The Narrows

by James Brogden

  All the same, the vacant lot on Moon Grove exercised an inexplicable fascination over him, and he managed to find an excuse to keep driving past it briefly over the next few days, sitting in his car with the engine idling, staring out at the weeds until he felt ridiculous again and left. And then came back the next day. He couldn’t call it anything as melodramatic as a stakeout, because there was neither person nor place to stake out. It was like trying to do a jigsaw without the picture, not knowing if any of the pieces were missing or even whether they were all from the same puzzle.

  And then on the eighteenth of December, a large piece of it literally fell into place when, just as he was about to give it up for good, he heard a scream of pain and saw a young woman with blood all over her face stumble out of the empty air and collapse to the rubble-strewn ground.

  7 Dowsing for Beginners

  ‘So,’ said Andy. ‘Now what?’

  ‘This what,’ replied Bex, frowning at a sudoku puzzle.

  ‘That’s not very helpful.’

  She sniffed and filled in a four.

  They were lying each to a sofa before the fire in what Andy was now calling the Big Room, because everything in it was huge, overstuffed, and threadbare.

  The whole of Moon Grove was much emptier and uncannily quiet after the upheaval of the last twenty-four hours. It seemed that only the hardcore Narrowfolk had chosen to stay – either that, or they were the only ones who had been able to scavenge enough provisions to earn their keep.

  Andy wondered where the rest of the ‘normal’ just-passing-through squatters had found refuge. Shelters? Friends’ floors? Doorways? He kept remembering the young man on the Pallasades ramp and wondering what had happened to him. So many people seemed to just appear and disappear at random, like dust motes drifting through a beam of sunlight in an empty room, drifting into the Narrows, invisible, unreal, falling out of the circles of the world.

  He had, as a matter of pure pragmatism, quickly reconciled himself to Walter’s talk of ley lines and energy streams and cosmic onions. Apart from anything else, it was the only plausible explanation so far for everything that had happened to him.

  It didn’t make it any easier for his eyes to accept what was outside, however.

  The Narrowfolk called it the Fane, and at first glance it looked like a wall of white mist surrounding the house and its grounds. Closer, however, there was nothing cloudlike about it; nothing swirled or eddied; it was simply a point beyond which everything was completely blank, and to approach it too closely was to invite dizzying vertigo when it filled one’s field of view completely.

  When he tried to touch it, there was no fading or zone of transition; it appeared as if his hand had simply been cut off cleanly at the wrist. He’d felt neither temperature nor texture – no sensation whatsoever, including when he made a fist. In a panic he drew his hand out again and found it to be unharmed and working perfectly. He’d thought about sticking his head in to discover whether or not he could see his hand on the other side, but decided it probably wasn’t a good idea. Apparently it was easy enough to leave Moon Grove – you just walked into the void and kept on walking. Once you were in, you couldn’t turn around, and once you were through there was absolutely no coming back. He wasn’t prepared to risk that.

  Inside the Fane’s protective circle there was no weather to speak of – no rain, bright sun or breath of wind. By Walter’s decree the Grove had no television, radio, telephone or internet connection, and those few of the Narrowfolk who possessed such devices found that no signals from the outside world made it through either.

  Instead, the evenings were times of feasting, warmth and firelight, but after two doldrum days of trying to find odd jobs to keep himself busy, Andy was surprised to find that he was bored stiff.

  ‘I thought you were desperate to get out there and do something,’ he said, as Bex continued to ignore him. ‘You know, find the man with the staff and do a Buffy the Vampire Slayer job on him.’

  ‘I am,’ she said. ‘And I will. Just not now. You saw what happened when we left your place. You and me are no good to anyone if we’re stuck out in the middle of nowhere. And I don’t mean nowhere as in Redditch, either. I mean really: No-Where.’

  He couldn’t argue with that, so he took himself off to stare at the void again.

  ***

  With little else to occupy her time, Bex finally got around to the painful task of sorting out Dodd’s things.

  The clothes were the easiest – they were thrown into the common store of spare clothing in the cellar, which was probably where they’d come from in the first place. She found bundles of battered old Ordnance Survey maps so folded and refolded that they hung in tattered oblongs. There were dozens of books, mostly a lot of old science fiction and horror novels (including something called The Borribles, which she kept to one side; she wasn’t much of a reader, but that one didn’t look quite so sad and geeky), but the majority were about leys, standing stones, earth mysteries, geomancy, feng shui and even yoga.

  She discovered, folded into the back of one, a page torn from a magazine; the “Missing: Can You Help?” page from an edition of the Big Issue several years old.

  Rodney Stokes

  Rodney, known to his friends as Dodd, will be 22 this year, and disappeared from his home in Nuneaton, Warwicks., on the 13th of November, aged 19. He was last seen at Coventry Station, and it is believed that he was going to spend the weekend with friends in Birmingham.

  His parents, Bob and Irene, are desperately worried for his well-being and want only a phone call to know that he is well.

  If anybody has seen Rodney or knows of his whereabouts…

  But she couldn’t read any more, because her tears were making everything blurry.

  Then, at the very bottom of the box, she caught a gleam of metal. When she brought out what she found there and held them up to close inspection, suddenly everything made sense.

  ***

  Andy was walking the perimeter of the Fane for the umpteenth time when Bex came running to find him.

  He was at the back of the Grove, in the thin belt of uncultivated ground between rows of winter crops and the white wall. There was a crazy-paned greenhouse nearby, where Lark and her partner Cameron were doing whatever it was one did in a greenhouse, whilst cheerfully singing Christmas carols with a total lack of self-consciousness. He spotted Bex’s small, coat-muffled figure tramping at speed straight through the parsnips, waving something thin and metallic over her head and grinning like a maniac.

  ‘I’ve cracked it!’ she yelled. ‘I know what he was doing!’

  ‘What? Who?’

  She reached him and showed him what she’d found: a pair of long L-shaped pieces of wire, the shorter ends of which were sheathed in narrow copper tubes.

  ‘What are these?’

  She whacked him. ‘God, you are so bloody slow sometimes! They’re dowsing rods, of course! Dodd was dowsing the Narrows! All those funny little squiggles in his A-to-Z. He wasn’t just mapping the closures. I don’t even think they are closures anyway, not really. You know what I think they are?’

  ‘If I say I don’t know, will you hit me again?’

  ‘They’re diversions. Those Narrows aren’t being blocked – they’re having their energy diverted somewhere else. Dodd was trying to work out where. It explains everything, don’t you see? It’s perfect!’

  She bounced up and down in front of him in excitement while he took the rods and examined them sceptically. ‘I don’t know about this…’ he said slowly.

  ‘What?’ She snatched them back. ‘Everything you’ve learned so far, and you can’t take this?’

  ‘Just because one mad idea turns out to be true doesn’t mean they all are.’

  ‘But it’s all true, Andy! Everything! Aliens built the pyramids! Narnia’s inside a ward
robe! Fairies exist, and they hate holly! And a couple of bent coat-hangers can show you where the lifeblood of the earth runs. Watch!’

  She took the rods, one shorter end in a closed fist so that each rotated freely in its copper sleeve with the long arms pointing straight ahead, weaving gently to and fro like a pair of antennae. With slow, careful steps she approached the Fane, and as she neared it the dowsing arms spread gradually apart so that when she was within a few feet of the white wall they pointed left and right, parallel with it.

  ‘See?’ she said. ‘They point in the direction of the energy flow. It’s dead easy.’

  ‘It’s dead bollocks,’ he retorted. ‘All it is, is the muscles in your hands and arms making tiny unconscious tweaks to move the rods in the direction you want. There’s nothing mystical about it at all. It’s just boring old physiology and a bit of wishful thinking. Give them here – I’ll show you.’ He took the rods, ignoring her poisonous glare, and moved back a couple of yards to come back at the Fane in the same way she had done – but this time he would make sure that they didn’t move.

  It was with considerable surprise that he found them starting to rotate.

  They were turning very slowly in opposite directions. He shifted his hands to try and make them stand still, but without success – they rotated faster the closer he got to the barrier. Soon they were spinning like pinwheels.

  ‘Yes, yes, very clever,’ said Bex. ‘You can stop taking the piss now.’

  ‘I’m not!’ he protested. ‘I’m not doing anything at all!’

  He stopped walking, but by now the rods seemed to have acquired a life of their own and were spinning freely, madly. Soon they were just blurred circles and he could hear the high-pitched whine of the wire whistling through the air like two miniature propellors. He appealed mutely to Bex, who simply shrugged, as dumbfounded as himself. The rods were shuddering now, rattling in his fists and growing uncomfortably hot.

  He was just considering throwing them to the ground when, without warning, the copper sleeves split and the dowsing rods tore themselves from his hands, slicing thin gashes across his palms.

  Bex screamed and flung herself to the ground as one arrowed over her head and disappeared into the Fane. The other shot like a slim, lethal dart across twenty yards of open space to the greenhouse and straight through both sides of it, shattering two large panes of glass which rained tumbling shards down onto the surprised, upturned faces of Lark and Cam.

  They ran blindly from the greenhouse, Lark with both hands pressed to her forehead and blood streaming from between her fingers, neither of them taking much notice of where they were going.

  Andy couldn’t tell who yelled first, a chorus of panicky voices from all directions – ‘Lark! No! Stop! Come back!’ Confused, she turned, crying out ‘I can’t see! Why can’t I s…?’ tripped over a furrow of earth, fell backwards into the Fane, and before anybody could get a hand to her she was gone. Her cry of alarm was sliced off as neatly as if it had never been uttered at all.

  8 Re-entry

  ‘Lark, no!’ Cameron lunged forward to follow her, but Bex was already there, blocking his way.

  ‘Cam! Think! She’s gone out – you can’t do her any good going straight after her.’

  ‘She’s hurt! She’s out there on her own. You know what it’s like this time of year.’

  ‘I know. But she’s a clever girl, Cam. She’ll realise what’s happened, and she’ll sit tight, and she’ll…’

  ‘The skavags will…’

  ‘…she’ll wait for you to join her. After you’ve got her stuff, and yours. You can’t go out there with nothing. Starvation and hypothermia are not very romantic, you big idiot. Think. And you should get those looked at first, too.’

  Cameron was covered in numerous small cuts which he appeared to notice for the first time. Gradually he calmed. Kerrie, who had come hurrying over from the house, appraised his wounds, pronounced him to be a big baby and led him back towards the kitchen. Bewildered Narrowfolk began to clear up the pieces of broken glass.

  Andy said quietly to Bex: ‘I think I’d better go get her.’

  ‘That’s not funny.’

  ‘I mean it!’

  ‘Really. Just like that.’

  He shifted uncomfortably, as if embarrassed. ‘The thing is, I’ve been watching this Fane thing for the last couple of days and I’m not sure that it’s as one-way as everyone seems to think. I swear, every so often I can hear things through it.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Nothing very exciting. Traffic. Music. Once, a siren. It just makes me think, maybe if sounds can get in – not to mention light and air and gravity and all those really basic fundamental things – maybe people can, too, and nobody’s been looking hard enough.’

  ‘Interesting theory. I’m sure that’s never, ever occurred to Walter at all.’

  ‘Well, since he hasn’t bothered to show his face since we came back,’ Andy retorted, stung, ‘I might just not bother taking it up with him, if it’s all the same to you.’

  ‘Okay, alright, calm down.’

  ‘Look, the upshot is this: if I’m right, Lark doesn’t have to spend midwinter fighting off drunks and junkies in a shelter. If I mess up, you don’t have to drag my sorry arse all over the city any more. I broke it; I pay for it.’

  She regarded him speculatively for a long moment and then said, ‘Think you can manage it?’

  ‘I don’t know. There’s only one way to find out.’ He knelt down and pulled up a parsnip, wincing at the sharp pain in his palm, and tossed it into the Fane.

  ‘Well that was big and clever,’ she observed drily.

  Still kneeling, he reached in up to his armpit and felt around on the ground in the blank, white nothingness. When he drew his hand back, he was holding the parsnip again.

  ‘And again with the impossible,’ she breathed, eyes wide. ‘My god, you might just be able to do it.’

  ‘Maybe.’ He pulled two more parsnips and threw all three into the void.

  ‘What was that supposed to prove?’

  ‘Nothing. I just don’t like them very much.’

  ***

  He held the iron stake and stood facing the Fane, a blank wall of apparently motionless mist so close that it filled the entirety of his vision, and for a moment it seemed that gravity had inverted itself by ninety degrees, and he was hanging miles above a featureless, arctic landscape. He wasn’t sure whether he stepped deliberately or swayed forward, but there was a momentary sensation of being violently sideswept by a powerful tidal force, like surfing the outer edge of a whirlpool, and even as he formulated the panicked thought Jesus Christ, it’s going to tear me apart, he was suddenly facing brick walls, tarmac, and the clouded sky of the real world again.

  Here, Moon Grove was a vacant lot that gaped like a broken tooth where the house had once stood, even though he knew it was still there in some fashion, just behind him. He could feel it, or at least he could feel the forces which hid it, swirling behind his breastbone like heartburn.

  It didn’t take long to find Lark – and that she was not alone.

  She was sitting on the pavement at the front of the lot, with her arms braced behind as if caught in the act of trying to crawl backward, and a strange man was doing something to her face.

  Andy panicked, thinking that his delay had already been too long, and lurched awkwardly across the rough terrain, brandishing his stake. ‘Hey!’ he yelled. ‘Hey, leave her alone! Get the hell away from her!’

  Rosey looked up in surprise from where he’d been applying a bit of basic first aid, to see a young man in mismatched clothing running towards him waving what looked like a crowbar.

  Lark stared around at Andy in surprise, and he realised his mistake when he saw the wound strips which dressed the cuts on her forehead. ‘And
y?’ She was quite gobsmacked. ‘Bex’s Andy? What are you doing here? Where’s Cam?’ She jumped up and peered eagerly behind him.

  ‘No, it’s just me, I’m afraid. Sorry. Who’s this?’ He eyed the older man suspiciously.

  ‘Andy Sumner?’ Rosey’s stunned expression mirrored Lark’s.

  ‘Yes? Hang on – what? Who are you?’

  ‘Andrew Penrose.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Where’s Cam?’

  ‘He’s back inside. Kerrie’s trying to stop him doing anything silly.’

  ‘Pete Sumner’s boy?’

  ‘Right – stop!’ Andy yelled. This was starting to get out of hand. ‘Lark. Calm down. We’re going back inside soon and everything will be cool. Okay?’

  ‘But that’s…’

  He held up a warning finger, and she subsided. ‘I know. But we’re going to do it anyway.’ He turned to Rosey. ‘You, whoever you are…’ Then he stopped and thought for a second. ‘Actually, it doesn’t matter. Thanks for looking after my friend here. Have a merry Christmas. Bye.’ He turned to go, wondering how on earth he was going to make good on his boast to re-enter a place that didn’t exist any more.

  Rosey had known that he was going to have to choose his words carefully if the boy wasn’t going to take fright and simply run. ‘Aren’t you even curious about how I know your name?’ he asked.

  Andy turned back. ‘Honestly? No. If you had any idea of the weird shit that’s been happening to me so far this week, you wouldn’t be surprised either. You’re pretty low down the food chain – no offence.’