Gristle & Bone

  Contents

  Praise for G&B

  Title

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  BABY TEETH

  VIRAL

  ARTIFACT (#37)

  //END USER

  BEWARE OF DOG

  FAT OF THE LAND

  SCAVENGERS

  A Sample from SALVAGE

  THANK YOU

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MORE FROM THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE FOR "GRISTLE & BONE"

  "Intelligent, character-driven horror tales."

  Jack Ketchum, Author of The Girl Next Door

  "Mr. Ralston writes horror fiction that is unflinching and pulls no punches."

  Kit Power, Author of GodBomb! (for The Ginger Nuts of Horror)

  "Duncan Ralston can write. Oh yes, he can write so damn well that you're instantly pulled right in there. And he's got some truly nightmarish visions to share with you."

  Chris Hall, DLS Reviews

  "Gristle & Bone will lead you into a world of unrestrained imagination."

  Thomas S. Flowers, Author of the Subdue series

  "A collection of stories that will have you glued to them from the first words. "

  Nev Murray, Confessions of a Reviewer

  "Duncan Ralston is writing honest stories about real people, pitched headlong into extraordinary situations. And that is what makes them so horrifying."

  Ken Preston, Author of the Joe Coffin series (for Dirge Magazine)

  "A chainsaw straight to the jugular... balances horror with humanity with effortless ease."

  Daniel Marc Chant, Author of Into Fear!

  "Duncan Ralston has a knack for writing three-dimensional characters and can bring the darkness just as well."

  Zakk Ex Libris, The Eyes of Madness

  "Each story has a great way of blindsiding you, leading you down one path and then coming at you from a completely different angle of attack."

  J.R Park, Author of Upon Waking

  "Ralston is not afraid to take chances, with his story ideas or his narrative structure. In that regard, he's like a typical free swinging baseball power hitter."

  Silver Screen Videos

  "As a fan of horror, this is the kind of writing that is exactly what I look for."

  Chad A. Clark, Author of Behind Our Walls

  "I cannot praise this book highly enough."

  Shadow Girl, Becki's Bloody Book Blog

  "Literary and plausible, all the stories remain firmly grounded in reality, which makes them even scarier. The first story of the collection... made me wince, stop reading, and collect myself. It's a bar-raising achievement. "

  Jeffrey X. Martin, Author of The Flock (for Popshifter)

  GRISTLE & BONE

  DUNCAN RALSTON

  __________________________

  These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author.

  SHADOW WORK PUBLISHING

  Copyright © 2015, 2017 by Duncan Ralston

  All rights reserved.

  Cover by Michael Bray

  Also by Duncan Ralston

  Salvage (novel)

  Wildfire (novella)

  Woom (novella)

  Where the Monsters Live (novella)

  The Method (novel)

  Video Nasties (collection)

  Ebenezer (novella)

  Ghostland (novel)

  The Midwives (novel)

  _________________________________________

  Get these FREE ebooks when you join

  the VIP list at www.duncanralston.com!

  INTRODUCTION

  Chris Hall

  DLS Reviews

  "...if you crossed the rather rational line between keeping household pets and eating them alive, would enough humanity remain to think in terms of morality and mortality?"

  – 'Scavengers,' Duncan Ralston

  I discovered Duncan Ralston through Gristle & Bone. It was one of those from-out-of-the-blue situations which suddenly grabs you by the balls and gives you an unsettling tug. Like an explosion of violence along a crowded walkway. It brings the whole world into pinpoint perspective; in an instant you're suddenly aware of nothing else but what's directly in front of you. Your entire world zeros in on that one thing—blanking out all the mundaneness around you.

  Let me rewind the tape for a second. Before a copy of Gristle & Bone dropped through my door I'd not really heard the name Duncan Ralston before. I'd been reviewing horror and dark fiction through my website DLS Reviews for little over a year at this stage. I was just quietly settling into the scene and making a dark little home for myself amongst the veritable chaos out there on the World Wide Web.

  I'd found that it had become a regular occurrence for novels to arrive at DLS HQ by authors I'd never heard of before. At first Gristle & Bone appeared to be just another book to churn through, to hopefully garner some gritty enjoyment from and subsequently dissect at length—as is the way on DLS.

  However, as soon as I'd gotten a page or so into Gristle & Bone's first offering—a truly horrifying Barker-esque vision of a messed-up imagination entitled 'Baby Teeth'—the world folded in around me and I found myself a strange hostage to Ralston's will as he unleashed an assault of stark brutality upon my prone senses. There's undeniably something in the way Ralston writes that sinks into your flesh and pulls you into his stories. His prose is viciously barbed; keeping you from backing away from the gaping maw of his hideous and truly malicious world.

  Each short story is a raw vision of sensual and visceral terror which embeds itself upon the retina of your mind. Shit—it's a whole year later and I'm still having over-exposed flashbacks of cannibals, scavengers and pornographers carving me up for the slaughter. I've become a victim of Ralston's cruel imagination—unknowingly put into harm's way and somehow allowed a dark seed of corruption to infiltrate the delicate harbour of my mind.

  As a young curious horror reader many, many moons ago, I discovered Clive Barker's Books Of Blood—collections of short stories which, as a young inquisitive teenager I eagerly (and almost uncontrollably) devoured with absolute gusto. Barker had opened my adolescent eyes to the terrifyingly limitless scope that was possible through the medium of written fiction. He'd plunged the depths of depravity, tore apart the once sacred layers of flesh, and exposed the furthest reaches of our tingling nerves. Reading Barker for the first time scared me in such a way that I couldn't help but seek out more.

  Fast forward some twenty odd years and there I was again, my inner senses ravaged and raped by the uncaring savagery of an author who was some three-and-a-half thousand miles away. There I was—a dedicated horror fanatic who'd certainly churned through more than my fair share of horror stories over the ensuing years—and I was once again being sliced and diced by the vicious blades of an author. Ralston, a name I'd soon come to fear as much as admire, was penetrating my thickly calloused skin in seconds. This hadn't happened to me for a long time. 'Baby Teeth'—his opening short—had sucker-punched me, leaving me completely exposed and at the mercy of his next assault on the senses.

  The following three-hundred-odd pages were nothing short of a merciless bloodbath.

  So what is it about Ralston that fucks with your head so much? I'm an unashamed dissector of novels. I love to tear things apart and expose the innards. Books, that is! I'm no frigging Jeffrey Dahmer (if that's what you're now
thinking). Although I wouldn't be all that surprised if I hadn't been just a teensy-weensy bit nudged off the normal course as a result of the Barker/Ralston tag team effort. But anyway... back to the point I was trying to make... I like to examine stuff. And so, after I'd finished Gristle & Bone—once I was able to come up for air and reacclimatise myself with the real world—I began backpedaling through the horrors I'd just put myself through. Part of reviewing is reliving the experience in micro-snippets so I can offer readers a hopeful taste of what the book offers. I was keen to see what it was that had caused me so much inner turmoil. To see how Ralston had managed to submerge my living world into an abyss of visceral horror, in such a way that an over-exposed image of the nightmares still remained seemingly burnt onto the inside of my retina.

  What I discovered wasn't anything ground-breaking. It wasn't anything perverse or fundamentally outside of the box. Ralston used the same words as all of us. He used the same format and the same old sentence structures. His prose is sharp, snappy and straight for the gullet—but nothing outlandishly ground-breaking. However what he does do is tell his stories hauntingly, terrifyingly and uncompromisingly well.

  When you've got a propensity for inflicting savage cruelty on your (potentially unsuspecting) audience, when you impregnate this urge for malice with a masterful knack for creeping under their skin and enticing a downward spiral of dark exploration, then you have yourself one truly nightmarish cocktail. Ralston unsuspectingly (but quite purposefully) plants corruptive seeds under the skin of his readers. He knows exactly which seeds will germinate in these conditions, unseen and away from the eyes of their host. He knows the stuff that will grow dark tentacle-like roots deep inside you; chilling your organs as they explore deeper and deeper into your body. It's only when his horror breaks the surface of your flesh, when the violence is in your face and the blood is seeping out everywhere that you realise that it's not just what's in your face and splattering the floor; it's actually lodged itself deeper within you. It's at that moment you'll realise those deep-set roots can't just be pulled out. The moment when the real terror sets in.

  When reviewing Gristle & Bone one thing that became increasingly apparent to me was how varied and remarkably different each story in the collection was. 'Baby Teeth' is an early Clive Baker meets Mark Morris style nightmarish horror. 'Fat Of The Land' is a Jean-Pierre Jeunet / Marc Caro style of gut-churning visual butchery that spirals into a maddening heart-racing finale that quite frankly flings you about the place as if you're a mere rag doll. 'Beware Of Dog' is textbook Stephen King right down to the heart-wrenching love interest that grows from the crazy-ass horror amongst an all-American backdrop. 'End User' is a current-day 2001: A Space Odyssey, suitably grubbied-up for an internet-obsessed generation, whilst 'Viral' messes with your head like a Koji Suzuki film does—only with more of those dark roots I detailed earlier exploring your insides.

  But of course, like a true showman, Ralston leaves the most terrifying, the most vicious and remorseless stories for last. 'Artifact (#37)' is nothing short of harrowing. You've got your Clive Barker tendrils in there again, exploring, probing and penetrating your nerve endings. But there's a worrying modern-day, grim-as-it-comes reality about it that sticks with you like a malignant tumour. It's something that burrows away at you from the outset and, despite the passing of time, never seems to dissipate. You read this and you're soiled for good.

  Then we come on to the Grand Finale of the book. The final nail in the coffin of your disappearing wellbeing. 'Scavengers' is Ralston's answer to all our niggling fears and childhood terrors. It explores those things we consciously try to pretend could never happen and zeroes in on the utter plausibility of it all. This is pure dread. Terror masterfully sculpted and laid out on a plinth for us to gaze in awe at.

  Duncan Ralston is everything that I love about early Clive Barker. He doesn't care who we are. If we happen upon his stories, if we take the bait and bite down on that barbed hook—then we're his for the taking. From that moment on—from the first tentative bite of his tantalising visions of horror—we're sucked in and at his mercy. What follows in Gristle & Bone is a sensory overload akin to the restless night of a painfully troubled mind. Where Barker took his readers to his own uniquely imagined vision of hell and its horrors, Ralston brings the bestial, barbaric grimness of the darkest reaches of our personal nightmares and lets them loose on our unwitting senses.

  In Ralston I see nightmares made terrifyingly real.

  Watch this man—because he'll be watching you...

  Chris Hall, May 2016

  BABY TEETH

  IN EARLY JANUARY, the doctor told Candace McMurray she would never be pregnant.

  The obstetrician hadn't called her "barren" outright, but the word had occurred to Candace. Years of childhood antidepressants might have ravaged her ovaries, he said. Her husband, Joel, had suggested adoption, but Candace wanted her own children, not someone else's. Joel considered the decision outlandishly selfish, though he said nothing. He shared in her disappointment, wanting children with a hunger matching hers, but he knew her sadness could easily spiral into depression. No use making it worse by arguing a point he knew he'd never win.

  Candace was determined not to let the bad news affect their sex life, but despair wormed its way back into her life and into their bed, and soon she couldn't bring herself to orgasm, no matter how persistently Joel pushed her toward it. By the end of the month, she'd realized she had entirely soured on sex.

  After several nights ending with Joel's chin rested on her cold shoulder in the dark, breathing into her ear as he worked on her with the thick index fingers of his right hand, while pressing his desperate erection against the cleft of her buttocks, Joel McMurray finally stopped trying to initiate.

  That first night without contact, Candace silently wept herself to sleep. Eventually the McMurrays fell into an easy but essentially joyless routine: eating together, reading together, sharing stories about their day, but knowing nothing of sexual or romantic intimacy. No words of love now passed between them, no kisses more sensual than a peck, for fear of stirring Joel's desire.

  In the meantime, Candace took up scrapbooking. By June she'd filled two albums with old photos, silhouette portraits, weathered letters and envelopes, copies of birth certificates and citizenship papers, reaching far back into the McMurray family history and her own—the Leasons—but never moving forward. The past became a rich, bright tapestry for Candace McMurray; the future was empty and cheerless. Every blank page in the scrapbook now reminded her of that terrible word: barren. She filled them as fast as she could.

  It was late June when Candace awoke to a jolt of pain in her right breast. Two words immediate sprang to mind: Mom and Cancer. But as the pain abated, throbbing dully, she realized it had felt like teeth. Had Joel bit her? The thought was absurd, after so long without even a touch.

  She rolled over to find him on his side, facing away from her. They'd slept that way, on either side of the bed, for months now. Candace held vague memories of their early nights together, spooning while the sweat dried on their naked flesh, or the rise and fall of his breath and the beat of his heart lulling her to sleep as she rested her head on his smooth chest. Seeing him asleep now, with his back turned as hers had been only moments before, still brought sadness.

  "Joel?" she whispered into the dark. "Joel?"

  He stirred. "Mmn?" He rolled onto his back. "What? What's wrong?" Still muttering, half asleep, he peered over at her, eyes puffy.

  "Nothing," she said. He clearly couldn't have bit her if he'd been sleeping. A bug bite? "Go back to sleep," she said. No use keeping him up; he'd only be cranky in the morning.

  He sighed heavily through his nose. "Did you hear something?"

  "No," she said. She wanted him to go back to sleep. She didn't want to reveal what she'd thought. He would laugh at her, and she couldn't bear to be laughed at—not now. Half asleep, she'd imagined the feel of teeth on her areola, the sharp wetness of them,
the suction drawing her nipple out to stiffen.

  Felt so real.

  "I thought I heard something, but it's nothing." She patted his shoulder, the first time she'd dared touch him in bed since early in February. He shrank from her touch. Not meaning to, she thought, but as if her fingers had stung him, and she withdrew further into herself from the shock of it, rolling over onto her side of the bed, her sovereign territory.

  "Hon?" Joel said.

  She pretended to be asleep. After a moment, she heard him sigh through his nose again, annoyed this time, the chuff of an angered beast. She curled into the fetal position, pulled the blanket in her bunched fists tight beneath her chin, an elbow grazing the bruise, bringing fresh pain.

  A moment later, Joel got up to use the bathroom. She felt his side of the mattress swell in his absence, the familiar block of ugly yellow light falling over her side of the comforter as his urine splashed into the bowl. She'd have to wipe it off the seat tomorrow, mothering him like the child she'd never have.

  I was born to mother, she thought. Born to be a mother. She drifted off thinking this, fast asleep when Joel returned to bed, if he'd returned at all.

  JOEL HAD ALREADY left for work by the time Candace rolled out of bed. He managed an online shopping company, while Candace transcribed medical recordings from home—not a lucrative job, but it allowed her the time and freedom here and there to work on her scrapbooks, and before them the novel she'd been writing, now long abandoned.

  She'd forgotten all about the nipple incident until her shower, where under a second skin of soap bubbles the areola appeared to be bruised. She rinsed and toweled off quickly, wiping away a circle of mist to examine it in the mirror. It looked like a hickey, puffed out and unnaturally large, a small purple and yellow ring with a tiny crescent of dark marks that could easily have been the teeth of a very small mouth, the bumpy little glands much more prominent than usual.