Kenny could not outwalk his grief, but walking was the only thing that felt like it helped. He’d avoided their favourite places since Bill died but, on a rainy day when it couldn’t feel much worse, he set out along dreary pavements towards the edge of town. A track; a stony path laid with puddles, which led to the top of a valley, then dropped to the bottom and some old farm buildings. Just beyond them were the patches of raised ground that was once the village of Balsdean. A small memorial marked the location of the church altar. In the rain, in his waterproofs, Kenny could cry and have the rain hide the tears.

The man appeared from nowhere. The damp day had forced Kenny into rain gear, but the other man was dressed for a sunny day and was somehow still dry, which should have been impossible. The rain seemed to miss him; until he turned, saw Kenny, and started to get wet.

“Where did you come from?” asked Kenny,

“I’ve just come over from Lewes. Didn’t you see me?” said the stranger.

“But you’re barely even damp, and in this rain,” Kenny pointed out.

“Say, are you all right?”

It was an obvious attempt to change the subject, but Kenny didn’t mind. “I used to come here with my lover, and it’s my first time here without him.”

“I’m missing someone too,” sighed the stranger. He took a step towards Kenny. “Do you want to see something amazing?”

Kenny said he did and the man gestured to follow. A few steps towards the mound which was once Balsdean church and he saw it - a sort of tear in the world - a cut, like when you slice your finger and the blood isn’t flowing yet. The man stepped through and Kenny came behind him.

They were in the valley, but on a different day. The other side was warm and Kenny opened his waterproofs. A flock of birds flew over this valley, and church bells sounded in the distance. Somewhere nearby, a drone of bees. The colours were bright as a picture book. The flock of birds flew over the valley again. Turning a little seemed to change the view more than it should, like a kaleidoscope.

“It’s always summer here,” says the stranger. “Even when it’s bitter outside.”

“What is this place?” asked Kenny.

“I made it for my lover,” said the other man.

“They must have been very flattered,”

“He never got to see it,” said the man. “He threw his life away instead.”

The flock of birds flew overhead. A cloud passed in front of the sun, and bees droned. “It’s difficult,” Kenny sighed.

“It is. But I wouldn’t want it to be easy.”

They walked back through the cut and into the rain. “I have to go now,” the man told Kenny. “But we will bump into each other again, and I want to hear about Bill.”

As the man walked away, Kenny knew that he was going to meet the other man again. It didn’t seem strange that he knew Bill’s name without having being told. He wondered who it was the other man might have lost.

Walking away from Kenny, the Devil thought about his own loss, how they had planned to grow old together. They talked about keeping two sheepdogs, and naming them Goodness and Mercy. That was the thing about Jesus, he liked telling jokes. The dogs might change, he’d said, but the names would stay the same. And so the Devil had built a place for them, in a valley hidden from God’s eyes. It would not last forever, but it would have been enough.

Background

Back in 2019, I started writing notes about a set of stories set along the South Downs Way. The original concept was to write about hiking - but I’ve also ended up writing a lot about the Devil. There is a long story that I’m telling about him, and this story fills in some of the background.

Balsdean is an amazing place, a tiny village that was evacuated to be used for target practise in world war two. Little remains of the buildings now, just bumps in the grass and a memorial stone. It’s a strange, haunted location.

Recommendations

I've just finished reading Stephen King's new collection You Like it Darker. The first few stories made little impression on me. Simple twist-in-the-tale things that seemed to fall apart when one reached the ending. I didn't like them much, but they were interesting because they were King.

I've been reading Stephen King for about 30 years now. Some of his work has felt unremarkable, but other stories have stuck with me. King has produced a fascinating body of work but it sometimes felt like the scale of his career would overwhelm the good moments.

King's prose is rarely flashy, but when it works he builds a world and wraps you in it. This happened for me in several of the stories in You Like it Darker. The longest one is Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream, which is similar to his novel The Outsider, with a supernatural incident framing someone for a crime. It gripped me, so that I was reluctant to stop reading at night.

Another interesting thing is how King captures the feeling of the pandemic. It's never the focus of these stories, but it's there in the background, particularly in Rattlesnakes. Some of these stories had a powerful feeling of absence.

There was much that didn't work - an unnecessary Flannery O'Connor pastiche, a mean-spirited piece about a man killing a wife he thought was nagging him. But there is some great work in this collection, and a lot of it is about people coming towards the end of their life. There's an elegaic feeling, reminiscent of the last few books in Le Carre's bibliography. One of the stories is a sequel, of a sort, to an early King novel, published over 40 years ago.

King has produced over 77 books since 1974’s Carrie (here is a ranking by Esquire from May 2024). I don’t have time to go back to any of them now, but if I make it to retirement, I’m looking forward to re-reading this career.