The Last House on Needless Street Read online

  ‘The buzz building around Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street is real. I’ve read it and was blown away. It’s a true nerve-shredder that keeps its mind-blowing secrets to the very end. Haven’t read anything this exciting since Gone Girl’

  Stephen King

  ‘Books like this don’t come around too often. An intelligent, well-written, stylish psychological thriller … with a perfectly structured plot arc and a perfectly satisfying whammy at the end. I would say I inhaled this in one, but I think I was too busy holding my breath throughout. Bravo’

  Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat

  ‘A chilling and beautiful masterpiece of suspense, cunningly plotted and written with the elegant imagination of a Shirley Jackson or a Sarah Waters. I was completely enthralled’

  Joe Hill, author of NOS4R2

  ‘Believe the hype. The Last House on Needless Street is not only a masterclass in horror, but in storytelling full stop. Up there with the best I’ve ever read. The most unsettling, beautiful, sad and wise book, it’ll stay with me a long time. I’m in awe’

  Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Mercies

  ‘The new face of literary dark fiction’

  Sarah Pinborough, author of Behind Her Eyes

  ‘A masterpiece. Beautiful, heartbreaking and quietly uplifting. One of the most powerful and well-executed novels I’ve read in years’

  Alex North, author of The Whisper Man

  ‘This book is tender rather than terrifying. Playful and sweet as well as sinister and thrilling, the creeping dread is tempered beautifully with humour and it ends being extremely emotionally impactful’

  Emma Healey, author of Elizabeth is Missing

  ‘This immersive modern gothic reads like a timeless classic as it lures you hook and sinker into its world’

  Essie Fox, author of Somnambulist

  ‘I didn’t think it was possible but The Last House on Needless Street is even greater than the hype suggests. Clever, devastating, beautiful, terrifying, poignant, how often can you say that about one book? There are not enough stars in the world for Catriona Ward’

  Chris Whitaker, author of We Begin at the End

  ‘This is the best horror novel I’ve ever read. Even Shirley Jackson, Her Majesty, would have to concede to this one’

  Natasha Pulley, author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

  ‘A breathtakingly ambitious book, gorgeously written, and never once shies away from showing you its fangs and its beautiful blood-filled heart. Stop reading this blurb already and open the damn book’

  Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts

  ‘Both harrowing and compelling. As soon as I finished it I wanted to read it all over again. An absolute masterpiece’

  Katerina Diamond, author of The Heatwave

  ‘Absolutely brilliant. This is extraordinary, high-wire-act horror, audacious as hell’

  Christopher Golden, author of Red Hands

  ‘One of the most original and exciting books I’ve read in years. Prepare to be immersed in this chilling, thrilling, emotional read’

  Jo Spain, author of Dirty Little Secrets

  ‘Brilliant. This is a book everyone is going to be talking about. Dark, clever and utterly page-turning’

  Cass Green, author of In a Cottage in a Wood

  ‘The most extraordinary book. It’s mesmerising, original and challenging. A work of genius’

  Mark Edwards, author of The House Guest

  ‘The creepiest, saddest-but-funniest, most mesmerising book I’ve read in a long time. Psychological thriller and horror writers beware: Catriona Ward just raised the bar skyward’

  Tammy Cohen, author of When She Was Bad

  ‘As mad as a snake but all the better for it. A story that slinks deeply into uncomfortable places in the tradition of Fowles’ The Collector. An enigmatic story of trauma

  Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual

  ‘Breathtakingly brilliant. Dark and relentlessly twisty, the best thing I’ve read this year’

  Lisa Hall, author of The Party

  ‘I thought The Last House on Needless Street would be good but I didn’t know it would be THAT good. It’s a book of the year. For any year’

  Martyn Waites, author of The Old Religion

  ‘Not only edge-of-the-seat, terrifying suspenseful horror, but it also broke my heart into tiny pieces. Such exquisite writing’

  Muriel Gray, author of The Ancient

  ‘Incredible. Absolutely creep-inducing, skin-crawling, even agonising: and also so beautiful, both in writing and heart. One of my favourite things in ages’

  James Smythe, author of The Explorer

  ‘A taut, dark, twisting exploration of the human condition. At once gripping and heartbreaking’

  Rebecca F. John, author of The Haunting of Henry Twist

  ‘A haunting novel, beautifully conceived and written, which will have you in pieces from the beginning to the surprising and audacious end’

  Tim Lebbon, author of Eden

  ‘An extraordinary, disturbing, original and powerful book. A bloody marvel’

  Anna Mazzola, author of The Story Keeper

  ‘Jaw-droppingly original, deeply disturbing and one hundred per cent heartbreaking. Psychological horror at its very best’

  S.J.I. Holliday, author of Violet

  ‘Incredible. Just incredible. Throughout, I didn’t know where to put my heart. A breathtaking, fiercely beautiful novel’

  Rio Youers, author of Halcyon

  ‘Terrific. An utterly mesmerising feat from a powerhouse writer who elevates the British horror genre’

  Irenosen Okojie, author of Speak Gigantular

  ‘What an incredible read: complex and clever, dark but not without vital rays of hope. Beautifully written. Gothic thrills at their finest’

  Adam Christopher, author of Empire State

  ‘Weird, glittering, inventive and shot through with needles of warped, brilliant light, this book slipped under my skin from the first page’

  Emma Stonex, author of The Lamplighters

  ‘Exceptional. Uplifting, terrifying, beautiful and mesmerisingly dark’

  James Brogden, author of Hekla’s Children

  ‘This book won’t just stay with you, it’ll knock you off your axis. An exquisite, heart-crushing masterpiece. Worth all the buzz and then some’

  Victoria Selman, author of Snakes and Ladders

  ‘My mind is blown. What a brilliant, breathtaking, heartbreaking book’

  Paul Burston, author of The Closer I Get

  ‘The kind of story that novels were made for. A thrilling yet tender vortex of a book that you’ll want to share with every reader you know the second you finish’

  S.R. Masters, author of The Killer You Know

  ‘I wanted to savour every single brilliant sentence. Exquisitely and chillingly written; at points it literally made all the hairs on my arms stand up. What a read’

  Nikki Smith, author of All in Her Head

  ‘I absolutely loved it. Genuinely disturbing: a relentless creeping dread of madness and murder that begins on the first page and keeps building to the last gasp’

  Peter McLean, author of Priest of Bones

  First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

  VIPER, part of Serpent’s Tail,

  an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

  29 Cloth Fair

  London

  EC1A 7JQ

  www.serpentstail.com

  Copyright © Catriona Ward, 2021

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no p
art of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 78816 6164

  Export ISBN 978 1 78816 6171

  eISBN 978 1 78283 7527

  For my nephew River Emanuel Ward Enoch, born 14 August, 2020

  Ted Bannerman

  Today is the anniversary of Little Girl With Popsicle. It happened by the lake, eleven years ago – she was there, and then she wasn’t. So it’s already a bad day when I discover that there is a Murderer among us.

  Olivia lands heavily on my stomach first thing, making high-pitched sounds like clockwork. If there’s anything better than a cat on the bed, I don’t know about it. I fuss over her because when Lauren arrives later she will vanish. My daughter and my cat won’t be in the same room.

  ‘I’m up!’ I say. ‘It’s your turn to make breakfast.’ She looks at me with those yellow-green eyes then pads away. She finds a disc of sun, flings herself down and blinks in my direction. Cats don’t get jokes.

  I fetch the newspaper from the front step. I like the local because it has a rare bird alert – you can write in if you see something special, like a northern flicker or a Siberian accentor. Even this early, the dim air is as warm as soup. The street feels even quieter than usual. Hushed, like it’s remembering.

  When I see the front page my stomach goes into curls and knots. There she is. I forgot it was today. I’m not so good with time.

  They always use the same picture. Her eyes are big in the shadow of her hat brim, the fingers clenched on the stick as if she thinks someone might take it away from her. Her hair lies wet and sheeny on her skull, short as a boy’s. She has been swimming, but no one is wrapping her in a fluffy towel to dry her. I don’t like that. She might catch cold. They don’t print the other picture, the one of me. They got in big trouble for that. Though not big enough if you ask me.

  She was six. Everyone was upset. We have a problem with that around here, especially by the lake, so things happened fast. The police searched the houses of everyone in the county who might hurt children.

  I wasn’t allowed to wait inside while they did it, so I stood out on the steps. It was summer, bright and hot as the surface of a star. My skin burned slowly as the afternoon wore on. I listened as they pushed back the ugly blue rug in the living room, tore up the floorboards and knocked a hole in the wall in the back of my closet because they thought it sounded hollow. Dogs went all over my yard, my bedroom, everything. I knew what kind of dogs they were. They had the white trees of death in their eyes. A thin man with a camera came and took pictures as I stood there. I didn’t think to stop him.

  ‘No picture, no story,’ he said to me as he left. I didn’t know what that meant but he waved goodbye in a cheerful way so I waved back.

  ‘What is it, Mr Bannerman?’ The woman detective looked like a possum. Very tired.

  ‘Nothing.’ I was shaking. Got to be quiet, Little Teddy. My teeth made little clicks like I was cold, but I was so hot.

  ‘You were yelling my name. And the word “green”, I believe.’

  ‘I must have been thinking about this story I made up when I was a kid, about the lost boys who turned into green things, at the lake.’ She gave me a look. I knew it well. I get that look all the time. I held tight to the trunk of the little oak in the front yard. The tree lent me its strength. Was there something to tell? If so it hovered just over the edge of my thoughts.

  ‘Mr Bannerman, is this your only residence? No other property around here? No hunting cabin, nothing like that?’ She wiped sweat off her top lip. Care pressed down on her, like an anvil on her back.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, no, no.’ She wouldn’t understand about the weekend place.

  The police went away in the end. They had to, because I was at the 7-Eleven all afternoon and everyone says so. The security tape says so. What I used to do there was: I sat outside on the sidewalk by the sliding doors. When they parted with a whoosh and released people in a blast of cold air, I asked for candy. Sometimes if they had it they gave it to me, and sometimes they even bought it for me. Mommy would have been ashamed if she knew but I loved candy so much. I never went near the lake or Little Girl With Popsicle.

  When they finally finished and let me back in the house I could smell them all over. Traces of cologne, sweat, squeaky rubber and chemicals. I was upset that they’d seen my precious things, like the picture of Mommy and Daddy. The photograph was fading even then, their features growing pale. They were leaving me, vanishing into white. Then there was the broken music box on the mantel – Mommy brought it from her faraway home. The music box didn’t play. I broke it the same day I smashed the Russian dolls, the day of the thing with the mouse. The little ballerina was snapped from her stem, felled and dead. Maybe I felt worst about her. (I call her Eloise. I don’t know why; she just looks like an Eloise.) I heard Mommy’s beautiful voice in my ear. You take everything from me, Theodore. Take, take, take.

  Those people had looked at all my stuff with their eyes and thoughts and the house didn’t feel like mine any more.

  I closed my eyes and breathed deeply to calm myself. When I opened them again the Russian doll smiled fatly back. Beside her sat the music box. Eloise the ballerina stood proud and upright, arms perfect and poised above her head. Mommy and Daddy smiled down from the photograph. My beautiful orange rug was like soft pills underfoot.

  I felt better right away. Everything was OK. I was home.

  Olivia’s head butted my palm. I laughed and picked her up. That made me feel even better. But overhead in the attic, the green boys stirred.

  The next day I was in the newspaper. The headline was suspect’s HOUSE SEARCHED. And there I was, standing in front of the house. They searched other houses but the article made it sound like it was just mine and I guess those people were smart enough to cover their faces. No picture, no story. They put my photograph right alongside the one of Little Girl With Popsicle, which was a story in itself.

  The picture didn’t show the name of the street but people must have recognised it, I guess. Rocks and bricks came through the windows. So many. As soon as I replaced a pane another rock came through. I felt like I was going crazy. It happened so many times that I gave up and nailed plywood over the windows. It slowed them down. Not as much fun throwing rocks when there’s nothing to break. I stopped going out during the day. That was a bad time.

  I put Little Girl With Popsicle – the newspaper with her picture in it, I mean – in the closet under the stairs. I bend down to put it at the bottom of the pile. It’s then that I see it on the shelf, half hidden behind the tower of newsprint – the tape recorder.

  I recognise it immediately. It’s Mommy’s. I take the machine off the shelf. Touching it makes me feel strange, like someone’s whispering nearby, just below the level of my hearing.

  There’s a tape already in the machine, part used – about half of one side has been recorded. It’s old, with a striped yellow-and-black label. Her faded formal handwriting. Notes.

  I don’t listen to the tape. I know what’s on it. She always spoke her notes aloud. Her voice had a slight hitch around the consonants; she couldn’t quite get rid of it. You could hear the sea in her voice. She was born far away, Mommy, under a dark star.

  I think, Just leave it there, forget I’ve seen it.

  I ate a pickle and now I feel a lot better. After all, that stuff happened a long time ago. The light is growing and it’s going to be a beautiful day. The birds will be arriving. Each morning they pour out of the forest and descend on my back yard. Yellowthroats, kinglets, buntings, red crossbills, sparrows, blackbirds, city pigeons. It’s crowded and beautiful. I love to watch it. I made the peephole just the right size in just the right
place in the plywood – I can see the whole back yard. I make sure the feeders are always full up and that there’s water. Birds can suffer in this hot weather.

  I am about to look out like I do every day, when my stomach lurches. Sometimes my insides know things before my mind does. This is wrong. The morning is too quiet. I tell myself not to be weird, take a deep breath and put my eye to the hole.

  I see the jay first. He lies in the dead centre of the lawn. His bright mess of feathers shine like an oil slick. Twitching. One long wing strokes the air, desperate for flight. They look weird when they’re grounded, birds. They’re not meant to stay put for long.

  My hands shake as I turn the keys in the three big locks on the back door. Thunk, thunk, thunk. Even now I take a moment to lock it behind me. The birds lie all over the yard, scattered on the parched grass. They twitch, caught helpless on what looks like pieces of tan paper. Many are dead, maybe twenty. Some are not. I count seven hearts still beating. They gasp, their narrow black tongues stiff with pain.

  My mind runs like ants, everywhere. It takes me three breaths to make sense of what I see. In the night someone went to each feeding place and put glue traps down, wrapped them around the wire cages, attached them to the balls that hang from string. When the birds came to feed in the dawn their feet and beaks stuck to the adhesive.

  All I can think is, Murder, murder, murder … Who would do this to the birds? Then I think, I have to clean up. I can’t let Lauren see.

  That stray tabby cat crouches in the ivy by the wire fence, amber eyes intent.

  ‘Go away!’ I shout. I throw the nearest thing to hand, which is an empty beer can. The can flies wide and hits the fence post with a noise like dunggg. She goes slowly, in her uneven clawless limp, as if it is her own idea.

  I collect the living birds. They stick together in my hands, bound into a twitching mass. They look like a monster from my bad dreams, legs and eyes everywhere, beaks drinking the air. When I try to separate them, feathers part from flesh. The birds make no sound. Maybe that’s the worst part. Birds aren’t like people. Pain makes them quiet.

  I take them inside and try all the things I can think of to dissolve the glue. But it only takes a few tries with the solvent to see that I’m making it worse. The birds close their eyes and pant in the fumes. I don’t know what to do now. This kind of stuck is for ever. The birds can’t live but they’re not dead. I think about drowning them and then hitting them on the head with a hammer. Each idea makes me feel weirder. I think about unlocking the laptop cupboard. Maybe the internet has an idea. But I can’t figure out where to put the birds down. They stick to everything they touch.