The Blood of Angels Read online

  Also Available by Stephen Gregory

  The Cormorant

  The Woodwitch

  THE BLOOD OF ANGELS

  STEPHEN GREGORY

  With a new introduction by

  MARK MORRIS

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  The Blood of Angels by Stephen Gregory

  First published in Great Britain by Piatkus in 1994

  First Valancourt Books edition 2015

  Copyright © 1994 by Stephen Gregory

  Introduction © 2015 by Mark Morris

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

  Cover design by Henry Petrides

  INTRODUCTION

  I first met Stephen Gregory around 1990, having discovered his work via an enthusiastic endorsement of his second novel The Woodwitch from Ramsey Campbell, who described the book as ‘a powerful novel of psychological terror and a thorough reinvention of the Gothic landscape.’

  After gleefully devouring both The Woodwitch (and finding Ramsey’s quote to be entirely accurate) and Stephen’s equally wonderful first novel The Cormorant, I duly contacted John Gilbert, editor of Fear Magazine, and asked him whether he would be interested in an interview with/article on Stephen and his work. John said he would, whereupon I immediately set myself the task of tracking the elusive author down.

  Perhaps I’m being melodramatic by describing Stephen as elusive, though what you have to remember is that this was in the days before Facebook and Twitter, even before email. I can’t, therefore, now remember exactly how I tracked Stephen to the isolated cottage in the Welsh countryside where (just like his protagonist in The Woodwitch) he was then living with only his dog for company, though I suspect it was through a combination of letters and phone calls, firstly with Stephen’s publisher and latterly with Stephen himself.

  I had hoped to use that long-ago interview – recorded on a Dictaphone, hand-transcribed, re-edited into a concise article and then painstakingly typed up on a manual typewriter – as the basis for this introduction, but looking back through the entire 34-issue run of Fear I made a disappointing and long-forgotten discovery: it was never published. I know John had intended to use it, but I know too that Fear was abruptly cut off in its prime when its parent company, Newsfield Publications, unexpectedly went belly-up, and so I can only conclude that the crash happened before my inter­view with Stephen, of which no copy exists that I’m aware of, managed to see print.

  My account of that first meeting will, I’m afraid, have to therefore rely entirely on my own admittedly vague memories. What I recall is that I disembarked at a tiny train station somewhere in Wales, to find that Stephen, a kind, gentle, softly spoken man, was waiting for me. He drove me to his cottage, made a pot of tea (and possibly even some sandwiches) and we spent a very congenial afternoon chatting about books and writing. Indeed, it was so congenial that Stephen and I subsequently became friends, to the extent that my wife Nel and I even used to pay occasional weekend visits to Stephen and his other half Christine in Caernarvon, before the two of them upped sticks and moved to Brunei, where Stephen has now been living and teaching for the past fifteen years or so.

  Speaking to Stephen over cups of tea in his little cottage on that drizzly afternoon twenty-five years ago, what struck me was how pleased but baffled he was that his work had been so enthusiastically embraced by the horror genre. Despite the ghost story elements in The Cormorant, coupled with the strong suggestion that the titular bird is, to all intents and purposes, a malign and destructive spirit, and despite the protagonist Andrew Pinkney’s macabre preoccupation with death and decay in The Woodwitch, Stephen was of the opinion that he didn’t write horror. It wasn’t a snobbish attitude on his part; it wasn’t that he was contemptuous of the genre in any way; it was simply that he knew very little about it. He confessed to me that he hadn’t read much horror, and therefore had no more than a passing knowledge of its history, its conventions, its trends. I recall his concern when he showed me a copy of a Dean R. Koontz novel, which his then-editor had sent him, accompanied by the suggestion that his next book should be aimed more overtly at the commercial horror market. At the time Stephen was working on a third novel called The Brittlestar, which – largely because it wasn’t the commercial horror blockbuster his editor had been hoping for – would subsequently be rejected by his publisher Sceptre.

  All of which leads me neatly to the book you now hold in your hands.

  As those of you who have leafed through The Blood of Angels, or possibly even read it, before turning to this introduction will know, Brittlestar is the title of the second of the novel’s four parts. The gestation of The Blood of Angels is an interesting one. As I recall, it started out as three separate short novels, each of which featured a male protagonist at a different stage of his life. The first, Toadstone (whether this was the original title or not, I don’t know), featured a naïve and somewhat socially awkward young man in his early to mid-twenties; the second, The Brittlestar, featured a man in his thirties, whose lonely life on a permanently-moored boat is disrupted by the arrival of his younger sister; and the third, Star-Splitter/Ammonite, took as its main character an even lonelier man in his fifties, embittered by life, who doggedly refuses to leave his home despite the fact that he has been driven upstairs by the rising tides, which surge into the downstairs rooms of his house at night, bringing with them all manner of strange and unwelcome aquatic visitors.

  Unable to sell any of these novels (a fact which both astonishes and enrages me even now – how could publishers turn down such great work?), Stephen contacted me in 1993 or thereabouts to ask whether I thought my then-publisher Judy Piatkus might be interested in taking a look at them. I paved the way by sending Judy a letter waxing lyrical about Stephen’s work, and was duly delighted when I discovered that Judy had liked all three books enough to make Stephen an offer.

  Now this is where it gets interesting.

  I’m not sure at what stage it was suggested, or by whom, that the separate protagonists of the three novels shared enough common characteristics that they might well be seen as the same character at different stages of his life, but ultimately the decision was made to amalgamate all three narratives into a novel recounting significant episodes in the varied and tempestuous life of a single man, the extraordinary Harry Clewe.

  As a result of this decision The Blood of Angels was born, and subsequently became – and remains – a novel that is far more than the sum of its parts. Like life itself, it is complex and contradictory. It is, on the one hand, a richly-textured, heart-achingly poignant and poetic portrait of a sensitive, lonely, unhappy man who has been dealt a cruel hand by life, and on the other it is a rough, blustering, wind-swept story about a filthy, monstrous – indeed murderous! – individual, whose every relationship ends in unmitigated disaster.

  As in all of Stephen’s work, the natural world – of which Harry Clewe himself is an integral part – plays an important role in the book. Nature in all its many and varied forms is here portrayed as an elemental force, and birds in particular are seen (as in The Cormorant) as malign, destructive spirits or harbingers of doom. Fire, water, rock and earth feature heavily in the first third of the narrative, as does – most prominently – the natterjack toad, which is regarded by an already unraveling Harry as a ta
lisman, a charm that brings him good fortune, whereas the sea and its moods dominate the final two-thirds. Indeed, the sea can almost be seen as a separate character – or more accurately, perhaps, as Harry’s alter ego. Swirling and crashing and foaming, it often mirrors his turbulent, unpredictable emotions, a state of affairs that is invariably a precursor to violence and tragedy.

  What else can I say about The Blood of Angels? Perhaps most pertinently that it is both a beautifully-written book with a compelling narrative, and a lusty storm of a story that will sweep you up from its first page and take you on a breathless, emotionally exhausting but ultimately invigorating journey.

  If this is your first encounter with Stephen Gregory’s fiction, then please don’t make it your last. After reading this book, do yourself a favour and check out his others: The Cormorant, The Woodwitch, The Perils and Dangers of This Night, The Waking That Kills and Wakening the Crow. In my opinion he is, quite simply, one of the best and most underrated novelists in the world.

  Buy his work. Read it. Cherish it.

  Mark Morris

  2015

  Part One: Toadstone

  Chapter One

  Harry Clewe had had a terrible migraine. It felt as though someone had hit him on the head with a very heavy, very hard object. At last it was over. Utterly drained, he went to bed and fell asleep straight away.

  When he woke up, he was cold. But his headache had gone. It was dawn, and his bedroom was just light enough for him to make out the shape of his jacket hanging on the door. There was no sound of traffic on the road outside. The branches rattled in the fir plantation and sent a spatter of rain against the window.

  Harry shivered in the narrow bed. Something stirred on his belly, something cupped in the palm of his waking hand: a warm live thing which shifted slowly and rearranged its limbs more comfortably there. He looked down to see what it was.

  It was a toad.

  The toad was round and fat, as soft and dry as a boxing glove. Its long tongue flicked out, over and over again, to caress the skin of Harry’s palm. He smiled to himself and lay very still in the lightening room, holding the toad on his belly.

  That summer, in the late 1960s, Harry Clewe was working in a hotel garden in Beddgelert, a village in Snowdonia. The manager had hired him to repair a dry-stone wall which had collapsed because the roots of a rhododendron had forced it apart. Harry was singularly unsuited to the work. Twenty-five years old and nearly six foot tall, he was thin and fragile, with a hollow, hairless chest. He was a stone underweight after a year as a volunteer teacher in Sudan; well-meaning, altruistic, he’d gone there at a time when it was more fashionable to travel overland to Istanbul and Kathmandu. But he’d been ill. His freckled skin was an easy target for the desert sun; his red hair seemed to attract it. His pale eyes had flinched from the dazzling whiteness of sand. A stomach infection drained him, and he’d grown thinner and thinner. Sudan had been difficult for him.

  But he was doing his best in the garden. He demolished the rest of the wall by climbing onto the terrace above it and making a few well-placed incisions with a spade, so that the great mass of boulders came crashing down. That was the easy part. It then took two weeks of strenuous work with a pick axe to cut the rhododendron roots from the boulders. And in that garden, which rose steeply behind the hotel in a series of terraced lawns until it petered into the oak woods at the top, the only suitable place for the burning and disposal of the debris was high on the hillside, on a plateau among the trees. Harry was bruised and worn out by the repeated journeys he made from the bottom of the garden to the top, with armfuls of slimy rhododendron roots.

  Each time he reached the plateau and threw down his load, he lay in the bracken and rested for a few minutes, to enjoy the view over the roof of the hotel.

  Two rivers joined in the middle of the village, after their tumbling descent from the foothills of Snowdon. Then, a single, broader river set off towards the sea at Porthmadog, slowly at first through flat fields soiled by grey sheep, before accelerating spectacularly under the Glaslyn bridge and gathering momentum for another more leisurely stretch towards the coast. High above the hotel roof, Harry looked down on the village, its cottages and gift shops, the car park full of tourists’ cars and caravans, across to the green sides of Hebog where tiny figures in orange and blue waterproofs moved towards the summit. A few people were walking along the riverbank to stand at Gelert’s grave and read the questionable legend. There were jackdaws in the trees at the top of the garden, clucking like chickens among the branches. Ravens croaked and somersaulted overhead. The sky above the village was quick with swifts, brittle and black like splinters of coal. Harry sat and watched, trying to get his breath back for another armful of rhododendron roots.

  One morning there came a shout from the hotel. There was a telephone call for Harry Clewe. He stumbled down the path, started to kick the soil from his Wellington boots before going into the hotel, but the manager hurried him inside. Wiping his glasses on his shirt, Harry pressed the telephone to his ear.

  It was his mother. There’d been a terrible accident. Lizzie, Harry’s twelve-year-old sister, had been thrown from a horse onto a piece of farm machinery. She was in hospital in Shrewsbury with internal injuries and the possibility of permanent spinal damage.

  Harry put the telephone down. He loved his little sister very much. He envied her, too, for her self-assurance and poise; he himself had none. Lizzie wore her red hair like a bright, dancing flame; Harry’s gingery mop seemed to quench his face. He was for ever peering shortsightedly into the distance and being punched on the bridge of the nose: that was what it felt like. After a year of muddling incompetence as a probationary schoolteacher in Oswestry, after a bruising, debilitating year in Sudan, he’d come for a bit of peace and blessed relief in Wales.

  He still had the headaches: he’d had them since his teens, when his eyesight suddenly deteriorated. They started with a spark in his right eye, which he would try to rub away with his fingers . . . more sparks, until there was an arc of light, shimmering like an angel in the top right-hand corner of his vision. And when the angel disappeared, his head was racked with migraine. There was a pounding, relentless pain. Lying in a darkened room, he would listen to the demolition of his faculties, a cacophony in his skull as though someone had recorded and overlaid the noises of abattoir, discotheque and iron foundry into one anarchical clamour. He could only ease the pain by vomiting, before falling into a night­marish sleep.

  In Wales, in lovely Wales, he still had the migraine sometimes, but never so often nor as badly as in Oswestry or Sudan. He was already a bit better for making his escape. Now he thought of little Lizzie, how quick and bright and funny she was . . . and he hoped so hard she’d recover from her accident that tears sprang into his eyes.

  Harry quickly explained to the hotel manager what had hap­­pened. The repairs to the garden wall were straight away aban­doned. In five minutes, Harry was hurriedly washing in his rented cottage only a mile or two from Beddgelert: and when he’d thrown some clean shirts into a suitcase, he was driving his battered, red sports car as fast as he could along the snaking valley road towards Betws-y-Coed. From there it would be less than two hours to Shrewsbury.

  The car was one of three things Harry Clewe had picked up from his year in Sudan. The other two, salmonella poisoning and hepatitis, had gone. But he still had the car. He was Wabenzi.

  Wabenzi! That was the sneering name for the wealthy Sudanese who cruised the streets of Khartoum in their Mercedes-Benz. And not just in Khartoum . . . Although he’d found the country so mystifying and distressing, although he was ill, Harry had stayed for another month after his contract was completed, travelling hundreds of miles west and south of the capital. The poor were as poor as only the sub-Saharan poor could be. Many of the people had nothing: no clothes, no food, no fuel, no shelter. But even in the most desperate of desperate villages, he saw the Wabenzi, who’d somehow managed to accumulate enough cash to buy the most prec
ious symbol of power and influence: the car with the three-pointed star.

  Now he, Harry Clewe, was Wabenzi . . . although he’d gone to Sudan to teach on a meagre local salary in a girls’ school in the nor­thern desert. There’d been nothing to spend his money on. He’d lived in a schoolhouse with five of the Sudanese teachers, sharing their company, their beans and rice, their lamplight. So, at the end of his contract, when he’d called into the shabby, stifling, chaotic office of the ministry of education in Khartoum to negotiate his exit visa and his air ticket home, he’d been handed a money order for his entire year’s salary. Puzzled, embarrassed, guilty, he’d stum­bled out of the office. He’d clutched the slip of paper in his fist and wandered blindly in the blinding sunlight.

  At home again with his parents in the affluent suburbs of Shrewsbury, restored to health by his mother, Harry had bought the Mercedes-Benz at an auction. A convertible sports car, it was uncommonly cheap for a model that would normally have cost a great deal of money. Harry got it for exactly the amount he’d brought back from Sudan. The car had been driven hard and treated badly all over Europe; the man who was trying to sell it at the auction had picked it up in Marseille, where it had stood in sun and sand for months without moving. There was no hood. The white leather seats were cracked and burst. The red bodywork was crazed by years of Mediterranean sunshine. The passenger door, heavily dented in some accident, was jammed permanently shut. The bonnet flapped; the catch didn’t engage properly. The windscreen had a huge starburst of cracks, like a bullet hole, in the top right-hand corner. When the car came snorting into the ring, the air was blue with smoke. Worst of all, as far as its auction prospects were concerned, it had left-hand drive. Nobody bid at all.