BLOOD MOON: A Novella and Eight Short Stories

By Garry Kilworth

Blood Moon: a novella and eight standalone short stories from 'Arguably the finest writer of short fiction today, in any genre' (New Scientist).

 

Scar, a lone grey wolf wandering the North Canadian plains, harbours a strange and burdensome secret which caused him to be banished from his pack. Now he must hide his grotesque affliction for as long as possible in the hope that he will find a new pack. He knows that as soon as it's discovered he will either be torn to pieces or ostracised again, yet his one hope of redemption is that this life-long burden might actually become a weapon to use against the ultimate enemy of all wolves.

 

Also included in this volume: eight short stories of science fiction and fantasy, seven of which have never before been published.

• Language: English
• Publisher: infinity plus
• Release date: Mar 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781386426608

Book preview

Contents

Introduction by Robert Holdstock

Foreword

Blood Moon

The Clockwork Man

The Hollow Man

Fata Morgana

Two Dead Men

Pointe Shoe

Dancing Bears

Lirpaloof Island

The Last Martians

Acknowledgements

Some reviews of Garry Kilworth’s books

Garry Kilworth is arguably the finest writer of short fiction today, in any genre. (New Scientist)

His characters are strong and the sense of place he creates is immediate. (Sunday Times on In Solitary)

The Songbirds Of Pain is excellently crafted. Kilworth is a master of his trade. (Punch)

A convincing display of fine talent. (The Times on A Theatre Of Timesmiths)

A masterpiece of balanced and enigmatic storytelling ...Kilworth has mastered the form. (Times Literary Supplement on In The Country Of Tattooed Men)

A subtle, poetic novel about the power of place – in this case the South Arabian Deserts – and the lure of myth. It haunted me long after it ended. (City Limits on Spiral Winds)

Kilworth is one of the most significant writers in the English language. (Fear on Cloudrock)

To Anna Tambour, fellow miner in the measureless caverns of ideas.

Introduction

by Robert Holdstock

[This introduction, in slightly different form, first appeared in Garry’s collection Hogfoot Right and Birdhands.]

If it’s true that the origins of a writer’s ideas, and the nature of the creative process, are subjects of interest to readers, then you could do no better than to follow Garry Kilworth around for a day or two, monitoring his every blink and every glance. Garry comes up with ideas all the time. He is a walking, breathing, living ideas factory. Once you know the man you can tell the precise moment at which the story has crystallised. The moment of creativity is transparent. Whether talking or walking, he suddenly goes vague, his eyes narrow and his focus becomes distant. He leans back, or looks away, and slowly raises a cigarette to his lips, inhaling thoughtfully. (Although now that he’s given up smoking he just raises two fingers and makes odd little puffing sounds.) I’ve seen this happen a daunting number of times (daunting because I speak as a writer who has had nine short story ideas in as many years, whereas Garry gets that many while changing his socks). The most vivid and infuriating example of this was when he wandered away from the table after lunch at my house. I found him in the kitchen staring through the window at the mature vine which sprawls over the garden wall. I crept up behind him and tried to follow his gaze, to see what was, so to speak, stimulating his creative juices. It seemed to be a bunch of grapes.

Getting an idea, are we? I asked sourly.

Yep, he replied distractedly.

After several moments he had said no more and I became a little annoyed. They’re my grapes, so I demand a share of the notion.

He laughed in that highly amused fashion of his, then said, It’s just a question of seeing the ghosts, and went back to join the company.

Ghosts in a bunch of grapes?

The story became On the Watchtower at Plataea in which time travellers find themselves stuck in one of the Greek City States, during the Spartan Wars. He had the temerity to offer it to me for one of my anthologies. I bought it at once and scoured it for grapes. There were no grapes. And I still don’t know how the creative process in Garry works. (But I’ve stared through that window for hours, now, getting ideas for my novel Vine on the Wall.)

~

An idea, of course, is nothing unless it is enriched by the experience of the author, and here too Garry holds a hand of trump cards. He is the most travelled man I know, and his novels and short stories are more often than not set against the exotic backgrounds of the countries in which he worked, first with the RAF and then with Cable and Wireless. His first novel, In Solitary, is an alien occupation novel set in Polynesia; the examination of the island societies, with fragile boats and complex rituals, completely transform what could so easily be a very traditional piece of science fiction. Split Second—a marvellously evocative piece of fiction—is set on Cyprus: a modern boy’s mind becomes trapped in the mind of a child living in Cyprus in prehistoric times. Spiral Winds and Standing on Shamsan draw upon Garry’s experiences in Aden during the crisis years of the mid-sixties. Spiral Winds is set in the Yemen, and particularly in the desert-lands where TE Lawrence lived and became legendary. The haunting feel of the desert, the sense of place and people is exhilaratingly drawn; and the menace too. Because here is personal experience informing the plot of a novel of the supernatural: as a child, Garry was lost in that desert for several days. Heat radiates off the page. The images shimmer like mirages. It is a favourite book of mine.

~

Perhaps the landscape that features most dramatically and most powerfully in Garry’s work, however, is that of East Anglia, where his family have lived for generations. It is in many places a bleak and flat land, endlessly windy, an area of marshes, stark copses, grey rivers and muddy dikes. It is a place, too, filled with a sense of magic. Witchcraft still flourishes. The churches are grey and silent; one, at Canewdon (King Canute’s Fortress), looks out across the scene of the battle where Canute defeated Edmund Ironside in a terrible and bloody battle in 1016 AD. Garry lived across the river from that place, where a second church marks Ashingdon (The Fortress on the Hill of Ash Trees). Two ancient strongholds, now surmounted by cold and eerie churches. I love the area, but not with the same passion as Garry. When you walk with him across this landscape he radiates belonging, and deep- rootedness, and memory.

East Anglian marshland flows in him. His sense of the place and its people, many of whom are long gone but who remain present in the dialect and in the faces and in the genes, is powerful indeed.

~

This sense of people and place, this feeling of belonging, of the intimate connection between folk and earth, resonates in all of Garry’s fiction that is set on Planet Earth (perhaps less so in his alien environment stories where different joys of description and feeling abound), but that resonance is perhaps most effective in Witchwater Country and in his evocative and haunting novel of foxes, Hunter’s Moon, in which he explores the mythological and belief systems of these lovely animals.

Witchwater Country is simply a delight. It is set in 1952, in and around the saltmarshes of Essex, where a boy and his friends set out in search of legendary creatures called waterwitches. 1952 was a year of elemental forces in that part of England: fire, wind, and then terrible flooding, when the sea wall burst. Hundreds died, thousands were made homeless. Garry’s family lived through it, and though to read Witchwater Country is to read a thoroughly ripping yarn, it is also to read a great deal about the author himself, and he freely acknowledges this.

I make no apology for the personal tone of this introduction. If you know a writer well, if you’ve been involved with the novels as they’re talked about, enthused about, worried at, finished and launched, there is a feeling of belonging

I’ve known Garry since 1975. I still cheer every time he tells me that his first published story (Let’s Go to Golgotha) has been translated into yet another language (on last count I think it’s up to twenty, plus a play version, and the story is taught in schools!). He’s a poet too, with a small press publication Tree Messiah to his name. And he writes extensively for younger readers.

But for all the time I’ve known him, he’s been talked about most for his short stories, in which his wide experience of Planet Earth, his versatility, his secret liaisons with ghosts, his acute sense of the odd and wonderful in societies, and his skill at that most difficult and essential of trades, storytelling, fuses and flourishes. He is a writer who, through all, keeps a refreshing sense of perspective on his talent. He’s cautious, he’s persistent, like the Master and his hound in his poem Thorns:

The hawthorns knit across my path

and rake my legs, and yet my hound

runs through their nets without a scratch—

this is the way with bold and cautious movers.

Robert Holdstock

Foreword

A long time ago, back in the 1980s, I wrote a novel called Hunter’s Moon. It was about the life of a vixen named O-ha and its sales success allowed me to give up my day job and become a professional writer. Naturally, because the book went well, I tried to repeat this animal fantasy with a novel about wolves. Midnight’s Sun was in its way a deeper and more incisive novel, but the sales did not equal those of its predecessor. I was told by marketing that the probable reason for this was while many people liked foxes they were wary of wolves. This suggestion has stuck with me for 30 years and my thoughts were, if people find the nature of wolves untrustworthy and unloving, then a novel in which the anti-hero is a wolf with a strange affliction, a supernatural flaw, might well satisfy a reading public voracious for animal fantasies. So here it is, along with a clutch of short stories: science fiction, fantasy and horror tales.

‘The Last Martians’, ‘Pointe Shoe’ and ‘Dancing Bears’ are most definitely in the category of science fiction.

‘The Clockwork Man’ and ‘The Hollow Man’ are probably affiliated members of the science fiction genre. They both deal with mechanical heroes, albeit in an historical setting, though in a more fantastical way than pure sf.

‘Fata Morgana’ has one foot in each camp: science fiction and fantasy. Take your pick as to which you believe it favours.

‘Two Dead Men’ and ‘Lirpaloof Island’ are horror stories in the old-fashioned sense.

The main story, Blood Moon, is the only novella I have written on my own. I did a collaboration with that wonderful writer and great friend Robert Holdstock, entitled The Ragthorn, which won prizes and wonderful reviews, but it was only half mine. Here, after 73 novels is my full contribution to the world of novellas.

Garry Kilworth, 2021

Blood Moon

One

A weak, early-morning sun was sketching charcoal shadows of jack pine trees on rocky ground. The sky above had been painted with streaks of stratus cloud using lazy brushstrokes. The landscape between was empty of all but a single bedraggled creature, a carnivore whose eyes and nose were tuned to the possibility of any prey larger than a rodent.

This carnivore was a grey wolf, with the thick-furred coat that keeps all grey wolves warm in the freezing winters of a high northern climate. He was a male with strong markings. Much of his coat was the grey of a sunless cloudy sky. This was streaked with darker slate-coloured hues and with the odd splash of white here and there. There was a black ruff around his neck and black on the tips of his ears. The two mesmerising but unreadable almond eyes slanted in towards his muzzle. At the other end of this powerful beast was a huge, bushy white-tipped tail. He was, on the outside, a normal wolf.

He was now scouring the landscape for food.

‘I will stand. I will walk. I will stay strong.’

The lone grey wolf, Scar, kept repeating this mantra to keep himself from dropping to the ground and staying there until death overcame him. He told himself it was lucky that spring had come early to the land, although there was still snow patching the landscape. He had travelled a long way from his former home farther north and was now on a wide plain fringed by mountains and forests. Had the ice and snows still been gripping the earth with frozen claws, he might not have survived the journey. It was highly likely he would not have managed crossing the bleak fastness that overshadowed the plains. He was a wolf on his own with no other wolves to help. Scar was aware that he needed a pack to hunt with and to protect him. So far he had managed to keep alive with small rodents, worms and other creatures closer to the soil.

Scar’s stomach, though, felt it was empty of all but gravel.

Apart from having to contend with permafrost ground and scarcity of game, Scar had had to be vigilant in avoiding savage and stronger enemies. The grizzlies and black bears were only just beginning to wake up after their winter sleep, but cougars were around all year and though they would not attack simply because he was a wolf, they were fierce in protecting their territory. And there would be no help for him if he accidentally stumbled upon their cubs.

So, he had to find a pack, a clan, to take him in.

‘There has to be at least one pack on this wide plain,’ he told himself. ‘Maybe, even two. It shouldn’t be hard to find them.’

He knew there was a problem with that. Packs were often made up completely of family. The leading pair, the top she-wolf and her mate, breed their own family pack. Strangers have great trouble in being trusted to join such a group. Usually they are driven off without sympathy or a second thought. Scar had to be very careful he did not get injured in any such situation. If he suffered a wound and was left on his own, he was surely a dead grey wolf. One who would take a personal and alarming secret to the grave. A tomb which in the case of wild animals simply consisted of an exposed rotting carcass lying under the great vault of the open sky, left for carrion to pick at the dried, putrid flesh.

I will survive, he told himself. I will do my utmost.

He trotted forth over the burgeoning grassland, crossing streams and at one point a river, seeking the scent of any grey wolf pack. At noon that day he caught such a scent on the breeze and turned to head in the direction of its source. It led him to the bank of the river he had crossed earlier and over the water he could see a pack drinking in the shallows. One or two individuals looked up and then signalled to their leading she-wolf, who stared at Scar from a distance. Then she called and gestured before Scar could enter the water to swim across.

‘Stay on that side,’ she snarled. ‘There’s nothing for you here.’

‘I could help in the hunt,’ Scar called. ‘I’m strong and able.’

He realised as soon as he said it that it sounded like pleading and if there was one trait that wolves hate, it’s self- pity.

‘We don’t need any help. If you value your hide, you’ll leave quickly and not look back. We don’t take to strays.’

It was useless. She was a big female and appeared to be as unfeeling as any grey she-wolf leading a large pack. He turned and ran away as fast as his five-toed front feet would carry him. He was fast, faster than most other four-footed creatures, but in this case he might be chased by his own kind, just as quick, just as athletic. Once he felt he was out