The Walk: And other stories

By Angelo Marcos

"...a thrilling collection of twisted crime stories, all focusing on the darker side of human nature... Well-paced and expertly written, with just the right amount of tension and excitement running throughout." – Parkiaki newspaper
---------- 
From Angelo Marcos, author of psychological thrillers ‘The Artist’ and ‘Sleep No More’, comes a collection of five thrilling short stories. 
Each tale explores the sinister side of human nature, as well as the lengths to which people will go to satisfy their darkest impulses. 

Mayan Ruins 
The captain of a Caribbean party boat learns that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. 

Accident and Emergency 
Even for a trained paramedic, saving lives isn’t easy. Taking them, on the other hand… 

Child’s Play 
A children’s’ playground. A tragic demise. But does the boy’s death mark the end of something, or the beginning? 

The Walk 
A man’s journey home through the streets of London takes a sinister turn after an encounter with a stranger. 

The Great Outdoors 
Hiking through the forest after losing sight of his campsite, one man suspects he is not as alone as he had first thought. 

“Don’t fear what is certain. Fear what is possible...” 
----------

PLEASE NOTE: This is a collection of 5 short stories and so is not the size of a full-length novel. It is around half the size of a full-length novel.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Angelo Marcos
• Release date: Jun 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781513033808

Book preview

Mayan Ruins

1.

Paul squinted out across the glistening Caribbean sea, staring into the eternity stretching beyond.  He felt the gentle rising and falling of his boat beneath him, as the vast expanse of water moved as a single unit to rock him like a mother does her baby. 

A scattering of birds swooped and soared overhead, scanning land and sea for an easy meal.

He leaned back and turned his face up to the sky, closing his eyes and allowing the cool evening breeze to soothe his tired muscles.  Moments of peace like this were rare, and he’d learned to grasp the opportunity when he could.

The wind direction changed slightly, carrying with it a bad odour as if prompting Paul that he hadn’t quite finished his work for the day.

He stood up on tired legs, picked up his neoprene floor squeegee and resumed cleaning the deck.

Walking over to the source of the smell, he pushed the last of the vomit off the large, sweeping bow and into the glistening water, watching as the ugly mess dissolved into the salty depths.  He stood for a while, holding onto the rail with his free hand – the captain of the ship – and watched as all traces of the mess vanished before his eyes.  The sea was the great cleanser.  Over a long enough time period, everything dissolved.

His boat – an old passenger party vessel that had, to put it mildly, seen better days - bobbed gently on the water, a stone’s throw from the beauty of the ruins at Tulum.  The stones and eroded structures of the great walled city perched majestically atop cliffs that rose twelve metres above sea level.  It was one of the most-visited archaeological sites in Mexico, and towered over a beach generally regarded as one of the best in the entire Riviera Maya, if not the world.  From Paul’s vantage point, he could see why.  The white sands and crystal blue water looked like a painting, an artist’s rendering of the perfect shoreline rather than an actual, physical location. 

Paul often wished he ran cruises around this part of Mexico, rather than boat parties in the circus that was Cancun.  Unfortunately, the vast majority of his income came from that particular circus, and the Spring Breakers that flocked there had no desire to travel two hours away from their hotel merely to get on a boat.

The fluorescent vomit of the overzealous partygoers didn’t bother him that much today for some reason, and he didn’t even flinch when cleaning up the sticky mass of rubbish he’d found in the ridge along the gunwale.  It was a colourful mishmash of cigarette butts and general detritus, stuck together with a concoction of lipstick, alcopops, and who knew what else.

Gunwale, he thought, and smiled to himself.

A year ago he hadn’t known the word existed, let alone what it meant.  Now he knew all the nautical terms, and could even tie a mean mooring hitch.

He stretched his arms up to the sky and arched his back in an attempt to loosen his stiff muscles.  As he did so, he looked again toward the shore, and noticed the blurred outlines of blue signs and what looked like a cordon stretching along a section of the beach.  It had been closed off to protect the nesting turtles, he guessed.  It was April, and so still a month before nesting season officially began, but they’d probably put up the signs early to stop overexcited, drunk tourists from clambering onto the beach and falling all over the poor unsuspecting wildlife.  It was a good thing too, otherwise they’d all go there instead of clambering onto his boat party and paying him for the privilege.

Not that it mattered too much if he had a bad season.  His wife Clara was the successful one, after all.  It was her career which had brought them here, her employer who had provided the luxury villa in which they resided.  Facts which she reminded him of with malicious regularity, ensuring she pronounced it ‘The Villa’, as if it required capital letters. She was the youngest hotel manager of the Akin Lakuna, the top – and probably most expensive – hotel in the entire Yucatán Peninsula.  It was more a small village than a hotel, spread across acres of both wild jungle and pristine beach.  He’d seen an aerial shot of it once, and decided it looked like some alien arachnoid creature, whose legs stretched territorially from its fat, overfed body, as if crushing the previously-unspoilt beauty below it.  Unfortunately he’d verbalised that particular remark while out at dinner with Clara and her hotel cronies.  It hadn’t gone down well with any of them, not least with her.  She’d been even more unbearable than usual that night.  After ensuring the last guest was out of the villa – The Villa - and so out of earshot, she’d aimed her insults with surgical precision so as to ensure her victim didn’t die too quickly.  Death by a thousand cuts. 

She’d made him sleep in the spare bedroom – which wasn’t a problem as they had three to choose from, all with their own television, air conditioning and en suite bathrooms.  He’d slowly become addicted to sleeping pills, as a way of shutting out the world for a few hours, so a couple of those little white tablets and he could sleep anywhere.

Not that she didn’t continue making sure he kept on paying for his comment in other ways, especially in the midst of some fight or other when she really wanted to goad him.  No matter the specific words she used, the subtext was always clear.  If it wasn’t for them – for her – he would be nowhere and he would have nothing. 

The shame washed over him even now, miles away from Clara and her cruel barbs.  The emotion felt out of place as he drifted in the Caribbean sea.  An unwanted interloper, on his own boat no less.  He knew her stock response to that – Whose boat?  I don’t remember you making many payments recently... 

Reflexively, he turned round and looked towards the women’s toilet on the deck behind him, checking that the thick padlock and ‘out of order’ sign were still in place.  It didn’t look like any of the partygoers had tried to get in.  And if they had, he was sure he would have known about it by now.

Satisfied that nothing had been tampered with, he went over the deck one last time until the squeegee’s neoprene head squeaked loudly, then walked towards the galley.

2.

The idea for a party boat had been his, even if the money to fund it had come from Clara.  He’d always wanted to own a bar or a nightclub, always imagined himself standing above the crowds and looking down on them rather than being in the midst of things.  He was the same in business – the one who made things happen, not the cattle below.  Even now, he welcomed the guests onto the boat, took them out onto the water, cranked up the music, brought out the alcohol and then left them to it.  Most of them just wanted to get wasted over spring break and go back with stories to tell anyway – what was he going to add to that?  Stories about nesting turtles and Mayan ruins?  He’d get laughed off his own boat.

He put the squeegee into the cupboard in the galley, retrieved the broom and other cleaning products, and began sweeping the dancefloor area.  The capacity of the boat was around one hundred people, one-twenty at a push, and it always amazed him how much mess they could make.  The exterior of the boat wasn’t the main problem, it was the interior that was the hardest to clean.  The deck was obviously waterproof, so everything could be either hosed or sloshed straight into the sea.  It wasn’t the most environmentally-friendly way of doing things, but to be fair most of the detritus was organic – surely something in the sea would find alcopop vomit nutritious.  And as for the other fluids he sometimes found, the less he thought about those the better.

The dancefloor annoyed him the most.  The boat’s first owner had obviously thought that light-coloured wood was the way to go, but had then promptly got bored and stopped polishing and treating it.  This meant there were a million little grooves and cracks which had absorbed years of moisture of all types.  Add to that Paul’s current clientele and their inability to hold a bottle or glass for longer than thirty seconds without dropping it, and the resulting floor resembled warped pastry more than hard wood. 

Not that he hadn’t wanted to replace the floor, even once summoning the courage and swallowing the requisite pride to ask her for the money.  That had been a short-and-sour conversation, mainly involving humourless laughter and cruel jokes about Paul’s ‘soft wood’.  It always astonished him how she could switch on the charm in an instant with the hotel guests and her colleagues.  It was as though she absorbed the insults and stress of her job throughout the day, in order to fuel up and fire a barrage of repressed anger at him when she got back to ‘The Villa’.  Some people went to the gym to relieve stress, Clara got married.

He knew that relationships always look different from the inside, and that only the people in them ever know the whole story – and sometimes even they aren’t completely sure.  But their marriage was so obviously loveless, he was sure that others could see that from the outside too.  They’d never had children either, although they’d tried unsuccessfully at one time.  It was if their bodies knew what they hadn’t yet realised – that the marriage was doomed to fail, why drag innocent children into the inevitable inferno? 

He sometimes wondered why she stayed with him – he knew why he stayed with her, he had nowhere else to go.  Maybe it made her feel superior, being with someone she detested and outclassed in so many ways.  She’d initially been attracted to his money, he knew that.  He had been – maybe still was – a shrewd enough businessman to know a gold-digging opportunist when he saw one.  At the time he didn’t care, all he saw was the flawless skin, the Marilyn pout, the incredible body that other women would kill to have.  The first time they met, he wanted her.  It wasn’t love, of course, he didn’t even know if it was anything as pseudo-romantic as lust.  He just knew he wanted her.  He’d always been a predator in business, and decided on the spot to extend the approach to his love life.  He pursued her aggressively, and she dutifully played the role of the coquettish virgin all the way.  It was only months after the wedding that he realised just how much of an act she had been putting on.  An act she played to the hilt in her career, which rapidly eclipsed his own.

Once his redundancy hit – really hit, with the Porsche having