Gareth L Powell Read online

  DOWNDRAUGHT

  Gareth L. Powell

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  This novella is being made available as a free pdf during the Covid-19 crisis.

  Please feel free to share it with friends and family—but don’t try to charge

  anyone for it, because that would be a real dick move.

  This novella © Gareth L Powell, 2020

  All rights reserved.

  www.garethlpowell.com

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  ALSO BY GARETH L POWELL

  NOVELS

  LIGHT OF IMPOSSIBLE STARS (TITAN BOOKS, 2020)

  FLEET OF KNIVES (TITAN BOOKS, 2019)

  EMBERS OF WAR (TITAN BOOKS, 2018)

  ACK-ACK MACAQUE: THE COMPLETE TRILOGY (SOLARIS BOOKS, 2017)

  MACAQUE ATTACK (SOLARIS BOOKS, 2015)

  HIVE MONKEY (SOLARIS BOOKS, 2014)

  ACK-ACK MACAQUE (SOLARIS BOOKS, 2013)

  THE RECOLLECTION (SOLARIS BOOKS, 2011)

  SILVERSANDS (PENDRAGON PRESS, 2010)

  NOVELLAS

  RAGGED ALICE (TOR.COM, 2019)

  COLLECTIONS

  ENTROPIC ANGEL & OTHER STORIES (NEWCON PRESS, 2017)

  THE LAST REEF & OTHER STORIES (ELASTIC PRESS, 2008)

  NONFICTION

  ABOUT WRITING (LUNA PRESS, 2019)

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  Dedicated to all my followers on Twitter and Patreon.

  I wouldn’t be here without you.

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  DOWNDRAUGHT

  Gareth L. Powell

  5

  THE MONSTER DIDN’T DREAM.

  At least, he didn’t remember dreaming.

  He wasn’t aware of time passing.

  And when he awoke, he was already drowning.

  6

  1.

  Lee’s father was from Swansea, his mother from London. They were both

  college lecturers. Even in the holidays, they had work to do, books to read.

  Having successfully bred once, they seemed disinclined to repeat the

  experiment. Lacking siblings and scorned as a ‘blow-in’ by the other children

  in the village, it was inevitable Lee would wind up in the orbit of another

  outcast—in this case, the farmer’s daughter from the house on the hill.

  She lived with her father in the farmhouse at the top of the lane, high

  above the higgledy terraces of the village. He was an ideological farmer, a city

  boy driven to the country by a need for self-sufficiency and a fear of urban

  collapse. Their house had solar panels, a composting toilet, and a wind turbine

  whose blades rattled as they spun. The cellar held enough tinned food for a

  year. Growing up readied and prepared for an environmental or political

  apocalypse, Kerri was as different to the pinch-faced village girls as June is to

  January. She had six freckles on her nose; comb-resistant tresses of off-blonde

  hair that danced and played behind her ears; and eyes as bottomless and

  unreadable as the sky-polished surface of a tarn.

  In the summer, when the tractors droned and grumbled in the fields and

  the high-hedged roads were full of walkers heading for a day’s ramble around

  the brown bracken foothills of the Brecon Beacons, the two of them would sit

  in the shade of the ruined tower in the paddock to the west of the village, their

  backs resting against the coolness of the stones. The tower and a few crumbled

  walls were all that remained of a twelfth century castle and constituted the

  village’s one and only tourist attraction. They scuffed their feet in the dirt,

  watching newly shorn lambs nose among the fallen stones; read superhero

  comics; and listened to music on their mobiles. Kerri liked anything with a beat

  and a bit of aggression. She was also occasionally a bit mean to him and teased

  him the way girls sometimes do; but she let him hang around with her, and

  together they explored the hills, her father’s farm, and the ruins of the castle.

  And then, on one particularly hot and drowsy August afternoon, when

  they were fourteen years old and stretched out in the shadow of the old tower,

  she saw a helicopter and burst into tears.

  They’d been lying in companionable silence, looking up at the dome of sky

  suspended between the hills on either side of the valley, and Lee had been

  thinking about the stars and how they were all still there, on the other side of

  that blue curtain, and how it was only the fact that they were hidden during

  the day that let mankind forget what a precarious and insignificant ball it lived

  on, adrift in a vast eternity of night. How different, he wondered, would we

  have been as a species if, throughout history, the stars remained visible during

  the day? Would we have still bothered to raise monuments and build skywards

  like the builders of this castle tower; or would our spirits have been crushed

  beneath the weight of the universe? Personally, he rather liked the idea of

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  having that constant reminder. At home, he’d filled his bedroom walls with old

  Hubble photographs of rosy nebulae and colliding galaxies, and pictures of

  Mars and Titan torn from the pages of National Geographic. His dream was to

  one day program his computer with a complete and accurate scale model of the

  solar system: a simulation he could explore at his leisure, with every comet,

  rock and asteroid accounted for and in their proper orbits.

  He and Kerri both had computers, of course; but where Kerri was content

  to play games and mess around on the Internet, Lee wanted to know how his

  worked. At school, while the other kids flocked and clustered, he sat in the

  corner and read programming manuals and computer magazines. It wasn’t

  enough for him to know how to use the desktop his parents had given him; he

  wanted to delve into its code and build his own worlds and amusements.

  Because, he thought, what would be the point of owning such a remarkable

  machine if you weren’t going to pop the hood and tinker with it, and exploit

  its full potential?

  Sometimes, he wondered if he was the only person in the village with a

  drop of curiosity in his head. He couldn’t understand how the people around

  him could go on ploughing the dreary furrows of their lives when all around

  them, just beyond the valley’s hillsides, the entire universe seethed with drama

  and potential. On clear nights, he’d sit at his bedroom window and watch the

  vault of Heaven wheel overhead, and imagine himself as an old man, withered

  and gnarled; a lone scholar huddled over a lamp in the topmost nook of the

  castle’s tower, custodian of the world’s few remaining books of science and

  literature (and superhero comics); curator of knowledge and learning that

  would otherwise be lost to the ravages of the weather, and the indifference of

  the barbarians outside.

  He was about to open his mouth to ask Kerri if she ever thought about the

  stars during the day, when he heard the eggbeater thump of an approaching

  helicopter, and a grey military transport chopper battered its way down the

  length of the valley, sashaying from side to side as it tracked the course of the

  river that wound across the valley’s meandering floor. He and Kerri watched

  it pass over
head; so low they could read the number painted on its underside

  and feel the thud-thud-thud of its rotors in their chests.

  Lee sat up to watch it clatter off down the valley. When he turned to Kerri,

  he saw that tears were sliding down her cheeks in translucent stripes.

  “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  She let her gaze fall from the dwindling helicopter and angrily wiped her

  eyes on the back of her wrist.

  “Shut up.”

  “But-”

  “You wouldn’t understand.” She turned away and sniffed.

  Lee glanced nervously around the paddock.

  “Are you okay?”

  Kerri pulled a crumpled tissue from the pocket of her denim shorts and

  snuffled wetly into it.

  “I heard about Mike, okay?” she said.

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  Lee blinked, then frowned.

  “Mike?”

  Kerri gave him a look.

  “Mike James. You know, Glyn’s older cousin. He lived with his ma on

  Forest Street.”

  “Oh, him.” Lee remembered the kid as a red-haired, thick-knuckled bully,

  maybe four or five years older than them. “Didn’t he join the army?”

  Kerri climbed to her feet. In the week since the start of the school holidays,

  the sun had tanned her scrawny legs the colour of weak tea. She brushed grass

  from her palms.

  “Yeah, and now he’s dead.” Her lips whitened as she pressed them

  together. Then her face collapsed like a sagging cake and she stood there, hands

  at her sides, sobbing.

  Lee scrambled up. His heart thumped with an odd sort of panic. He didn’t

  know what to say. He wasn’t used to girls crying. Tentatively, he reached out

  and touched her shoulder.

  “What happened?”

  “H-he was in Afghanistan and he d-died.”

  “How?”

  Angrily, she brushed a strand of hair away from her eyes. “Does it

  matter?”

  Lee withdrew his hand and used it to adjust his glasses.

  “I don’t understand why you’re so upset.”

  Kerri hunched her shoulders.

  “I’ve never known anyone who died before.”

  “But he was a dick.”

  “That doesn’t mean he deserved to die!” She crossed her arms over her

  chest and walked away.

  Lee watched her go.

  He could feel the sun on the back of his neck. The air held the farmyard

  scents of scorched grass and sun-warmed dung, and his insides felt empty,

  hollowed out by an inexplicable sense of aching loss.

  He didn’t see Kerri for the whole of the next week. She wouldn’t answer her

  phone or reply to his texts. When she finally came to find him, he was surprised

  at how much she’d changed. She’d chopped her tangled locks into a Warhol

  mop, and wore a denim jacket at least three sizes too large. A pair of sunglasses

  perched on the end of her nose. The small, round lenses shimmered with the

  iridescent peacock sheen of an oily puddle.

  “Where have you been?”

  A shrug.

  They were standing by the tower, in their usual spot. She pulled a soft

  pack of cigarettes from the jacket and tapped one out.

  “When did you start smoking?”

  She pushed the cigarette between her lips and pulled out a disposable

  plastic lighter.

  9

  “You don’t know everything about me.” Her thumb clicked the little

  wheel and, with her hands almost imperceptibly trembling, she held the flame

  up to the cigarette’s tip.

  As she sucked the cigarette into life, Lee watched the smoke curl around

  her face and hair, grey and blue in the sunlight. He could feel his heart

  twitching in his chest, panicky with the sense that he was witnessing an act of

  perverse and irreversible self-mutilation.

  Kerri looked over her glasses at him and smiled. Then she offered him the

  pack. “Do you want one?” She waggled it, daring him.

  Lee shook his head. “No way.”

  “God,” she laughed, “you’re so immature.”

  She leant her denim shoulders against the stone tower and crossed her

  legs at the ankle.

  Lee looked down at his clothes. He wore a red superhero t-shirt and a pair

  of knee-length cargo shorts that his mother had bought him. He felt his cheeks

  flush. Kerri was right; he was still a kid. And, at some point over the past week,

  she’d become something else. She’d gone on without him, leaving him behind.

  The little girl he’d known had left, displaced by something taller and leaner,

  with awkward, self-conscious limbs and eyes that glittered with an aggrieved

  and surly hunger.

  He swallowed hard. A pair of bright white butterflies danced between the

  fallen stones like scraps of windblown paper. A lorry ground its gears on the

  main road out of town.

  “So, what do you want to do?” he asked, struggling to keep his voice level.

  Kerri looked at him. Then she pulled out her mobile and started thumbing

  through her text messages.

  “You do what you like. I’m waiting for someone.”

  “Who?”

  She huffed, exasperated by his questions. “Him.”

  Lee turned to see Glyn James, Pete Evans and Geraint Hughes climbing

  over the stile at the village end of the paddock. Like Kerri, the three boys held

  their cigarettes curled self-consciously in their hands. They spat the smoke

  from the corners of their mouths like curses.

  “Oh shit. What do they want?”

  “Glyn probably wants his jacket back.”

  Lee looked at her with wide eyes.

  “You nicked it?”

  Kerri laughed. “No, he lent it me. He says he’s taking me to the disco at

  the church hall tonight.”

  “But, but,” Lee waved his arms, lost for words. Glyn James was in the

  year above them at school. When he wasn’t playing football, he was finding

  new and inventive ways to make their lives a misery. “He’s a dick.”

  Kerri’s eyes narrowed into slits. “You said that about his cousin. Maybe

  you’d like to see him dead, too?”

  “I never said that.”

  10

  “You didn’t have to.”

  Lee felt his eyes prickle. “Why are you being like this?”

  With a shrug of her shoulders, Kerri pushed herself away from the castle

  wall. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.” He waved a hand. “Different.”

  “You wouldn’t understand; you’re too immature.” Angrily, she tugged at

  her cuffs. Then she turned to face the approaching boys. “All right, Glyn?

  What’s happening?”

  Glyn took a last drag on his cigarette, and then flicked the butt into the

  weeds. He spoke around a mouthful of smoke.

  “You coming up the hill?”

  Kerri swallowed. “Yeah.”

  “Good.” He turned to Lee, and his lip curled. “Hey, pidyn,” he growled,

  “keep away from her, yeah?”

  Kerri tugged his sleeve. “Ah, leave him alone, Glyn, he’s not so bad.”

  Glyn shook her off. “I don’t like him. He’s always hanging around.” He

  held his fist in the younger boy’s face. “Go on, fuck off. We’re going up the hill,

  see. And we don’t want you following us.” A finger jab to the chest. “Got that?”

  Lee knew
enough local slang to know that ‘going up the hill’ meant they

  were heading for the old quarry. It was the place the older kids went to snog

  and fumble. Porn mags, old syringes and used condoms carpeted the floor of

  the rusty corrugated iron shed at the far end, in the shadow of the rock face.

  He stuck out his chin.

  “I can go where I want.”

  For a moment, the older boy looked surprised by his defiance. Then he

  shoved him hard against the tower’s stones and slapped him across the face.

  Lee’s glasses fell to the floor.

  Glyn drew his fist back, ready to throw a punch, but Kerri caught his

  wrist. She pulled him away.

  “Come on, you said you’d leave him alone if I did what you wanted.”

  Glyn shook her off. He ran a hand across his hair and looked her up and

  down. Then he smirked.

  “All right, then.”

  Lee knelt to retrieve his specs.

  As he cleaned them on his t-shirt and slid them back onto his nose, Kerri

  led Glyn across the field to the lane. The other two boys slouched along behind,

  grinning at each other around their cigarettes. Occasionally, one or the other

  would turn and flip Lee an obscene gesture.

  Miserably, he watched them go. His fists were knotted at his sides. His

  throat felt tight and his eyes were burning. His face stung where he’d been hit.

  Mercifully, he managed to wait until they were out of the paddock before he

  started to cry.

  He didn’t want to follow them. He knew no good could come of it, yet he

  couldn’t help himself. Tears rolling down his cheeks and fogging his glasses,

  11

  he stumbled forward on traitorous feet, unwilling and yet somehow

  compelled. With each step, he winced, cringing inside at the prospect of the

  hurt to come; but still he trudged onward, inexorably drawn to the lip of the