doors, and stepped outside into the cold, driving rain.

  *

  The journey home was slow. Traffic was heavy, despite the late hour. The therapy sessions always ran from 8p.m. until 9:30p.m. Usually, this meant that the rush hour was over and the roads were quiet, but tonight the weather seemed to be causing problems. According to the local radio news, there’d been an accident on the ring road, which had meant a lane closure and backed-up vehicles for several miles. Alice sighed and switched off the radio, selecting a CD of mellow music to help calm her nerves.

  As she sat in an unmoving queue of traffic, she remembered the piece of paper Clive had given her. She fished it out of her coat pocket and unfolded it, still keeping her eyes on the road. Carefully, she held up the sheet against the steering wheel, and once she was certain the traffic wasn’t going to lurch forward suddenly, she quickly scanned the single-spaced print, wishing that her reading glasses weren’t in her handbag on the back seat. The light from outside was just about good enough for her to read the invite.

  Dear Alice,