Leaves the World to Darkness > Buy Leaves the world to Darkness | Contact the Author
The beginnings of centuries have always been periods when fairy stories were popular, but mostly for children. Leaves the world to darkness dares an adult novel that have fairies – or rumours of fairies – at its heart. Also a missing poem, a crumbling home, a secret passage, and the answer to a question about love.
WHEN Harry Weston walked into the parlour and found his grandparents dead,
he was not terribly surprised. When people are as old as they were, you kind
of expect sudden death. Harry could hear it whispered around them, could sense
the waiting in everybody’s dealings with them – even a kind of impatience,
as if the order of things was not being upheld and they were keeping the afterlife
waiting.
Probably his grandparents had ceased to perceive these things decades before,
but even at his age, Harry picked it up. He knew they were so old they had almost
been forgotten.
He had gone there before anyone else in the house, as he always did. The cool
morning sunlight was only just ahead of him as he pushed open the creaky old
parlour door. The same door had been pushed open by generations of maids with
china dishes, shepherds with blood and snow on their hands from the wintry fields,
and boys back from the local hunt – right back to Cromwell’s time
when the old one had been splintered apart by angry soldiers.
And there were his grandparents in their two ancient chairs, staring out of
the window across towards Saxon Wood, as still as ever – they always were
still, as if even the slightest movement might tear their papery skin. But this
time they seemed more than usually shrunken. There was an extra quietness about
the room that struck him the moment he lifted the latch. And when he walked
through, and heard his small feet pad on the linoleum, he could tell there was
something missing, like a dog can tell if a house is empty.
Afraid for no obvious reason of making a noise, Harry tiptoed quickly across
the room and grasped his Grandpapa just below the shoulder. There was a horrible
crunch and a smell of something dusty and just a little fetid – or was
that always there when he sniffed the air? To his horror, Harry realized his
fingers had met in the middle, and the arm of the patched black jacket the old
man had worn for decades was hanging loose.
Harry glanced at their empty faces and bolted. It was as if something had beaten
him into the room some hours before, in the darkest part of the night when the
oil-lamps were out – he was too young to have more than the haziest idea
of what the house was like in the dark – and sucked the life out of them
like a vampire.
Leaves the World to Darkness by David Boyle can be ordered from any good bookshop
or by clicking the button corresponding to the currency of your choice below.
(Electronic payment transacted by PayPal) or by sending a cheque made payable to Tandem Press to Tandem Press, Creative
House, 82-90 Queensland Road, London N7 7AS.
| UK Price: £10.79 (£8.99 + £1.80p&p)
|
|
| EU Price: Euro 17.50 inc p&p
|
|
| The following cards are accepted |     |
Please complete the following form and press the submit button to contact David Boyle.
Softcover - 248 pages - Price: £8.99 - ISBN 0-9552263-0-9 - ISBN13 978-09552263-0-4
Book published in the UK by The Real Press.
This page maintained by TandemPress.com