Types of Everlasting Rest

From Italy and Russia in the time of Napoleon to the fate of Boy Scouts in Czechoslovakia during the Second World War, Clio Gray’s short stories are filled with intrigue, conspiracy and murder. Laden with sumptuous detail, each story leads the reader directly into the compelling and sometimes bizarre inner worlds of her fascinating characters.

Praise for Types of Everlasting Rest:

‘Clio Gray is a master of atmosphere and sensuousness. She combines historical realism with the bizarre, whimsy with the macabre. Reading her is like being at a sumptuous feast in a palace, just before it is stormed.’ Alan Bissett

‘...powerful stuff ... worth savouring. Clio Gray is an uncommonly interesting writer. One wonders, expectantly, what she will do next.’ Allan Massie, The Scotsman

‘... fresh, original, beautifully written... a highly impressive collection.’ Lesley McDowell, Scottish Review of Books

About Clio Gray

Clio Gray was born in Yorkshire, brought up in Devon and has been living in Scotland for the past fifteen years, where she works at her local library. She has won many prizes for her short stories, most notably the Scotsman/Orange Award in 2006. Her first novel, Guardians of the Key, a historical mystery, was published by Headline in 2006; the sequel, The Roaring of the Labyrinth, will be published in August 2007.

See the author's website at www.cliogray.com

An Interview with Clio Gray

When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?

I used to write scary stories as a child at Primary School, and then lots of essays at college, usually veering wildly off subject into those things that interested me. I only started writing fiction seriously only once I moved up to Scotland, and have been hard at it for the past five or six years.

Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind Types of Everlasting Rest? And about what you were trying to achieve, what ideas you were trying to convey?

Most of my stories contain a kernel of death in there somewhere, and often vast or alien landscapes, very far from my normal, everyday life, presumably a mirror to my bleak and wandering interior landscape!

How do you go about creating your voice on the page?

With short stories, I usually begin from a single idea, maybe some intriguing fact I have read about, or even a single word which I like the sound of. Then I just sit down, and wait for the fingers to set off on the keyboard, and see where the original idea takes me.

How and when do you write?

I write in my study, surrounded by books and files, dogs at my feet, looking out of the window at the opposite roof and the sky above it; can be any time of day, morning, afternoon or evening, depending on what I have to do that day.

What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?

I read a huge amount, cross-genre fiction and non-fiction; some books I have read recently and really enjoyed are:

P.J.Tracy: Snow Blind - the latest in a quite unique mother/daughter writing team which has given us the best crime fiction going today;

James Lee Burke: A Strained White Radiance: all his books are a joy; his ability to describe places and people is staggering, and you are right there in the Deep South with him, though sometimes wondering how he makes his life so complicated!

Ron Butlin: Vivaldi and the number 3 & other impossible stories: for sheer weirdness, these stories are unbeatable. They are also very moving, once you’ve got past the initial feeling of incongruity, and a superb example of their form.

Philip Reeve: Mortal Engines: I often read teenage or children’s fiction, often because they’re shorter and easier to finish at one sitting at night! This particular book was shocking in that he kept killing all the characters off, and actually had me squeezing tears. Great! Straight off to read another one…

Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman: Good Omens: If you want to know about the ins and outs of religious fundamentalism and how ridiculously easy it is to start wars, then this is the book for you. Plus it makes you laugh and has a great plot.

An extract from Types of Everlasting Rest

BP’s Boys

Mafeking, 1900, May 12th and the town has been besieged for almost seven months. Sergeant Major Goodyear of the Cadet Corps, twelve years old, pedals madly through lines of enemy fire carrying messages and what little supplies are left. He prefers the bicycle to the donkeys: faster, more manoeuvrable. The downside is you can’t eat bicycles and food is getting very short. He tries not to worry, concentrates on weaving around potholes and unexploded munitions. He doesn’t know it, but this is the last big assault before reinforcements finally arrive. B-P, the Commanding Officer, has held back troops nine times the size of his own for two hundred and seventeen days, and in a few short days Mafeking will be won.

Kimski Gopnik thinks of Goodyear and his dead donkeys while he sits shivering in the lee of a fallen tree. It is cold but, oddly, thunderclouds have gathered over the mountains and lightning shrieks from peak to peak. His dog Smiv was so frightened that she has run off into the trees. Half an hour ago they heard the shot whistling through the cold air, heard the brief bark of protest. Kimski tries to stop the tears, freezes his face with snow. He knows what will happen now. The snow covered their tracks as they went, but now little Smivka has given them all away. The soldiers will follow her tracks through the forest and find them. The stronger ones have gone ahead, are going to try to reach the gorge, drop down into the caves that line its sides. The younger ones, like Kimski, have volunteered to stay behind, to sweep over footmarks, crack branches, make false trails, try to melt back into the trees and down to the town before they are spotted. But for Kimski it is too late. He has twisted his knee and has no where else to go. He has whistled the alert, but knows no-one will reach him in time. He thinks of his mother, closes his eyes, tries to feel the warmth of her kitchen, smell the bread rising as she grinds up poppy-seeds, tells him how proud she is that he has joined the Cubs.

‘Just like your father,’ she says and sighs, wipes her hair away with the back of her hand, grinds the pestle a little harder.

And like his father, Kimski too will soon be dead.

Abaft, abeam, adrift, astern, haul the warp from the weatherside, and carry away. You could drown a man in the linguistic undercurrent of boats. Right now their rhythm gives me comfort, and I try not to think what is happening below. Six blasts on the whistle and we know someone is in trouble. The thunder has closed the sky over us like a box; the lightening is so close the air is crackling and our skin tingles as it splits the air, sends shockwaves gliding over the surface of the snow. We’re in the hills of the Nizke Tatry trying to reach the river at Spisska Nova Ves. The Hitler Jugend have been tracking us ever since we left Bystrica. We didn’t think they were so close. But haven’t they always been close? Wasn’t Cacek, their leader, at school with me? He always came in crumpled clothes and only ever wore one sock. He never told us why. Look at him now! All shiny in his uniform, just like the ones we used to wear, exactly the same ones we used to wear. We were all together then, proud of our hats and our badges, happy to shout out that we were the Scouts of Zvolenka, worked hard for the honour it gave us. And then came 1939, and our country was carved up like a chicken and handed out on other people’s plates. Midnight, and as the clocks of Munich chime, the men around the table pen their names to the paper. The Germans are there, and the Italians, the English, the French. But where are the Czechs? They are not represented at their own autopsy, and as September 29th slips in, we are hacked in two. If you axe a man off at the knees, the rest of him will soon fall. And so it was with us.

We’ve been trekking through these mountains all our lives, making camps and tying knots, setting traps, learning the names of trees and plants and the berries you can eat and those you can’t, making canoes and paddles out of hand-sawn planks, learning to box the compass and follow the stars at night. Now our uniforms have been confiscated and our huts occupied by the Jugend. Several of our Scoutmasters have been shot for insurgency. Others have managed to survive out in the woods, on the hills, in caves. We have brought them food and clothing. We have passed messages between them, formed contacts with the Partisan Alliance, kept clear the escape routes that will lead them over the border into Russia and finally to join the exiled government of Benes in London.

I am running through the thin snow, my boots skidding on the frozen pine needles beneath. My breath comes short and hard, the air getting too cold to be comfortable in my lungs. We have gone past the gorge and lowered the men by rope and gaffe. We have brushed the ground at the lip; disguised the scuffle by overlaying tracks of wolf and bear which we have stamped in wood. We have caught and killed a small deer, sprayed its blood in an arc through the trees. Now we are slipping away like fish down a salmon ladder, separating, keeping to shadows and undergrowth. I can hear them, the Jugend, crashing up the path we have just left. The cramp in my side makes me stop, doubles me over. I lean against a tree gasping for air, the cold bark melting snow into my back. Thunder growls overhead, knocks shivers of ice from my hat onto the hands I have braced against my knees. Just one more minute, I think, planning my route. I will speed my ascent, go up instead of down. I will go through the pass that will take me down to Brezno, I will…

Two strong bare hands have taken hold of my arms, forced them behind my shoulder-blades, sent me stumbling forward, my face hitting the frost-hard snow. My nose breaks with a crack and blood is forced through my mouth, gagging out dark and thick around my head. My hat has fallen off and someone grabs me by the hair, drags at my head, stretches the skin across my throat. I see two snow-sodden boots, one sock.

‘He died today, your Baden-Powell. Did you know?’

He laughs, puts the blade of his knife under my chin, whispers in my ear, ‘Somewhere in Africa, so I heard. Not much use to you now, eh?’

We are grateful to the Scottish Arts Council for a grant towards the publication of Types of Everlasting Rest.