Today we have an excerpt from Matt Hill‘s new “visceral… moss-coated horror” novel, Lamb, which is due out next month. Due to be published by Dead Ink Books, here’s the synopsis:
‘It’s inside every parent to want to carry their child’s terror. It’s the thing they never tell you about. Watching your child grow up, watching your child learn to suffer…’
When lorry driver Dougie Alport carries out a deadly attack on his employer’s head office, the reverberations of his actions unleash a grief in his wife Maureen that threatens to reveal the secret she has spent years hiding from their son, Boyd. Moving north to start again is Maureen’s best response. But as the walls begin to throb with mould and his mother slips from his grasp, Boyd decides to flee, finding solace with a new friend at the landfill site on the edge of town. Here, a startling discovery upends Boyd’s new life and forces him into a reckoning with his mother, her past, and his future.
A visceral story of collective memory and moss-coated horror, Lamb asks us how far we’d go to protect those we love, and how intensely we are bound to those who have come before us.
And now, on with the excerpt…!
*
Boyd stood numbly between a supine Tony and the bale of moss. It felt physically impossible to even glance at the man, who was whining thinly through his nostrils, so instead he regarded the moss, alert to an immediate danger passing, a kind of relief, everything in flux. He had some sense that an unfixable crack had opened in the world, and that he was falling through it. The acid fear had receded, but a dull pain radiated from his stomach, down his legs and up around his temples. Behind this thrummed a voice, soft yet insistent, that kept telling him to kill himself. Dissociation: an image of his own body, puffy and grey. Who’d even notice? Who’d ever know?
He waited there, like that, for a long time. Eventually he gave in to curiosity and poked the block with his foot. It was definitely moss – it had the texture, that anxious, springy movement. And it had begun to ooze a thick liquid. He experienced both a strange compulsion to eat it, and a powerful disgust, as if staying so close might poison him.
At last he found his voice and called out for Maureen, even as his gut told him she was gone. It was a deep knowing, in fact, which came with its own lightness – a faint recognition that, untethered from her, he could at least drift on. The house was too quiet, and slowly his perspective shifted. This wasn’t his fault. He went to the staircase and knelt by Tony’s head. There were grubby marks in the carpet where Tony and the moss-block had come down.
‘Tony,’ he said in a halting voice. ‘Can you hear me?’
If Tony could, he wasn’t in a state to reply. The blood behind his ear was congealing, and the sticky brown material on his neck, which up close had a texture like old wallpaper, was also in his hair. Boyd touched the man’s cheek. The skin was warm. His ribcage rose and fell. There was a string of saliva from the corner of Tony’s mouth, in which Boyd saw movement, particle life. A hot wave of nausea passed over him. He remembered to breathe. He remembered he shouldn’t move the man, lest he worsen an injury. If nothing else, he could see that Tony, despite his position – the feet and legs still partway up the stairs – was comfortable enough, head cushioned by Maureen’s coat.
Before he went upstairs, Boyd barricaded the front and back doors with kitchen chairs. He’d already lost any sense of how long he might have until the boy returned with friends.
‘Gnnngh,’ Tony said, as Boyd stepped over him. ‘Gnnnngh…’
Boyd took the stairs slowly, as though each were rotten. Pain flashed in the cartilage between his ribs, and his legs felt like someone else’s. Tony had been right: the smell of the house changed halfway up. Sharp pine gave way to mud and leather, a rich, bitumen stench; on the top landing, a foul sweetness. The damp had spread quickly; now the entire landing wall crawled with it, and it was making a start down the stairs. In one corner, the wallpaper had peeled away to expose slimy plasterboard. There were fibres of moss all over the carpet.
We know what your mam is—
Boyd went to his room first. It was empty, exactly as he’d left it that morning. Duvet in a pile, yesterday’s socks in a ball. In Maureen’s bedroom, there were clothes neatly folded on the bed. The suitcase was still on the floor, but it was open. The main compartment was packed with comfy sweatshirts and bottles of sun cream. The netted pocket held a pair of compression socks, and several of the plain pharmacy boxes he’d seen Maureen with before. To one side of the suitcase – placed, rather than discarded – was the pink fantasy novel, a sheaf of paper tucked inside its cover. Boyd stooped to pick it up, cradling his belly. A list of partial phone numbers, a receipt for rent, and a bank statement showing weekly deposits from an anonymised account.
Boyd pulled back Maureen’s bedcovers. A sheen of sweat and moisturising oil, Red’s moulted fur. Scattered on the far side were various used tissues, some bloody, the rest blackened by Maureen’s efforts to clean the walls.
She wasn’t in the cupboards, or behind the curtains, or under the bed. But when he turned to leave again, there were three severed heads hanging from the back of the door.
Brunette. Silver. Crimson.
Boyd rubbed his face. The fear again. He caught himself. They weren’t heads – they were wigs on hooks. He went to them, wiping his nose down his sleeve. Each wig was a simple shoulder-length bob, shorter than Maureen’s natural style. He touched the brunette wig, knowing it was the same one she’d been wearing that morning. The hair felt real, expensive. He took the wig from its peg and sat on the stool by his mother’s dresser. All those times he’d watched her getting ready in the Watford house. This same stool. The same mirror. The same orange-backed brush, whose collected hair he occasionally found in the toilet bowl. He could see her, if he really looked: casually dressing and doing her make-up. And when he held the wig to his forehead, he almost became her. The same brow, the downturned mouth, the dimpled cheek. He put the wig on the dresser and opened the middle drawer. A collection of make-up pens, pads and brushes. Exactly the same products in the right-hand drawer, and again in the left.
The same items, arranged in the same way. A make-up set for each of the wigs. A way to lighten or darken her features to suit.
Guilt rose, now. He was intruding, betraying what remained of their bond. At the same time, a mystery had unlocked itself. Maureen had created a way to become three other people, each a stranger to him. More of a stranger, that is, than she’d already become.
Which led Boyd to another, bigger question: who knew these other Maureens?
He thought of the woman in the anorak.
The boy who’d been downstairs.
This time he knew he was going to be sick for real. He rushed to the bathroom. The tarpaulin curtain was back, bundled into the tub. A starchy substance – possibly sun cream – had clotted in its folds. The tiles were slick with condensation. He went to his knees and noticed a mark on the toilet cistern, impressions of unnaturally long fingers. Even the toilet contained threads of the moss. His throat tightened. He retched. The wave passed once more.
*
Matt Hill’s Lamb is due to be published by Dead Ink Books on October 12th, in the UK.
Civilian Reader 