Last Days
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.
LAST DAYS. Copyright © 2012 by Adam Neville. All
rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175
Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
First US Edition: February 2013
LAST DAYS
Adam L. G. Nevill was born in Birmingham, England, in 1969
and grew up in England and New Zealand. He is the author of three other novels of supernatural horror:
Banquet for the
Damned
,
Apartment 16
and
The Ritual
. He lives in London and can be contacted through www.adamlgnevill.com.
Also by Adam Nevill
Apartment 16
The Ritual
ADAM NEVILL
LAST
DAYS
MACMILLAN
For mom, dad, my brother, Simon, and sister, Melissa.
The best kind of family.
In the search for authenticity, when creating my own apoca -
lyptic cult, the following books provided a fascinating and encyclopaedic education, as well as much inspiration:
The
Pursuit of the Millennium
by Norman Cohn;
Raven: The
Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People
by Tim Reiterman with John Jacobs;
Charles Manson
:
Coming
Down Fast
by Simon Wells;
Under the Banner of Heaven
by John Krakauer; and
Koba the Dread
by Martin Amis. The two that reserve a very special acknowledgement are
Love
Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of
the Final Judgement
by Timothy Wyllie (Edited by Adam Par-frey), and that masterpiece of true-crime writing,
Helter
Skelter
by Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, because it was the reading of these two compelling works that first lit my fuse.
Learning the basics of guerrilla documentary film-making was another task much enlivened and enlightened by
The
Guerilla Film Makers Pocketbook
by Chris Jones, Andrew Zinnes and Genevieve Jolliffe;
Digital Film-Making
by Mike Figgis; and the superb free online resource,
Guide Book for
Guerrilla Filmmakers
at www.jamesarnett.com by James Arnett.
The website www.desertmuseumdigitallibrary.org was a vii
terrific resource for imagining the Sonoran Desert of Arizona.
And I want to raise my hat to those horror films that made the idea of a recorded testimony of half-seen terrors, by film-makers, so affecting:
REC
,
The Blair Witch Project
, and
Paranormal Activity
.
Many thanks to my agent John Jarrold, and editor, Julie Crisp, for their consultations and desk-side manners, and thank you again my readers: Anne Parry, Clive Nevill, James Marriott, and Hugh Simmons. Much appreciation goes out to Chloe Healy in publicity and Catherine Richards in editorial at Pan Macmillan.
Membership in my own temple of gratitude goes out to the many writers, book reviewers and bloggers who have offered kind words for such a creature of the literary shadows as I: Eric Browne at the
Guardian
, Alison Flood of the
Sunday
Times
, David Moody, Jonathan Maberry, Joseph D’Lacey, Mark Charan Newton, Tim Lebbon, Stephen Volk, Mark Morris, Brian Showers, Peter Tennant,
Black Static
,
SFX
, Teddy Jamieson at the
Sunday Herald
, the
News of the
World
, Graeme’s Fantasy Review, Jared at Pornokitsch, Fantasy Book Review, Spooky Reads, LEC Book Reviews, Black Abyss, Speculative Scotsman, Ginger Nuts of Horror, Read Horror, Iwillread blog, Hagelrat, and Kamvision, among others.
Finally, to the readers who took a chance on me, or who have stayed with me, I salute you.
viii
I have watched her sometimes away off in the open country, creeping as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
The Yellow Wallpaper
denver. 3 march 2011
And the woman could hear those old friends moving in the distant, and not so distant rooms of her home. Old friends she tried to forget for longer than she had the strength to remember. Until she understood her life had been one long wait for them to show up and commence with whatever business they were so eager to finish. Because the old friends never forgot. They arrived without invitation and appeared with little warning. They visited after dark and they never let go.
Of late, the old friends were bolder and stronger. More skilled at getting inside. At passing over. Tonight, their movements suggested the visit was conclusive; the endgame to an incremental reunion.
Closing her eyes, the woman sighed and supported her weight with one hand against the door frame. Then looked up, her body rigid with enough determination to take one step inside the house. Then another. And another after that.
Stood at the foot of the stairs in her unlit house, still wear -
ing her coat and shoes, she looked up and into the dark -
ness concealing the top of the stairs. And listened with all the straining concentration the ears of the frightened can 1
ADAM NEVILL
command. But she also listened with the resignation of the weary.
Only the thinnest peripheral glow from the closest street lamp provided any light, and that never penetrated far inside the hallway before the open front door. In the distance a car accelerated and she wished she were inside it. She turned her head and looked at the deserted street. And was gripped with a powerful urge to run for somewhere where the lights would still be on and where the faces of people would be engaged in their smiles or their talk, or just their silence. She wanted to be with them, and part of their unexceptional lives so much it hurt. She tensed in anticipation of her usual flight taking hold. Moved one foot towards the open door. But not the other. She stood still. Stood her ground.
Because she was as damned as a ghost on the last day of its occupation. A wraith with little to haunt besides the empty rooms of an unpeopled existence. A shade watching the world from another place, half in this world and half in another, listening to the sound of all the bright, clear voices, but never offering up her own. She’d fought harder than the rest. She had endured when others had gone under.
Into her came a sudden invasion of regret, and its atten-dant hopelessness. Living with the consequences of actions committed before reason and experience had much say in anything felt familiar enough to be tedious. No matter how many times she revisited the past and added presumptions, or extracted details, it remained unmovable and always promised to deliver her right to where she currently stood, alone. She reckoned she was about ready for
that time
. She swallowed and removed the cold weight of the .38 from her handbag. And to think she was one of the lucky ones.
2
LAST DAYS
This was the third house the woman had rented in the past five months under a false name, and she had lost her deposit on each property because of the walls and the signs the old friends had put upon them. Three days back, she came downstairs from her bedroom to a cold house without power.
Scents of bad water and the ashes of a fire soaked by over -
night rain had seeped up the basement stairs into the hallway.
She’d found wires chewed through under the fuse box in the basement. And the wall behind the damaged cables was stained by unidentifiable matter, mostly dry, which she covered with black paint. Kept her eyes closed and cried at the same time as she lashed the wall with the brush.
With an unwelcome frequency
they
had also begun to leave things behind. To introduce inevitability to a daunting reacquaintance. Yesterday, before she wrote a long email to her son in Toronto, writing as if it were the last communication she would ever make, she found a little blackened shoe on the kitchen floor. Small enough for a child. Hard as wood, stitched like a buckskin moccasin, and old. So very old.
Dropped from a foot she dare not even consider. A puff of soot had fallen from it when she scooped it up with a pizza menu to drop in the trash.
And here we are, girl.
Bump bump bump bump
. Frantic now in at least one room upstairs. Probably her bedroom. The woman recalled a party above the thin ceiling of a motel room she’d once rented in LA, a long time ago, on the run even then. Those muffled thumps of feet and sudden shrieks and bursts of laughter from strangers that served no greater purpose than a reminder of her disen -
gagement from life, while keeping her awake. But up there, 3
ADAM NEVILL
in this house, her final refuge, wasn’t any kind of party she wanted to attend.
They were in her room for sure. Because the determined bumps, swaddled by bedclothes, had become crashes as something on her bed started to cast about. A bedside table was swept of its contents.
The woman pulled her dry tongue from the roof of her mouth to swallow the lump in her throat. She knuckled a fist against the wall until the dizziness passed. Then turned around and closed the front door. Shut herself inside. With them.
Another of her uninvited visitors attempted to raise itself from the floor of the kitchen. She could hear it behind the closed door at the end of the hall. A disturbance she’d heard in the last two apartments she’d rented right before she fled them in the middle of the night. Sounds that brought to her mind the image of a wildebeest calf she had once seen on television, with a leg broken by the jaws of a crocodile, jerky in its attempt to pull itself away from the water.
When she wondered if they would come for her on all fours or upright, she raised the pistol and went and stood at the foot of the stairs. Supported her lead hand with the other like she’d learned on the gun range, but with the barrel pointed up. Ready.
The woman stilled her mind and let her final thoughts find a memory of her boy, on the night she carried him through the cold desert, pressed into her chest. So long ago, but she remembered his snuffles, his warmth, a little hand clasped in her raven hair like it was yesterday. Went all the way down to her waist in those days and covered her baby like a water-fall. That boy always knew who his mama was too. Didn’t 4
LAST DAYS
matter what they did to make it not so, make no mistake, he always knew. And she got her boy out.
She smiled through her tears. Sucked her breath inside.
‘Come on you bitch!’ she screamed at the thing that moved into partial visibility, in a murky articulation of painful movements, onto the top step.
Darkness folded about the stairs; they brought it with them from the lightless place between here and somewhere else.
And within its protective veil, the intruder obeyed her request and came down to her, on all fours, the face upturned.
Before it covered the short distance between them, the woman shoved the cold barrel of the handgun inside her own mouth. When it felt like it was somewhere behind her eyes, she squeezed the trigger.
5
THE PROCESS
‘An epic story of inhuman savagery’
Irvine Levine,
Last Days
ONE
bloomsbury, london. 30 may 2011
‘Have you ever heard of Sister Katherine and The Temple of the Last Days?’
The smile vanished from Maximillian Solomon’s eyes when he asked the question; a sign of self-seriousness, or a sudden scrutiny of Kyle’s fitness for disclosure; something Kyle noticed about mind, body and spirit types who spoke about their interests with strangers. Ufologists and mediums were the same.
But even though Solomon’s eyes hardened, the small tanned face of the CEO of Revelation Productions retained its default setting of being vaguely amused. With Kyle. Or maybe with everyone in the world except himself. The permanent half-smile was either convivial or mocking. It was hard to tell which with
these people
: the successful, the owners of things, the commissioners and controllers he’d dealt with as a film-maker.
‘Yes,’ Kyle said, and then his mind snatched at what he did know about Sister Katherine and The Temple of the Last Days. Fragments resembling instamatic polaroid photos: sun-bleached flashes of a scruffy, bearded man in handcuffs, walking from a police car and into a municipal building; 9
ADAM NEVILL
aerial footage of what might have been a ranch or a farm in
. . . California? Snippets of imagery from something about the cult he’d seen on telly a long time ago. A documentary, or was it news footage?
He wasn’t sure of the source of the impressions, but they were glimpses of things that suggested a notoriety that had evolved into the noir and the cultish. He knew that much; the group was perceived these days as dangerous and cool.
A US Indie band called itself Sister Katherine in the eight -
ies; some industrial band called itself The Temple of the Last Days in the next decade. And of course, he’d recognize the iconic portrait of Sister Katherine anywhere without know -
