You Will Grow Into Them

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For Mum and Dad

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Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction by Angela Slatter

Passion Play

Two Brothers

Breadcrumbs

Her First Harvest

We All Need Somewhere to Hide

Dogsbody

Songs Like They Used to Play

The Last Meal He Ate Before She Killed Him

The Bridge

The End of Hope Street

Acknowledgements

About the author

About the Publisher

Copyright

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1

Perilously Elegant

Angela Slatter

Someone far wiser than me once said that if you’ve got any sense at all, you’re not here to read the Introduction; that you’ve already gone straight for the stories; that, maybe, you’ll come back to read it later. Wherever you sit on that spectrum, I’ll try to make it worth your while.

So, what’s a short story? If we’re considering a short story collection, it makes sense (to me at least) to think about the nature of the building blocks that make it up. Murakami calls them ‘soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left’. Gaiman says it’s ‘the ultimate close-up magic trick’. For Bacigalupi they’re ‘hand grenades of ideas’, and for King a short story is ‘a kiss in the dark from a stranger’.

All of these things are true. But perhaps all of these things are also lies. Or maybe half-truths because every writer is different. Every writer takes the form and makes it their own. We like to think – always before we’ve started to write one – that the short story will bend to our will. They never do. That they’ll be quick to create because they’re short. They seldom are.

2So, what’s a short story?

Well, a story that’s short.

A facetious answer, yes. Still, I could just leave it at that, but it would be too flippant and it would definitely be dismissive, and the short story doesn’t deserve that because it requires so much skill to get right. It takes, as David Henry Thoreau said, ‘a long while to make it short’. It should have a single affect, according to Poe. For me, it should deal with crisis, choice and consequence. It should feel rich and complex but may well look achingly, annoyingly simple. That’s the giveaway that it wasn’t simple at all. It most certainly was not easy. And it’s ending should leave you with the sense that somewhere, somehow, the story’s still going on – you’re just not there anymore. That’s a lot of shoulds.

Perhaps one thing is certain: the short story is a matter of angles. Its shape will depend on the perspective you’ve chosen, the slender facet of life and time you’re examining, trying to show to the reader; calling to them with ‘Look here!’ before you open Pandora’s Box. The tale will live and die by all the things you bring to it, and all the things you leave out but imply.

Brevity is key. The trick is to flense out all the details except the ones that hit hardest at the readers’ cultural capital, shared experiences – the half-remembered things that live in the back brain – and set off a series of depth charges, a lighting of beacons, triggering recognitions – or something we think we recognise. It’s a sleight of hand to make readers think what you want them to think. It’s the impressionist painting that makes sense only from a particular distance or corner of the gallery, but when you’re done feels like 3an expressionist did a break-and-enter in your heart; the emotional devastation seemingly much larger than expected.

For the relatively brief time they take to read, the very best ones will haunt you for the rest of your life. Sending a cloud over a summer’s day sun. Waking you in the cold hours with an echo. Making you smile though you don’t quite know why. Sometimes, they feel like memories you’re not sure you own.

Malcolm Devlin’s stories are like that.

In 2017, way back in the Light Ages – i.e. before the Plague Years – I read the original edition of this collection to do a cover quote. It went something like this: ‘You Will Grow Into Them is filled with stories that are deceptively simple and perilously elegant. They look like fairy tales, but aren’t really – in fact, they are best described as a precise alchemy of language. Perfectly pitched, thoroughly disquieting. You Will Grow Into Them is like a light in the darkness that might lead you home or lure you from the path. Malcolm Devlin is one of our finest voices.’

It’s comfort to all of us to know that after a re-reading I haven’t changed my opinion.

Which brings me to another consideration: It’s all well and good to produce a tale or two, but after having written a bunch of short stories? A bouquet of them? A murder of them? A herd? Well, then you’ve got to construct a collection, and when I say ‘contruct’, I mean yes, ‘construct’. That’s not an easy task either. As with cooking, you don’t just dump in whatever you’ve got in the pantry, unmeasured, untasted and untried. You weigh the stories, their subjects, their emotions, their impacts, their joys and their violence. How they rest on the mind, how they ring or sing in the ear. You 4assess the themes and the characters, what they might say to each other as well as the reader. You keep some back for a rainy day.

A more apt comparison might be designing a rollercoaster ride: planning and plotting the highs and the lows, the sideways swerves, the crawling ascents, the stomach-dropping descents, the bone-jarring stops. What effect will this story have when it’s sat next to this one? Or this one? Will they be good neighbours or start a turf war over the placement of the privet hedge? Putting together a short story collection is an art in itself, and it’s a pleasure to feel that You Will Grow Into Them achieved the right balance.

Devlin’s stories engage with and transform ancient and modern tales, giving them an unexpected spin. The crosshatch man in ‘Passion Play’ stalks religion and the terrain of urban legend; leavened with warnings against leaving the path it shifts you from the real to irreal. ‘Two Brothers’ explores a loss of identity, the ghosts of old selves and toxic masculinity via a lens that’s almost Hansel and Gretelish. In ‘Breadcrumbs’ the world is morphed into something fantastical and possibly even more threatening, a place where threads of Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty meet, and folk become both less and more themselves – which sometimes requires feathers and fur and thorns. There are cursed inheritances and inherited curses, stolen skins, unexpected escapes and unemployed werewolves, mushroom cotillions and war hero widows, and a street where no hope can be found.

A debut collection’s a showcase of what the writer can do when they’re starting out. It’s a very tangible and public 5mud map of where the mind and pen have roamed in the early days, putting a pin in things and saying ‘Here. Now. This is what I’ve been thinking about for better or worse.’ It says ‘This is where I started. This is where I’ve got to so far.’ It can be as simple as surprised cry from the writer: ‘OMG, look at all these stories I’ve got lying around!’ And it should definitely say ‘Keep watching. Whether anyone likes it or not, I’ll keep going.’

Later stories and collections will track the writer’s journey across a career. You can see new obsessions and interests, interrogations and angers. You can see the writer’s skills and gifts mature. You can see them changing their mind about things, getting more mellow or (hopefully) raging and rebelling still and refusing to go gentle into a good night or a bad one. With luck, a writer will be sensible enough not to want to rewrite their early stories – what’s the point of a do-over? It won’t show how you’ve gotten better, how you’ve grown as a writer – because that’s one of the great joys in reading an author’s work across time, seeing how they’ve changed. Writers shouldn’t remain the same or they get stagnant, stunted, boring. They lose their bravery and their daring – a writer who never fails is a writer who never tries something new. But a debut collection says ‘Wake up. I start here.’

One of the things I love about Devlin’s stories is that they reach – you can see them putting forth tendrils and creeping outwards to new ideas and forms and expression. They’re all united by themes of transformation, isolation, and the inexorable wheel of the universe that keeps moving whether we want it to or not. Change isn’t death (although a lack of it is), it’s simply adaptation. One thing 6becomes another and the sooner you accept it the easier the transition will be. Stories (and writers) should always be growing, changing things, casting the shadows of what will come next: newer stories, bigger stories, stranger stories whose reach exceeds their grasp – perilously elegant stories you will grow into.

Dr Angela Slatter

Brisbane, AUSTRALIA

2 May 2024

Angela A.G. Slatter is the award-winning author of, among other things, the gothic fantasy novels All the Murmuring Bones, The Path of Thorns, and The Briar Book of the Dead (Titan Books), twelve short story collections, three novellas, and a Hellboy Universe collaboration with Mike Mignola, Castle Full of Blackbirds.

angelaslatter.com

7

Passion Play

Cathy McCullough’s mother fastens the chain around my neck and turns me by the shoulders. It’s a small cross, unadorned, and she puts her hand on my chest, covering it with her palm. Her hand feels warm, like it’s been balled in a fist too long.

‘She would have wanted you to have it,’ she says.

She looks at me and I wonder what she sees. I don’t look like Cathy, not really. Her hair is redder and mine is browner. I’m a little taller, and the idea that we might look similar didn’t cross my mind until her old class photo started doing the rounds. We all look the same in those photos, but on any other day you’d never confuse us if you knew us both.

Mrs McCullough is looking at me like she doesn’t know Cathy anymore. She’s looking at me as if she’d take anything of her she can get.

‘She loved you so very much,’ she says, and then she holds me tight.

Maybe she didn’t know Cathy at all.

I stand stiff and awkward in her arms. I can see my own mum is watching us from the other side of the street. She’s watching Mrs McCullough holding me with the same expression Cathy would use if she knew I was being given her crucifix.

Mum marches forward to intervene. Gentle but firm, she pries Cathy’s mother off me. She does this with one of those carefully pitched smiles she sometimes uses when she wants to change the subject.

8‘They want to start now,’ she says. She reaches out and touches me on the shoulder. She’s already given me the ‘you-don’t-have-to-do-this’ speech. She’d do it again if Cathy’s mum wasn’t there.

Instead, she says: ‘Be careful.’ And she leads Mrs McCullough away. Cathy’s mother folds up against her chest and I don’t hear her crying until she reaches the other side of the street.

Because Cathy McCullough has gone missing. Because Cathy McCullough went to find the cross-hatch man.

I didn’t volunteer to be Cathy.

The police came to the school, and from the classroom I could see them parked out in the playground, two of them: a man and a woman, who was so tall and beautiful even Mr Newland, the headmaster, stared at her wide-eyed like he was a kid.

I saw him nodding at something she was explaining and then he looked round and met my eyes like he knew I was watching. I panicked, thinking he’d caught me not paying attention in class and I turned to stare at the French verbs Mrs Parkhirst was writing on the board. When I risked a glance back out of the window all three of them were looking at me.

They called me out of class a little while after. In Mr Newland’s office, they told me they wanted to stage a reconstruction for the press. They wanted to retrace Cathy’s last known movements, which they’d patched together from witness reports.

They needed someone to be Cathy, they told me. It wasn’t a question. They just sat there waiting for me to volunteer.

The policewoman’s name was Veronica.

9‘You should think about this carefully,’ she said. ‘There’ll be a lot of people, a lot of photographers. Everyone will be looking at you and it’s a very serious, very difficult thing.’

The other policeman was a little plump and a little bald. He cleared his throat.

‘Did you know Cathy McCullough?’ he said.

Mr Newland answered for me. ‘They’re best friends.’

I didn’t correct him. It used to be true.

Cathy and I were born within three weeks of each other and we were always in each other’s houses as we grew up.

But I’ve never wanted to be her before. We were too close for that; I knew the worst of her as well as the best. Even when I would hide in my room because I got mad with Mum, I might have looked out the window to see if I could see a light on at Cathy’s, but I don’t think I ever seriously thought she was having a better time.

At least my parents are still together. True, Dad can be a complete jerk at times, always on Mum’s side because he never has an opinion of his own, but Cathy’s dad had run away when she was twelve. Some of the kids in school said her mum was a drunk and it was true that Mrs McCullough was usually pink cheeked and friendly when I went to visit, and yes, she’d sometimes go to bed at strange hours. But maybe she just got tired. People get tired. If I lived with Cathy, I’d get tired too.

There were a lot of witnesses to see Cathy McCullough leave St William’s Secondary School on Tuesday, February 16th.

Cathy had been one of seventeen students who had attended Miss Buckley’s after-school drama club. At five o’clock in the evening, 10she waved at Leela Allen and Katie Cox, whom she would normally have taken the bus with. Instead of going home, she walked in the opposite direction, sidling through the bicycle bars where Barracks Road becomes Barracks Lane.

The day she went missing, Cathy was wearing a pink Superdry raincoat over her school uniform, with a grey Zara messenger bag slung over her shoulder. I know this because that’s what I’m wearing now. I keep catching the reflection of myself in the windows of the admin block and in the corner of my eye. The reflected me isn’t me at all.

Veronica is briefing the photographers and journalists. There aren’t as many of them as I was expecting. Most are from the local news but I don’t recognise any of them. I count only four or five photographers when I was expecting a crowd like you see on TV when a famous singer gets out of a limo. They’re watching me, waiting for me to turn around, because it’s the back of me they want people to recognise. The me that’s walking away from them.

Mum has got rid of Mrs McCullough so she can spend more time looking worried about me. She brushes a stray hair behind my ear.

‘I thought you said they wanted to start now,’ I say.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ she says.

I smile at her and I wish that Simon was there instead.

Mum kisses me on the forehead and there’s a click-flash from the direction of the photographers that makes stick-man shadows appear at our feet and then vanish again. I duck away from Mum, embarrassed, but the photographers aren’t looking at us; one of them is looking at his camera and frowning. He’s only taking a test shot, I tell myself, but I wonder what he sees.

11‘Be careful,’ Mum says again.

Veronica claps her hands and the crowd’s attention snaps into focus. She comes up to me and asks if I’m ready. She barely waits for a response before she’s talking to the crowd like it’s a congregation. She talks to them about Cathy. She calls her a ‘little girl’ which doesn’t seem the right way to describe someone who’s fifteen.

Mum touches me gently on the arm, then drifts away to join the waiting mob. I try to find Mrs McCullough among the faces but she’s gone; maybe someone has taken her home. I hope someone has taken her home.

Veronica smiles.

‘When you’re ready,’ she says.

I turn towards the bicycle bars and, behind me, the cameras begin to pop and click and flash. They see Cathy, they do not see me at all.

At around five minutes past five, Sam Clooney and his brother David were having a kick-about on the top pitch when they saw the girl in the pink coat walking confidently through the trees along Barracks Lane. Sam, the younger of the two brothers, was nervous about getting home before it got ‘properly dark’. He remembered thinking the girl must be very brave walking through the trees alone where there weren’t any street lights.

‘She wasn’t walking like it was getting dark,’ he said.

The crowd thins out as the path steers away from the playing fields and into the trees. There are two policemen clearing the way ahead of me; hi-vis jackets and walkie-talkies. Veronica introduced us but I’ve forgotten their names. I name them PC Left and PC Right, and it sounds 12so childish, I find myself smiling stupidly, which isn’t like Cathy at all. PC Left is young, black and sort-of handsome. He wears small square glasses and tells me he has a sister my age. PC Right is a bit older and has a thin ginger beard. He won’t meet my eyes.

The others are somewhere behind me: the crowd and the photographers and the people from the newspapers. I can hear them rather than see them. I know my mum is with them, and Veronica too. Veronica said I should lead everyone, but I feel like I’m being herded.

There is movement in the trees just ahead and I almost stop in surprise. PC Left ducks off the path to investigate but reappears only moments later empty-handed. I see him talking to PC Right, then murmuring something into his walkie-talkie. It’s probably nothing, just a bird or maybe a squirrel. I risk a glance to the side as I walk past and see only trees and the tangled knots of blackberry brambles. Cathy said she’s seen deer on this path before but I don’t know if I believe her; it sounds too much like a fairy tale to be true.

The noise wasn’t Simon, then. Of course it wouldn’t be Simon. When a fifteen-year old girl goes missing, her family gets prayers and her boyfriend gets questioned. Even if he has an alibi – and Simon does have an alibi – he’s still not welcome. I’ve already heard people asking why he wasn’t there for her. They don’t know Simon at all; he’s the least threatening person you’d ever meet. If he and Cathy ran into trouble together, she’d be the one rescuing him. Sometimes I think that’s why she liked him so much, she liked the idea of having someone to save.

Simon moved to town a few years back; his dad was an engineer who was trying to settle the family after a few 13military contracts sent them around the world. I don’t think Simon’s ever been in any place as long as he’s been here and sometimes you can see it makes him twitch just thinking about it. He’s skinny and lanky and kind of cute in a don’t-look-at-me sort of way. Restless, Cathy would describe him.

They’ve been together for around six months, maybe a bit longer. Well, they had been. I’d hang out with them sometimes. I’d go round to Cathy’s and find them together. It was sweet. They never let me feel like I was intruding and after a while it felt like he’d always been there.

Cathy never really told Simon about the cross-hatch man. I mentioned it to him once and he just nodded, like he hadn’t been told enough to be interested.

‘So,’ he said, ‘it’s like some local ghost story?’

‘Something like that,’ I said. At first I liked the idea Cathy was keeping it a secret from him, but the more I thought about it, the more disappointed I felt that she hadn’t told him. As if it was something she had grown out of; something she thought wasn’t important enough to share.

At nearly twenty minutes past five, driving instructor Charlie Brandt was sitting in the passenger seat of his Vauxhall Corsa waiting for his student, Tiffany Lowry, to pull out into the traffic on Hollow Way. They had been practising parallel parking in the lay-by opposite the ironmonger’s shop and Tiffany had already lost a hubcap to the kerb.

Charlie reassured her no one had seen anything and it was none of their business if they had. Tiffany was teetering on the edge of tears, and when the girl in the pink coat walked past – the trailing zipper of her shoulder bag striking the car window like a gunshot – she tipped over completely.

14From Barracks Lane, Hollow Way is a one-sided street. To the left, a large hedge hides a driving range which nobody uses. On the other side, there’s a row of run-down shops which I can’t imagine anyone going into. After those, there’s a stretch of terraced houses which continue all the way up to The Corner House pub.

I’m surprised to see a small crowd has formed on the pavement opposite. I didn’t think Cathy was that popular but maybe people think they’ll have a chance to be on TV. They might be lucky: there’s an outside broadcast van from the local TV station parked next to The China Girl takeaway. Its giant satellite dish makes it look overbalanced and a bit ridiculous. It looks like a giant wok bolted to the top of the van.

As I pass, there’s a burst of static from inside the van. I glance backwards and see a guy in a baseball cap disappearing inside. The sound makes me look closer at the crowd, half-convinced I might see someone amongst them who shouldn’t be there. There is no one of course, just a line of everyday figures looking like they’re waiting for a bus.

Cathy and I first saw the cross-hatch man on a school trip to the church of St Michael on the Mount, nearly a year ago. St Michael’s is a small church teetering on the edge of the Lye Valley Nature Reserve which cuts around behind it. As a school trip, it covered a number of bases: it was a church (Religious Studies) and it dated back to the eleventh century (History). It was also close to the school, so it was cheap to get to (Mathematics).

It was raining when we arrived but Sister Assumptia, who was usually angry and always short, had no patience 15for complaints. She corralled us inside and instructed us to appreciate the place. The threat that we would go to Hell if we didn’t was left unsaid.

Cathy glowered at her. She wasn’t the sort to bend to school-sanctioned dogma without a fight. While I was happy to get swept along by the surface rhythm of the various rituals of my family and peer group – school service on Wednesday, church on Sunday, the tick-tock-tick of my mother’s monthly rosary – Cathy was looking for something more tangible. The cross she wore had been given to her by her grandmother and her attachment to it was more sentimental than spiritual.

‘Besides which,’ she told me, ‘it’s a disguise.’

We fanned out, wandering around the nave and transept and trying to find something interesting to justify our being there. The trouble being that there wasn’t really anything there at all. The big rose window above the door might have looked pretty with the sun behind it, but it was dormant on such a dull day. The rest of the church was dull too, built in an age where function was valued above form, it was all square corners and stark empty walls.

Mostly empty. The exceptions were the Stations of the Cross, a series of small paintings spaced neatly around the transept. Cathy described them as a Catholic comic where Jesus takes fourteen panels to die. We’d seen them before of course; we went over them at school every Lent, and more than once we’d been made to draw versions of them ourselves.

Some sets included an additional fifteenth panel, which showed Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, but the versions in St Michael’s were strictly traditional, and ended with Jesus’ body being laid in the tomb. Individually framed, they 16took place against dark, gloomy backgrounds so the scenes looked as though they’d been spotlit with a torch.

The images were the usual. Jesus is condemned to death, Jesus receives his cross, meets Mary, is crucified and so on. I lost interest pretty quick – there’s only so many times you can look at pictures of people suffering before everything starts to feel numb – but Cathy was looking from one to the next with a genuine interest which surprised me.

She beckoned me over.

‘Who do you think that is?’ she said.

She pointed to the picture. It was the third in the series where Jesus falls for the first time.

‘That’s Jesus,’ I said. ‘You might have heard of him. Son of God, that sort of thing.’

‘No, idiot, this one.’

She jabbed her finger at the painting and I looked closer. Not Jesus, but something just behind him. A figure was there, barely distinguishable from the shadows. I shrugged.

‘A Roman solider, maybe?’