The Narrows

by James Brogden

  ‘Andy, NO!’ Bex shrieked.

  He jumped.

  ***

  There was no hope of defending himself; Andy was driven to the floor instantaneously. He simply curled himself into the tightest of foetal balls and waited for the biting to begin.

  He didn’t have to wait long.

  He’d once seen a documentary about shark attacks in which the victims had described feeling no pain but a violent tugging sensation, and that this had been put down to a combination of shock and the incredible sharpness of the sharks’ teeth. The skavag attack felt nothing like that. It was the worst pain he had ever experienced in his entire life. They worried at him like a toy from all directions.

  He’d been afraid that he wouldn’t be able to call up the same responses which had saved him first on Gramma’s boat and then again at the flat, but in the end he didn’t have to think about it at all. His flesh responded instinctively – the same instinct which crushes the wasp as it stings, or keeps a cornered animal fighting even as it is ripped apart.

  Wherever teeth or claws pierced his flesh, his ch’i surged in gouts of ravening blue flame. It burned into the heads and limbs of his enemies, warping their own energy meridians and the flesh within which these were anchored, causing sudden catastrophic malformations of muscle and bone which were at best crippling, and in most cases instantly fatal. Limbs twisted and snapped. Internal organs burst. Skulls imploded. Within a few moments he found himself bleeding from innumerable wounds but surrounded by a ring of twitching, dying creatures.

  ‘Andy!’ Bex screamed. ‘Andy, speak to me, please!’ Tears were streaming down her face as she tried to climb over the barricade, and it was only with great difficulty that Rosey and Lark were able to hold her back.

  Andy tried to struggle into a sitting position, and the skavags came for him again. Clenched into a screaming ball, his ch’i raged out of the holes they made in him and burned them back once more.

  They came for him three more times before they learned that attacking him simply meant their own deaths, and retreated to a respectful distance, snapping at each other in baffled frustration. By that time Andy was completely motionless, buried beneath a pile of contorted bodies.

  The only other sound was Bex’s hysterical sobbing.

  Slowly it seemed to occur to the skavags that there was still prey hiding up there that didn’t burn them when they bit it, and they began to edge up the stairs again.

  ‘Let’s get this thing reinforced,’ ordered Rosey, and the Narrowfolk set to work.

  12 Old Bonds

  Andy was standing in a child’s bedroom. It looked like it had been decorated following the instructions of a prison inmate who had lived in solitary confinement for most of his life and had only the haziest notion of bedrooms, let alone those belonging to children. Everything was slightly too bright, and none of the walls seemed to meet each other at the right angles. There was a Transformers lightshade hanging from the ceiling, and from underneath it spun a small brass medallion which he seemed to recognise from somewhere. Beneath that, on the bed, lay a boy – not much more than a toddler – apparently asleep.

  He walked towards the boy across rough, unsanded floorboards vicious with splinters, and then a rug on which plastic cowboys and Indians were fighting. They were the kind which could be pulled apart and swapped around, and whoever had set them up had mixed them together so that Indian braves had cowboy heads, and cowboy bodies walked in buckskin and moccasins.

  The boy woke up as he approached and sat up, regarding him calmly. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m Andy,’ he replied. ‘What’s your name?’

  The boy’s face crumpled into misery. ‘I don’t know,’ he answered and began to cry. ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you could always borrow mine, I suppose.’

  ‘Really?’ the boy brightened momentarily, then looked doubtful. ‘Is that allowed?’

  Andy shrugged. ‘It’s my name. I can lend it to anybody I like.’

  The boy’s grin was like the sun chasing away clouds on a wind-driven day. ‘Then I’ll be Andy too.’

  ‘Okay. But see, names are a serious business. We’d have to shake on it.’

  ‘Shake?’ Boy-Andy tried an experimental shimmy and looked confused.

  Grown-Andy laughed. ‘No, you big pudding. Shake. Hands.’

  ‘Oh!’

  Solemnly they shook on the deal. As they did so, Boy-Andy inspected the bites and cuts all over Grown-Andy’s forearm. They were no longer bleeding, but still fresh and raw.

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  Grown-Andy examined himself gingerly. ‘Not at the moment. I expect it will do, though, soon enough.’

  They traded anxious glances, the reflections from the slow-turning brass mobile drifting in curled shavings of golden light between them.

  Boy-Andy said: ‘The man with the needles will be coming back soon.’

  Grown-Andy replied: ‘I know.’

  ‘He scares me.’

  ‘He bloody terrifies me!’

  Boy-Andy giggled and clapped a hand to his mouth. ‘You said a swear word!’

  ‘Too bloody right I did.’ Grown-Andy wasn’t joking.

  Golden shavings of light. Drifting, drifting.

  Boy-Andy said: ‘You can’t stay here, you know.’

  Grown-Andy’s reply was a reluctant whisper. ‘I know.’

  ‘You have to go and meet him, or your friends will die.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do, though. I don’t know how any of this works.’

  ‘Here.’ Boy-Andy reached up, and even though he was far too short to reach the Transformers light-shade, he managed to take down the brass medallion. ‘You gave me something, so you should get something too.’

  Now that he was able to examine it closely, Grown-Andy saw that it was a series of concentric rings with delicate spokes – it looked like a sun, or a burning wheel.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s you,’ came the reply.

  ***

  When Andy regained consciousness, he was lying brokenly on the stairs as creatures climbed around him, carefully avoiding any contact. Their smell was overpowering, like the ripeness of burst bin-bags.

  Everything hurt. Even the darkness behind his eyelids seemed to be nailed to the back of his skull. Up behind him, as if from a great distance, he heard the commotion as the skavags renewed their attack on the barricade, and then full awareness uncorked his ears and it all came rushing in, a tumult of noise: yells, screams, and hoot-howls.

  He levered himself painfully up the wall at his back. The skavags nearest to him recoiled, yowling, made as if to attack him, and then recoiled again as instinct warred with the hard-won lesson of their dead packmates.

  ‘What are you going to do about it?’ he snarled at them and lunged. They fell back over each other, snapping at themselves in confusion, and he laughed weakly; it was nice to see something else cower for a change. He was able to ease his way past them and down along the wall.

  A sudden cheer from upstairs made him pause and look back.

  ‘Oi! Sumner!’ Bex was grinning like a maniac. ‘If you’re going out, get us twenty Marlborough Light, yeah?’

  ‘And a curry!’ shouted Stirchley raggedly.

  Reluctant to provoke the skavags any further by replying, Andy settled for simply grinning in return and giving them the finger before continuing downstairs. It was time to a put a stop to this.

  The creatures parted ahead of him and closed in behind as he reached the ground floor. He was bracing himself for the inevitable moment when one of them got up enough nerve to come for him, because he didn’t think he had enough left in him to survive another onslaught, but it seemed that whatever pack mentality ruled
their aggression also controlled their fear. He saw it webbing them together like a low-grade telepathy. Too many were afraid of him for any single one of them to attack alone, and so he reached the shattered remains of the front door unmolested.

  He made his way across the churned up chaos of Moon Grove’s once-proud allotments and the splintered wreckage of sheds and greenhouses, to where Barber stood. At his feet, an emaciated figure lay clad in rags.

  ‘You’ve made them fear you,’ Barber remarked. ‘It feels good, doesn’t it?’

  If he was at all surprised to see Andy simply walk out of their midst, he didn’t show it. For his part, Andy could barely stand, let alone engage with this. He brushed Barber’s words away.

  ‘Enough. Call them off. You’ve got what you want. I’m here. The rest are no threat to you.’

  ‘Dear boy,’ laughed Barber. ‘What on earth makes you think that I want you for anything?’

  Andy swayed, confused. ‘Then why… why all…?’

  ‘Dear lord listen to you, trying to find reasons for everything, as if that would make a difference. Because, you meddlesome little by-blow – and please stop me if this gets too technical – quite simply you are fucking up the programme. Every time you set foot in the Narrows, you end up disturbing the delicate system which has taken me decades – and I cannot emphasise that enough: decades – to develop. I desire nothing from you at all except your immediate and permanent absence.’

  His coat began to billow and unfurl, the glittering rows of needles in its lapels flashing as they began to squirm free. Distantly he could hear the sounds of renewed fighting in the house: smashes and screams as his friends died. Barber’s grin was as wide as a lake of broken ice. Andy seized on the only thing which seemed to offer even a whisper of hope: the image of a brass sun ornament spinning in impossible geometries. He still had no idea what it meant but it did at least remind him of something.

  ‘Do this, and you’ll never find out where I planted that stake I took,’ he warned, sounding far more confident than he felt.

  Barber’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘You see I do know a little bit about this fabulously delicate system you’ve got set up here. I know that you tried to do something to me with those needles when I was a kid, except that Walter stole me away, and so it didn’t take. I know that now you’re trying something similar, just on a bigger scale.’ Even as he was improvising wildly he felt the rightness of it, and the words tumbled out of him as if trying to catch up with his racing mind. ‘I don’t know what it is exactly, but I know you’ve got these stakes planted all over the city doing something to the energy patterns. You know I took one – because I’m so meddlesome, aren’t I – but you don’t know where I put it back in, do you? You’ll never find it, trust me. Needle in a haystack. You’d better hope that whenever you switch this thing on, or fire it up or whatever, something doesn’t go pop. Because it’ll probably be quite a big pop, don’t you think? Sorry if that’s not technical enough for you.’

  ‘You lack either the wit or the forethought for that, shop boy.’

  ‘And don’t you just wish you could take that chance,’ he shot back. ‘But you don’t do chance, do you? As for these sorry things,’ he indicated the skavags who were lurking nearby, ‘breaking them is nowhere near as satisfying as the look on your face right this minute. Call them off. Now.’

  ‘You’re lying. You’re lying to me, and I’m going to tear the truth of it from your living soul, you arrogant pup…’

  ‘You might find that harder than you think,’ Andy warned in a low voice. Motes of energy crawled down the meridians of his arms and burned from his fingertips like brief-lived fireflies. ‘I’m sure you could, but then, I’ve just walked right through everything you could throw at me, so you work it out. You have no idea what I’m capable of. Why make things harder than they have to be? I’ll give it up to you willingly – you can tear me apart, find out what makes me tick, fine. Just call them off and let my friends go. Third and last time, or things between you and me start to get awkward.’

  ‘You lie.’

  But the momentary cloud of uncertainty which crossed Barber’s face was enough to tell Andy that he’d won. He just prayed to whatever force was keeping him on his feet that Bex didn’t take it into her head to come running out at that moment waving the stake over her head.

  ‘Very well. Your friends will live to squat another day. What few there are left of them.’ The sounds of fighting in the house ceased abruptly, and a swarm of dark, hunched shapes poured out of windows and doorways as quickly as they’d come, disappearing into the gloom. Andy heard a distant, ragged cheer rise from inside. Too few voices, though – far too few.

  Barber’s ambush happened so quickly that he barely had time to register the flash of movement before the needles struck him.

  At nine points from just below his hairline, down the length of his body to the back of his left knee, they were driven with such force that in most cases they pierced through several layers of clothing and into the meridian points of the flesh beneath. When he tried to run, or indeed react in any way, he found that he was completely paralysed.

  He hadn’t been deprived of his sight, however. He saw the lines of his own aura stretched tight through the needles and into Barber’s own, wrapped and knotted, held fast, flickering wildly in ribbons of dying neon. It made him sick, like watching himself being operated upon. Barber examined them briefly, made a satisfied-sounding grunt and stepped back to regard Andy contemptuously.

  ‘Walked through everything I could throw at you, did you? I think not. I am going to burn the truth out of you, make no mistake about that, but don’t worry – I’m not going to kill you. Not as such.

  ‘Well!’ he said brightly, clapping his hands and looking around at the devastation. ‘This has been a lot of fun, but I mustn’t overstay my welcome. You know what they say: no rest for the wicked. Thank you all so much for entertaining me. You really must come to my place some time. Why not right now? What a cracking idea! Come, boy. Heel.’

  A marionette, Andy had no choice but to follow. As they passed the corpse on the ground, he was horrified to see it struggling to prop itself up on one elbow; he hadn’t thought anything so damaged could possibly live.

  ‘Wait…’ Carling gasped. ‘Boss, where’re you… wait for…’

  Barber stopped and looked down at the crippled thing. ‘My boy,’ he murmured, almost regretfully. ‘My poor, faithful boy.’

  ‘…got you in…’ Carling insisted, though the effort was almost too much for him.

  ‘Yes you did. Nobody else could have. You have been given such strength, and you have used it so well.’

  ‘…then… help…’

  Barber shook his head sadly. ‘No, Carling. I’m not going to help you. I’ll be honest with you there. You deserve that, at least.’

  ‘…promised…’

  ‘Yes, I know I did, but the circumstances have changed.’ He indicated Andy, an impotent witness to this latest betrayal. ‘He has proven to be considerably more difficult to subdue than we anticipated, and I’m going to be forced to make use of some additional resources. I fear that the system will not cope with both breaking him and healing you. I am truly, truly sorry.’

  ‘…fuck your sorrys…’

  ‘Goodbye Carling.’ Barber turned back to Andy, his eyes dark with accusation. ‘You should take a lesson from this. Everything he has done has been in complete accordance with his nature, even at the cost of his own life. That’s your place he’s lying in, Sumner. Remember that.’

  And he led Andy away into the narrow places of the world.

  ***

  The skavags drifted away into the shadows, along with the last shreds of Fane-cloud, and reality settled itself back around the devastation of Moon Grove in stunned silence.

  ***
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br />   When the survivors emerged, they found Carling crawling with agonising slowness across the scarred ground towards the undergrowth. He was covered in freezing mud and shivering uncontrollably.

  ‘What do we do with this?’ asked Rosey, staring down at the struggling figure with wary disgust.

  ‘Stupid question,’ replied Bex, and hefted the iron bar over her head. But she hesitated as Carling rolled over onto his back and started to make a thin, hitching, tearing sound that took her a while to identify as laughter. ‘What are you laughing at?’ she demanded. ‘You don’t get to laugh, you piece of shit, not after what you’ve done! Not after what you’ve done!’ She raised the point of the stake to bring it down – and found that Rosey was in the way.

  ‘You don’t want to do that,’ he said.

  ‘What do you know about it?’ she yelled in his face. ‘Just who the hell are you to tell me anything, anyway? You’re not one of us, policeman. He did this! And everything else! He killed Dodd, I know he did!’ she shoved Rosey aside roughly – no mean feat given how much bigger he was – and raised the point of the stake again. ‘I’ll do it, by Christ, I will.’

  Carling wheezed with mocking laughter. ‘’f you was going to… you’d’ve already done it… weak bitch… besides, they won’t let you.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘…them..’ he pointed a frail finger ahead at the bushes towards which he’d been crawling. There, half-hidden in the dripping gloom, crouched three skavags.

  They made no move to attack. Instead they sidled warily out of the shadows towards Carling, flinching and snarling in fear at the small group of Narrowfolk. They were clearly female and apparently quite old, judging by their flat, wrinkled dugs. It was the first time Bex had even considered the possibility of skavag sexes. Up until now she’d seen them as neutered and anonymous threats with nothing to differentiate them, but to think now that there were skavag females and therefore skavag males, and presumably by extension skavag babies…