Search Worlds Without End

Funny, frightening and moving, the stories in Simon Bestwick's new collection explore how our childhoods mark us, our regrets haunt us, and how our innocence is sometimes lost -- and sometimes taken away.

A young policewoman is drawn into a dreadful bargain. Murdered girls walk the streets of Manchester beside their still-living friends. Tormented children call on an urban legend for help, and the events of a long-ago summer and first love return with lethal consequences for four childhood friends. All this and more besides, in these fifteen short fiction works.

Table of Contents:

• The Man Who Put the Best in Bestwick (2019) essay by Ramsey Campbell
• Dermot (2011) short story
• Beneath the Sun (2004) short story
• The Moraine (2011) short story
• Comfort Your Dead (2019) short story
• The School House (2008) novella
• Left Behind (2008) short story
• Hushabye [Paul Hearn] (2007) short story
• A Small Cold Hand (2007) short story
• The Proving Ground (2009) short story
• Angels of the Silences (2011) novella
• ... And Dream of Avalon (2004) short story
• Winter's End [Paul Hearn] (2010) short story
• They Wait (2003) short story
• The Children of Moloch (2011) short story
• And Cannot Come Again (2019) novella
• Notes from the King of the Bastards (2019) essay

Breakwater by Simon Bestwick is an sf novelette about an engineer, who with her late, marine biologist husband designed an underwater research platform, is caught up in the war between humans and mysterious creatures beneath the seas that are destroying coastal cities around the world.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Alice has returned to her old home town to put her life back in order. 378 Collarmill Road looks like an ordinary house. But sometimes, the world outside the windows isn't the one you expect to see; sometimes you'll turn around and find you're not alone.

An old flame of Alice's - John Revell - reluctantly comes to her aid when the house begins to reveal its secrets. The hill on which it sits is a place of legends - of Old Harry, the Beast of Crawbeck; of the Virgin of the Height and the mysterious Red Man - and home to the secrets of the shadowy Arodias Thorne.

Thorne's influence seeps up through the ground, infiltrating Alice's new home, and only she and John stand between Arodias and the rest of our world.

The dream never changes: a moonless, starless night without end. The road she walks is black, bordered with round, white pebbles or nubs of polished bone; she can't tell which but they're the only white in the darkness, marking her way through the night.

In dreams and nightmares, Helen walks the Black Road. It leads her back from the grave, back from madness, back towards the man who caused the deaths of her family: Tereus Winterborn, Regional Commander for the Reapers, who rule the ruins of a devastated Britain.

On her journey, she gathers her allies: her old mentor Darrow, the cocky young fighter Danny, emotionally-scarred intelligence officer Alannah and Gevaudan Shoal, last of the genetically-engineered Grendelwolves.

Winterborn will stop at nothing to become the Reapers' Supreme Commander; more than anything he seeks the advantage that will help him achieve that goal. And in the experiments of the obsessed scientist Dr Mordake, he thinks he has found it.

To Winterborn, Project Tindalos is a means to ultimate power; to Mordake, it's a means to roll back the devastation of the War and restore his beloved wife to the living. But neither Winterborn nor Mordake understand the true nature of the forces they are about to unleash. Forces that threaten to destroy everything that survived the War, unless Helen and her allies can find and stop Project Tindalos in time.

In the haunted desolation of post-nuclear Britain, the Catchman walks. Spawned from the nightmare of Project Tindalos, it doesn't tire, stop, or die. It exists for one purpose only: to find and kill Helen Damnation, leader of the growing revolt against the tyrannical Reapers and their Commander, Tereus Winterborn.

Meanwhile, Helen is threatened from both without and within. Her nightmares of the Black Road have returned, and the ghosts of her murdered family demand vengeance, in the form of either Winterborn's death or her own. And close behind the Catchman, a massive Reaper assault, led by Helen's nemesis, Colonel Jarrett, is nearing the rebels' base.

Killing Helen has become Jarrett's obsession: only one of them can emerge from this conflict alive.

Helen Damnation's rebellion against the Reapers has spread. All across post-nuclear Britain, the fires of revolution are beginning to burn. But her old enemy Tereus Winterborn still intends to rule supreme, and has a new ally in Dr Mordake, the creator of Project Tindalos - now monstrously transfigured by the forces he unleashed at Hobsdyke.

Their target is Helen's closest ally: the last Grendelwolf, Gevaudan Shoal. The worst tortures of all await him in the cells of the Pyramid. At Hobsdyke, in the tunnels beneath Graspen Hill, the legacy of the Night Wolves is waiting for him - along with secrets about Helen that threaten to tear both Gevaudan and the resistance apart.

With the Reapers poised to strike at the first sign of weakness, a series of brutal killings breaks out behind rebel lines - and the evidence leads back to Gevaudan's door. With all those closest to Helen turning against her, she faces her greatest challenge yet as Winterborn begins his bid for ultimate power.

Flash floods devastate Britain and an army of the dead rise from the waters to hunt town the survivors. For ex-prostitute Katya, it's a constant fight to stay alive, but also a chance at freedom. Ex-soldier McTarn is sent on a mission to retrieve a scientist from a northern village. When the floods cut them off, McTarn may be Katya's only hope of survival!