Mammoth Books Presents The Unexpected by Michael Marshall Smith

Author:Michael Marshall Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472102775
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

NICHOLAS ROYLE

The Reunion

NICHOLAS ROYLE IS THE author of five novels and two novellas, and the editor of thirteen anthologies, including Darklands and The Time Out Book of New York Short Stories. His own collection, Mortality, was shortlisted for the inaugural Edge Hill Prize, and he has won three British Fantasy Awards.

Born in Manchester in 1963, Royle teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and reviews fiction for The Independent newspaper. He also runs Nightjar Press, publishing original short fiction in signed, limited-edition chapbooks. Currently he is editing a new anthology of uncanny bird stories for Two Ravens Press.

“‘The Reunion’ is based on actual events,” reveals the author, “but the story only really came into focus for me when I was invited to contribute to Ellen Datlow’s Poe anthology.

“Poe is brilliant. I was at a conference recently where a teacher revealed that she had read Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ to a lecture theatre full of schoolchildren. She switched off all the lights and used a torch to read by. A number of parents lodged complaints, which she took as a measure of the event’s success. My tale is inspired by a different Poe story.”

ON ARRIVAL, we’d had to wait behind a man in jumbo cords and a pastel polo shirt who was giving the receptionist a hard time about some problem in his room, a missing towel or a faulty light, and we formed an immediate impression of him that was somewhat negative. It wasn’t long, however, before we realized he had a point.

They didn’t have any record of our booking, despite having sent us an email of confirmation, which happily Maggie had printed out and brought along. So we had to fill in a form, holding up those who had arrived after us, and finally the girl behind the desk gave us a key card and a map.

Yes, a map. It was a big hotel. A huge hotel. One of those places you get apparently in the middle of nowhere but actually no more than twenty miles from one or other dreary Midlands town. A former RAF training camp or stately home or converted mental asylum. This appeared to be all three, with not only west wings and east wings, but whole houses and vast halls tacked on to the main building. The room belatedly assigned to us was in one of the modern blocks.

We walked along one edge of a grand, colonnaded reception hall, past a tuxedoed piano player, through a little ante-room dominated by two stags’ heads mounted on adjacent walls. We passed a bar with its shutter down, then turned right into a wide corridor.

The further we got from the main part of the hotel with its marble columns and wide, red-carpeted staircases, the shoddier and tattier everything became. There was an armchair in a corner that was missing a castor, a cabinet of drawers covered in scuff marks.

I said to Maggie that it was like that scene in Jacob’s Ladder where Tim Robbins is wheeled down

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