The Wretched

By David E. Gates

A teenage boy explores the forbidden areas of his home town and gives life to a new evil that stalks him and his friends and family with vengeance in mind. Whilst grappling with the onset of puberty, he must battle the shape-changing menace which haunts his dreams and knows no bounds in its savagery whilst coming to terms with his own metamorphosis.

A unique horror story, drawing inspiration from local folklore, set in and around Portsmouth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David E. Gates
• Release date: Nov 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370677719

David E. Gates

David E. Gates has published several books and short-stories. His first book, Access Denied, is a true story.  A deeply personal and heart-wrenching account of becoming a father and having to fight the mother and Family Courts to see his daughter and also battles against the incompetence and lies of the Child Support Agency who seem hell-bent on ruining him, emotionally and financially.. It has garnered 100% positive reviews. The Roots of Evil, his first horror novel, is a graphic, violent, intense and gore-laden horror story. His second fictional novel, The Wretched, is an original horror story set in and around Portsmouth. David has made a documentary film about the battlefield memorials in Ypres, Belgium called Ypres – The Battlefield Tours and previously wrote film reviews for Starburst and Samhain magazines and interviewed the likes of Clive Barker, Terry Pratchett, James Herbert and many others. He has also written many short stories and poems, a full-length motion picture screenplay, the screenplay to a short film and in his spare time hosts a rock radio show. Also by David E. Gates: Access Denied The Roots of Evil The Wretched Omonolidee First Words Unzipped: The Mind of a Madman The Projectionist A Planned Demise The Ghost of Clothes Fixing the Faker The Christmas Carol Omonolidee - Morgado, Portugal, 2018. Two Sides of Vegas

Book preview

Foreword

I was born in Portsmouth and grew up in Stamshaw.

I loved to explore the harbours, scrapyards and dockyards that were in and around Portsmouth – sometimes trespassing into those sites to further my own sense of adventure. Not knowing how dangerous the sites we explored could be was part of the innocence of my youth.

Since my early teenage years, I’ve written short stories, film reviews, poems, scripts, novellas and books. It seemed fitting that a story filled with memories of my teenage years, albeit embellished with fictional aspects, should be set in and around the areas I grew up.

Some of the locations are since long-gone. Others have been developed and are unrecognisable as the places I once knew. Some you will recognise, especially if you were in Portsmouth and Southsea during the seventies and eighties.

I hope that as well as a unique horror story, The Wretched will provide you with some pleasant memories of places from a time that already, to me, seems so long ago.

Enjoy.

David E. Gates

The Wretched

Chapter 1

I'll tell you what I know. I remember Ripley saying it in the James Cameron movie Aliens, before she related to the Marines the horrible, terrifying experience she'd gone through years before, as depicted in the prequel, Alien. She'd been woken from a deep hyper sleep on the way back to Earth, from a mining expedition on a remote planet, to investigate a distress signal that was being transmitted from another, and equally remote, ball of rock. Ripley and her crew landed and investigated, and encountered a malevolent force. Something that was unstoppable. Something that was unrelenting and unforgiving.

I can tell you what I know.

I'd lived in Portsmouth my entire life. The city was different back then, during the seventies and eighties. The place was an urban sprawl but there were still places to explore. It had yet to develop into the built-up and student-saturated island that would extinguish the places where a teenager with a sense of adventure could go and explore.

One such place that the ravages of development had yet to reach was the scrapyard. Owned by a local man, by the name of Pounds, the scrapyard was a huge estate of broken, worn-out and derelict vehicles, sitting on plinths and waste ground, waiting for the stripping down and recycling of anything of worth from their innards and exteriors. A dangerous place, if you were aware of the potential for things to go wrong. But for me, a fourteen-year-old pubescent teen, it was a treasure trove of discovery. Not just of the machines that littered the large expanse of land adjacent to Alexandra Park, but of myself and my sexuality.

It was hot. The weather, I mean. It was hotter than it had been all summer and some said for more than ten or twenty summers before that. Some said it was too hot but I never complained when it was like that because I hated the rain so much.

Some people say that when the weather goes barmy, some of the people do too. My father once spoke of lycanthropes.

They're not werewolves, he'd explained. They're people who believe they'll become werewolves, usually during a full moon. It's the moon that drives them mad, he'd said. No-one physically changes into something they're not.

He was right of course, but it didn't stop him shouting Fuck! out of fright when he saw the werewolf attack a helpless victim in Joe Dante's film The Howling.

Some said it was the heat that had kicked it all off.

'The heat touched the lightship', I'd heard someone state.

The lightship was a mysterious boat moored to the makeshift quays that separated the scrapyard from the water of the small harbour that surrounded the barren outcrop.

It was rumoured that the lightship was haunted. Several people, who were generally known as liars or who had problems with drink - something that made their stories even more unbelievable - had told of things living inside the wreck.

According to the rumours, when the lightship was touched by the heat, a creature unlike any other that roamed the earth, in its entire history, was born. The creature would haunt an individual, usually the first to see it, until it had taken its third life. Other rumours suggested it was called upon by witches. The witches called upon it to do their bidding. Further tales said that it was raised up from Hell by ordinary folk to seek revenge or avenge those that had been inadvertently wronged.

Urban legends, probably told originally to try and keep the kids away from the scrapyard, permeated the playground of my school, and Chinese whispers distorted the story in a multitude of ways. They told how it assumed human form until it killed, energy from the kill giving it the power to shape-shift into its true form.

Other stories told how the thing was aided and abetted by another. Some said that was Nathaniel.

Nathaniel, or Nat' as I always referred to him, was a tall, lanky, greasy-haired and dishevelled fellow that roamed the streets like a wandering nomad. I'd never seen anyone with such dirty hair. He always wore worn, dark brown trousers which were loose and baggy from his thighs down but looked overly tight around his hips and waist. They sometimes looked like they might have been women's trousers but no-one would have ever dared to ask Nat' if they were.

Not many people talked to Nat' from what I could gather. He kept himself to himself and rarely spoke. I remembered how he always had a rolled-up cigarette in between the fore and middle fingers of his right hand, the skin on those fingers showing a mustard colour from the effects of the nicotine stick. His nails were always chewed, right back and beyond the quick in some cases, and were black around the edges. His hands looked like the hands of a mechanic who'd only briefly washed his hands. I doubted Nat' ever washed his hands.

He had a gaunt, almost ghostly, appearance and some said that he'd caught that look from her. It was never clear to me if they were referring to the creature or the lightship, as some said he lived on board the derelict boat, and others told stories of how the creature assumed a female form to trap its victims with a sexual invitation.

I don't think there was a single person in our part of town that didn't know, or at least know of, Nat'. I'd seen kids taunt him. One kid, Barry Dryer, fat and always eating chocolate to the point where he'd make himself sick to eat some more, used to goad him. Barry would yell names at him and make faces and hand gestures, to get money that the other kids readily paid out to him to irritate the weirdo and to see The Stare.

The Stare was when you got Nat' to react. You did or said something that caused him to look at you with those dark coloured, un-seeing eyes in a way that turned your blood cold.

When fat Barry called him mother-fucker one day, Nat' just stopped where he was. Everything went quiet. It was like someone had pulled the plug on a radio, the sound dying out gradually, then suddenly becoming extinguished, over a few seconds. He'd turned and looked straight at Barry, his eyes seemingly brighter but the colour in them no more distinguishable despite this. The kids who were there said everything went cold like the wind had suddenly got up, but that there was no breeze. They said everything fell silent, even the birds. Someone compared it to the time when there was an eclipse, only without the relative darkness. No-one had moved. Not until Barry pissed his pants then turned and vomited over his mother's gnome garden. Even then, the only movement was of Barry running into his house.

Nat' had stood motionless until Barry had gone indoors. The children that were gathered outside giggled amongst themselves when they heard Barry's mother cursing him for soiling his trousers and for his obesity. Nat' had turned back, facing the way he'd previously been going and walked slowly away. The kids who'd urged Barry to taunt Nat' fell silent once he'd started moving again and until he'd disappeared from sight. Even then they just said their goodbyes and made their way home.

Barry disappeared two days after that. Some say that Nat' got him. Others said she came for him. A few said that she and Nat' had come for him, in the night, taking the chubby boy away from his home in the middle of the darkest hour, with no complaints from his mother. It had to be agreed that it was strange the fact that Mrs Dryer had shown no grief over the mysterious loss of her son. Maybe she was tired of feeding his unending appetite.

No-one knew for sure though. The kid had just disappeared and parents, mine included, warned of the dangers of antagonising Nat' and threatening that a similar fate might befall those who did. My father suggested there would be significant consequences if I had any part in anything unsavoury relating to the local vagrant.

Nathaniel still wandered around, seemingly in a world of his own. I remember I was the first person, on our estate at least; who discovered that he had a job. I think this surprised a lot of people when I told them. Some said this made him a bit more normal. I wondered if that meant that before this news he was abnormal.

He swept the quays and cleared the rubbish from the moorings down at the Flathouse Docks which stood empty at the narrowest end of the harbour. He'd quite often be seen standing waist deep in the sewer outlets, clearing the wood, stained lumps of polystyrene, plastic bags and other household rubbish from where the filthy sea lapped and foamed lazily at the slips.

It struck me when I came past the dock area, where Nat' worked, on the Wednesday of the third week out of six of the summer holidays, that no-one had any idea where this guy lived. People speculated, suggested he slept on the lightship, but no-one knew for definite. I wanted to know. God knows why but I did.

I'd stayed down at the Clarence Pier fair in Southsea late into the evening and had taken the route that led past the docks on my way home. As I came past the main entrance to the docks, I saw Nat' gathering rubbish that was being thrown onto the quayside by sailors aboard a Russian ship docked at the quayside.

I watched him for about half an hour, from behind the gate, until he went into one of the cabins sat just inside the dock grounds. I waited for a further fifteen minutes, watching the lights of the ships reflect in the water and looking out for him to leave the hut. I was about to go home, boredom more than tiredness causing me to yawn more and more frequently, when I saw him leave the cabin, coming towards the gate I was stood behind. I ran across the road, ducking behind a pile of pallets and oil drums left outside the gates of a metal re-cycling plant and watched him leave the docks.

He closed the huge metal gate behind him and made his way along Quayside Terrace, which led from the docks up to Buckland. Buckland was a small council estate, near to the motorway, which had become a sort of ghetto. The design of the estate had lent itself to turning into such a place. All the houses were grouped tightly together, with a matrix of dark, dank corridors and alleyways running between them here and there.

It was not the sort of place you were encouraged to walk through alone, whether it was day or night. I'd ridden through there on my bike a few times but had kept myself on the main routes. I'd seen people huddled in the alleys, smoking and fighting and God knows what else. I'd seen people lying in the alleys too, in dark pools of what I presumed to be blood, which looked to be surrounding them. Subsequent nights when I'd cycled through the notorious area I'd seen that the bodies were gone but that the stains from the dark pools remained.

It is surprising to me now, why I went through there as often as I did. I started taking different routes after there had been reports, that had made the local news, of the murder of a schoolgirl who'd merely taken a short cut home through the area. They'd caught the guy who'd done it within a couple of days. A junkie who had no recollection of what he'd done but who had the girl's purse and necklace, which he'd macabrely hung around his own neck, in his possession when arrested for shoplifting from a local store.

I'd walked through, just the once, but only when I'd had about half a dozen people with me. It always seemed okay to cycle through there, I'd previously thought. Like I would have a fair chance, speed being my ally, should something happen.

I waited until Nat' was almost at the end of Quayside Terrace before leaving the relative security of the pallets and oil drums, which mostly obscured me from view. It was just as well I did because, when I moved away from there, a huge Doberman Pincher leapt up at me from behind the fence to the Metalworks factory. I stood totally still as the dog hit the fence, which the signs said were electrified, and then stood - unharmed - barking furiously at me from within the factory's grounds. I looked towards the end of the road, in the direction Nat' had gone. He'd disappeared, probably having reached the corner and turned. I told the dog to Fuck off in an absurd show of bravado and walked on, my pace quick as well as my heartbeat.

I reached the end of the road and looked left and right. Nat' was nowhere in sight. He could have gone anywhere. He could have gone down Mile End, a large dual carriageway road which led up towards the main roundabout where the motorway, that was one of the main entrances into Portsmouth, ended. I couldn't see him anywhere on Mile End, though that didn't mean he wasn't there as the road northwards dipped down about three hundred yards away and this could have hidden him from my view.

I surmised he could have gone in the opposite direction and into Landport. Landport was adjacent to Buckland and was almost as dangerous a place to walk through. Not so many dark alleys in Landport but lots of blocks of flats where the troubled and troubling could still secrete themselves.

The only other option was that he could have crossed straight over the southern end of Mile End Road and gone into the Buckland estate. If that was the case, then I wasn't going to follow him. I looked around for another few minutes and then decided to give up my chase. I started on my way home again.

I'd walked down Mile End about fifty yards or so when I saw Nat' coming out of an area of scrubland, covered mainly in nettle and gorse bushes, on a path to the left of the pavement I was on. I thought about turning and running back the way I'd come but I knew he'd probably seen me already, the many streetlights making it almost daylight in this part of town. I decided to keep walking on, hoping he'd change direction so that our paths wouldn't cross.

I