Body Rides
Authors: Richard Laymon
Richard Laymon
Copyright © 1996 Richard Laymon
The right of Richard Laymon to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2012
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cover photograph © Michaela Stejskalova/Shutterstock
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN: 978 0 7553 9172 1
HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP
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London NW1 3BH
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www.hachette.co.uk
Richard Laymon wrote over thirty novels and seventy short stories. In May 2001, The
Travelling Vampire Show
won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror Novel, a prize for which Laymon had previously been shortlisted with
Flesh
,
Funland
,
A Good, Secret Place
(Best Anthology) and
A Writer’s Tale
(Best Non-fiction). Laymon’s works include the books of the Beast House Chronicles:
The Cellar
,
The Beast House
and
The Midnight Tour
. Some of his recent novels have been
Night in the Lonesome October
,
No Sanctuary
and
Amara
.
A native of Chicago, Laymon attended Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, and took an MA in English Literature from Loyola University, Los Angeles. In 2000, he was elected President of the Horror Writers’ Association. He died in February 2001.
Laymon’s fiction is published in the United Kingdom by Headline, and in the United States by Leisure Books and Cemetery Dance Publications.
Praise for Richard Laymon:
‘A brilliant writer’
Sunday Express
‘Stephen King without a conscience’ Dan Marlowe
‘This is an author that does not pull his punches … A gripping, and at times genuinely shocking read’
SFX Magazine
‘In Laymon’s books, blood doesn’t so much as drip as explode, splatter and coagulate’
Independent
‘No one writes like Laymon and you’re going to have a good time with anything he writes’ Dean Koontz
‘Incapable of writing a disappointing book’
New York Review of Science Fiction
‘One of the best, and most underrated, writers working in the genre today’
Cemetery Dance
Also in the Richard Laymon Collection published by Headline
:
The Beast House Trilogy
:
The Cellar
The Beast House
The Midnight Tour
Beware!
Dark Mountain*
The Woods are Dark
Out are the Lights
Night Show
Allhallow’s Eve
Flesh
Resurrection Dreams
Darkness, Tell Us
One Rainy Night
Alarums
Blood Games
Endless Night
Savage
In the Dark
Island
Quake
Fiends
After Midnight
Among the Missing
Come Out Tonight
The Travelling Vampire Show
Dreadful Tales
Night in the Lonesome October
No Sanctuary
Amara
The Lake
The Glory Bus
Funland
The Stake
*previously published under the pseudonym of Richard Kelly
Neal Darden, alone in his car, took backroads to stay away from Robertson Boulevard. He wasn’t worried about too much traffic on Robertson; he was worried about getting shot for no good reason.
After all, this was night in Los Angeles.
Anybody could get shot at any time of the day or night, but night was worse. And the well-traveled boulevards such as Robertson seemed more dangerous to Neal than the hidden roads that twisted through quiet, residential neighborhoods.
His theory was simple: the fewer cars in sight, the less likely you were to encounter a load of trigger-happy gangsters.
The very best way to stay alive was to avoid going out at all. Especially at night. Especially
late
at night. He refused to live that way, though. He was only twenty-eight years old, too young to become a hermit. For safety’s sake, he might make a few concessions – but he wouldn’t surrender and stay home for the rest of his life.
You take precautions and you go anyway.
Even if it’s just to return the video rentals.
The two movies were due before midnight. Marta had stayed later than usual, actually changing for work in his bedroom so she wouldn’t have to leave until the very last moment. By the time she’d gone and Neal had finished rewinding the tapes, it had been nearly 11:30.
Plenty of time to reach the store.
But a bad time to be out in your car on the streets of Los Angeles.
Neal knew that he could’ve waited and returned the videos tomorrow. There would be a late charge. Five or six bucks, he supposed. A small amount to pay, compared to the risk of taking
them back at this hour of the night. But there was a larger price in waiting for daylight: a payment made in freedom and self-respect.
What kind of chicken-shit’s afraid to drive five miles?
he’d asked himself.
Marta, who worked the graveyard shift at LAX, had to drive
thirty
miles, five nights a week. What would she think if she found out that Neal was afraid to take the videos back?