The Narrows

by James Brogden

  ‘I have him. Call off your dogs, Simon, leave my people alone, and I’ll give you back the boy.’

  Barber shook his head slowly in wonderment. ‘It’s incredible. You really have no sense of loyalty, do you? Personally, I think treachery is programmed into your genes. But my dear Walter,’ he laughed, ‘what makes you think I even want him? He is absolutely no use to me whatsoever now. Your betrayal set me back years. Decades. Did you think I wouldn’t have moved on since then?’

  Walter hesitated.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, though, I’ve just had an even better idea. How would you like to come back to Holly End instead?’

  Barber left the question hanging in the air between them for a moment, enjoying how its sudden allure made Walter’s eyes glisten. ‘It’s still there, you know,’ he continued quietly. ‘All just as you left it. The green is still there, the Clee boys are all grown up and terrorising the village; there’s a holly wreath on every door and a Christmas tree at every hearth, and even some drinkable homebrew at the Black Horse at last.’

  Walter responded as if the words were being forced out of him by torture: ‘There’s nothing I’d like more, you bastard, and you know it. This isn’t about me for once.’

  ‘St Kenelm’s needs its vicar, Walter. The villagers have been cut off for so very long and they need guidance more and more each day. Will you not come back to us?’

  ‘My god, if you knew how much I’ve dreamt of it…’

  ‘Then don’t bother with the boy, old friend.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Walter edged away in suspicion.

  ‘I don’t need him, so you don’t have to betray him. Well, not him alone, anyway. Give me all of them.’

  ‘What?’ It came out as nothing more than a gasp. He felt like he’d been punched in the stomach.

  ‘Yes, Walter.’ Barber’s smile was cold and feral. In the shifting blue light, the black pits of his eyes and white gleam of his teeth made him look like a shark. ‘The Narrowfolk. Give them to me, and you can come home.’

  ‘Never. You’re insane, Barber. You always were.’

  ‘After sixteen years, haven’t you grown tired of the filth and vulgarity out here? Living like a beggar, scrounging an existence out of other people’s bins. And what thanks do you get from those whores and addicts? You say that they are ‘your’ people, but what do they ever do except leave when they have taken what they can from you?’

  ‘Please…’

  ‘Your people, Walter, your real people are baking mince pies and waiting for someone to lead them in a proper carol service. Steven can come back with us. We can reunite him with his family, and all of this will have been nothing but a bad dream. A genuinely fresh start, Walter – how many people ever get that chance? We can be there in two hours. What do you say?’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘Then say no. It’s that simple. Say no.’

  He couldn’t. He thought of Dodd, Bex, Lark, and all the others exactly like them who had come and gone over the years, and yet he could not refuse this man. Had he ever made the slightest bit of difference in their lives? What right had he ever had to draw them away from normal society and into the insanity of the Narrows? Ashen-faced with shame, self-loathing and world-weary desperation, Walter whispered:

  ‘Yes.’

  Barber’s mocking laughter filled the room. ‘Oh Walter, it’s so nice to know that in this world of flux and mutability some things can always be relied upon. You know as well as I do that there can be no going back, but you just can’t help yourself, can you? Nobody needs you. I don’t even need your betrayal – my man Carling telephoned hours ago to say that he’s followed Penrose right to your door. Your Narrowfolk are already mine. You’ve simply demonstrated that you have no right to beg anything on their behalf, that’s all.’

  From the inside pocket of his jacket he removed the flat stationery tin of needles, and began to unfold the linen strip along which they were ranked.

  ‘However,’ he continued, ‘you also know that I cannot possibly trust you. You’re going to tell me everything about what the boy is and what he can do. Then maybe I’ll give you the death which is all you deserve, and what you really came here for after all.’

  At his signal, the door opened and two security guards entered.

  Walter, trapped against the window facing the street, threw himself at it as hard as he could. If Barber had allowed any modernisation of his inner sanctum the window would have been suicide-proof safety glass too tough to break, but instead the brittle old single-glazed pane exploded into jagged shards, lacerating him in a dozen places as he plunged into the night.

  He fell into a row of glowing, six-foot high blue and white snowflakes stretched high across the street and his limbs tangled in the construction wires as bulbs shorted out and exploded around him in showers of sparks. Even though the high-voltage electrocution killed him instantly, the high-tension cables – strong enough to withstand heavy winds and rain – held aloft his burned and bleeding corpse to the horrified gaze of upturned faces for hours before it could be cut down.

  ***

  The stake was easy enough for Carling to find: a foot of oak protruding from an elaborate piece of graffiti painted on the ground, wrapped in copper wire that gleamed faintly in the dark. He grasped it with both hands and pulled, exerting the last gasps of the stolen strength which had allowed him to survive the Fane in the first place. There was no point in pretending any more that he was ever going to get his hands on Sumner, but this would have to do. Bring down the walls of his castle and if he was lucky, live just long enough to see the fucker eaten alive.

  ‘I’ll huff…’ he grunted as he hauled upwards, ‘and I’ll puff and I’ll…’

  With an almighty wrench which tore something deep, deep inside, he pulled the stake free in an explosion of frozen soil and collapsed backwards, gasping for breath and staring up at the sky.

  This time he could see the stars.

  ***

  ‘All I’m saying,’ Andy insisted, ‘is that we should have some kind of fall-back just in case he doesn’t come back.’

  ‘Like what?’ demanded Cam. He had his arms wrapped protectively around Lark and glared as if Andy were the one threatening her.

  Andy was very nearly at his wits end. The Narrowfolk had mobbed him in Butlins, alternately demanding to know how he had got back in and where Walter had gone. Half of them refused to believe that they were in any sort of danger while the other half were waiting for him to tell them what to do, which was even more frightening.

  ‘I don’t know, do I? You’re the ones who live here! What do you normally do when someone tries to attack you?’

  ‘People don’t normally try to attack us – that’s the point.’

  ‘It’s not exactly people you need to be worrying about.’

  ‘And you led them to us! So what are you going to do about it?’

  Moon Grove suddenly shrugged around them in a jolt which felt sickeningly familiar, and he stumbled into Bex. Crashes and screams sounded in distant rooms.

  ‘Jesus, no!’ he moaned. ‘Not here too. Not here!’

  Seconds later Stirchley appeared in the opening, his eyes wide with shock. ‘The Fane!’ he gasped. ‘It’s fallen! They’re coming!’

  Cursing, Andy threw himself towards the stairs.

  ***

  An army of skavags poured past Carling and across a broken landscape of concrete and churned mud towards Moon Grove, which stood high and vulnerable against the orange sky. One or two stopped to sniff at him, but now there was nothing left to inspire even an animal’s curiosity, much less fear.

  The baying, yammering horde quickly surrounded the house, tearing apart the outbuildings and fighting to find a way in, and after them strode Barber’s tall figure. His greatcoat swep
t about his ankles, and serried ranks of needles gleamed down its wide lapels. He stopped for a moment by Carling’s inert form and knelt. Very gently, he brushed a crumb of dirt from the ravaged face.

  ‘That’s two you’ve cost me now, Lyttleton, you faithless swine,’ he growled. At his touch Carling’s eyes flickered open and his lips moved feebly.

  ‘Got you in, didn’t I?’ His voice was the whisper of winter in dry grass.

  ‘You did at that,’ Barber replied. ‘Bless you my boy, but you actually did it. So strong. So very, very strong. Rest now, boy. You’ve earned it.’ He watched as the last shreds of Fane-cloud dissipated from around the house, listening with satisfaction to the screams of women and children. The skavags paused in their frenzy, awaiting his orders.

  Sieges had always bored him to tears.

  ‘Kill them all.’

  ***

  The house was chaotic with panicking Narrowfolk. Children howled, adults grabbed their belongings together and shouted desperate warnings to each other as they ran from room to room, finding no escape through any door, any window.

  ‘Get everybody upstairs!’ Andy yelled, but he was completely ignored in the panic. In the hall he collared Stirchley, who was trying to run and stuff a carrier bag of Rizzlas into his rucksack at the same time. ‘Get these people upstairs!’ he demanded, ‘and switch on every light you can find!’

  ‘Lights?’ Stirchley’s eyes were wide and darting.

  ‘They’re nocturnal aren’t they, those things?’

  ‘Yeah… but…’

  ‘Well then!’

  The two of them ran down into the chaos, grabbing people by the arms, the heads, whatever, and yelling at them to get upstairs, get up there now, as far as they could go, and flicking on every light switch within reach as they went. Stirchley stripped the Christmas tree of its fairy lights and wound them around his head.

  ‘Stirch?’ Andy looked on incredulously. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s okay!’ he grinned. ‘They’re battery powered!’ And he waved the battery pack at him. Andy had just enough time to think that he looked like some kind of mad-eyed disco Messiah before the first of the skavags crashed through the front porch. Somebody screamed ‘They’re in! They’re inside the building…!’ and tailed off into a gurgling shriek which was drowned in high looping cries; the creatures were smashing their way in through every ground-floor window. They clambered through broken glass, pale-eyed and blinking, cutting themselves but not apparently feeling it, or else their hunger was overriding the pain. The black-red of their blood smeared over each other and the floor like oil.

  Andy was in the Big Room when they tore through the window, where it seemed that a hundred years ago he’d pinned up a holly sprig and listened to the winter wind, dreaming fairy tales of Holly Kings and Oak Kings. A skavag leapt up and half-sat on the window ledge, its head moving in quick darts as it scanned the room. It saw him and keened.

  It was answered a thousandfold, from every direction.

  He scrambled backwards, dragging the door shut as bodies slammed heavily against it on the other side, claws tearing at the wood, scrabbling at the doorknob.

  Back in the hallway, towards the front of the house, skavags were in the graffitied porch, tearing furiously at the walls as if bent on shredding every sign of the Narrowfolk. From the other direction, the kitchen, he heard loud shrieks and heavy metallic clanging sounds accompanied by a frenzied female Irish war cry of ‘Get out of me fecking kitchen, ye little feckers!’ Ceridwen was defending her realm, for the moment.

  People were fleeing to the upper floors, and he could hear Bex shouting orders shrilly over the din; he prayed that she was organising some kind of defence up there. Then clawed arms burst through the panel of the door at the same time as the porch door shattered, and the hall was filled with leaping monstrosities. He ran for the stairs.

  On the first-floor landing, he met a line of Narrowfolk ranged across it – Bex, Stirchley, Cameron, Lark, and half a dozen others he didn’t know – pale with fear but armed with whatever makeshift weapons had come to hand. Several had torches. Bex handed him his iron stake. ‘Thought you might need this,’ she said.

  ‘So what’s the plan?’

  ‘Plan? You think there’s a plan?’

  Any reply he might have made died in his suddenly dry throat as skavags boiled up the staircase. Everything after that was a jumbled nightmare of screams, thuds, flailing limbs, claws, and teeth. Those defenders with torches flashed them directly into the skavags’ light-sensitive eyes while the others bludgeoned them with golf clubs and cricket bats, but there were simply too many.

  Stirchley’s torch began to dim almost immediately; he shook it and peered at its dying bulb. ‘Solar-powered piece of crap!’ he complained and threw it at the head of the nearest creature. Then a sudden savage tug on his right ankle brought him to his knees. In the melee he’d found himself at the very edge of the landing, hard up against the balustrade, and as he looked down over it he saw that a skavag had clawed its way up the side of the stairwell and reached through to grab at him. It was funny; his foot looked oddly short. Then he saw his own toes, still wrapped in half an army surplus boot and a shred of sock, being chewed in the creature’s wide muzzle. His blood was squirting down its face – he heard it gargling on his blood – and his shriek cut wide through the sounds of fighting.

  Heads turned. Guards dropped. Weapons wavered. Cameron was seized by a dozen clawed arms and dragged into the seething pack. Lark shrieked with fury and tried to go after him, but Andy and Bex dragged her back.

  ‘This is fucked!’ Bex spat. ‘We can’t do this!’

  There was a sudden resounding crash from somewhere up on the next landing, as if a large piece of furniture had fallen over, and Penrose shouted down ‘You lot! Get back up here! Right now!’

  They fled backwards up the next flight, flailing wildly at anything within reach, helped only by the narrowness of the staircase which forced the creatures to climb over each other, choked by their own numbers.

  At the top the defenders found that Penrose and several others had indeed dragged a wardrobe from the nearest bedroom and flung it on its side as a makeshift barricade at the edge of the second floor landing. Stirchley was unceremoniously posted over and dumped in a moaning heap on the other side.

  As they squeezed past, Rosey upended a bottle of home-brewed sloe gin over the wardrobe’s length and struck a match. It ignited with a dull fump! and the smell of burning sugar, eliciting yells of alarm.

  ‘How the fuck are we supposed to escape now?’ Bex shouted at him.

  ‘Escape?’ Rosey laughed shortly. ‘I’ll settle for not getting eaten, thanks.’

  As far as fires went, it was dismally weak and short-lived, barely hot enough to blister the varnish – but for a moment it kept the skavags at bay, and they milled on the stairs, mewling uncertainly in their near-human voices. Elsewhere in the house, they could be heard running amok; Andy wondered if Kerrie and any of her Kitchen Tarts had survived. It was possible. They had a big lockable larder and a walk-in fridge. Then a thought struck him.

  ‘Why have we still got electricity?’

  Bex blinked at him. ‘Relevance?’

  ‘This happened before at my flat, didn’t it? Somehow he dropped the whole building into a Narrow, and the first thing that happened was the power got cut. So why not now?’

  ‘Easy,’ she replied. ‘Power’s running off the gennie in the cellar. There’s nothing to cut off. What are you on about?’

  ‘I mean the light’s the only thing slowing them down at the moment…’

  ‘That was slow?’ Stirchley’s voice was raw with hysteria. Rosey was trying to wad the stump of his foot with a bath towel; there was blood everywhere. ‘Calm down,’ he growled.

  ‘… but what happens when they
find the generator and cut the power?’

  Stirchley laughed a high bubbling laugh. ‘How can they cut the power, man? They’re animals!’

  ‘No, they’re not animals. At least, they are normally, but they’re being controlled aren’t they? So all bets are off as to what they can and can’t do.’

  ‘And this is getting us where, exactly?’ protested Bex.

  He wasn’t sure. But he’d seen something, both outside the Fane earlier that day and just now as the skavags had come swarming up the stairs. Their auras were simpler than those of human beings: cruder, the connections between them coloured in muddied shades of fear and dominance. The rank and file were held in thrall to their pack alphas who were in turn driven by a terror of something outside which walked in the shape of a man but was more monstrous than any of them. It compelled them to attack a brightly lit house full of people when every instinct said to run, hide, seek the shadows and narrow places. What are you? he wondered. Anything more than just attack dogs? He remembered Gramma’s dog, Spike, and the skavag in his kitchen – the way its skull had shifted and imploded under his fingers. In that flash of connection knew how he could fight them, even though his heart shrank at the thought of what it might cost him.

  The flames were dying, and the skavags milled more bravely in response.

  Looking at the faces of his friends Andy realised that the cost of inaction would be immeasurably dearer.

  ‘Hold this,’ he said to Bex and passed her the iron stake.

  ‘What? What are you…?’

  He climbed up onto the side of the wardrobe and stood looking down. Below him, gangrel monstrosities filled the staircase from wall to banister. The dying flames threw distorted shadows of their already grotesque shapes up the walls, shining redly on claws, teeth, and eyes, and they set up a ululating chorus as they saw him: their hunting call. If this was not a vision of hell, thought Andy, then death would be fine, because no afterlife could boast anything worse.