Before You Wake [S.S. Col.] by Nevill Adam

Author:Nevill, Adam [Nevill, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Short Stories
Publisher: Ritual Limited
Published: 2017-08-08T09:03:48+00:00

Ray helped John and his laundry basket to the front door of their destination. He returned to his car and waited a good ten minutes for a new passenger to emerge, as per his instructions; John had told him that a second passenger required picking up at the address. An odd request, but it was another fare. The meter was ticking.

From inside the car, with the windows cracked to dispel the miasma of John’s sweat, Ray smelled smoke.

Peering through the passenger-side window, he spotted a plume of black smoke. The smoke billowed over the roof of the house he was parked outside, before drifting into the sky. The fire must have been burning in the back garden of the house that John and his basket were inside. Over the sound of his radio, Ray was also sure that he heard a sharp human cry issue from the rear of the property. But the shriek was immediately muffled by the laughter of a large group of people. They must have been in the garden.

‘Not the weather for a barbecue,’ he said, in an attempt at humour, and as a tactic for drawing out some information from the new passenger, after she’d shuffled to his car and settled herself in the rear seat. ‘Lot of smoke back there. What’s it, bonfire? Festival, like?’

The ancient Indian woman in the rear never answered him. Once she and her Samsonite suitcase had been installed in the rear of the vehicle, she had merely passed a piece of paper between the seats. Printed in capitals was an address Ray recognised in Handsworth, near the park. He wouldn’t need the satnav.

As Ray pulled away, he glanced through the passenger-side window. There was a space between the house and the equally vast neighbouring property. The sound of laughter, and now applause, at the rear of the house continued. Ray assumed that the scream had been part of some Asian festival or tradition. The people who had initially crowded about the front door to welcome John and his laundry basket were all well-heeled Sikhs, as Ray had expected them to be. Though their smiles and greetings were warmer, and more excitable, than he’d expected to see on any face after the arrival of a little scruffy man with a pet inside a laundry basket.

During the journey to Handsworth Park the elderly Asian woman never looked up from staring at her withered hands. She held them together on top of her lap. Bonfire smoke had caught in the folds of her sari. Ray suspected that she didn’t like him.

Ray parked outside a large semi-detached Victorian house, across the road from Handsworth Park – the address requested by the old Indian woman. A middle-aged white couple appeared in the doorway before Ray applied the handbrake. They came into the street to help the elderly woman out of Ray’s taxi.

The couple looked alternative yet fashionable. Ray recognised the type; they’d migrated into Asian and West Indian neighbourhoods because the big houses and long gardens were half the price of the houses in Moseley and Kings Heath.

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