Quarter Square Read online

  Quarter Square

  By David Bridger

  English Carpenter Joe Walker thinks his life is over when he discovers his wife and best friend having an affair. Restoring an abandoned theatre offers little hope for a fresh start…until he follows a group of strangers through a hidden door into a world he never could have imagined.

  In the haven known as Quarter Square, Joe encounters a community of supernatural street performers who straddle the mortal world and the magic realm known as the Wild. Here, Joe finds a sense of belonging he’s never known before—and a chance to uncover the truth behind the frightening visions that have haunted him since childhood. He also meets Min, an enchanting singer who quickly captures his heart.

  But as Joe settles into Quarter Square, he learns their haven is under attack, while an ancient enemy threatens to tear him and Min apart. Now, Joe must learn to wield his own powers in order to save the life he’s come to love…

  47,000 words

  Dear Reader,

  I feel as though it was just last week I was attending 2010 conferences and telling authors and readers who were wondering what was next for Carina Press, “we’ve only been publishing books for four months, give us time” and now, here it is, a year later. Carina Press has been bringing you quality romance, mystery, science fiction, fantasy and more for over twelve months. This just boggles my mind.

  But though we’re celebrating our one-year anniversary (with champagne and chocolate, of course) we’re not slowing down. Every week brings something new for us, and we continue to look for ways to grow, expand and improve. This summer, we’ll continue to bring you new genres, new authors and new niches—and we plan to publish the unexpected for years to come.

  So whether you’re reading this in the middle of a summer heat wave, looking to escape from the hot summer nights and sultry afternoons, or whether you’re reading this in the dead of winter, searching for a respite from the cold, months after I’ve written it, you can be assured that our promise to take you on new adventures, bring you great stories and discover new talent remains the same.

  We love to hear from readers, and you can email us your thoughts, comments and questions to [email protected]. You can also interact with Carina Press staff and authors on our blog, Twitter stream and Facebook fan page.

  Happy reading!

  ~Angela James

  Executive Editor, Carina Press

  www.carinapress.com

  www.twitter.com/carinapress

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  Dedication

  To the love of my life, my wife and best friend,

  Janette.

  Acknowledgements

  The first person I want to thank is Lazette Gifford of the Forward Motion writing community, for it was on one of Zette’s excellent Two Year Novel courses that this book was conceived, born and nurtured.

  Fellow 2YNers gave me feedback on the outline and first-draft scenes, and later in the process writer friends from Forward Motion, LiveJournal, Romance Divas and Litopia critiqued my opening chapters.

  My wonderful critique partners for Quarter Square were Sandy Williams, who lived it with me chapter by chapter and supplied invaluable insights as I wrote the thing, and Margaret McGaffey Fisk and Erin Hartshorn, who each critiqued the entire novel when I was preparing to submit it for publication.

  I’m grateful to www.plymouthbarbican.com for a paragraph describing some historical highlights of the Barbican, which I used for a tourism leaflet in this story.

  My thanks to everyone on the Carina team, and especially to my brilliant and inspiring editor, Kym Hinton, who is a joy to work with.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  I curled up on the stage floor and listened to rats scratching in the darkness high above. At least I hoped they were rats. The thought that something else might be stalking about among the rodents up there, its claws clicking on the dusty floor, brought my old fear of wolves bursting to the surface.

  Stupid phobia. I’d never even seen a wolf in the flesh, and there was no way a wolf would be prowling the roof space of an abandoned theatre in Plymouth. No reason to think the creatures above me were anything other than rats.

  It would serve Tony right if his building was infested. I might call the local council tomorrow and let them know. After all, I was supposed to be surveying the place. Might get a pest-control inspector down here and make it official before Tony even knew he had a problem.

  On the other hand, I would probably walk away and leave him to his rats.

  The place smelled old. Not damp. Not rotting. Just dusty and ancient. I rolled onto my back, gave my scalp and beard a good scratch and tried to concentrate on the noises and the smell of dry centuries. I preferred them to the sound of my thoughts and the stink of betrayal.

  But the scurrying rats and deep darkness offered no distractions, and my haunted mind slid back to the source of my misery: the bright hotel room to which I’d returned unannounced twelve hours earlier, to find my naked wife riding my naked best friend.

  I couldn’t blank out the memory of her hair swaying across her back, or their moans of pleasure as I walked into the room, or Tony’s grunt of pain when Carole twisted off him to crouch on the floor by the other side of the bed.

  “Joe.” They gasped it simultaneously.

  They tried to talk to me, but I didn’t want to hear any of their shit. Tony took a step towards me, covering himself with a pillow and spouting some pacifying crap, until I punched him in his lying mouth. He went down, spitting blood, and had the sense to stay down.

  Carole wrapped herself in the bedsheet and stood tall. She raised her chin to me, as if offering a second target.

  How could she think that of me? I’d never lifted a finger against her. She might have felt better about herself if I had hit her, but that wasn’t my style.

  I sighed into the darkness. So here I was, alone in a strange city, at the lowest point in my life, spending a night on the dirty floor of my property developer friend’s latest auction purchase, with nowhere else to go and no one to turn to. Great.

  New noises broke into my thoughts: footsteps and low-pitched voices coming from somewhere inside the building, as if men were walking up the corridor from the fire exit towards the foyer, on the other side of the wall from me.

  I scrambled around for my boots, grabbed the heavy lamp without turning it on and pushed open one of the double doors a crack.

  Three lithe, muscular young men dressed in dark clothing filed purposefully across the moonlit foyer. Their supple movements put me in mind of cats.

  They didn’t break stride as they approached a blank wall. Just before he hit the old plaster, the front man snapped his fingers, and a door appeared in the wall.

  My jaw dropped, but I managed to stay silent.

  The finger snapper held the door open for the others, then walked through and left it to swing shut behind him.

  I hurried across the foyer to catch the door before it closed, opened it carefully and slipped through, then stood on the pavement and stared out to where the office buildings should have been. But they weren’t there. In their place, a raggedy square of Elizabethan houses surrounded a small public garden.<
br />
  Was this a film set or something? Coloured lamps twinkled in the trees, and the warm night air carried the murmur of voices. Someone barked a friendly laugh. A violin played a jig, and dancing movement flashed on the other side of the high bushes. People were having a party in the garden.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head, but when I looked again, the square was still there, under a three-quarter moon so bright it threw shadows. I reached behind me to touch the door—just checking—and leaned towards it, as if I were standing on a cliff edge.

  Soft footsteps sounded on the cobbles, and a woman of about my age rounded the corner, snapping her fingers as if she was listening to music. She wore a pink T-shirt with black skinny trousers tucked into combat boots. Her blond bob had pink streaks. She crossed the road and shot me a pretty smile.

  “You’re lost, aren’t you?” Her voice was clear and sweet.

  I inhaled her light scent and gazed across the square. “I don’t know.”

  She started singing.

  Running on a dry riverbed, stumbling over rocks and logs and other obstacles hidden by the night, terrified for my life, I’m surrounded by the pounding and scrabbling and thunderous panting of the monster behind me, and I know there will be no escape. In the end, when its hot breath hits the back of my neck, I can’t help it: I glance back. It drags me down, hauls my head back savagely to bare my throat, and its hideous jaws gape.

  Dusty sunlight streamed through the high windows of the theatre. I started my daily coping routine, which entailed lying quietly for several minutes while I sealed the nightmare in its box. I was determined to fight this fear and kill the wolf monster that had hunted me in my dreams for as long as I could remember.

  I replaced the horror with pleasant scenes from the earlier dream—the old square, the garden hung with lights, people dancing to violin music, the lovely woman. Her voice and her delicate scent, like freshly cut oranges and lemons, had seemed so real. The whole experience had. Except for the magic door.

  Well, that was something I could check out. I sat up and pulled on my boots.

  The foyer wall was as blank and featureless as it had been the previous day during my survey. No matter how I prodded and poked, there was no opening or edge.

  Shaking my head and feeling foolish about chasing a dream, I left the magic door and the woman where they belonged. It was time to deal with real life.

  Half an hour later, after washing and tidying myself up in one of the dressing rooms, I left the theatre and walked uphill from the mediaeval harbour towards the hotel on Plymouth Hoe.

  I watched Carole and Tony eating breakfast for a while before they noticed me.

  They looked more like a married couple than Carole and I ever had. Well dressed in similar styles and exuding the same casual confidence, like two peas in a pod. How come I’d never noticed that before? Too busy with my own stuff, I supposed. Certainly that was how things had been for the past year or so. Too concerned with the new direction my life was taking and always on the defensive against Carole’s complaints about the changes.

  She saw me first, and Tony’s shoulders tensed in response to her expression. I paused by their table without making eye contact and told them, “I’ll wait for you upstairs.”

  A waiter noticed me and moved to lay another place at their table, but I shook my head. This time yesterday I’d been enjoying a full English. Today I didn’t belong.

  Somehow it didn’t feel right to go into the hotel room I’d shared with Carole, but I didn’t have to wait in the corridor for long. I guess their appetites were no better than mine. Carole opened the door, and I made a beeline for the armchair with a view from the window. I didn’t want to look at them.

  “I’m so sorry, love.” Carole was near to tears.

  I stared out at a yacht sailing across Plymouth Sound. “Don’t call me love.”

  “Joe…” Tony whined.

  When I glared at him, he glanced at my white knuckles on the arms of the chair. He licked his bottom lip, which was swollen and shiny.

  “I’m not going to hit you again. You’re not worth it. Say your piece and let’s get this finished.”

  Neither of them spoke.

  “How long has it been going on?”

  “For a while,” Carole admitted. “We’re in love, Joe. It isn’t just sex. We’d never do that to you.”

  “How. Bloody. Long?”

  Tony bit the bullet. “Nearly a year.”

  “We were going to tell you,” Carole said. “Honestly, love. It was never the right time.”

  “Well, now it is. Tell me.”

  “We want to be together,” Tony said. “We didn’t want to hurt you.”

  Enough was enough. I stood and prepared to leave.

  “Hang on.” Tony extended his hand, his fingertips splayed and quivering slightly, as if I were a hot plate and he didn’t want to get burned. “We can’t leave it like this.”

  “We should sort it out,” Carole said.

  “We can sort it out later,” I replied. “Right now I don’t want talk to you.”

  “Carole and I are going to live together,” Tony blurted. “We’re going back to London today. What will you do?”

  What the hell did they expect me to do? Sit in the car with them? Make small talk? Hang around the house like a spare part while Carole packed up and left me? Well, none of those things were going to happen. That much was certain. But what was I going to do?

  For a moment music echoed in the back of my mind: a woman’s voice, singing in the distance.

  “I’m not going back. I’m staying here.”

  “Plymouth?” Carole’s tone held an all-too-familiar London-centric assumption. “Why?”

  “The theatre,” I said to Tony, anger and something else, something I didn’t recognise, building inside me. “You don’t really want it, do you? I’ll take it off your hands.”

  “It’s a dump. What will you do with it?”

  “None of your fucking business.”

  Tony shrugged. “If you put it straight back into auction, it’s worth half a million as it stands.”

  I nodded towards Carole without breaking eye contact with him. “It’s worth a Carole. I’ll sell her to you.”

  I sensed Carole clenching her jaw. It must have nearly killed her to stay silent. For the first time in years I didn’t feel responsible for her unhappiness.

  Tony stiffened. “If that’s how you want to play it.”

  Typical Tony, with his business head on: an instant decision and no haggling. He’d never wanted the theatre anyway. It was the least attractive property in a job lot he’d bought at auction last month, and he doubted a renovation would be profitable. My demand allowed him to off-load two liabilities while keeping the asset he wanted.

  I hoped my face wasn’t betraying my emotions. “Arrange the transfer and send on the paperwork. Address it to me at the theatre.”

  I made it round the corner from the hotel entrance and out of sight of their window before I gave way to tears. Leaning against the seawall and facing a salty breeze, I allowed myself to feel the full force of their betrayal. I didn’t stand there with my shoulders shaking, so a passerby wouldn’t have known there was a problem, but my heartbeat made my throat ache.

  Our marriage had been difficult for some time, and that was mostly my fault. I had moved the goalposts, not Carole. She wasn’t the one who’d abandoned a good salary and prospects last year in order to make a dream come true. As she never tired of telling me, she had married a chartered surveyor, not a bloody carpenter. She had ganged up with my parents, and they had poured disappointment over me from the moment I announced my decision.

  Tony had been equally bewildered by my life change. “Thirty-two is too early for a male menopause. Get a grip, for fuck’s sake.”

  It dawned on me that betrayal by my best friend hurt more than betrayal by my wife, and the realisation made me feel a bit better about things somehow. Truth be told, Carole and I had fal
len out of love a long time ago. But a friendship as solid as the one Tony and I had shared should have lasted a lifetime. We’d been like brothers for more than twenty years.

  That was why I’d punched him. Not for screwing Carole, but for screwing me.

  For pitying me. For knowing exactly what he wanted and making me face the fact that I didn’t know what the fuck I wanted. And for taking what he wanted instead of overthinking everything, which was what I did. What I was doing right now, in fact.

  I’d spent my entire life wondering who the hell I was supposed to be. I went through the motions—a good degree, a good, middle-class career, a good marriage to a clever and ambitious woman—but none of it had ever been solid for me.

  Only my dreams had any substance. I dreamed of working in wood, and I dreamed of a great love—one my real-life loves had never lived up to.

  I’d never found a soul mate. But last year I’d finally taken the step I’d dreamed about for years, when I threw away my salaried security and set up as a jobbing carpenter.

  Working in wood hadn’t made my life blissful. I still yearned for a lover as wonderful as the soul mate of my dreams. But at least I was doing what came naturally.

  My phone vibrated. I knew who it was before I glanced at the display—Carole. I watched the screen flash until the answer message kicked in, then hurled the phone, high and spinning, into the sea.

  It was time to pull myself together. I needed coffee. Then bedding, cooking and eating stuff, basic toiletries and some cleaning gear. A camping shop would be the place to start equipping myself for my new life.

  I turned my back on the past and walked into the city.

  Chapter Two

  I grabbed a McJunk breakfast and ate outside while seagulls screamed overhead and street dancers performed in the shadow of a department-store building. Three masked men with rippling muscles threw a darkly exotic woman between them in high flips and somersaults. At the top of each dangerous loop the woman’s dazzling white gypsy dress caught the sun and made her fly.