Blackstoke Read online

  Blackstoke

  Rob Parker

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Rob Parker

  Published by RED DOG PRESS 2021

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  Copyright © Rob Parker 2021

  * * *

  Rob Parker has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  * * *

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

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  First Edition

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  Hardback ISBN 978-1-913331-72-6

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-913331-94-8

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-913331-77-1

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  www.reddogpress.co.uk

  Early Praise For Blackstoke

  “It’s been a while since I read any horror but this was such a great way to rediscover of the genre. There’s an unmistakeable sense of tangible terror building right from the start, and when it spills over into action, it literally grabs you by the scruff of the neck for the duration.” —ROBERT SCRAGG

  * * *

  “Rob Parker has created a world that pulls you in from the very first page—the Blackstoke estate becoming your home for the duration. The tension starts high and only ratchets up from there. The band of characters are well drawn, threat is a constant companion and the all-out action of the final half of the book is so brilliantly written that you feel like you are the middle of it, deflecting blows and scrabbling in the darkness. It’s visceral, adrenaline packed and an absolute vital addition to your shelf.” —CHRIS MCDONALD

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  “Rob Parker has tremendous fun preying on our primal fears in this deeply unsettling and dark slice of suburban gothic. An exciting and taut horror novel for the ages. It’ll put you off moving into a new build for life!” —CHRISTOPHER GOLDIE, THE TAPES PODCAST

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  “Bloody hell! Blackstoke is a truly terrifying trip into the dark unknown. Arterial sprays of Death Line, The Descent, The Hills Have Eyes, and The X-Files, all crammed into a creepy half-built housing estate, where bloody hell lurks under the middle class suburban veneer. One to read with the lights on.” —DL MARSHALL

  To all the things that kept me awake in the night as a kid.

  This one’s for you.

  * * *

  And Becky, always.

  Prologue

  He was small. So small.

  As if some higher being had agreed to grant him life—but begrudgingly, using only the scantest of table scraps.

  Months early, he was fully formed yet scaled down almost to the quick, and had spent each of the three days he’d been alive in a Perspex box.

  Alone.

  But suddenly, that changed. The lights around the box took on a far more intrusive hue, flickering wildly, and screaming erupted all around him. He was crying.

  Alone.

  A shadow cast over the box, and it was ripped open with a loud bellow. Hands plunged in to grab him, and he was lifted out urgently. He knew the touch immediately—the speed of movement couldn’t mask the softness and smell he knew innately.

  Not alone anymore.

  He was carried away from the noise, away from the heat, and away from the churning, rasping thickness that suddenly choked the air.

  Down.

  Then down again.

  ‘It’s okay,’ a gentle voice repeated to him as they moved. ‘It’s fine. It’s going to be just fine. You and me,’ she said, and she echoed those words until there was only darkness for them both.

  1

  They had officially moved in the day before, although the process was, somewhat inevitably, ongoing. The possessions and obsessions, the things that make up a family, were all airborne, unsure of where to land. How his family would carry on, now that their lives had been upended and rearranged, was still to be determined.

  It was 7.24 a.m. Peter West stood downstairs in his new house holding a clipboard, like a regiment leader whose squad comprised rows and rows of cardboard cubes. Yesterday had been for the boxes. Today was furniture. Seemed a stupid way round to do it to Peter. But Pam had said they needed the little things first, and there was so much of that that the whole event had to be spread over two days… so they had camped in a cardboard prison overnight—with no furniture. That stuff, on which all this bric-a-brac would sit, was due at half past. Six minutes.

  Peter was forty-two, broad-shouldered but with a softening gut, and he didn’t know, in the harsh precision of the deep-dark-truth, why the hell they’d done this. The real reasons, he meant. He had no trouble recalling what led to it, but now it all seemed so stupid, petty and, worse, clichéd.

  The wife was driving him nuts. The kids were driving him up the wall. He was driving himself round the bend. Too much driving with no end in sight. No destination. Peter had felt, as a family, they were going nowhere. A rut, that’s what they were in. And it had taken him a long time to admit it.

  He walked across the rows of boxes, looking at the mountain of sorting that lay ahead of them. That burden, and fitting it in with his actual nine-to-five workload, had kept him awake all night. That and the slow, steady deflation of their airbed. What kind of family moved house and took a burst airbed with them? His.

  It had all changed with his promotion—well, it was supposed to have changed. His wage had doubled in an instant, a reward for his loyalty to Wilson PR, plucking him from middle-management in a move offering that thing all nine-to-fivers crave: upward mobility.

  He did
n’t know that would bring its own problems and expectations. Every day after his new wage had been revealed, he felt like his wife, Pam, looked at him funny, as if to say ‘I know what you’re earning and you expect us to keep on living here?’.’ He got sick of it very quickly, and made an offer on a house in the slick new housing development a few miles away. The Blackstoke Estate, from development titans Community Developments, or COMUDEV as they were otherwise known, which promised erstwhile unattainable luxury at accessible prices. Swanky and pretentious, but on a budget—they would be entry-level arseholes.

  When he’d been promoted, the estate wasn’t even built. The land was mired in construction, the diggers from COMUDEV only just breaking ground. That was two years ago. Meanwhile, there had been plenty of slaps on the back and suggestions that Peter was destined for ‘big things’. He went with it. The house, at that time, was out of their price range, but he could sort the deposit out immediately, so he decided not to wait. That distant date of completion, tentatively marked for a couple of years into the future, was when Peter had expected his financial status to have leapt forward again. He’d believed his own hype.

  It didn’t pan out that way. His career, while still better paid, was in stasis again. And suddenly the house was ready, and he felt he couldn’t let his family down. Too much talk of their new life had been aired and taken root. He had to take an eye-watering mortgage and go with it.

  He poked open the corner of one of the top boxes with his pen to see what was inside, help him get a flavour for the work to come. It was chock full of Beanie Babies. Over a hundred of them. Why, in all hell, had they needed to bring this garbage with them? They were already dusty through years of neglect, and would only gather more here.

  He turned away, and took in his new home.

  The house itself was nice. Three stories high, with six bedrooms. They’d need all that space, because standing here looking at the mass of stuff they’d brought with them, at least three of those bedrooms would end up as junk rooms.

  The bottom floor was a large open wraparound space, encircling the central column of the house in which the stairs stood guard. It was, aside from the ordered boxes in the living room, tastefully bare, with white walls and polished wood floors. Despite Peter’s concerns, he thought it all looked rather good.

  He kept finding himself doing exactly this. Standing there, taking in their new surroundings, musing interminably on the weight, practicality, and sanity of the decision they’d made. He was scared. Yes, it was grand, but, with the giant mortgage looming over them like a jittery nightclub bouncer, they were one false move away from it all going to hell in a handbasket.

  He was sure people would look at the house with envy. He thought Pam still did, even though they now lived in it.

  Pam.

  He’d already seen her once this morning, and that’s how he’d ended up downstairs. They’d had a frank and fraught discussion about toothbrush placement in their plush private bathroom, just off the master suite. Peter couldn’t give a perfect shit about where he kept his sodding toothbrush, but to his wife, it had proven an apparent dealbreaker. She said they should start as they meant to go on, putting things in their rightful place until the act became habit as opposed to chore.

  And so it turned out, given there were now two sinks in their bathroom, that he was to use one and she the other. His sink had been decreed, without his consent, to be the one furthest from the door, deepest into the bathroom.

  Peter knew it was a small thing, and that he should just forget about it. It was a tiny thing, a pinprick, but a pinprick that belied so much more. That solitary foot of extra bathroom tiles he had to walk each morning and night, well, that represented her selfishness—her innate value of her convenience above his—and in his acknowledged pettiness at assuming this, he had become aware their relationship had stagnated.

  Peter was already finding it hard not to see that overpriced foot of hideously on-trend Azteca bathroom tile as a metaphor for not just the move, but their marriage as a whole. Such was their nit-picking and bickering, he knew that it would take considerable effort not to let that pinprick rip into a huge gushing wound. And that it would be the first of many as they settled into their new lives. He didn’t want it to be like this.

  He checked his watch. Seven thirty. He wondered if they’d called for directions, and checked his phone but alas, as expected, there was no reception. COMUDEV had indeed been great at getting them in here so quick, but they hadn’t been so great at making sure the mobile phone mast was up.

  He walked a circle around the central column of stairs, taking in every area, from kitchen to living room, to dining space, to reception, right back around to the entrance hall where he’d started, and as he arrived back to the faux marble tiles, his foot caught the corner of one of the boxes stacked by the stairs.

  ‘Jesus,’ he winced, hopping on his undamaged foot, and crunching down on the bottom step. ‘Damn boxes.’

  ‘It’s so pathetic, the way you blame other things for your ineptitude. You walked into the box,’ said a female voice he recognised immediately. He had kind of hoped the tone it was laced with wasn’t going to move house with them.

  ‘That doesn’t stop it from hurting,’ said Peter, stretching out his toes. Nothing broken, he’d be fine in a minute. He caught Alice walk straight past him down the stairs without pausing to say hello or see if he was alright.

  ‘It’s called resistentialism,’ she said, and all he could see were those jogging pants she’d begged for—Superdry emblazoned up the leg in vivid pink on navy—as she strutted around the corner to the kitchen, her voice carrying as she went. ‘The belief that inanimate objects are hostile to humans.’

  ‘What about the belief that teenage daughters are hostile to their fathers? You have a fancy name for that?’ he replied.

  And with that, the removal van arrived outside with a loud sigh of exhaust. That would be all the new furniture he’d been forced to buy. They just couldn’t take their exhausted old furniture to their smart new home. Pam had made that clear. But he didn’t actually know what kind of furniture it was. He hadn’t picked it.

  He opened the front door to the glimmering early November morning, as the removal van started reversing up their four-car drive, only half of which was occupied by the West’s measly two vehicles.

  Their corner of the estate was the first finished, and therefore the first deemed habitable. There were five houses here on the northeast corner of a development that would eventually boast two hundred properties in total, each house with its own grandstanding name on its own regal-sounding street. Peter West and his family lived in Iron Rise on Broadoak Avenue, a phrase that he would no doubt eventually take much delight in recounting to future visitors.

  Broadoak ended with a cul-de-sac in which Iron Rise sat, with another even grander home opposite across a circle of tarmac, after intersecting with Lance Drive, which was a very bold name for a tiny, twenty-yard street that had a single much smaller house on it. Two other houses occupied the same side of the street as Iron Rise, and all five in this little pocket were occupied.

  Peter just hoped that the people living in those other houses were as normal and functional as his family pretended to be.

  2

  Pam heard the van from the master bedroom as she stood working out whether to hang her dresses in order of colour, or occasion. What frustrated her was that it would organise itself in the end, the least worn pushed further back on the rail to the far end in a little squad of flat, dusty relics, while the near end would be where she put the favourites, flustered, fresh from the drier.

  No, she thought. This would be a fresh start, in more ways than one. She brushed a lock of deep, brown hair from her forehead, and tucked it behind her ear like a builder would a pencil.

  ‘Your furniture’s here!’ shouted Peter from downstairs. She rolled her eyes, unable to stop herself from doing it, just like he had been unable to resist having a little dig about the furni
ture. That damn furniture. If only he had given the slightest shit about it, they could be excited together. No, instead, Peter had just given her some budgets, relating to finance deals she wasn’t sure he could afford, and had told her to choose. So, like the good little wife, she had done exactly that, and tried to pick the ones that wouldn’t offend him too much, and stuck to the financial rules rigorously.

  Whatever happened, she was sure to have got it wrong. Just like the chat about sinks earlier that morning. She had weighed up the pros and cons of the two sinks for both parties, and noticed that the second sink was right next to the electric shaver point. She suggested Peter had that one, simply because he actually had an electric shaver. He didn’t see it that way, and another petty argument had broiled out of nothing. At least she knew she’d tried.