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| The Judderman |
I've been very happy to watch the numbers of people hitting the links to Efestival of Words, Hallowe'en Horror event tick by. When you take part in an event with other writers, many of whom are a lot more read than you are, you get nervous. It's been nice to see my excerpts get a good hit rate too! So thank you.
Below is another excerpt from Sleet Dreams, the opening of the story is here. Again, there is a coupon for 25% off Fragments for the month of October, over here, and lots of giveaways from authors taking part in the horror promotion, here. There is also a 5000 word excerpt from The Fool, and occult thriller novella, on the link. Enjoy!
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One
advantage to snow and ice was that trawling for decent food was a lot easier:
nature’s fridge, she sometimes thought of it.
But constant contact with frozen metal wore the soul down and ate into
any warmth you might have. Her rucksack
held a good supply of zip lock bags, so she could salvage what she could safely
when she could. Keeping hands warm and
dry was crucial and she’d learned to always use a thick pair of rubber
household gloves over her woolen ones.
Useful in pelting rain too, as it kept her hands dry no matter how much
the rest of her dripped.
Wet days, or days with thick snow,
were spent on her regular route of thrift stores and Goodwill. She was always searching for a warmer pair of
boots or a thicker coat. She never
scrimped on ice grips: she could not afford a fall. A sprain would be bad enough, a broken bone
would end her independence, she was sure.
She’d be in the spiral down to the shelters, and then the gutters,
before you could blink.
Her driving force, her mantra, was
if that she got through one more winter and kept on saving, she would one day
be able to get on a bus and move back down south. Then she’d be in clover, then she’d be able
to relax, and maybe get another dog once she’d found a decent place to
live. She’d almost done it four years
back, then Bertie had got ill on her and the bills on trying to keep him alive
had wiped her out. Every day, as she
moved through the alleyways, the sight of another unfortunate accompanied by
their dog pierced her heart. Like the
Ice Queen she’d once read about as a child, she felt there was ice in her eyes,
moving into her bloodstream and freezing her soul. Sometimes when she woke up in the night, she
still reached for his hairy hide to stroke and would wonder why he wasn’t
there.
One day, one day, she’d be in the
south and not have to worry, and she’d find another mutt to love and keep safe.
A really bad day, a terrible day,
was a day when it was too fierce outside to go out at all. When no matter what she did, or where she
might go, she’d be returning colder, hungrier, than when the day started. Those days would be spent in, aware that
every moment the TV ran, the light burned, for every zing of the microwave...
she was using up her precious electricity.
She lived in terror of being stuck in the room without any electricity
at all. To be cold, and hungry, unable
to heat a cup of water to sip down whilst sucking on cheap candy. To be sitting in the dark waiting for her
next pension draw. It had never happened
yet: she forced herself to add extra to the card all year round to get her
through the winter. And she maintained
her routine at all costs, during the snow, when she could. It was the stick she used to beat herself out
into the streets every day, while keeping her sights on the carrot in her head:
of one day getting on that bus south. And
on days where the cold had driven out that thought there was always the promise
of summer: it would come. It always
came: just as it always left.
Today was going to be a bad
day. All she had was some peanut butter scrapings
and noodles. It had been too wet, for
too many days. She’d three outside coats
in all, as drying out a wet one was painfully slow with little heat. Each were battered, bruised, and patched but
didn’t smell and did a fair amount of work in keeping her from dropping down
dead with cold, or being refused entry to the mall or the library. But all were still damp. She spent ages sifting through in her mind
which one to go with. Outside, the rain
was turning to snow and driving into the windows horizontally. Sleet.
She hated sleet the worse. Snow
was warmer than half snow, half rain, she was convinced. Sleet hit you physically, like little
bullets, far more raw and draining than hailstones. Hailstones bounced off you. Sleet clung to you, drenched you, drained
you, shivered into your veins. Sleet
soaked through and down faster than anything.
She looked out at the slushy streets and the people wading through to
get to work, to get home from work, to do anything to get off the street at all
costs.
If it had been just after social
security day, as opposed to a couple of days before, she’d had stayed in,
holding onto the last of the morning’s heat doggedly, spinning out the hours
until the evening bounty arrived. Or
maybe gone to the Laundromat and relished the sultry rush of steam laden air,
as she worked through her few clothes methodically. Then rushed back to watch TV and hide,
holding the warm clothes in a bag as protection against the cold as she dived
back to her room. But it was not to
be. If she stayed in the spinning disk
on the meter might betray her. ‘Sides,
she needed food and had empty pockets.
She wrapped her feet in three layers
of socks and two layers of plastic bags.
She really needed to find new boots, with intact soles, but soles were
thin by the time she got her feet into any shoes, and the streets long and
hard. Walking kept up her wiry strength,
kept her heart pumping and her bones from growing too fragile. Walking was life, not just for the scavenging
that could be achieved en route.
She took a deep breath before
launching out the door, pulling warm air into her lungs and praying it would
hold there for as long as it took to get to somewhere else.
It was, without doubt, the worst day
of her life. Nothing had worked on any
level. It was dark again, and she was
wet, frozen, shivering, and hungry. She’d
been so cold that when she’d walked past the filthy lump of rags that was Dolly,
and Dolly had offered the usual swig of something foul and very alcoholic,
she’d almost been tempted. Almost
allowed herself to feel the flood of warmth as whatever gut rot it was rolled
down her throat and set fire to her belly.
Almost. Her hand had stayed, and
then retreated, and she’d smiled at Dolly and moved on, as she always did. Dolly swore at her heels for being a stuck up
bitch, as she always did. But next time they’d
see each other, they’d smile, and Dolly would offer the bottle. And if she had it, Maggie would hand Dolly
some food. It was a miracle to her that Dolly
somehow kept going. No doubt she was so
foul the rats were scared to nibble on her.
Maggie knew that she wasn’t so foul that some of the equally foul street
men didn’t woo her for her favors. How
else was a girl to get ethyl alcohol? There but for the grace of God...
It was a long way back to her
room. Even now, crying silently under
her breath with the cold and the effort to keep moving, Maggie couldn’t face
returning. If she went too early, the
room would be cold. She’d be locked in
there waiting out the moment the radiators sprang to life. It could sometimes take forever, it seemed,
and it unsettled her badly. Brought her
hard up against the walls of her life. No,
she must get another hour, maybe two, out of today. Somehow.
She had to eke out some comfort, somewhere, before she went back. She had to walk into the welcoming heat, and
take advantage of every scrap of it: she had to stay away just a bit longer.
The wind picked up and drove sleet
into her eyes; she stumbled, and gripped the walls of an alleyway, holding onto
the corner to keep her upright. Across
the road, someone fell over, and a couple of bulky figures moved forward to
help. One of the helpers went down. The wind shrieked in her face, bringing with
it the raw fury of the lakes that funneled all that cold into the canyons of
the city: she had to get out of this onslaught.
She picked her way down the
alleyway, trying to find the spot where the wind no longer tore at you, the
walls calming the demon. The grabbing
hands dropped and she was out of the wind’s assault. The sleet was hammering down on her now, from
above, still lethal, still deadly, but no longer being driven into her sideways. She slumped back against the walls, no longer
bothered about how filthy they might be, and tucked behind the corner of a
dumpster. A moment: she just needed a
moment, and then she’d give in, try and sneak on a bus and go home. Wrap her hands around a mug of hot water with
a stock cube in it and dream of summer, watching something on the box. Wait until she’d dried, and then thawed on
the radiators. Get herself into bed while
the heat was still in the air, then settle down to listen to her radio and read
a book.
As she stood to prepare herself for
the battle back out into the wind, she noticed something gray and furry, back
in the shadows. Was that a dog? Alone, abandoned? She moved forward. Oh dear
god, please don’t let it be a poor dead thing, abandoned here in the cold and
muck. She approached the mound
cautiously; like humans, dogs were animals.
Animals required caution until you had the measure of them. The closer she got, the less it looked like a
dog, the more it looked like... a wolf? Here? It was hard to see, between the shadows, the
falling sleet, and her tiredness. She
called to the animal under her breath, making reassuring noises. The sleet was starting to settle in slush
piles around the fur... surely it would move out of that puddle that would soon
form ice, if it could...?
She’d had to kneel down, trying to
ignore the stabbing pain in her knees as they soaked in the cold. Her hand reached forward to touch the thick
pelt, but she couldn’t feel anything through her layers of gloves. She stripped her right hand free, and touched
the pelt again, gently trying to shake whatever it was awake. Warmth flooded into her fingers, over her
palms, as she connected with the fur.
Whatever was here, wasn’t dead, that was for sure.
Shaking it brought no response. She took her other glove off, and tried to
search around to find the head, the legs, anything, that would make sense of
this shape. Her hands moved under into
the slush and little daggers stabbed into her.
Ice was forming well under there.
A touch of panic prompted her to grab what she thought might be the ruff
of the animal and pull it back up and out, trying to unfurl it. It gave too easily and she fell back onto the
sludge of the alleyway. The fur had come
with her, and ended up on her: it was a fur coat. She was holding the thick collar and the
lining had been revealed up to the skies; the fur side was touching down on her
body. Her butt was stinging, with both
the impact and the puddle of sludge she’d landed in. She stared at the coat in her hands, then
panicked and jumped to her feet as well as she could: the coat lining was
getting wet. Without a thought, she
stood and whipped the coat over her back, like a cloak: why was there a thick warm
coat, lying in the gutter..?
The warmth, the unctuous slide of
heat that smoothed out over her shoulders distracted her. The fur repelled the sleet, the cold. She
felt the chill lift and her body relax.
Even her frozen backside was warmed through. This is
why they raised minks... to keep out the thick cold. This is why they suffocated them by putting
their heads in jars... to keep the fur intact...
She’d never bought fur, ever. Not only had she never been able to afford
it, she’d been repelled by the thought: repulsed. Now, as the seasonal enemy that relentlessly
assaulted her was beaten back and conquered... she shivered her arms into the
coat, snuggled it round her. The collar
wrapped up over her head, in a hood. The
coat went past her knees. The thick
sleeves engulfed her hands. Only her
feet stayed cold but with the rest of her warm, that was bearable. She closed her eyes and wrapped her hands
tightly across her chest.
She
no longer felt cold! She felt warm...
she felt dry...she felt safe.
She stood, her eyes
closed, drinking it in.
Her feet asked her to move.
She opened her eyes and was a little
transfixed to find herself still in the alleyway. The sleet was still slamming down but it
simply didn’t penetrate the coat at all.
Her feet, however, still stood in freezing sludge. She looked down and shuffled them, urging the
blood warming in her core to pump down and get her feet moving. Her feet responded, and the urgency to move
diminished.
As she brought her gaze back up, she
looked on what the coat had covered.
What the coat had been hiding.
Her feet jumped back as her mouth
let out a puff of silent, strangled air.
It was a body: a woman’s body.
Maggie stared. It was not the first body she’d seen, and she
supposed it would not be her last. It
was, however, the most pathetic body she had ever seen. The woman was face down, her dark hair matted
over her head. Nothing of her face could
be seen. She was skin and bone. Like an old chicken stripped for broth
making. The hand that lay dead and cold,
so very cold, so very blue, on the rat droppings and rubbish the wind collected
in the back of the alleyway, was tiny, shrunken: like a sick child’s. Ankles showed above canvas sneakers and below
the hem of her pants: wasted. Maggie was
sure that if she pulled back the sweater she could see there would be track
marks all over her arms. A crack whore,
no doubt. A body that wasted, a life
that ruined, would rarely fall so far, without serious addiction. The sneakers were worn and split. Maggie pulled the coat tightly around her,
tears dripping out of her eyes. To die
like this, to die alone, face down in dog shit, in this cold... it was her
worst nightmare.
The coat warmed her through.
The coat.
How could this woman have such a
coat as this?
The contrast between the clothing
still on the woman – the body – and the
coat Maggie now wore could not have been greater. Everything about the body screamed poverty
and neglect. Perhaps she had stolen
it...?
Thoughts of the body, and how she
might, or might not, have lived her life, was scaring the bejeezers out of
Maggie. She needed to go get help, and
bring someone to this poor wretch, and get her out of the alleyway. She turned, and headed back out to the main
street.
The wind picked at her within a few
feet and the sleet once more slammed in horizontally. Or it tried to. With her muffler over her mouth and the hood covering
her forehead and shielding her eyes, Maggie found she could stand against
it. She was aware it was there, but it
didn’t scour into her. She pushed
herself into the wind and back up the street.
She should find a telephone and call the police. She’d left her gloves back at the body and
she pushed her hands into the deep pockets of the coat, wondering what they
might hold. They held warmth: delicious,
delirious, warmth. She moved down the
street so quickly she was across the main road and skirting the park in a few
moments. There were phones at the bottom
corner, by the bus lines. As she walked,
she felt the niggling weight of her rucksack: the coat felt tight and bulky
across it and a cold draught slipped up the back of her legs at each stride –
the shape of the bag causing the coat to billow out. She put up with it, as she couldn’t bear the
thought of taking the coat off to unhook her back pack.
Maggie stared at the phone. Even though taking her gloveless hands out of
the pockets and picking up that plastic handle would hurt... she should do
it. She should call the police and ask
for aid. She should.
Once she’d done that, however, there
would be a whole world of standing around in the cold wet terror of the street.
She might miss the heat going on... if she phoned and didn’t say who she was,
there would be questions. The police
would ask who’d been about at the time of the call. She looked up and down. Plenty of people on the way to and from work,
fighting the elements as they plodded on.
People standing at the bus lines beside her.
People were already looking at her
coat. At the comfort it was affording
whoever wore it, under that hood.
A spasm of agony flamed through her
body. Oh my goodness, she’d stolen a
coat off a poor dead woman! She was
standing in the coat and that poor woman was back there, alone, in the sleet
and ice...
She stumbled back up towards the
alleyway. She needed to go back, give
the woman her coat back, and then phone the police.
Give it back.
Everything in her rebelled: she
couldn’t. She just couldn’t.
She couldn’t go back to being cold.
She stood at the mouth of the alleyway,
wondering at the feeling of not being cut in two by the wind; feeling her soul
cut in two instead.
She turned away from the alley, faced
into the wind and began the slog home.
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