Red Gloves, Volumes I & II Read online

  Red Gloves is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2017 Hydra Ebook Edition

  Copyright © 2011, 2017 by Christopher Fowler

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hydra, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  HYDRA is a registered trademark and the HYDRA colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in the United Kingdom in a print edition by PS Publishing, Hornsea, East Yorkshire, in 2011 and in a digital edition by Transworld Digital, a division of Penguin Random House UK, London, in 2017.

  Ebook ISBN 9780399180477

  Cover art: Martin Butterworth

  randomhousebooks.com

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Red Gloves, Volume I

  Zygomaticus

  The Rulebook

  Dead Ground Zero

  Locked

  Lantern Jack

  An Injustice

  The Adventure of Lucifer’s Footprints

  Down

  The Stretch

  The Deceivers

  Killing the Cook

  Oh I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside

  Enjoy

  Red Gloves, Volume II

  Unheimlich

  The Eleventh Day

  Piano Man

  The Girl on Mount Olympus

  Halloween Dog

  Poison Pen

  The Conspirators

  The Boy Thug

  The Velocity of Blame

  Arkangel

  The Mistake at the Monsoon Palace

  Beautiful Men

  By Christopher Fowler

  About the Author

  Foreword

  Horror stories were always my drug of choice. I could never keep away from them. To celebrate my twenty-fifth year in the field, I created this hefty volume featuring brand-new tales of unease.

  The first half contains London stories, where deceptively ordinary events like an evening in a pub or a night on the town have surprising consequences. Here you’ll find hauntings, revenges, murders, monstrosities, redemptions and the dark hands of the urban night reaching out to seize the unwary.

  The second half contains world stories, where innocent travellers are beset with accidents, tragedies, murders, nightmares and epiphanies as they wander far—maybe too far—from home.

  This was probably my favourite overall collection to write, mainly because its range was far wider than anything I’d previously attempted, and several of the stories went on to win awards. In the London half I worked through most of the key horror tropes, tackling everything from zombies to ghosts, killers, detectives (Sherlock Holmes!), ventriloquist’s dummies and hallucinations. I also returned to the theme of women going mad—possibly because I know so many of them, but I could equally have filled a book with madmen.

  In the World half of the collection there are hauntings, demons, revenges, bizarre murders and even a Wild West tale. One of the stories, ‘The Mistake at the Monsoon Palace’, was written after I explored an abandoned and supposedly haunted city in Northern India. Some of the stories were designed to be read aloud, and I found myself performing them at festivals. Artist Graham Humphreys produced two startling covers for the original double-edition, which could be turned upside down and read from either end.

  By now it was becoming hard to get short fiction volumes published, and Red Gloves went to a small press publishing house. Consequently, it’s the book that’s been least discovered by readers. I’m pleased that it can finally reach a wider readership in e-format. As for the red gloves of the title, blame it on my love of giallo…

  —Christopher Fowler, 2016

  Red Gloves, Volume I

  Devilry—The London Horrors

  Zygomaticus

  ‘If Death Was Something Money Could Buy, the Rich Would Live, the Poor Would Die.’

  I’ve always had trouble with titles. My last collection, Old Devil Moon, borrowed the title of a beautiful but forgotten song from a peculiarly whimsical sixties musical about racism, socialism, drugs and, er, leprechauns, called Finian’s Rainbow. Originally I was going to call this volume The Horrors, a phrase often associated with wartime and panic, a sudden overwhelming sense of the weight of the world. Put another way, a rush of awareness. My mother still speaks of having ‘an attack of the horrors’. But I realised that the title would prove misleading to anyone expecting the frisson of revulsion you get from exposure to blood and guts—these are tales that step into areas of unease rather than the abattoir.

  Red Gloves suggests to me that no-one is innocent, and carries all sorts of interesting connotations, from Macbeth to giallo. The hand stained with blood is a mark of lost innocence.

  At the start of each collection, I outline some of the press reports that have provoked me during the writing of the stories, and use them as a sort of timeline running beside the production of the book. The remit of journalism is to make the important interesting, but there are often times when it does the reverse; press releases are now routinely recycled as substitutes for real news. The absurdities of life we all face have a way of turning a genuine smile into a forced one, hence the title of this foreword. Zygomaticus refers to the muscle that makes the difference between two types of smile.

  —

  As I came to write the stories, I realised they were falling into two distinct groups—ones that were primarily set in London, and ones set in the rest of the world. I love to travel and I love my home town, so it seemed a good idea to create two volumes for this, my twenty-fifth year of writing such tales. The stories in this volume all take place in London—I count Sherlock Holmes because he’s a Londoner, and there’s a seaside tale because it’s a London day trip that’s familiar to everyone who lives in the city.

  And so to the writing of the stories themselves, and the press items I was reading that often seemed to me more outrageous than anything I could devise from my imagination.

  As I started the second volume’s New Orleans–set tale ‘Piano Man’, a devastating cyclone killed thousands in Burma and left many more without shelter, food, water or electricity, facing the ravages of disease. The Burmese militia responded to this by banning emergency aid imports and handing out DVD players to homeless villagers who had no food or power.

  During the writing of the next story, the fifth most read item on the internet was the crash of world stocks. But the most-read story was someone getting voted off the reality TV show Big Brother for spitting. As the credit crisis deepened, columns about collapsing banks finally took the lead over tales of exploding hamsters or supermodel Naomi Campbell’s latest screaming fit.

  Meanwhile, it was revealed that Sarah Palin, the gun-toting cartoon-brought-to-life former running mate of Senator John McCain, once asked her librarian how to go about getting books banned, as there were some she didn’t like. Oil-worshipping Sarah was Alaska’s biggest polluter, but promised to give everyone in her state a $2,000 cheque in return for destroying it.

  Before he went, George Bush reneged on his few climate change promises and bade farewell to a disastrous G8 summit meeting with the words ‘Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter’. He then punched the air and grinned as the French and British prime ministers looked on in shock. The scene is still on the internet—a total jaw-dropper.

  On the subject of the environment, ministers annou
nced that ‘Plan A’ (carbon reduction) had failed and that ‘Plan B’ (invent something fast) was now the only remaining solution. But planet management never gets easier. On the island of Macquarie, between Australia and Antarctica, cats left by ships got rid of the mice but preyed on rare flightless birds, so conservationists culled them, only to watch horrified as the rabbit population exploded and stripped the island of its vegetation, causing a landslip that wiped out a rare penguin colony. The chain of events is an example of ‘trophic cascade’ leading to ‘ecosystem meltdown’.

  In the last week before he quit the White House, George Bush declared his intention to exploit the vast oil and mineral wealth hidden below the Arctic Circle by extending America’s sovereign rights over the seabed. As he bowed out, I was reminded of his quote about books. ‘One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures’. In the broadsheets, as is traditional during times of regime change, his apologists began his immediate rehabilitation.

  Three months after I wrote a story called ‘The Conspirators’, the fiction found a peculiar parallel in real life when a millionaire hotel owner was charged with the murder of a Middle Eastern pop star in Dubai. The emerging details were, once again, stranger than anything I had created.

  Meanwhile, the Czech artist David Cerny was paid £350,000 to commission artworks forming a huge sculpture of twenty-seven nations for the atrium of the European Council, but admitted hoaxing the EU by knocking it up with his pals. Officials began to smell a rat when they noticed that Romania was represented by a Dracula theme park and Bulgaria by a Turkish lavatory, but in a typical state of indecision they went ahead with the opening anyway. Britain was represented on the sculpture as a blank space.

  Mexico’s long border with the US, the world’s main drugs consumer, became the site of more killings than Iraq. The chances of kidnap became so high that we heard about microchip tracking devices being implanted into the arms of wealthy schoolchildren.

  On a lighter note, Adam Deeley, thirty-four, a mature British student, choked to death in an impromptu challenge to see who could eat the most fairy cakes at the Monkey Cafe, Swansea. He managed five at once. Or rather, he didn’t. Paging Mr Darwin.

  In Britain one in ten children now lives in a mixed-race family, with mixed-race relationships so common that traditionally distinct ethnic groups have started to disappear. Not in the royal family, however, after Prince Harry was rebuked for using the term ‘Paki’ and Prince Charles admitted to calling an Asian friend ‘Sooty’. Hating to miss out on any publicity, Margaret Thatcher’s daughter Carol publicly called the handsome and talented French-Congolese tennis champion Jo-Wilfried Tsonga a ‘golliwog’.

  In Washington, a Christian group called Pray at the Pump started gathering around petrol pumps and praying to the Lord to lower prices. ‘If we keep this up,’ says its leader Rocky Twyman, ‘we can bring down prices to less than $2 a gallon.’

  Thanks to rising oil and food prices, the production of a new food staple was stepped up in Haiti as mud cakes soared in popularity; the baked grey discs of dirt apparently taste like—well, dirt with margarine in, but stop stomachs from feeling empty. If the starving weren’t prevented from leaving by US Coast Guard patrols, they could have gone to stare through shop windows at the Hermès ‘Birkin’ handbag, which went on sale in New York for $37,000. At the time of the stock market crash, it was still selling well. And in case that’s not enough, Louis Vuitton started selling custom-made travel caviar sets, for all your urgent caviar-on-the-go needs. And spa treatment centres started including a ‘caviar face pack’ for old vultures with too much time and money on their claw-like hands.

  As the credit crunch hit home, an article appeared in The Observer about hot new fashion scents: Wode, which sprays the wearer blue (sadly the effect quickly wears off), and ‘the very first internet perfume’, called ‘Violence’, a scent based on old photographs of skinheads hitting each other. The makers say it smells of ‘sweat, boot polish, Indian food and warm bricks’, although if it’s based on old photos it should surely smell of developing fluid. Harvey Nichols announced their own best-selling scent, ‘Molecule’, which according to their advertising smells vaguely of something, and then of nothing. I guess it makes a change from most scents, which smell of either roses or lemons.

  Advertising got even more slippery. The film Sex and the City had—unsurprisingly—ninety-five brands cunningly dotted through its running time. Shane Meadows’s neo-realist film Somers Town went one better and had the entire film sponsored by Eurostar trains. But it was in black and white and he’s an auteur, so that’s all right.

  The Big Brother show finally faded to the faintest of radar blips and was binned, but not before its producers burrowed below the ground zero of bad taste. In a twist of Jacobean grotesquery, they informed reality TV star Jade Goody that she had cervical cancer in the Big Brother house, India, so that her tearful reaction could be captured live. Goody undermined the media leeches feeding on her by inviting camera crews in to film her wedding to a convicted felon, then remained in the spotlight as the press gloatingly ticked down the days to her death. Goody, from a deprived, abusive working class background, ultimately attained grace by confounding the critics who harped on about her intelligence; she behaved intelligently.

  As Channel 4 and other inept, failing TV networks scrabbled around for viewers, channel director Michael Grade announced that televised fiction was dead because we all prefer talent shows and documentaries about fat people.

  Arnold Schwarzenegger championed gay marriage in California. This is largely the same legislation we have in the UK, undermined in the US by fears that appropriation of the word marriage would somehow diminish its mythical strength. Mormon-backed Proposition 8 promptly banned it again, leaving the 18,000 couples who got hitched in the four-and-a-half month period when it was legal stranded and exposed to the proposers’ next attempt—to retroactively annul the marriages. The California Supreme Court upheld the proposition but invoked a grandfather clause allowing the existing marriages to stand.

  It transpired that Tanzanian albinos were living in fear of their lives because people were seeking their body parts for witchcraft. There are over 200,000 albinos in the country, and with more than thirty murders in ten months, many were frightened they would be skinned alive and partially dismembered. Meanwhile, Southern Australia held a ‘Sorry Ranga’ day to celebrate its ginger-haired population, ‘Ranga’ being short for ‘Orangutans’.

  Channel 4 aired a ‘child reality show’ in which twenty primary school children were left without adult supervision for a fortnight. Unsurprisingly, this led to cries of abuse and an outcry from psychologists, as the parents used their own children as leverage for fame. The show flopped.

  As economists announced the financial end of the world and climatologists paced up their doomsday scenarios, a social networking site provided the world with the conversational equivalent of polystyrene when Twitter’s bitter chatter spread to celebrities. Exchanges between singer Lily Allen and tagalong webfan Perez Hilton descended—not that it had anywhere to descend to—into hurled abuse, reminding us yet again how far the Hilton brand has fallen since the 1950s.

  The Jade Goody (1981–2009) Official Tribute Issue of OK! magazine appeared, featuring her final words and bearing the banner ‘In Loving Memory’. There was only one problem: Ms Goody was still technically alive at the time. Magazine lead-times were apparently to blame.

  Google street-mapping arrived in the UK. Across the country, a million cries went up: ‘Why did they have to film our street while the scaffolding was up at number 57?’

  A German couple abandoned their three children in an Italian pizzeria because they had run out of money on holiday. They thought the authorities would probably figure out where they lived and send them home. Luckily, money is just something poor people have to worry about. On the same day, a Thai jewellery designer displayed a $4.2 million dog tiara at a canine fashion show.

>   The massive expenses scandal engulfed MPs from both sides of Parliament, as Tory MP Douglas Hogg revealed he spent £2,000 of taxpayers’ money getting his moat cleaned. Another was caught having a duck-house built from public cash, and complained that the ducks had never really enjoyed using it anyway. Best of all was Tory MP Anthony Steen, who shoved the inspection of five hundred trees on expenses and had this to say about being caught out. ‘I think I have behaved impeccably. You know what it’s about? Jealousy. I have got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral, but it’s a merchant’s house from the nineteenth century. It was this government that introduced the Freedom of Information Act and it is this government that insisted on the things which caught me on the wrong foot.’

  As decades of financial abuse came to an end, MPs screamed like stuck pigs. Weirdly, some were defended in the national press by kowtowing members of the public who clearly relished the prospect of returning to a feudal system. The exposure of MPs’ expenses threw up some wonderfully odd claims; Conservative leader David Cameron claimed almost seven hundred pounds on ‘burning oil’ (presumably for his Aga cooker). Others claimed for biscuits, jellied eels, a wig, orchids and a hedge trimmer for a helipad.

  Susan Boyle, a middle-aged woman with a pleasant singing voice and a face that could send a dog under a table, became one of the most-viewed internet sensations of all time, but failed to win a television talent contest. Her overnight ‘career’, from rise to fall, ended with a breakdown and her admittance to The Priory clinic—a microlife that eclipsed even Jade Goody’s.