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    Only Shadows Move
    Only Shadows Move
    Only Shadows Move
    Ebook53 pages38 minutes

    Only Shadows Move

    By David Martin

    ()

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    About this ebook

    "Spiders, by David Martin, is infused with paranoia bought about by the combined effects of job losses, bomb scares and hangovers.The trace of horror gradually becomes something more palpable, as Martin satirises the violent ecosystem of business cost-cutting and downsizing, making for an effectively grim and darkly comic story." The Workshy Fop blog (workshyfop.blogspot.co.uk).

    "Relic is artistically drawn. Quite superb." - www.abctales.co.uk

    Short, sharp shocks and fragments from the darker corners of 21st century life. From the lingering legacy of the Cold War, to the surreal aftermath of the financial crash, to the ghosts of unlived lives. David Martin's debut short fiction collection draws together stories previously published by the London Magazine and Unthank Books, among others, together with exclusive new work.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDavid Martin
    Release dateOct 19, 2015
    ISBN9781310809873
    Only Shadows Move
    Author

    David Martin

    David Martin is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Honorary Professor of the Sociology of Religion at Lancaster University.

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      Book preview

      Only Shadows Move - David Martin

      Only Shadows Move

      By David Martin

      Distributed by Smashwords

      Copyright David Martin 2015

      For Al and Evie

      Cover image by Louis Emmett

      Thank you for downloading this free ebook. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes provided the book remains in its complete original form.

      Contents

      Relic

      Returning

      Spiders

      Sunday Morning

      This Is A Warning

      Erased

      An Ending

      Acknowledgements

      Relic

      NO ONE saw him fall from the sky the night of the strange lights. The lights themselves were only seen by the sleepless, the drunk, the late shift workers raising gritty eyes from their screens for a moment’s break. And they caused only a flurry of filler in the local news, and a brief effusion of conspiracy theories gibbering to themselves in the digital dark. But he lay undiscovered for days, weeks, embedded in the soft ground by the shattering impact of his fall, in the heart of the wood in a bare and clodded field on the edge of town.

      No one was watching at the frozen hour when the lights streaked low overhead, or in their wake heard the crashing of branches and the outraged eruption of birds.

      Close up you could see the marks of his descent through the canopy of trees, their broken limbs charting his passage, letting new shafts of light fall into the shadowed space where he lay, close by a silent pond. From outside the wood was undisturbed, keeping its secret. But secrets find their way out, too good to keep, but good enough to keep close.

      We never saw what was inside the suit, it was still intact, but burned and battered, its identifying markings lost, the visor black and impenetrable. We liked to scare ourselves daft by imagining the broken and rotting form within. Because it was definitely occupied. You could tell by the heft and shape of it, even before one of us dared to poke it with a stick and then ran like hell after feeling something’s inert bulk shift within, a sound and movement we never forgot.

      Someone said he’d probably been dead for decades, a remnant from the black and white days of moonwalks and spacewalks and Sputniks, some failed long-denied Cold War mission. Maybe there was only ever a dried-out skeleton inside, empty eye sockets still haunted by the years of staring into a greater void, while the Earth in all its blue-white beauty revolved forever out of reach.

      No-one was quite sure who found it first, and it was a story that seemed to choose its own initiates. Somehow each of us knew the kind of person we should confide in. We weren’t all friends, came from all over town, had little else in common, yet somehow we knew to keep it secret from everyone else, even siblings, even our obvious best friends. Looking back, it was as though it could see something in each of us that we couldn’t. But soon a few of us were coming down regularly, clandestinely but never alone, always with increasingly elaborate cover stories. We would cling

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