The Unblemished Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  PART I

  RESURGAM

  1. The House of Flies

  2. Outfangthief

  3. The Devotee

  4. Mister Picnic

  5. Nice Work

  6. Fast Food

  7. Subtle Invasion

  8. Development

  9. Carbon

  PART II

  BLOOD MEALS

  10. Hide

  11. Seek

  12. Shock

  13. Safe Harbour

  14. Pack Mentality

  15. Graham Greene

  16. Force Meat

  17. Special Dentistry

  18. Rehabilitation

  PART III

  MIASMA

  19. The Archive

  20. The Map-Eater

  21. Contact Inhibition

  22. How Can It Not Know What It Is?

  23. Fogbound

  24. In

  25. The Map Unfolds

  26. Six Million Strangers

  27. Welcome to the Jungle

  28. Bad Bokeh

  PART IV

  APPETITIVE BEHAVIOUR

  29. Mercy Mission

  30. Recovery

  31. Flight to the South Bank

  PART V

  FIFTH INSTAR

  32. Hiveminds

  33. The Seven Chimneys

  34. Colostrum

  35. Crossfire

  36. AKA

  37. Hardwired

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Enter the mind of a serial killer who believes he is the rightful son and heir to an ancient dynasty of flesh-eaters.

  Follow the frantic journey of a mother whose daughter is infected with the stuff of nightmare.

  Look through the eyes of Bo Mulvey, who possesses the ancient wisdom a blood thirsty evil needs to achieve its full and horrifying potential. A man upon whom the fate of the entire human race depends.

  One of the most powerful horror novels of our time, The Unblemished is an epic tale of history and destiny, desperation and desire, atrocity and atonement. It is a savagely beautiful tale of a mother’s determination to rescue her daughter, which plunges you into the monstrous world of serial killers and a cannibalistic apocalypse that rips through modern Britain.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Conrad Williams is the author of two previous novels, Head Injuries and London Revenant, as well as the novellas Nearly People, Game, The Scalding Rooms and Rain, and a collection of his short fiction, Use Once, Then Destroy.

  Born in 1969, he sold his first short story at the age of eighteen and has gone on to sell over 80 more to a variety of small presses, professional magazines and critically acclaimed anthologies.

  In 1993 he won the British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer. His work has since been shortlisted for awards by the British Fantasy Society and the International Horror Guild, the latter proclaiming The Unblemished as Best Novel.

  He is married to the writer Rhonda Carrier and they live with their three sons and a monster Maine Coon cat in Manchester, where Conrad teaches creative writing at a local university.

  Praise for The Unblemished

  ‘No fan of literary horror should miss it.’ – The Times

  ‘This stark, gripping novel will stay with you for a long time.’ – Guardian

  ‘Top-notch writing skills, poetic vision and beautiful prose raise this way above your Hammer House Of Horror … this is an unusual – as well as highly accomplished – terror.’ – Sunday Express

  ‘This is an intelligent book that appeals to the unpleasant 12 year old in all of us.’ – Time Out

  THE UNBLEMISHED

  CONRAD WILLIAMS

  For Ripley

  I love you, squawker

  PROLOGUE

  Horror and reverence are declensions of the same bewilderment – the bewilderment of being fully alive. When one is fully alive, the entire world is alive. The observed observes. The forest becomes a congeries of eyes.

  Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilisation

  WHAT SCARED CLAIRE more than the encroaching trees and the worsening state of the road was that the immutable faith she had in her map had proved misplaced. According to the atlas, the B4525 ought still to be carrying on merrily squirming like a tapeworm through the guts of Northamptonshire. She was a good map reader, but something had gone wrong within the last hour and she couldn’t figure out what it was. Her boyfriend, Oliver, had run the gamut from mild irritation to apoplexy, via sarcasm and exasperation. Now he was hunched over the wheel, trying to peer through the imbroglio, his throat clicking whenever he swallowed. Darkness was coming on, and the possibility that they might have to spend the night in the car was growing firmer by the minute.

  She wondered again why they had decided to do this. Oliver had pointed out their lack of funds when she suggested a holiday, even though her idea – a week in a tent on the French coast near Arcachon had been modest and well within their means. She guessed he had been waiting for her to offer her plan, just so he could trump it with his own. The fact that he gave what seemed almost a presentation on the benefits of remaining in the UK – all that was missing was a PowerPoint display and photocopied handouts – exposed his extensive preparations. He bullied her into agreeing. How much of our own country do you really know? he’d asked her. How much of it have you actually visited?

  Her rejoinder, that Skegness in the wet would have the same attraction as the Lakes in the wet, or Dartmoor in the wet, was dismissed. And after all, it was his car they would be using had she won the vacation argument; his tent too. She felt she had to go along with him. She supposed she could refuse. But where would that leave them? Further down the road to the end of their relationship. And she didn’t want that. Not since she discovered she was pregnant. This holiday was meant to provide a peaceful, neutral arena where she could feel comfortable enough to tell him he was to be a father. She didn’t know him well enough yet to gauge how he might take the news. He was a difficult winkle to prize from the shell. But she felt she ought to share the news with him first before letting her mother know. God, there was a happy moment awaiting her. It had been tough enough trying to get her to agree to this little break. Her mum was sweating panic so hard over her debt and the wanker that was chasing them for it that Claire was convinced she could see it leaving acid tracks in her skin. She wanted to wrestle her down to the sofa, give her some hot tea, tell her to slow down, to breathe. That way, at least, Claire supposed, she would be getting some practice in at being mother.

  She looked at Oliver and thought about reaching out a conciliatory hand. But then he glanced at her with that disgusted, dismissive expression that he always seemed to wear in her company. She felt a stitch of dread, certain that it was on his tongue, this talk of finishing it, of moving on. He was tasting the flavour of it, that was sure. She wanted to tell him that he gave her a jolt whenever she saw him, as if he was someone she were seeing for the first time. She never seemed to recognise him. She wondered if this in itself was a good thing. She wondered why she couldn’t open her mouth to try to help seal some cracks. There was a big one in their age difference, one that she hadn’t even considered until it became clear there was something of him growing inside her. Eighteen and twenty-five. Suddenly she felt as if she were being driven around by an uncle.

  The long, white beaches of western France seemed further away than ever now. Rain began to fall, inviting the squeaking, metronomic rhythm of the wipers that irritat
ed her, but at least they cut into the terrible silence building between them. Thunder was a distant godly footprint, that of something determined to track them down. All we need now, she thought, is a flat tyre.

  ‘When was it that you lost the plot?’ Oliver asked suddenly. Claire felt it was a cruel question, full of the kind of ambiguity that he seemed to enjoy. He liked playing with people, tying them in knots.

  ‘We haven’t turned off the B road,’ she replied, refusing to fall for the bait. Arguing wasn’t going to magic them back on track. ‘So the map must be wrong.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ he said. ‘How does that saying go, the one about craftsmen and tools?’ His voice wasn’t right, though. He wouldn’t look at her. He uttered his insults flatly, without any of the chiding, bitter humour, the come-ons that she sometimes found bizarrely attractive. His eyes flashed at the rear-view mirror more often than seemed prudent. Something in his actions reminded her of a bird. It was a nervous, jerky routine.

  Claire checked the publication date of the atlas, in case it was out of date, but it was the latest edition. ‘Maybe we should just turn around,’ she said. ‘I vaguely remember seeing a pub before things started going wrong. About half an hour ago. We might find we know where we are if we get back there. And if not, we can always stop for a drink. Ask for directions.’

  Oliver wasn’t answering, and she looked at him. She almost instantly turned her attention back to the road, convinced that the person she had got into the car with, all those miles and hours ago, was no longer the same. His face was utterly alien to her. The light from the dashboard had picked out punctures and hollows that shouldn’t have been there, and perhaps hadn’t, before the tension of their situation had started to dig in. She wondered if she appeared the same way to him.

  ‘Turn around,’ she whispered. She didn’t like the way the road ahead was failing beneath the weather, as if it was being erased. She wanted to be with her mother. She wanted that controllable sense of hysteria. Domestic madness.

  Sweat crept out from beneath her fingertips where she clutched the edges of the atlas. She was pressing half-moons into the paper. The blackness beyond the windows was so complete that she was no longer certain they were on any kind of road at all, and suffered an awful, vertiginous pang that lit upon the nerves in her legs as she imagined the car falling through space. She flipped down the vanity mirror in the sunshield above her head. Now she saw what it was that Oliver was so intent on, what had robbed him of his ability to speak to her. Now she saw why they could not retreat. In the occasional red wash from the brakelights she saw hundreds of figures squirming in their wake on to the rubble-strewn road, many of them limbless, eyes reflecting as pale discs of silver. She yelled involuntarily, a nonsense sound that caused Oliver to flinch. ‘What are they doing?’ she shouted. ‘Why are they chasing us?’ Her hand went to the door handle and jerked it open. Oliver screamed at her to shut it.

  ‘What do they want?’ she asked. She could not recognise her own voice above the grind of the engine, the slam of her own heart.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Oliver said. ‘But what are we going to do? Reason with them? Look at them. I mean, fucking look at them.’

  There were so many of them wriggling over the embankment it seemed that at some point they would be engulfed. The car jounced as it crunched over bodies that slithered beneath the wheels. Claire screamed. And then she heard Oliver swear and ram his foot on the brakes. A fallen tree, twenty feet ahead, blocking their path. Oliver reached out and squeezed her hand. Sweat cellophaned him. He was all tendons and cords and failing intent. He opened the door and the howling wind and rain swirled into the car. He did not look back at her. He said: ‘Run.’

  Immediately Claire lost him in the squall. She guessed he must have moved in a straight line as soon as his foot hit the soil, hoping that, once over it, the tree would act as a barrier to the crawling hordes behind them. She didn’t for one second consider his behaviour, his abandonment of her. Neither did she consider the identity of the creatures hunting them down. All she thought about was catching up with him, not wanting to be out here on her own while whatever it was slid and slithered at her heels through the mud.

  ‘Oli?’ It was her first and last cry to him. The storm turned her words into confetti that fell around her ears. She decided to save her breath and follow the route she guessed he must have taken. She lost a shoe to the mud. Her leg rippled with fire where a stinger danced along it. She felt the rain almost instantly permeate her clothes and set about her skin. Finding Oliver was her task, her be-all and end-all. Sanctuary was now as fantastical an idea to her as heaven. Her determination to track him down before succumbing to whatever was closing in around her helped her to keep going. Dying out here seemed a given, all of a sudden, a fate instantly assimilated. What she must rage against was doing so without making some effort to reconnect with the person she loved. The fear of being alone at the end outweighed the terror of death to a point that she found almost amusing.

  The headlights of the car helped her to see where to put her feet as she scrambled over the tree, although a protrusion of some kind tore a hole in her blouse and scored a breast with pain. Beyond it the light was less helpful, and she had to rely on the flashes of lightning to give her moments in which to reorient herself. Within one, she believed she saw Oliver pinwheeling through a clump of trees to her right, so she altered her course and gave chase.

  The lightning was coming more frequently, scattering across different parts of the sky in sheets, as if searching for a seamstress to stitch them all together. Thunder filled in the gaps, shockingly close, at one point seeming to vibrate within her. The adrenaline, the storm, the hunt, all of it was conspiring to excite her. For the first time in her life, she felt alive. She screamed and laughed. Terror purged her of any logic. Instinct reduced her to the basest animal. She sprinted, a forgotten joy, and no longer felt any nettle or knock. She was suddenly insane, and loving every second.

  She reached the trees where she thought she’d spotted Oliver. There was no point in trying to search for his tracks. The rain had already turned the ground to nonsense. She heard something breathing hard and wet not too far behind her and pushed on, knowing that to stop was to die and she mustn’t allow that until she knew what had become of her man. The synapses of the sky flared with another packet of energy. She saw the land fall away rapidly. At the bottom of the hill light glanced off what could only be a barbed wire fence. She must get through that and hinder their progress some more. She needed time.

  She started a gingerly descent, but knew how she would reach the bottom. It didn’t take long before she lost her footing. Part of her wished that she might clout her head against a rock to inure her against whatever they were planning for her. But the fall was muddy and nothing else. Back on her feet she found a sagging portion of barbed wire and picked a way through it: she entered a zone protected from the worst of the storm by a thick canopy overhead.

  The deluge had failed to find a way through and the sudden lack of rain was as shocking as it was welcome. Even the thunder and lightning seemed subdued. The rich smells of damp bark and fungus hung thickly in the air. Broad, waxy leaves, Mesozoic in their size, sweated pungent sap that stuck like syrup to Claire’s skin. There was the breath of something old in the forest, a stale atmosphere filtered through centuries of shadow and heat. The air seemed to have been recycled to the point where there was no oxygen left. Claire sucked the stink and fumes into lungs that were working so hard, so shallowly, that it didn’t really matter what was in the air. The silence was not compromised by any rustles of animals in the undergrowth. There were none of the kind of caws or cackles she thought she might hear on any ordinary tramp through the woods. That concerned her more than she expected.

  Her mind was fixed hard on Oliver, trying to put up a barricade against the dark, which was deepening, and putting pressure on her flimsy defences. Terror, she was learning, was like gorging yourself at the dining table: it filled
you up and threatened to move outside of you, as if it could affect your surroundings too. It became more than what you were.

  She had always loved the forest and cherished the memories she had of playing there with her father when she was a child. But she pushed through the undergrowth now, panicked and confused by this old friend of hers, this betrayer. Her fear was so great that she was oblivious to the thorns and stingers that stood in her way. Her legs became striped with welts; a spine on a creeper scratched her eyelid. Blinking furiously, tears ruining half of her vision, she misjudged the space around her and careened into a tree, knocking herself off balance. She went down hard and winded herself against a fist of rock in the slippery earth. Her left leg caught beneath her and she was forced on to her front. The torrent had loosened a thin scree of rubble and mud; she travelled with it, her mouth filling with grit. Bottoming out, she was able to steady herself and get upright. Pain flew up her right side; her shin was bathed in blood.

  Queasily she felt around for a bone protruding through the flesh, but it was only a deep cut. She could walk. She became aware, as she angrily swiped at the tears and grime on her face, that the rain had stopped, replaced by an enormous heat; it was similar to the time she had stepped from a jet on to a Bahrain runway. The smells of vegetable mould were uppercuts punching through the heat. The canopy curved over her head, complete and unbroken, as if the trees were ganging up on her. They blotted out the black anvils of cloud to the extent that she questioned whether it had rained at all. A hissing sound, so low as to be almost subsonic, rose around her. It reminded her dimly of sprinkler hoses in her grandmother’s garden.

  It was while she was thinking about that garden, with its buddleia, magnolia and lemon thyme, that she stepped on what remained of her boyfriend’s face.

  Reality drained away from her. It was as if she were suddenly watching a film, or reading a book. Her detachment was so acute, so utter, that she imagined she heard her sanity uncoupling, like a giant bolt sliding back in its chamber. A couple of feet away she saw Oliver’s clothes, discarded as they had been on the first night they slept together. He had come hopping after her, trying to get his socks off, while she scooted back on her arse towards the bedroom, blowing him kisses, chanting, Come on then, Oli, come on then …