E-Book, Englisch, 448 Seiten
Howard Run Time
Main
ISBN: 978-1-83895-168-9
Verlag: Corvus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
From the No. 1 bestselling author of The Nothing Man and 56 Days
E-Book, Englisch, 448 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-83895-168-9
Verlag: Corvus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Catherine Ryan Howard is the author of 56 Days, which was an overall No. 1 bestseller in Ireland and a Kindle top ten bestseller, as well as winning Crime Fiction Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards 2021, and The Nothing Man, whichshot straight to the top of the Irish bestseller charts on publication, was a Kindle No. 1 bestseller in the UK and was shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. Her work has been shortlisted for the CWA/John Creasey New Blood Dagger, the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Novel, and for the Irish Crime Novel of the Year several times. She lives in Dublin.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
The road is narrow, the edges of it crumbling, as if losing its battle to hold the treeline back.
Donal is tense behind the wheel. Grip tight, back ramrod-straight, eyes fixed on the road surface illuminated by the beam of the headlights. The rental is a seven-seater Volvo that gave him pause when he saw it first and made him sweat nervously when he found he had to step into it. He’s only ever driven his own succession of second-hand Nissan Micras, and only around and between cities on smooth, well-lit streets. This car is far bigger and more powerful, and this road is basically a boreen with ambition.
Underneath the wheels, he feels the surface start to gently rise. It’s cutting through dense, gloomy forest, steadily thickening with darkness on either side of the car. Donal knows this is because it’s gone six on an overcast, late-January evening, but it feels like it’s because the forest is absorbing the light, sucking it in, swallowing it up whole.
on it.
‘It’s so creepy out here,’ he says.
Steve, sitting in the passenger seat, snorts and says, ‘That’s, like, the whole idea?’ in a tone that adds a silent on to the sentence’s end.
A heat flares across Donal’s face.
He’s already downsized his goals from to Donal has never held an assistant director position before. Not even close unless you counted the word . His most recent job was glorified receptionist-slash-dogsbody at a casting agency. Getting a gig as Steve Dade’s AD on this was an incredibly lucky break and Donal can blow it.
The problem is that he’s intensely aware of that and has been a ball of acute anxiety ever since he reported to set. He can only hope that when shooting starts tomorrow, he’ll be better at his job than he’s been at making conversation.
‘This is such a waste of time,’ Steve says. ‘They’re probably not even there.’
‘We can leave a note.’
‘Can’t we just leave a note anyway?’
‘Joanne asked that we speak to them,’ Donal says, ‘as a courtesy. That you do.’
Joanne is the owner of Cedarwood House, their set, and also this other, smaller property, Cedarwood Lodge. Steve had refused to spend the money to book out the lodge as well, so here they are, driving to warn the Airbnb-ers who book it this weekend about the shoot.
Steve groans like a teenager who’s just been ordered to go do his homework.
‘What are they even out here?’
‘Mini-break,’ Donal says. ‘A last-minute booking.’
‘Who books a house in a place like this in ? Wait.’ Steve twists in his seat to look back down the road. ‘Did you miss the turn? She said the gates were a mile apart. We should have— ’
This exclamation coincides with him jutting an arm across Donal’s face to point at something on the driver’s side, obstructing Donal’s view and making him slam a foot on the brake in panic.
The car screeches and shudders to a violent stop that jerks both men forward against their seatbelts before shoving them back against them again.
‘,’ Steve says. ‘What the fuck?’
Donal mumbles an apology even though it was clearly Steve’s fault, then looks for what Steve was pointing at.
The right headlight has found a wooden sign, hand-painted and peeling, nailed to a tree trunk at the edge of the road: Cedarwood Lodge, above a black arrow. In the gloom beyond, Donal can just about make out that the arrow is pointing to a pair of wrought-iron gates hung between two stone pillars. One stands open, inviting them to turn on to what looks like a dirt track through the trees that immediately disappears into a dense, inky blackness.
‘Cedarwood,’ Steve scoffs. ‘Where did they get the name? Aren’t these – what are Christmas trees?’
‘Firs,’ Donal answers. ‘And maybe they’re U2 fans.’ He turns to find Steve looking at him blankly. ‘That’s where Bono grew up. Cedarwood Road. In Glasnevin. They have a song about it. On .’
The blankness is morphing into bemusement, so Donal clears his throat and looks back at the gates, hoping the gloom in the car will hide his blushing cheeks. He just should stop talking to Steve entirely. Become mute. Stop the stupidity that is apparently intent on constantly leaking out of his mouth in the presence of this man.
‘Go on, then,’ Steve says, pointing. ‘Let’s go.’
Donal eyes the narrow entrance. ‘I should hop out and open the second gate, shouldn’t I?’
‘Don’t be daft. You’ve of room.’
‘Are you sure? I don’t think—’
‘It’s not a bloody you’re driving.’
It’s not a bus, no, but the gap made by the single open gate does not look as wide as the vehicle Donal actually driving.
He bites his lip to stop himself from saying this out loud and lowers his window in the futile hope that this will somehow help him see in this dark. He swaps the brake for the accelerator and begins to turn the wheel, his grip slipping a little on a surface made moist by his own sweat. Tentatively he noses the car through the gap inch by inch, barely breathing, braced for the horror sound of a scrape.
Once he sees the rear of the vehicle has cleared the second, closed gate, he lets his muscles relax with warm relief and, accidentally, breathes a sigh of one too.
‘All right, ,’ Steve says.
It is indeed a dirt track beyond the gates, narrower than the road they’ve just left and dotted with unexpected mounds and water-filled potholes. The chassis bounces over and into every one, while Donal winces in time. Every cent on this shoot counts – because there’s so few of them – so of course they opted for the cheapest insurance cover on the car, the policy that probably says if you do any damage at all, you’ll have to pay for it out of your own pocket.
‘This is pointless,’ Steve says. ‘They’re not even going to hear anything. Not all the way out here.’
And then, as if on cue, they hear something: a high-pitched, otherworldly, testicle-retracting shriek. Loud and getting louder, because whatever is making it is heading right for them.
A set of red glowing brake lights appear on the track up ahead. Except they’re not brake lights, because they can’t be, because they’re too high up off the ground.
Not lights, but . Glowing red, in the middle of two enormous wings.
On something that’s .
At high speed.
Directly at them.
At the windshield.
The shrieking takes on a kind of raw, guttural sound that reminds Donal of the demons that get exorcised from dead-eyed, white-haired children in the kind of seventies horror movies he doesn’t have the stomach to watch. He jams on the brakes just as he hears Steve say, ‘What the—’ and then the shrieking reaches a fever-pitch that makes Donal’s eardrums thrum with pain, and then there’s yelling too, and then a sound, as the … the , this huge, black, feathered with a pair of glowing red eyes swoops past them and over the car and disappears into the night.
Silence.
Utter silence. As if, all around them, the dark is holding its breath.
Donal is holding his, been holding his for way too long to be healthy, and now he starts gasping and coughing and trying to swallow down lungfuls of air, while also trying to do this because he’s pretty sure he just made a fool of himself and nearly crashed the car and almost wet his pants because of an owl.
An .
Who, flying directly into their headlights, looked surprisingly large and like he – she? – had red eyes.
‘,’ Steve says. ‘The fuck. Was ?’
‘An owl.’ Donal thinks he’s redeeming himself by saying this. Yes, he reacted like it was some kind of monster coming at them, but now he’s realised the error of his ways and can offer an informed explanation. ‘Barn owls make those kinds of weird screeching noises. That’s one of the explanations for banshees, actually. Owls and foxes. Foxes, especially, at this time of year. They’re mating calls, but they sound human. Well, human-like. That’s what people were actually hear—’
‘Foxes don’t fly,’ Steve snaps, ‘and that was way too big to be an owl. Did you not see the of it?’
‘Yeah, but it’s just a perspective thing. It looked bigger because it was flying right at us.’
‘Or because it bigger. That thing was as big as a man. The wingspan must have been, what? Five metres across?’
Donal would’ve gone with more like...
