New Devilry

By D.A. Watson

Newly divorced and old before his time, a bored accountant seeks to rekindle the passions of his youth in the wilderness of Alaska. Running Wild Tours promises nine days of kayaking, camping, whale watching, and only the slight possibility of being eaten by bears. The apocalypse is definitely not listed in the itinerary.

The annual Halloween office party at Lamplight Electrical Supplies always throws up an alcohol related scandal or two, and the Witches' Brew punch bowl and magic show provided by the new guy in the admin team has the night off to a flyer. Then the murders start. And the cannibalism.

In a remote glen in the Scottish Highlands, close to a lonely loch known and feared by the locals, a policeman finds an abandoned car containing three shotguns, a rucksack stuffed with cash, and a mobile phone. On the mobile is a video confession describing a bank heist gone horribly wrong, and the terrifying consequences for the robbers.

Featuring green-eyed monsters, flesh eating luchadores, malevolent squirrels and evil Christmas decorations, New Devilry is D.A. Watson’s second mixed bag of fiction in all its guises, a compendium of comedy and carnage where chills and chuckles collide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Next Chapter
• Release date: Aug 7, 2023

Book preview

New Devilry

NEW DEVILRY

D. A. WATSON

Copyright (C) 2023 D.A. Watson

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2023 by Next Chapter

Published 2023 by Next Chapter

Edited by Graham (Fading Street Services)

Cover art by Lordan June Pinote

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

CREDITS

Space and Time was first published in Pharos, released by Stryvling Press, 2021.

The Envy of Evie McCue was first published in A Calton Ceilidh, released by Rymour Books, 2020.

Restless Natives was first Published in Footsteps in the Dark, released by Flame Tree Publishing, 2020.

A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.

Chuck Palahniuk

CONTENTS

Buyer Beware

Gaia’s Song

Hark! The Herald Angel Sings

The Ballad of Getting Paid Twelve Times a Year

The Wolver

White Van Woman

The Shindig

Restless Natives

Space and Time

The Envy of Evie McCue

About the Author

BUYER BEWARE

A funny thing happened way back in the day, ‘twas the winter of nineteen-oh-three,

When I secretly purchased an old run-down cottage, a home for my lady and me.

Its foundations laid back in the seventeen hundreds, the quaint cottage was crumbling and old,

But enchanted I was by its old-timey charm, and the stories its walls could have told.

Such a spacious green garden! Oh, the fine parquet flooring! And the beautiful ivy-clad gable!

And out back a garage that in days long ago had once served as a coaching house stable.

But the cottage was troubled with leakage and damp, and a roof in some need of repair,

The electrics substandard, the plumbing deficient, the pure essence of ‘buyer beware.’

But despite the dire need for wholesale reconstruction and the cost of upgrading the place,

Unknown to my wife, I put down the deposit with a big gormless smile on my face.

We can make it a project! I said to myself, as I signed all the papers with glee,

The estate agent surely suppressing a laugh at such boneheaded naivety.

That night over dinner, I said to my lady, My darling, I have a surprise!

When I gave her the keys to our ramshackle love nest, her shock she could scarcely disguise.

"You bought us a house? she exclaimed in amazement, without letting me see the place first?!"

Do not fret, mi amore, I replied with a smile, your concerns will be shortly dispersed.

Well, despite my intent to surprise my beloved with a place we could live and grow old,

The reaction she had when she saw our abode turned the blood in my veins deathly cold.

I will spare you the details of what she said then, for the fear of offending your ears,

Sufficient to say that my ill-advised gift was received with some violence and tears.

Wiping blood from her knuckles, she cried in disgust, What the hell did you think you were doing?!

Get back the deposit, you drivelling fool! There’s no way I shall live in this ruin!

But my lawyer just laughed when I called on him, saying I wished to back out of the sale,

Check the contract, he crowed, For there’s no backing out. You should really have read the details.

So, I called up a builder and summoned a roofer, and plumbers and joiners galore,

They must fix the old house, or I feared that my spouse would soon angrily show me the door.

But when they came back with their facts and their figures, I confess that I wanted to weep,

Astronomical quotes that would beggar a king left me many a night without sleep.

Our homestead I’d have to repair by myself, lest I’d soon see the end of my marriage,

So, I set to creating a functioning workshop from the cottage’s stable turned garage.

I spent my last pennies on timbers and tools and read all that I could of construction,

And with piping and plaster and slating and solder, I put my grand plan to production.

I worked day and night, and I toiled until dawn, risking splinters and electrocution,

While unbeknownst to me, my own dear darling wife was devising another solution.

One day as I showed her my work on the rooftop, with my hammer she struck me a blow,

And she spoke of the merits of good life insurance, as I bled on the flagstones below.

And so ever since, I have haunted this ruin, still trying to fix up the house,

Eternally hammering on piping and walls, made a ghost by a murderous spouse.

And so, young happy couples, I warn you now, when buying a home have a care,

And to any poor fool who might purchase this cottage, I say to you, buyer beware.

GAIA’S SONG

Part One

Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.

Jack Kerouac

Day 1

Glasgow Airport

21 st July 2019

They say when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. A little trite perhaps, maybe a cynical person would even say it’s a naïve, simplistic credo, unrealistic in a world that more often than not seems to like nothing more than giving someone a right good shoeing when they’re already down, and fuck your lemonade.

Whatever. Being a generally upbeat sort, personally I always quite liked the expression. In theory anyway. I have to admit that until fairly recently, my life was pretty much lemon free. Never had any serious financial woes, no bereavements, serious illnesses or any of the other random bad turns of luck that the universe delights in dealing out to most people.

No one goes all their days without a bit of bother though, and in my case, my personal crate of lemons came in the form of the breakup of my marriage. Even then, it was a relatively small crate. More like a bag of four. Or just a squirt of Jif lemon juice in the eye.

Truth be told – and what’s a journal for if not telling the truth? – Jillian and I shouldn’t have got hitched in the first place, but, tale as old as time, we were young, stupidly in love, and as dumb as a couple of starry-eyed twenty-three-year-olds could be.

We’d met as first years during Fresher’s week at Strathclyde Uni where I was studying accountancy, Jillian computer sciences. We dated all through uni and graduated at the same time five years later, both of us lucky enough to find employment in our chosen fields practically before the ink on our diplomas was dry. We didn’t so much take a gap year as a gap fortnight, and cliché of cliches, on our first holiday abroad together, eloped and got hitched by an Elvis impersonator at a drive-through wedding chapel in Las Vegas. Both of us raised in very straight laced families, the spontaneous reckless cheesiness of the whole thing appealed to us, and in all honestly, we’d had more than a couple of cocktails beforehand, and were giddy with booze and a few wins on the slots. Like I said, young, dumb, and stupidly in love.

The inevitable separation was a lot less messy than it could have been. We’d no kids to mess up, thankfully, so when reality kicked in a little under two years later, and we realised we weren’t happy and that we’d made a mistake, all told, the divorce was a pretty clean and amicable business. There was no adultery involved, no bitter arguments, no resentment or the throwing of ornaments at each other’s heads. There were barely any tears. We both just realised we weren’t ready for a lifetime commitment to each other. In the end, our life as husband and wife was wrapped up in a matter of weeks. We managed a quick sell of the flat we’d bought and done up together without much drama, even making a modest profit on it, which we split fifty-fifty. My half of that little windfall was the sugar in the aforementioned lemonade from my divorce lemons, and it’s the reason I am where I am now, sitting in the departure lounge of Glasgow Airport.

A few months ago, a couple of days after the divorce papers had been signed and finalised, I was at work, sitting at my desk in the accountancy firm where I’d been employed since they took me on as an apprentice in my fourth year at uni, and I had an epiphany. In a moment of clarity, I realised that I’d had a house, a spouse, a stable career nailed down, and had been living a settled, mortgaged-up, middle-aged lifestyle before I’d even hit my mid-twenties. But with the house and spouse now gone - and a few shekels from the sale of said house burning a hole in my bank account – I realised that I was, as Mr Jagger (and later, the Soup Dragons) said, free to do what I wanted, any old time. As they say in law enforcement, I had the means, motive and the opportunity.

So, I took a few days off work to think about my life and what I really wanted from it. If I desired, I could have a very easy, modestly comfortable life. And all I had to do was… nothing really. Just stay where I was at Milne and Parker’s Financial Services, crunching numbers and making good money, climbing the company ladder. I could do it for another thirty or forty years if I wanted. As long as there was such a thing as money, my dad always said, there’d be a need for accountants. It was there, my future all laid out for me. Planned, stable, and unsurprising.

Or…

Channelling my inner man-child, I thought about the things I’d been in to when I was an idealistic teenager, before my parents had begun grooming me for a career in the money markets. In the end, I was able to whittle it down to three things: music, travel writing, and nature.

I’d played in a band in high school, strumming rhythm guitar for the questionably named rock quartet Raging Beavers, and had for a time dreamt of becoming a career musician. It soon became apparent however that though I knew a few tunes and scales and could batter out an F chord and maybe even the occasional guitar solo with passable ability, I couldn’t sing a note, and my attempts at song writing were painful at best. I was never going to be the next Jeff Buckley.

When I was sixteen, I’d also had a brief liaison with journalism, immersing myself in the work of Bill Bryson, Jack Kerouac, Anthony Bourdain, and Frances Mayes. I’d imagined myself as a globetrotting travel writer, visiting exotic locales, drowning myself in far flung cultures, enthralling readers with my vivid prose and profound literal ponderings. That idea was likewise binned when I discovered I struggled to write more than about fifty tortured words at a time and found myself cringing at what little I had managed to put on the page. It was probably something to do with the fact that at the time, I was a spotty teenage virgin with no real life experience and had never in all my puff ventured further than the annual fortnight in the Algarve with my parents. Or maybe it was just a simple lack of writing talent. In any case, I was pretty sure I was no Hemmingway either.

The only other thing that really piqued my interest as a young pup was nature and the environment. I’d been a dedicated boy scout, and loved camping trips, hiking, studying animal tracks, birdwatching, even the days our troop spent doing community beach cleans and picking up litter around my hometown. I became something of a teenage eco-warrior, went to a few anti-pollution protests, bugged the shit out of my parents about recycling, saving energy and buying sustainable products, and when I read up about the clearing of the rainforests, for a time I swore off Nutella and anything else containing palm oil. For a time, anyway. I was only fifteen after all. And, well… it’s Nutella. I’d been convinced helping save the world would be my life’s work, and was set on studying marine biology, conservation, or zoology at uni after high school. Thing was, the science subjects, which I’d need to get onto the uni courses I was set on, were never my strongest suit in school.

But perhaps more important than my lack of any God-given natural talent in the various potential careers I was interested in, I was raised the son of a sober-minded bank manager (Dad) and even more sober minded council financial officer (Mum). Though they were tolerated by my parents, none of my aspirations in music, travel writing, or environmental concerns had been encouraged as viable career paths, and I’d been half-gently nudged towards a more realistic and employable vocation in accountancy and finance, which I admit to not resisting against too much. I had a natural affinity for numbers after all and had always found a great deal of satisfaction in the neat, orderly laws of arithmetic. I might have been a C student in sciences and the arts in school, but maths and accountancy, that was my jam. Plus, I knew how much money you could make in that field. We all have our price.

In my defence, I will say that even though I sold out and went down the route of financial services instead of working for the Rainforest Alliance, to this day I still have a few Direct Debits on my bank account paying monthly donations to environmental charities. I still detest litterers, and while I’m not as avid as I was as a pissed off, banner waving teenager, I do still make the effort to shop sustainably, recycle my paper and plastic waste and do what little I can.

Anyway, the point of all this was I’d had a taste of a stable grown-up life, and now, single, footloose and fancy free for the first time since I was eighteen, I wanted something more than spending the rest of my days immersed in spreadsheets. I was young, had no real commitments, and had a decent pot of disposable cash, so I decided to let fate take a hand, and trusting in the gods of the online ether, Googled ‘music travel writing nature’ to see what came up.

The top result, weirdly enough, turned out to be the Plenty of Fish user profile for one ChadThunderpecsXXL, a self-described fitness nut, nature lover and aspiring musician and writer from British Columbia. Clearly something of a Renaissance man, Chad – whose profile pic showed a shirtless, square jawed, tattooed behemoth holding an old-fashioned quill and gazing thoughtfully into the middle distance - listed his interests as hiking, jamming, working out ‘mind, body and soul’, and most importantly, ‘gettin jiggy wit it’.

Though this wasn’t the pivotal, life-changing moment I’d envisaged, just like that, I knew what I was going to do.

I remembered a Discovery Channel documentary I’d seen when I was a teenager, sometime in the period when I was in between dreaming about being either an environmentalist or a rock star. It’d been about this marine biologist studying the communication methods of orcas, doing so while paddling a kayak through the fjords of British Columbia, home of the esteemed ChadThunderpecsXXL. It’d fascinated me at the time, the idea of being somewhere so remote, so wild, lost in nature, studying the eerily beautiful, musical language of these extremely cool animals. I’d even bought a CD of whale song at the time and experimented with using it as ambient instrumentation in my own tortured compositions for Raging Beavers. Needless to say, it didn’t go down well with my bandmates.

So, thanks to the unlikely inspiration of ChadThunderpecsXXL, I had a plan. Take a few weeks off work, dust off the old six string, pack a bag and just go, full on Bilbo Baggins style, leaving behind my comfortable but ultimately boring hobbit hole and go off on an adventure. I’d travel halfway around the world, throw myself to the mercy of the wilderness, check out some whales, play some guitar, and keep a travel journal, which I even entertained thoughts of trying to get published afterwards.

It was exciting and scary, which was what convinced me it was the right thing to do, because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been truly excited or scared. And even if it didn’t work out, I could always come back to the safety net of Milne and Parker’s Financial Services. At least I’d have given it a shot.

I didn’t overthink it. I might not have done it otherwise. I booked the time off work, and dove right in, and after a few more minutes of Googling, I’d booked up with Running Wild Tours for a nine-day adventure holiday in the Gulf of Alaska, hiking, kayaking, camping and whale watching in the remote wilds of the Prince William Sound.

I spent the next several weeks getting ready, buying all the gear I’d need for my jolly, going to the gym three nights a week to get in shape, breaking in my new hiking boots with long walks in the country during the weekends, and getting my hands reacquainted with my old Yamaha acoustic. That was the hardest part, but after a bit of practice I found I can still manage that F chord, and I’ve developed some wicked calluses on my fingertips. I also binge watched a shitload of survival shows. Ed Stafford, Bear Grylls and Naked and Afraid. You never know!

And so now here I am, scribbling away in a nice new leather-bound notebook, sitting at my departure gate in Glasgow Airport. I’ve found the writing part is a lot easier now than it was when I was that spotty teenager. Probably because I’ve lived a bit, and now actually have some experiences to write about.

I’m in front of the big glass walls giving a view out on to the runway and the planes parked outside. It’s a fine July morning, clear skies of the deepest summer blue, the early sun still low enough on the horizon to make me wince. My wings sit at the end of the umbilical, a sleek white jet with a blue and yellow tailfin. I’ve got quite the jaunt ahead of me. My flight to London Gatwick takes off in thirty minutes, and from there I’m pretty much straight onto a connection to Los Angeles LAX for a six-hour layover before the final leg of the journey takes me north to Anchorage, Alaska, where I’ll meet up with my tour group at the Anchorage Armada Hotel.

On the TV up on the wall, which is tuned to one of the rolling news channels, it’s all depressingly familiar. Politicians in the UK arguing over Brexit and an underfunded and understaffed NHS. Another mass shooting in America, seventeen dead while the Democrats shout gun control and the Republicans shout second amendment. A car bomb outside a mosque in Kabul. Another Hollywood movie producer disgraced over sexual assault claims. A bad landslide in Indonesia, wiping out a town and some two thousand residents.

Aside from everything else, it’ll be nice to be away from the news for a while.

Los Angeles International Airport

Stateside!

Landed at LAX an hour ago, and the flight across the pond was more than a little bumpy at times. Bumpy enough to cause one or two screams from some passengers. I didn’t scream, but the old ticker fairly sped up a bit when the whole plane was shuddering like a dog taking a shite, and I’m not afraid to admit my guts were in my throat when we hit an air pocket and suddenly dropped a few hundred feet through the sky. Just a little unexpected turbulence, the captain reassured us with infinite professional calm from the cockpit, though for a moment I thought I detected just a smidgen of uneasiness in the usually ice cool cabin crew. The joys of travelling, I guess.

Anyhoo, heart stopping near death experience aside, I got here in one piece, and am currently having a nerve steadying drink in a bar in LAX, waiting for my next flight up to Anchorage. I’m loving the fact that I’m actually doing this, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a tad uneasy about the prospect of taking to the skies again so soon. On the tv screen in the bar here, CNN are showing satellite images of a storm in the mid-Atlantic. I wonder if we maybe caught the edge of it? The meteorologist from the National Weather Service looks genuinely baffled as he tells Wolf Blitzer that not only is this as yet unnamed hurricane very much out of season, it’s also not on the usual path of destruction, following the Gulf Stream up through the Bahamas and southeast US states. This one’s heading east across the Atlantic apparently, destination as yet unknown.

So yeah, there’s that. I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea of flying again when there’s unpredictable hurricanes on the news, but at least it’s heading away from me, and I guess there’s enough safe distance between us. There haven’t been any announcements about my flight being cancelled anyway. Hopefully that doesn’t change over the next six hours or so.

It’s coming up on midday, and the lounge here is busy. I thought Gatwick was a big airport, but it’s dwarfed by LAX. Fifth busiest airport on Earth according to Google, with around two hundred thousand patrons a day by all accounts. Everywhere you look - people. So many people, from so many places. Every race present, every language spoken. Thousands and thousands of them, every one with their own story. A moving riot of colours and cultures.

I enjoy the opportunity for people watching in a place as busy and diverse as LAX, and I’m chuffed to bits about doing this whole voyage of self-discovery thing, but still, hanging around airports for any lengthy period of time sucks donkey balls, especially when you’ve already been travelling for near eighteen hours and the jet lag’s starting to kick in.

Too