The Strangeness

By David Rees-Thomas

Set in South Wales. Danny is returning to his hometown, his father's funeral.
But, Danny doesn't want to go. And, when he finally arrives, the world he once knew will be shattered forever.
The strangeness has settled on this never changing town, and Danny has to find out why, before it's too late, before it devours him, and everything he once knew.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Acid Publishing
• Release date: Aug 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201349622

Book preview

Table of Contents

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part 2

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

Part 3

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Part 4

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Part 5

Chapter 42

About the Author

Part 1

Chapter 1

The dusk had slipped into the night proper. The blurring of light and shade, a strange zone where possibilities pause for just a quiet moment before hurtling on into the mysteries of the darker world.

Danny watched the city of Cardiff slip from gray rain-splashed commercial zones to leafier and wealthier suburbs as the train shuffled through the streets and houses.

The train felt more like a tram or an airport shuttle, the way everything was made of plastic and bare metal, the way it seemed to repel the smells which used to soak into the old trains he remembered from his childhood.

But, back then, people could still smoke on trains, and the wood and fluffy seats would capture all the human odors, storing them in their fabric, releasing them like reminders of personal history through the decades.

He much preferred the older trains. They encapsulated and created memories.

The windows of the valley's line train to Llangrufydd had steamed up with the accumulated breath and heat of the passengers, and he wiped at the condensation to get a better view through the gray drizzle outside.

It wasn't that busy on the train, so he was able to secure himself a seat, and he’d plonked his bag next to him, another gray blob against the shrieking blue and yellow color scheme of what passed for modern day Valley’s Line train seating. Not a strategic move on his part, like someone might make to secure a double seat, more just one of convenience.

Going home.

Never an easy thing, more difficult the longer you leave it. And, Danny hadn't been back in so many years. The time between visits seemed to extend more and more each time.

It wasn't just the complications of family, it was the sense that the town was gradually sloughing off all the markers which he recognized, or which he’d contributed to. It wasn't exactly like he was being erased from his hometown's history, rather, it was just like an extended parting of the ways.

The rain seemed to insulate the train from the world outside, so even when the doors opened at the few stops between Cardiff and Llangrufydd, one of the southern towns of the South Wales valleys, little of the outside world beyond the intensifying of the rain splashing against the universe, seeped into the carriage.

The commuters looked too physically and emotionally tired under the ever steady fluorescent light to even bother talking, though he imagined that few even knew each other.

Only one young man in jeans and a college sweatshirt reading a newspaper, the headline reminding Danny of the story he’d heard on the news about a missing boy in town.

The young man folded the newspaper, and his eyes closed closely behind his glasses.

Danny had packed a paperback for the journey, a collection of new horror stories from someone he’d maybe met once at some publisher’s party or a conference, or something he couldn’t quite remember, but he didn't get much past staring at the front cover, at the rendering of something dead creeping out of the earth, slithering toward the bright lights and the big, big city.

He couldn't focus on fiction, his thoughts firmly rooted in the reality of his situation, back again to the town he'd departed so many years before, when he’d been determined to move into a new phase of his life, unaware of just how final his departure would eventually become.

Danny worked freelance as a technical writer, tech blogger, and even as a straight cut journalist at times, though over the years, he'd grown to despise his profession, finding himself constantly bending to the will of others when accepting commissions, becoming more and more acutely aware of the biases he was supposed to accept, and the nudges he was expected to encourage.

The train coasted through the wealthy suburbs on the edge of the city, the larger detached houses and faux mansions more and more obscured by woods and dark green meadows as they got closer to the hills which separated Cardiff and the valleys beyond.

The sound in the carriage changed as the train entered the tunnel which tied the more cosmopolitan capital city to the long thin towns of the valleys together. He'd always thought there was a strange, somewhat uneasy relationship between the two. A vague disdain for the capital from the old industrial and coal towns, returned in spades by some in Cardiff.

Even the accents were quite different. The valleys had a harder sound, though tuneful, or lilting as people tended to say. When people said the words, ear, year, and here, they all sounded the same in Llangrufydd and in the other towns. They all sounded like the word, year."

Not in Cardiff though. There they had more influences from all the different cultures which had settled over the years since industry had grounded itself in this once quiet port.

Danny remembered how in school some local thugs had once cornered him and his friend. Come by yer, they'd said. We won't hit you.

But, Danny had discerned the malice in their voice which they had tried to disguise. Clumsy actors, hardly surprising for bullies, and kids at that.

He knew what they meant, and the pair of them had legged it that day, running so fast they never even looked back to see if the kids on their BMX bikes were following.

The more he thought about it, the more he remembered things like that happening a lot.

In one way, Danny felt lucky it was only a thirty-minute train ride, any longer, and he'd probably fall asleep. On the other hand, every shunt forward as they left each station brought him one step closer to the home he'd finally realized he'd left behind.

And, it scared him.

Most people on the train were obviously commuters, but across the aisle was a little girl, maybe five or six years old. She sat with her mother, a woman who seemed more interested in rapid fire texting than her daughter.

The girl just sat there, her gaze wandering the inside of the carriage, lingering for a while on each of the frozen, tired faces, until she turned to Danny.

She cocked her head to the side slightly, maybe curious because Danny was the only one on the train who seemed to be watching as well.

He smiled, and knew he meant it.

She smiled back, then stared back out the window.

The train exited the tunnel, and in that short space of time between Cardiff and Llangrufydd, night had descended properly onto South Wales, and the world beyond his window seemed strangely familiar, oddly reassuring.

He felt a small degree of excitement in his belly as the train roared through the tunnel, but also felt dislocated from the other passengers who just seemed bored and sleepy, oblivious to the rising sense of tension within Danny's mind.

He breathed deeply, steeling himself for the week to come. If he could get out faster he would, he'd be back on the train to London as soon as possible. But, even thinking like that makes him feel stressed and miserable. Surely, he should be able to enjoy coming home.

The train exited the tunnel, and in that short space of time between Cardiff and Llangrufydd, night had descended properly onto South Wales, and the world beyond his window seemed strangely familiar, oddly reassuring.

Chapter 2

Some things always look the same, no matter how long a person stays away, no matter how long a person puts off returning. Danny lit a cigarette with the flick of a bic lighter, bored again with the strains of quitting, the incessant murmuring of the urge to smoke always yammering inside his head.

The night was typically cold for early January in the South Wales valleys. Another new year, another meaningless spin around the sun. So what if he smoked again. So what indeed?

He picked his bag back up, just a sports holdall, large enough to fit in a few changes of clothing, not enough to fit a suit.

Rain misted in the air, so the world felt chilled and damp, rather than sodden. When people ask him what he remembers about South Wales, it's this, the constant joint-aching cold, the feeling that everything could just disappear into the gray mist at any time, subsumed into the rotten soup of post-industrial wastelands, atom by stinking atom.

Streetlights illuminated, but didn't flatter the town which unfurled itself beyond the train station. And even the station itself seemed so much less than what he remembered. Gone was the old station office, with the old sweets and cigarettes stall, the metal turnstile gate, the old man in the railway uniform who used to use that funny punch thing to put a hole in his ticket before boarding the train.

Now, nothing but a fence all around the platform, some signs with blue and red borders denoting the station name, LlanGruffydd, and a machine with a scanner, on which he was supposed to place his ticket.

He didn't think of himself as a romantic man, not in the strictest sense of the word, nor even particularly nostalgic, but in that instant of touching the barcode ticket to the scanner, he felt a strange and troubling sadness for a world long gone tugging inside his mind.

He didn't want to be back in the small town he grew up in, but his older sister, Caroline, had pressured and cajoled, and finally slammed the phone down on him, her parting words ringing in his ears for a few days after, until he finally decided to listen to her.

He may have been a bastard, she'd said. But it's your father's funeral. And, seeing as you were the only bloody one out of all of us that he liked even just a little bit, you bloody well better get yourself here. Someone's got to stand up in the church, and it won't be me.

The last time Danny had come back was for a funeral, his mother’s on that occasion, and he’d come by himself, and for himself. Killed by a lunatic in a car. He’d been so full of hate, so confused at the absurdity of everything, how in the space of a few seconds, everything had so completely changed.

Danny's breath came out in long plumes which hung in the freezing air, condensation mixed with cigarette smoke. It filtered into the misty rain, before dissipating into the night.

A group of teenagers pushed past, and he was struck by the sounds of their accents, South Wales thick, a sound which never seemed distinct or out of place until he'd been gone for so many years.

And then he stood there, all alone, the cigarette a lonely orange light, no buses at the bus stops outside the train station, no people on the train platform, no cars rushing down from the mountain road on their way into LanGruffydd, or beyond into the northern depths of the Welsh valleys.

He took a deep drag, then flicked the cigarette into the gutter, watching it fizz in the rain.

She said she'd pick him up, although he'd told her he'd either walk or get a bus or a taxi to something else. Basically, he'd just mumbled down the phone at Caroline, because, god forbid he'd have her help him with something.

Pride was dumb at the best of times, and as he stood there in the rain, which was steadily turning from a faint mist to icy blobs which congregated on his clothes and in his hair, he sensed the pride as keenly as he never wanted to sense anything.

She was right after all. It was almost like she predicted the bloody weather, though, to be fair, in South Wales that wasn't usually too difficult.

The rain became a deluge, and Danny moved back to where the train station overhang afforded some shelter. He checked his watch again. Ten minutes late. Not Caroline's usual style.

He checked his phone. No messages.

He typed out a quick note. U OK?

After a few minutes of staring at his phone, a car came up from the right, the one way system only allowing traffic in from that side. It seemed to be moving with speed, sloshing through the rain, before it screeched to a halt about ten meters from Danny, in the middle of the road.

A woman inside leaned across the passenger seat, and pushed the door open.

Get in, she shouted.

Danny squinted through the rain which was now coming down in sheets. He didn't recognize the voice, and it didn't look like Caroline inside, unless she'd dyed her hair blonde and lost quite a few pounds.

Sorry? he shouted back.

Get in, before you get soaked.

She sounded friendly enough, and though her face was blurry in the rain, she seemed like she knew who he was.

Do I know you?

Shirl, I'm a friend of your sister.

Caroline?

Do you have another sister?

Her voice had a playful quality, and he couldn't help but smile.

One's enough, he replied.

"She asked me if