It was so dark that she had to wonder if she was able to see at all. Her blood was throbbing in time with the waves of pain in her jaw, and the way its dull sound was crushed into her head made it apparent that her ears had suffered some damage too. She tried to reach for her jaw to learn how badly it was injured, only to discover that she had no hands. She might have cried out except for her lack of a mouth.
He'd removed it along with her eyes and ears. Her entire body was seized by a convulsion that felt like an attempt to give shape to a scream. Her knees thumped a cold slippery unyielding surface as her spine pressed against the opposite wall of the receptacle in which she was stored. She struggled to stretch out, but the top of her head bumped another wall, and whatever was left at the end of her legs - less than feet, its absence of sensation implied - collided with a fourth.
Dudley Smith writes stories, but he has reasons why he wants nobody to know.
His mother Kathy knows he writes and wants the world to read his work.
Can Patricia, the journalist who interviews him, learn his secret before she becomes part of his research?
Secret Stories is a black comedy of creativity gone wrong, a contemporary Liverpool crime novel, a study of one of today's typical sociopaths. Ramsey Campbell has already written about killers before - in The Face That Must Die and The Count of Eleven and elsewhere - but never more memorably than this. You might know this one. You might work with him.
