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CHAPTER 1

Charley Reynolds wrapped one of the curls of her dyed, red hair around her finger over and over. This was a thing she found herself doing more and more these days, fixating on the slightly fraying ends, noticing the changes in color from countless dye jobs. It was an easy distraction, driving out here in the Sussex countryside with the man next to her — her boyfriend, Darren, wearing his usual grease-stained Tshirt. He pulled down the gear stick of the old, orange, Mark 3 Escort Mexico, a car he considered to be his pride and joy. A mechanical mass of fought back rust that she knew meant more to him any day of the week than she did.

She pulled the strand of hair in her fingers straight, transforming its tight curl into a long, wiry, dyed fuse, she let it go and it immediately sprang back into its original form.

'Pull the car up,' she said.

'Wha..?'

'Pull up.'

'What, you need a piss or something?'

'I want to get out,' she said with a stronger tone.

'Oh, here we go. Not this shit again. You been reading them women's mags ain't ya? Filling your brain with shit about how I treat ya?'

A flare of revulsion coursed through her like a warhead, infusing her with an overwhelming feeling of wanting to escape.

Without hesitation or care of the consequences, she reached out and grabbed the steering wheel, yanking it towards the side of the road. Loose stones, the smell of burning rubber all combined with the objecting tyres dragged in a direction they weren't prepared for. Darren hit the brakes hard, the car screeched to a halt, his refurbished rims barely missing the protruding six-inch concrete curb.

'You dumb bitch! What the fuck are you doing?' Darren yelled.

Quickly grabbing her handbag, Charley jumped out. Slamming the door behind her, walking away from the car, the dust caused by the sudden stop still hanging in the air like a mist.

'Get back in 'ere!' he screamed, a shower of spittle spraying from his mouth.

She thought about those melodramatic, grey TV shows, soap operas set in boring pubs, with down beaten people backstroking in depression and misery. Thought about screaming back, about telling him the old clichés. 'It's over.' 'I never want to see you again.' Or the council estate classic: 'You're doing my head in.' But she didn't.

Realizing where she actually was, walking on a random road, with nothing around apart from long stretches of tarmac and sundried green fields. She turned back to him, raging in his orange car, wearing his black-stained, yellow T-shirt, looking like a wasp maniacally trying to escape the insides of a particularly sticky piece of fruit.

The sound of his ranting, calling her all the 'bitches' and 'whores' he could muster, becoming distant as she stared forward and carried on. She narrowed her vision down to a thin tunnel, ignoring him, the outside border becoming a black blur, like darkness was consuming her.

After a few minutes of determined walking, a slick orange bullet flew past her, pulling as close to her as its furious driver would dare. She ignored it, throwing her handbag further over her shoulder. Silence suddenly seeped into the soundtrack, making her decision to be alone and away from him more real. The heat from the afternoon sun beat down on her, glad now that she had chosen to wear a cropped, white vest, tiny shorts and low top Converse.

She wondered where he would go, if he would come back, what she should do to keep him away. She remembered the family party when she introduced him as he swayed drunkenly in the doorway. 'You're late, Darren!' she moaned. 'You've been drinking again!' 'I'd rather be pissed and late than early and fucking bored with you lot,' he slurred.

Charley had back pedaled, tried to make his first impression more pleasant.

'This is Darren, he's a mechanic,' Charley said with pseudo enthusiasm in her voice.

'Fuck off, am I! I work on the bins, innit fella? Driving the dust cart.' He smirked as he patted her father on the back.

She had known her father hated him from day one. He had never said this outright to her, just to her mother. She'd always defended Darren, but now she wanted him out of the flat. Daddy's flat that he had bought his little girl. She knew how to play her father when she had to, and she knew he would make it his personal project to get Darren out.

She checked her bag for her phone. 'Shit,' she whispered closing her eyes, remembering she had left it in the Escort's center console, knowing his grubby fingers would be working at the password, trying to unlock it; trying to find the messages from the other men he had constantly accused her of seeing.

A breeze caught her hair, the curls rising and falling, propelled by soft gusts as she wondered if anything else could possibly go wrong today.

She continued to walk, making it from the main road, wandering by instinct to the south, going back to the seafront. She found her way to Eastbourne's promenade and headed west, back towards Hove. It was a long walk, the afternoon fading to the long shadows of evening.

The walk gave her time to think; to contemplate the decision of living with Darren, libido and petulant youth had overcome good sense when selecting a live-in life partner.

Maybe she should get a job, live like the regular people of the world and not live from Daddy's wallet. She never understood how they did it; she would often go shopping during the day, watching people work, managers, assistants and cashiers. Bored after ten minutes of viewing them run the rat race, she wasn't able to fathom spending eight hours there. It would send her mad, consumer retail incarceration, locked behind a till pressing buttons like a chimp trying to type Shakespeare.

Deep in her shallow thoughts, she looked up ahead at the nearing Brighton pier. It looked mystical in the setting sun, like a mirage that bridged the gap between the sea and the pebbly beach she walked on. She couldn't believe she was here already, her head so far away it distorted time.

Long, thin strands of rotting seaweed were caught on the structure's underside, hanging down and gently swaying in the wind like ghostly shredded curtains through an open window.

Above, on the promenade, a group of young men — boys in actuality, all drinking from cans of larger — shouted down to her. She looked up at them. Here was an entire gang of dick head Darrens, five of them in total. Dopey, Brainless, Gormless, Toothless and Fuck Wit — a small seaside tribe of lowbrows. They all had the same vocabulary as him, using their pub charms in her direction. 'Oi babe', 'Oi bitch'. 'Come suck on this,' one yelled, grabbing his genitals.

She thought about giving them the finger, using that old daytime TV dialogue she had mastered. Telling them all to piss off without the censoring bleep of a producer to stop her. But she didn't. She just looked forward and continued to walk, putting distance between her and their leering voices. Moving quicker, the wind picked up, its hollow timbre coldly whispering past her ears.

A few minutes passed, the sharp smell of the sea drifted to her senses, distracted her, immediately making her forget the bench full of morons. She looked up at the promenade again, and then stopped. Another figure was looking down towards her. There, as if in mourning, a dark-haired woman stood, wearing funeral black.

The woman raised the dark veil from her hat, looked down at Charley with eyes blackened by tear-stained makeup. She was middle-aged, beautiful, her expression gaunt and vague, masked by sadness. The woman's black, tar-like pupils defied the twenty feet between them, her mesmerizing gaze rushing through Charley like a pair of dark spears. Sharing a moment in time together, the lady in black sharply turned then walked away, disappearing from view.

Charley raised her hand to her hair, pushed it from her face as a breeze took hold of it again. The image of the woman in black turned in her head as she moved to the underside of the pier. She had never known anyone who had died, had never been to a funeral before. She wondered what it felt like to lose someone. The only feeling she knew of in life was the slow bubbling of wanting rid of another, not the grief or sadness of their unexpected departure.

Beneath the pier's metal structure, decay and rot clung in abundance. Hanging seaweed tendrils reached towards her like hundreds of miniature tentacles. She could see the sun in the distance pushing out its final orange glow, dipping on the horizon like a ball of fire slowly being extinguished by the sea. A refreshing coolness caressed her skin.

Taking this moment for herself, she suddenly felt anguished and worn out from the fight earlier, from the common foul abuse thrown at her by Darren. Reaching in her bag, she passed a cigarette in between her lips and lit it.

As the pier's acoustics reverberated, completely immersed her, the soothing sound of the wind mixed with the hypnotic roll of the waves and created a tranquility in her soul. She had never allowed herself these quiet moments before, she found a rock and sat down, her legs crossed in a meditative position, eyes shut. There was always a drama, a party, or a trip to the pub with Darren, manmade noisy nonsense, people creating their own pointless dramas all for the purpose of having something to talk about. She pulled three more drags on the cigarette, tasting its rough pleasures that her mind longed for and her lungs repelled.

The sea rolled in, a breeze touched her face.

The cigarette fell from her fingers as she dropped from consciousness. Slipping into a light but far away sleep, she thought of that deep look in the eyes of the woman in black. Her hypnotizing eyes. She had real problems. She didn't know how she knew this, but she felt it with an intuition she didn't really understand, a heightened instinct that she had drawn from her gaze.

A shattering shriek, an almost animalistic cry pierced the bubble she had put herself in. Her eyelids flew open. Panic surged in her blood. She swung her head around trying to find the origin of the sound that made her tingle in terror, her skin rippled as cold as the waves before her.

Then, as soon as the shriek had come, an alluring, ethereal song, not too many octaves away from the slight whistle on the wind, distinctive enough to be its own eerie thing, replaced it; a soft, female voice, romantic but empty, cold but warming. There was no understandable dialogue, just long drawn, sensual sounds. A soft sexuality entwined within a child's lullaby twisted into its tone.

Charley gasped at the air with parted lips, slowly calming herself, her rough fear smoothed as the strange song entered her mind, caressed her body and overcame her.

Her head lolled, her eyes closed with a slow, soft joining of her lashes, like the closing mouth of a Venus fly trap, ensnaring her in the darkness of her own mind. A tranquility as vivid as REM sleep washed over her. The song became more intense, closer and more personal, firing pangs of sexual excitement between her legs.

Suddenly, the song stopped. Immediately the foggy, intense desire in her mind dissipated. She opened her eyes and looked around, trying to discover the song's source. There was nothing, just the dying sun's final touch on her face.

The tide pulled out, the wind's icy bite now noticeable. Between the pebble beach and the sea there was something she hadn't noticed before. A collection of curved, black rocks, two feet high and four feet wide, all spread out in front of her under the advancing waves, each of them a similar shape and size, as they dotted out away under the shadowed length of the pier. As the tide rolled out again, momentarily, the song wafted up from the sea's creased blanket of waves, the desire filled drowsiness bubbled in her brain again.

She stood, transfixed by the pattern of black rocks, transfixed by the song.

That was where the song was coming from, the rocks.

A heightened intuition tingled through her, fueled her curiosity. Everything seemed like a dream, the song pulled her forward.

The tide drew in, lapping up at her feet before being sucked back out again. Her grin broadened, she felt drunk, filled with something that made her feel far away. The song ... the song.

Something whispered in its soft tones. A word — her name —

'Charleeyyyyyy.'

It was calling her, drawing her to it.

Without thinking, she moved forward dreamily, almost floated forward. The nearest black rock was only a few feet away now. With each step closer, the rock becoming bigger, the rock ... wasn't a rock. Its thick surface seemed to pulsate with a webbing of veins, like it was somehow ... breathing? With each rhythmic pulse the veins conducted a small glow of energy through them. A neon surge, like the bioluminescence of deep-sea fish, shone deeply below its surface. Each pulse matched the dreamy rhythm of the song. Yes, she understood, somehow, this ... thing was generating the song. She wanted to run, but it held her in place, became stronger, whispering her name over and over.

'Charleeyyyyyy, Charleeyyyyyy, Charleeyyyyyy.'

Re-adjusting her dreamy eyes, she began to notice recognizable contours. Thin limbs wrapped around folded legs. A smooth, black head bent to thin black knees. A long, thin spine rose in its middle, separating two halves of a human-looking back. Charley gasped, the fog in her mind thinning, settling, understanding, no, this was no rock. No, it wasn't a rock at all. It was a curled up humanoid form, a living, breathing, vein covered shadow.

The tide crashed in and pulled back out. A thin, spindly arm moved from the curled creature towards the wet sand, its fingers tipped with sharp talons that stretched into a vicious tarantula-like paw.

She wanted to turn away, wanted to run, but somehow the song held her in place, tears building in her eyes. Fear and intuition said, Run! Run! Run! The silky, slithering song said, Stay! Stay! Stay! The creature slowly unfolded, stood up, restructured into a sheet of darkness that blocked her view. Tears fell from her face, a jolt of panic broke the songs spell, she fell backwards, toppled down, landing violently on to the pebbly beach with a winding blow. The thing loomed forward, Charley's mouth curled to scream as two, fiery, night-time eyes drew down.

There was no scream, only the song filling her again, muting her from the inside.

It slashed her with its taloned hand, five, sharp, meaty holes gouged into her front, splitting the fabric of her white T-shirt, tearing down in her soft flesh, dragging across her breasts, pushing deeper, nicking at her ribcage with claw-like blades. Agony overwhelmed her and the next flush of tide was a deep crimson, polluted with her warm blood. It grabbed her, dragged her backwards. Her open mouth filled with water as she was pulled deep below the waves into a stagnant, silent place. Hollow, cold, isolated, where her terrified, bubbling screams would never be heard. She looked up to the surface of the sea, watched as it rapidly disappeared into the distance. Blood plumed around her, like a contrail of red haze from a plane. Wide-eyed, petrified, her lungs filled with gory, freezing, water, twisting and turning in panic, she was dragged straight down into the murky gulf. Straight down to her death.

In a trendy, overpriced but rundown part of Hackney, down a graffiti covered back alley, up a rusted fire escape and though an old, red brick warehouse door. A pair of deep-brown eyes stared mannequin-like, not blinking, as intense flashes hit their retina, licking them with light.

'OK turn to your left again ... drop your arm ... come on!' the photographer barked as he unloaded a rapid fire of camera clicks.

Modelling was Kirsten Costello's job; this was her way to pay the bills. She had been a fortunate girl at birth, blessed with all the right attributes in the facial department to be classed as beautiful. She had the cheekbones, the jaw line. Her nose was perky, her eyes held the correct distance between them to be cat-like and alluring. Others in her immediate family held just a few of these physical characteristics. Nice eyes, full lips, perfect cheekbones. Whether through good genes or the stars cosmic alignment, she naturally had the attractiveness many others searched for in surgery.

At 18, living in the tacky surroundings of South End, she felt London calling. A place that, in her mind's eye, promised to be a creative catalyst, a fuel pump for ideas she could feed directly to her brain. A place where she could revel in culture, rather than doss in run down arcades and chip shops. Originally, she had not relied on just looks for her future, but used her artistic talent instead. Skills and talent that were based behind the camera, not just standing in front of it, skills that had now become largely redundant. Applying for a photographer's position at a fashionable magazine, they quickly became less interested in her portfolio, and more so in taking her picture.

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Excerpted from "Night Waves"
by .
Copyright © 2018 David Irons.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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