The Traveller and Other Stories Read online

  Also by Stuart Neville

  The Ghosts of Belfast

  Collusion

  Stolen Souls

  The Final Silence

  Those We Left Behind

  So Say the Fallen

  Ratlines

  Copyright © 2020 by Stuart Neville

  Foreword Copyright © 2020 by John Connolly

  Many of the stories in this collection were originally published,

  sometimes in different form, in the following:

  “Coming in on Time” Copyright © 2019 by Stuart Neville. First published in Antioch Review. “The Green Lady” Copyright © 2013 by Stuart Neville.

  “Echo” Copyright © 2019 by Stuart Neville. First published in Being Various: New Irish Short Stories. “London Safe” Copyright © 2019 by Stuart Neville. First published in Ten Word Tragedies. “Queen of the Hill” Copyright © 2010 by Stuart Neville. First published in Requiems for the Departed. “The Night Hag” Copyright © 2020 by Stuart Neville. First publication. “Black Beauty” Copyright © 2013 by Stuart Neville. First published in Shortlist. “Followers” Copyright © 2007 by Stuart Neville. “Faith” Copyright © 2015 by Stuart Neville. First published in Hibernian Homicide: New Irish Crime Stories. “The Craftsman” Copyright © 2011 by Stuart Neville. First published in Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the Twenty-First Century. “The Last Dance” Copyright © 2008 by Stuart Neville. First published in Thuglit. “The Catastrophist” Copyright © 2016 by Stuart Neville. First published in Trouble Is Our Business: New Stories by Irish Crime Writers.

  “The Traveller” Copyright © 2020 by Stuart Neville. First publication.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  227 W 17th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Neville, Stuart, author. | Connolly, John, writer of foreword.

  Title: The traveller : and other stories / Stuart Neville ; [foreword by John Connolly].

  Description: New York, NY : Soho Crime, [2020] Identifiers: LCCN 2020015489

  ISBN 978-1-64129-203-0

  eISBN 978-1-64129-204-7

  Classification: LCC PR6114.E943 A6 2020 | DDC 823’.92—dc23

  Interior design by Janine Agro

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Juliet

  Introduction by the Author

  At the time of writing, it is ten years since my debut novel, The Ghosts of Belfast, was first published by Soho Press. That decade has seen huge change in my life, both professionally and personally. I became a full-time writer within a year of that book’s publication, got married not long after that, and became a father to two children. I’ve published eight further novels in that time, and the writing of each has been its own unique journey. Some novels were written in a matter of weeks, others took years. None have been easy. There have been times when I’ve questioned the sanity of what I do, and even considered quitting. At those times, one has to consciously remind oneself of the pleasure of writing, no matter how lost it seems.

  Thank the writing gods for short stories. While writing a novel has become ever more grinding, it’s the short form that reminds me why I do this in the first place. The thrill of discovery, the delight of letting an idea spool out until it becomes something more, a real and tangible thing that can be shared with others. I am always bemused by those authors—and there are many—who say they struggle with short stories, that they can’t write within that structure. For me, the short story has always been a pleasure, both as a reader and a writer. Even as a child, I devoured anthologies and collections, and continue to do so as an adult. Alas, the publishing industry doesn’t agree; collections and anthologies are rarely a profitable enterprise, even for those authors at the top of the food chain. I must therefore express my gratitude to those publishers who still release them into the wild, including my own.

  Every story has its own origin tale, a genesis, and those in this collection are no exception. Please indulge me while I share a glimpse of how the sausage is made . . .

  Part I: New Monsters is an assortment of stand-alone short stories I have published over the last decade, some crime, others reflecting the more supernatural reading I did in my teenage years.

  “Coming in on Time” is kind of an accidental story. It was originally written for a charity anthology with books as a theme, but for reasons too tangled to get into here, a completely different story wound up in that book. This story was inspired by a song of the same name by John Martyn, an aching ballad that uses a boat coming in after a long voyage as an allegory for the mother who abandoned him as a child.

  Like most eighties kids, I grew up reading Stephen King, and although I consider myself a crime writer, that horror influence still lingers today. “The Green Lady” builds on a local legend from my hometown. I grew up close to the Folly River and played in the woods there nearly every day. As children, we whispered of the Green Lady, a witch who haunted the ruins of the Old Mill. Woe betide any child who fell under her spell, including Billy, who is fishing for sticklebacks when a mysterious woman calls to him.

  I was enduring a year-long spell of writer’s block (yes, it’s a real thing) and desperate to find a way out when late one sleepless night I had the idea for a character: Echo, a young boy who is raised as the reincarnation of his own dead sister, Melody. I got out of bed, went to my office, and started typing. Over several weeks, the story got longer and more convoluted until I didn’t know what I had. Was it a novel? If so, what kind? Or maybe a novella? Stumped, I set it aside, occasionally opening the file over several years and wondering what to do with it. Skip forward to 2017 when I was contacted by the immensely talented Lucy Caldwell, originally from these shores, who was editing an anthology of Irish writing for Faber called Being Various. I happily accepted her invitation to submit a story, but soon realised I didn’t actually have anything. Then I remembered poor Echo, sitting lonely and neglected on my hard drive. I opened the file, and thought, I wonder? Over a few days, I pared it down from almost 15,000 words to just under 6,000, finally getting to the nub of the story. “Echo” was always meant to be a short story; it just took a prompt from someone else to make me realise that.

  “London Safe” was written for an anthology inspired by a song by Frank Turner in which the singer-songwriter described a box of postcards, reading the inscribed messages, and summed them up as Ten Word Tragedies. Each author was sent a postcard from the box and asked to write a story based on the message. Mine said, simply, “Don’t worry about me in London. I’ll be safe.” Simple as that.

  “Queen of the Hill” was the first story I was ever asked to submit to an anthology. The brief for Requiems for the Departed was an interesting one: a crime story based on Irish mythology. The obvious choice for me was Queen Macha, the warrior chieftain after which my hometown was named; Armagh comes from Ard Macha, meaning Hill of the Queen. The Christmas Eve setting meant it was also an obvious choice for Soho Press’s holiday anthology, The Usual Santas.

  “The Night Hag” is a new piece written specifically for this collection. It is inspired by the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, something I have experienced repeatedly over the years. Many people have been visited by the Night Hag at one time or another, and her manifestation varies from person to person. The protagonist’s experience of her closely resembles mine, but with added murderous guilt and invasive fingers.

  “Black Beauty” is an odd little story. I and a bunch of other authors were asked to wr
ite a piece of flash fiction to celebrate the three-hundredth edition of the men’s lifestyle magazine, Shortlist. There were two very specific requirements: the story had to be exactly three hundred words long, and it had to feature the colour black. Noir, in other words. That was quite a challenge, but in the end I was able to tie it into my life’s passion: the guitar. The 1957 Gibson Les Paul Custom earned the nickname Black Beauty for its lustrous ebony finish, and it plays a starring role here.

  Part II: Old Friends contains what my editor has dubbed “fan favorites”—each story ties into characters who have appeared in one or more of my novels.

  Several of my novels began as short stories, including “Followers,” which will be very familiar to anyone who has read The Ghosts of Belfast. I woke one Sunday morning in 2007 with an image in my head: a man getting drunk in a bar, surrounded by all the people he’d killed. At the time, I had a mobile phone with a word processor app, so I began writing the story then and there, and finished it later that day. A month or so passed, and the story continued to nag at me, telling me there was a novel here. That novel became The Ghosts of Belfast, and “Followers” is essentially the first chapter.

  As with some other stories in this collection, being asked to contribute to an anthology allows a writer to find a home for an idea that’s been nagging at them. In the case of “Faith,” it was the question of what might a man of God do if his belief evaporates? If a man has lived his life in avoidance of sin, what happens if he suddenly comes to believe there is no such thing? What sins might he then commit? When I was asked to contribute a story to be broadcast on BBC Radio Four, that was the perfect opportunity to finally explore the idea. Not only that, but the resulting story wound up being the basis for my novel So Say the Fallen.

  If you’ve read my novel Ratlines, then you’ll be familiar with the characters of Albert Ryan and Celia Hume. But that book was not their first appearance. They actually started as an elderly couple living outside Dublin. They share a terrible secret, and when they risk being found out, Albert must make an awful choice. “The Craftsman” first appeared in Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century, edited by Declan Burke.

  “The Catastrophist” is unusual in that it began as a title in search of a story. The story itself came from an earlier idea I’d had, involving a senior republican paramilitary travelling to the Irish border to investigate a murder within the ranks. “The Catastrophist” was written for the Irish crime anthology Trouble Is Our Business, edited by Declan Burke, and is one of four stories in this collection in which Gerry Fegan makes an appearance.

  “The Last Dance” is one of the oldest stories in this book, and it was written a few months after completing The Ghosts of Belfast. At the time, I simply wanted to revisit Gerry Fegan, see how he was getting on. When I sold the story to the online crime zine Thuglit, I couldn’t have guessed that it would be read by Nat Sobel, one of New York’s preeminent literary agents. This story, set in a grimy Irish bar in Boston, literally changed my life.

  This collection closes with a novella that’s never been published elsewhere, and it’s the only story I’ve ever written specifically at the request of readers. The Traveller is a response to the messages I’ve received over the years asking what happened to Jack Lennon and his daughter, Ellen, after the events of The Final Silence. Although I’ve always known exactly where Jack wound up—the coastal village of Cushendun, working as a security guard—I’d put off writing about it for several years. This collection offered the opportunity to finally put that right, as well as tie up several loose ends, including the eponymous villain coming back to take his revenge.

  Thirteen stories in total, representing more than a decade of work. I sincerely hope you gain some pleasure from them, and perhaps the occasional chill.

  Stuart Neville

  Fall 2019

  Foreword

  About twelve years ago, in a very different world, an author handed me his as-yet-unpublished manuscript following a literary event in Dublin. Now there are many occurrences that may cause a writer’s heart to sink—we’re sensitive, delicate creatures—but high among them is being handed an as-yet-unpublished manuscript after a literary event. Why? Because chances are that the writer in question has, only moments before, been broadcasting his own credentials as an open-minded connoisseur of new fiction, a supporter of budding talent, and a friend to small animals, children, and the poor. At that instant, he is at his most vulnerable. If his bluff is called, he has nowhere to hide.

  Thus I left the event carrying, somewhat grudgingly, the as-yet-unpublished manuscript of a book entitled The Ghosts of Belfast, also known as The Twelve outside North America for reasons far too complex and arcane to be entered into here, unless one is desperate for a disquisition on the difficult history of Northern Ireland, its tortured relationship with the rest of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, and how these factors may sometimes color the perceptions and attitudes of certain sections of the reading public.

  To be honest, it took me a while to get around to The Ghosts of Belfast. My house will never be short of books to be read, and I am resigned to the fact that I will go to the grave with that situation largely unaltered. Many of those books I have chosen for myself. Some I may even have paid for. In 2008, The Ghosts of Belfast did not fall into either of those categories.

  Yet—and this is most unlike me—I started to feel guilty for not giving the manuscript a chance. The author, after all, had seemed most personable, and his initial approach was admirably unassuming. In fact, had he been any less forward, I wouldn’t have been in possession of the book at all. I knew that the novel was scheduled for publication in 2009, so clearly someone, somewhere had decided it was worth a considerable investment of time and money. The least I could do was give it a few hours, and bask in my magnanimity forever after.

  I read most of The Ghosts of Belfast on a flight to New Jersey, and finished it on the airport station platform while waiting for my train to New York. That same evening, I met Joe Long, my oldest American friend, and a great proselytizer for Irish fiction. I told him that I’d just read the best post-Troubles Irish novel yet written, which was also the finest Irish mystery novel of the century so far, and therefore one of the great Irish mystery novels, period. It was no exaggeration, and I stand over those comments more than a decade after the fact. The Ghosts of Belfast was uniquely Irish in its mood and setting, but its prose style boasted the muscularity of the American crime tradition, while its generic influences were also wide enough to encompass elements of the British police procedural and the gothic—the latter a field in which Irish writers had excelled for much of the nineteenth century, but which had been neglected for much of the twentieth.

  The Ghosts of Belfast, therefore, provides a useful touchstone for this volume of Stuart Neville’s short fiction. The Canadian-American mystery novelist Ross Macdonald once noted that a writer’s first novel tends to function as an index to his or her subsequent career. In other words, everything that follows can probably be detected in nascent form in the debut work. This collection conforms, in the best possible way, to Macdonald’s observation. Here are monsters, both human and non-human. Here are hauntings, real or imagined. Here are old friends and older fiends. Here is the work of a prodigiously talented writer, one who has more than fulfilled the promise of his first book.

  Here, then, is The Traveller and Other Stories.

  —John Connolly

  PART I:

  NEW MONSTERS

  Coming in on Time

  Barry Whittle asked, “Is she coming in on time?”

  Old Man Gove, the loading officer, said, “Aye.”

  “Good weather today,” Barry said.

  “Aye,” Old Man Gove said.

  “Nothing to hold her up,” Barry said.

  “No,” Old Man Gove said.

  “She’ll not be long,” Barry said.r />
  “She’ll not be long,” Old Man Gove said.

  Barry stepped back, looked out across the channel. Saw the Sapphire cracking the flat table of water. Coming fast like it always did. Once a day, here in the morning, and back again in the evening. Tourists and locals, all of them squashed together, in and out of their cars. The ferry would spill them onto the slip soon. Just wait.

  Barry watched.

  He didn’t know if today was library day or not. He wasn’t good at telling the days yet. Mum had been teaching him: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, then . . . Barry wasn’t sure. He always got Saturday and Sunday mixed up. Without Mum to help, he couldn’t say them all in the right order, even if he counted on his fingers.

  Barry thought there had been three sleeps since Mum went. And he thought the last day he’d seen her had been library day, when the van came off the ferry and stopped in the small car park. Mum had brought Barry on board that day, like she always did, and let him take as long as he wanted to look at the books.

  Josie, who worked on the van, sometimes read books to him. The Tiger Who Came to Tea, Winnie the Witch, The Gruffalo. She would sit on the floor, her legs folded to make a nest for him, and he would let himself be swallowed by her. He liked the way she smelled, and the feel of her breath on his cheek when she leaned in close and read the words, her fingertip following the letters that he didn’t understand.

  He knew some words and letters. Mum had been teaching him. He could recognise DOG, Duh-Oh-Guh, and CAT, Cah-Ah-Tuh, and some more. Numbers too. But not well enough to read all by himself. Not yet.

  Mum would sit at the back of the van, reading grownup books. Or sometimes Josie would leave Barry to look at the books on his own and she and Mum would talk in low voices, their heads close together. Then, when it was time to go, Barry could choose six books to keep until the van came back. Mum did the same, and they would walk home to their house on the other side of the island. Sometimes, if they were too heavy, Mum would carry his books for him.