The Stone Man - A Science Fiction Thriller (56 page)

See, I think ‘the bother every couple of months’ were the Arrivals. And I think that, since ‘it’s not as bad as it was’ when they were having the ‘bother’, that says to me there hasn’t been another Arrival since the last one. I think that, since we’ve caught the original one here, and effectively have it stuck in a loop with me, it’s somehow gumming up the works. I don’t know, maybe they have to have them all back before they can start again, or maybe—and I think this is more likely, seeing as it was always the original that turned up first before the others came—that they need it back to make the system work, like it’s the linchpin or something. Or maybe they’ve just given up and moved on elsewhere, worried that we’re figuring them out or that we’re just too much trouble. I haven’t a clue. But either way, I think from the government’s point of view, the situation is this:

As long as they keep the original here, and following me, the others don’t come back. And I think that, unless the research yields some results soon, that will stay as the bottom line. And what that means for me, I don’t really like to think.

But better than the alternative?
I still think so. I
think
I still think so. For now, at least, I’m here. There’s air in my lungs and blood moving in my veins. I still want to keep it that way.

***

Paul paused for a moment, breathing slowly, then pushed the ‘STOP’ button on the Dictaphone. He looked as if he was going to start recording again and add something else, but then he pushed the ‘DELETE’ button instead.

Throwing back the duvet, Paul sat up in bed and swung his legs over the edge, rubbing at his face. He looked up into the upper right-hand corner of the cabin, at the small black camera lens, and gestured at the bed behind him. He then shrugged, put his face to his flattened hands to mime sleep, and then shrugged again. It wouldn’t look out of the ordinary; he often mimed things to it throughout the day, even though they could hear him. He didn’t like to talk to it for some reason.

He got up, reaching for a grab handle as the cabin turned, and walked the few feet to the sideboard. Grabbing a mug out of the rubber holder, he clicked the button on the kettle, and sighed gently as it boiled. Whilst he was waiting, he pushed the button on the CD player, and music began to play through the surround sound speakers embedded in the walls. A thought occurred to him, and for the first time in many months, he reached for the curtains that covered the small porthole window in the nearby wall.

As ever, if he really wanted to see it, he would have to flatten his head against the glass. They’d deliberately placed it so that he would see as little of that particular view as possible, but he’d learned that he could see it if he tried. The best time to do so was always on the turn. He remembered again how Straub had told him of one report, a bright spark of hope that said there’d been a drop in some of the energy readings; but the dip had only lasted a few days before everything had returned to normal. Even so, they were sure it meant something, but Paul didn’t dare to believe it.

He pulled back the curtains and pressed his face to the glass. The Stone Man was still there, of course, walking steadily after him. Just as it had always been.

*

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A SYNOPSIS OF THE
ORIGINAL ENDING
TO ‘THE STONE MAN’ IS ALSO AVAILABLE AT THE VERY BACK OF THIS BOOK.

NOW READ ON AFTER THE AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD TO READ
 
THE BEGINNING OF ONE OF LUKE SMITHERD’S OTHER BESTSELLERS (THE ONE THAT HE RECOMMENDS YOU TRY NEXT IF YOU'RE GOING TO READ MORE OF HIS WORK)
‘THE BLACK ROOM, PART ONE: IN THE BLACK ROOM’.
THAT BOOK IS FREE TO DOWNLOAD FROM AMAZON RIGHT NOW!

 
Author’s Afterword:

(Note: at the time of writing, any comments made in this afterword about the number of other available books written by me are all true. However, since writing this, many more books might be out! The best way to find out is to search Amazon for Luke Smitherd or visit
www.lukesmitherd.com
...
)

Well, here we are at last. The ‘Difficult Second Novel’ is finally finished. Admittedly, it should have been finished about eight months ago, and I’ll get to why in a second, but before any of that, I have something far more important to say.

Thank you.

The support I’ve received from complete strangers who have read
The Physics Of The Dead
, be it by e-mail, tweets, nice reviews on Amazon (vital!) or even financial means has been an extremely nice surprise. At the time of writing, there are currently a combined total of 33 positive reviews on the Amazon US and UK kindle stores, and the fact that somebody took the time purely to say that they enjoyed my work (and to encourage others to check it out) never fails to absolutely make my week. The downside is I’m left continually checking the site for new reviews at least five times a day. (Needy? If you only knew how much. But you can leave your star ratings/reviews on the
AMAZON UK BOOK PAGE
or the
AMAZON USA BOOK PAGE
. The 'Rate this book' feature on the Kindle is notoriously unreliable, so don't use that ;-) ) But seriously; I can’t stress enough how important those reviews are to me both personally and to the continued progression of any kind of writing ‘career’ that I might have. So thanks a million, all of you, it really helps me keep going with this. And if you’ve read
TPOTD
(as absolutely no one calls it, no matter how hard I try) and if you liked it, and you haven’t put a nice review up, well … hint, hint. YES, I know there were a lot of typos in the first version that went up, so I checked, and reposted, and STILL people said there were typos, and I checked and reposted, and STILL people said there were typos … so I did a fourth draft and left it. I basically read too fast to notice my own mistakes. Look, make me a millionaire and I’ll hire a goddamn copywriter, okay?? Sigh … just do me a favour though please? If you’re gonna mention typos in your otherwise very nice review, just don’t put it in the freakin’ review title (I’m looking at you, Ms Janet Farley … but whilst I’m here, thank you so much for your very kind words ;-) )

Okay, so some of you that read
Physics
(and if you haven’t … hint, hint, again
*author's note from the future: since I wrote The Stone Man, I've written another short novel called The Man On Table Ten, and a much longer novel in four parts called The Black Room. If you were thinking of reading another of my books, I would suggest starting with that instead -- part one is free! – because TPOTD has a slower start that you might not stick with unless you've developed a bit more faith in me as a writer. So I would go The Black Room (TBR!) a nudge first, then The Man On Table Ten (TMOTT!)
then
TPOTD if you were gonna work your way through my back catalogue … okay, now I'll hand you back to my past self. Hmm. Weird
) may have been wondering where the hell this book has been, seeing as I signed off the last one by saying I was going straight into writing the next.

Well, to be honest, it was all a matter of logistics.

The nature of the book you’ve just read—things having an impact on a national scale, military and government involvement, evacuations, religious mania—depended on the logistical side of those things being
believable
. By now, you’ll have probably made your own mind up about how successful I was in addressing those things, but it was something I initially found immensely intimidating. I had to decide what would actually happen—
realistically
—in a scenario that no government on earth would have prepared for, and how much of that would actually be seen by a man chasing a fantastical stone creature across the country. And I didn’t have the faintest clue where to start … so I kept on putting it off. I even ended up writing a load of plot notes for my next novel
instead of doing the same for the actual book I was supposed to be working on.
Something you should probably know about me—and this is going to sound like a bad joke but I swear this is true—I bought a book about overcoming procrastination and I never got around to finishing it. Honest injun.

Eventually, slowly but surely, I started to piece things together, including military research (difficult when performed in the context of a purely imaginary situation) and had enough to at least get started. Along the way, there were lengthy pauses whenever I got to a bit that meant more large-scale planning, but eventually the thing was completed. Funnily enough, Straub was never intended to be a woman; one e-mailer pointed out that, whilst they’d enjoyed
TPOTD
(Eh? Eh?) a great deal, they thought there was a lack of female characters.

Now, whilst I’ve never subscribed to the theory of writing characters specifically to appeal to a wider demographic—I write what I feel is correct for the story—I found myself thinking, well,
could
Straub be a woman? And a quick Google search told me that, at the time of writing, the highest ranking female officer in the British army was a brigadier. And, so far as I could tell, a brigadier could realistically be the person operating at the level Straub was in the story, and so, a woman she became. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t think it would benefit the story, and I really think it did. But what do you think? Get in touch at
[email protected]
and let me know. Incidentally, if there’s any military stuff that I’ve blatantly fudged, please don’t just post things slagging it off, instead let me know
how
I’ve gotten it wrong so that I can correct it.

The story as a whole started off as an image in my head and a question; the image being that of a huge stone figure, emerging from the sea and passing through a crowd of people as if they were made of butter, and the question being ‘what would a nation do if that figure was there to claim the life of one man, and was causing great damage in the process?’ I don’t know where those thoughts came from—they’d been there for a long time, a couple of years maybe—but I knew there was a story in it. It just needed drawing out. So, following the same process I used when I finally got round to bashing out the plot outline for
TPOTD
(EH?? EH???) I figured out what the hell was going on with that big stone bastard, and what it was actually there for. And what you’ve just read is what you got as a result.

You probably noticed them earlier than I did (if you read the last book) but it was only once I was nearing the end that I noticed some of the similarities between this story and the last; two men, thrust together into an extremely bleak situation, ending up trapped within a boundary that may mean their doom. The one major difference with the other book being, I guess, that they’re already dead (don’t worry, that’s not a spoiler; there’s a clue in the title.) Angela says that she sees a lot of myself in Andy—the few good bits, I mean—but I’d like to think that if a man offered me a bed and shelter for the night, I wouldn’t fuck his wife. I’ve recently put myself forward for reasonably extensive testing regarding Asperger’s, ADHD and the like (see: major procrastination issues, above) and various other minor neurological hiccups (I always feel like I have brain fog a lot of the time, and am so frighteningly easily distracted) and it was my experience and reading about all of that that made me inject some of that into Andy. I didn’t want to have him dwell on it any more than someone that actually has the condition would, but both as a plot device and a way of explaining some of Andy’s social views, as well as his shortcomings (and I’m not saying that Asperger’s makes you a bit of an asshole, that’s just him) it fitted very nicely for me. He turned out all right in the end, I think; a lot that was as a result of the experiences he’d been through, but where his guts came from in the end … well, that’s the question, isn’t it?