by Gary McMahon
Lana stepped back into the room and picked up one of the discarded whisky bottles. She held it by the neck and approached the kneeling figure. Then, entirely without guilt or remorse, she pulled back her arm and clubbed him with the bottle across the side of his head, sending him crashing back to the floor. Flames caught at his trouser legs; he tried to kick them away, but it was too late, the fire was climbing towards his midriff. He opened his mouth to scream, but all that emerged was a dry, rough rasping sound, animalistic in its intensity. His eyes were empty – there was barely anything left of him to burn.
Lana turned around and left the heat of the room, closing the door behind her to hold back the fire for a little longer, just until they could make it down the stairs.
Tom was waiting for her at the door. He was standing with his head bowed, his forehead resting against the doorjamb. His eyes were closed. “What have we done?” he asked, as if he were talking in his sleep. “What have we done here?”
“We’ve taken care of business.” She went to step past him, entering the cold night. The air felt good against her skin; it tightened the flesh on her face, drawing it around her skull, and made her feel like a different person.
She was just about to walk away when a hand gripped her shoulder. Spinning around, with both arms raised, she saw a figure lurching towards her out of the smoky darkness inside the gym. Eyes that were all big, black pupil loomed into her field of vision, a bleached white face hung in the greying air.
“Get off me!” She pulled away, back-pedalling in the doorway and falling out into the street. Tom was already outside; he had moved aside as she had come stumbling out backwards.
The man stood in the doorway, hands grasping the frame. He was bobbing from side to side like a drunkard.
Lana suddenly realised who he was.
It was the junkie, Banjo. His face wasn’t ghostly white at all; it was the bandages, the dressings pulled taut across his ruined features. She recalled the news report about his escape from the hospital and reasoned that he must have made his way back here, back home, and come to the last place he could ever remember being before he lost his mind. His hair stuck out of the bandages in random tufts. His eyes rolled. Those huge dark pupils looked like marbles pressed into the front of his head.
“Go on, now,” she said, coaxing him as if he were a child. “Go back inside, out of the cold.”
He swayed there, uncertain, trying to focus on the sound of her voice. He was empty: a gap in the shape of a man. Whatever had been done to him it had hollowed out his mind, leaving his head as empty and draughty as an abandoned room.
“Go back in there.” She pointed over his shoulder, and finally he seemed to glean some kind of understanding. Lumbering like an injured beast, he turned clumsily on his heels and staggered back inside, closing the door behind him. Smoke billowed out around the edges of the door, and Lana felt no guilt for sending him away to burn.
It’s for the best, she thought. What the hell kind of life could he ever have? He’s ruined; this place has ruined him, just like it ruins everyone.
They walked quickly back to Tom’s car with the sound of sirens slicing the air, cleaving it like blades as the emergency services raced towards the estate. Someone – a rare concerned neighbour – must have noticed the smoke or the flames and called the authorities. The sirens drew closer as they reached the vehicle, and when they closed the doors they could still hear them clearly, as if the windows were rolled down.
“What do we do now?” Tom started the engine.
“We get away from here. I need to look at this book, see if it gives me any clues to where that fat bastard might’ve taken my daughter. It’s all I have to go on. He won’t hurt her, I know that now. From what Bright said, the fool seems to think that she’s his only shot at salvation. Funnily enough, she’s probably safer with him, wherever they are, than she is with me right now.” She smiled, but there was no humour there. It felt more like a scowl.
They drove away from the Grove, heading out towards Far Grove.
“Where are we going?” Lana stared through the windscreen. She could see firelight reflected in the glass.
“My place is less than five minutes away. You can look at the book there, and it’s my turn to show you something.” He was gripping the wheel so tightly that his knuckles had turned white.
Lana turned over the book in her hands, inspecting it: Extreme Boot Camp Workout by Alex ‘Brawler’ Mahler. It sounded ridiculous, like something you’d buy on a satellite TV shopping channel. The binding was frayed and dirty and the edges of the pages were worn thin by Bright’s fingers. She opened a page at random, and saw an extract from an A-Z pasted across the middle pages of the book, obscuring the text and several printed diagrams of a man performing exercises.
The glued page was a map of the Concrete Grove, and someone – probably Bright – had handwritten words over certain areas. ‘Skeights’ was one word, this one scrawled over the section representing Beacon Green. ‘Croatoan’ was another. These words looked simultaneously familiar and utterly alien – like historical artefacts found under the soil in a backyard. She’d seen the second word before, but couldn’t recall where.
A thick arrow, marked in blue ink, pointed off the page in the direction of the council refuse tip close to the old Near Grove train station. There were other words, other phrases, some of them in what looked like a foreign language. Lana couldn’t make out what any of this meant, but she knew it all added up to something important.
‘Twins’ (this one gave her a twinge), ‘Channels’, ‘Captain Clickety’, ‘Hummers’… all words that must have added to and expanded upon Bright’s private mythology of the Grove: keywords and buzzwords signifying events and knowledge that had died along with him.
Located at the centre of the page, directly over the centre-fold of the workout manual, was the Needle. Someone had drawn crude shapes that were meant to be trees. They’d even coloured in the leaves a dark shade of Crayola green. A big red cross had been inked there, and gone over so many times and so heavily that the pen had torn through the paper. ‘Locus?’ said the word – which was also a question – written next to the cross.
Suddenly she knew where the fat man had taken Hailey.
“Stop the car,” she said, turning to face Tom. It all seemed so obvious. She couldn’t believe it had taken her so long to make the connection.
“I am. We’re already here.”
She glanced up through the windscreen. The house was in darkness. “Why aren’t there any lights on?” Tom had pulled up in the middle of the road.
“I told you,” said Tom, taking the keys from the ignition and opening the car door. He stepped out and crossed to the kerb. “I need to show you something.” His voice was strange: low and husky, as if his throat had tightened.
Lana got out of the car and followed him across the road to the front of the house. She left the book in the car but didn’t even notice its absence. The book had given her all the information she required. “Tom, she’s in the Needle. He has her in that fucking tower. Come with me, help me get her out.”
He walked along the drive and stopped outside the front door. Then, without saying anything, he took out his key and opened the door. He turned to her, smiling, and motioned for her to follow him inside. Then he stepped into the house, leaving the door wide open.
Lana knew that she needed to go back to the Grove, to get to the tower block while everyone else in the area was distracted by the fire. The sirens were still wailing, but they had stopped moving. The fire brigade and police must have reached Bright’s gym and begun the process of extinguishing the flames. But still, she walked along the drive and stood at the open door, with one foot resting on the doorstep as she peered inside.
“Tom?” She called into the house, but there was no reply. It was dark in there, but she could make out a figure in the entrance hall, standing at the bottom of the stairs.
Lana took a step inside. “Come on, Tom. Let’s
get Hailey, and then we can get away from here. We can hide out up in the Highlands, or somewhere. Find a place where they’ll never catch up with us.” She knew she was lying: there was no way out of this, not now. The best she could hope for was to save her daughter. Little else mattered.
Tom was standing over the body of a very large woman. She was motionless, and lay face-down at the bottom of the stairs, her nightdress hitched up to show her massive, creased legs and her saggy, crumpled buttocks. Her head was twisted brutally to one side, forced around at an unnatural angle.
“It attacked me,” said Tom, staring down at the woman’s corpse. She was clearly dead: her face was as white and crumpled as old linen sheets. “I fought with it, and we fell down the stairs. Powerful beasts, these things. So, so strong… like a fucking ox, or something.”
“Tom… what are you talking about, Tom?”
His head spun around to face her. His eyes were huge, eating up the residual light in the room. “This,” he said. “The fucking sea cow.” He kicked the corpse but it barely moved. It was too heavy. “Clickety-clickety-click.”
She ignored that last part, unable to even grasp at its meaning. “This… this is your wife?”
He shook his head. “Don’t be stupid. I don’t know where Helen is. This is the sea cow. It took her place, and it attacked me. Up there.” He raised a hand and pointed up the stairs.
How the hell had she managed to get up there? She was paralysed from the waist down. Had he dragged her out of bed and up the stairs only to throw her down? “Tom, I think you need to take a look at her and try to focus. Really look at her. Look at your wife.”
He was crying now. “I wish I knew where she was. I need to find her, to make sure she’s okay, and then we can leave. You, me and Hailey. We can leave all this shit behind us and start a new life.”
“Tom.” She was losing patience now. The old Lana might have taken the time to talk him down, to make him realise his mistake, but the new Lana, the warrior woman, couldn’t spare the time or the effort. “I’m going now, Tom. I’m going to get my daughter. You’ve killed your wife, do you hear me? You killed her. I can’t help you, not with this. There isn’t the time.”
He sunk down to the floor, onto his knees. Slowly, with great care, he reached out and began to stroke the dead woman’s fleshy cheek. Her eyes were open. White foam was dried around her mouth, like a crust of salt. “Where’s Helen? Such gentle creatures when you see them on telly, but you’re not gentle, are you? You stole my wife.”
Lana turned away and made her way slowly to the door. When she stepped outside, emerging into the cool night air, she reached behind her and shut the door firmly, making sure that it was tight to the frame. She could at least do this for Tom: give him some peace and some time to figure out what he had done.
In the distance, over the estate, the sky was bright with reflected flames. She could see the Needle beyond the capering yellow light, sticking up like a thick, grey finger pointing towards the stars.
“I’m coming, Hailey,” she whispered as she started to run. “Mummy’s coming.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
IT DIDN’T TAKE Lana long to reach the outskirts of the Concrete Grove. People were milling in the streets, trying to get a good look at the fiery display. Two fire engines were parked on Grove Lane, with groups of firemen working to put out the blaze. It looked like they’d managed to catch the fire in time to stop it spreading, and they were in the process of limiting the damage. The gym was already ruined, a blackened shell, but the nearby properties were undamaged apart from soot-stains on their frontages. Most of them were empty, anyway, and the rest were rented properties. Nobody in authority would care about the fire: even the landlords could claim on their insurance, and the evening’s destruction would be considered nothing more than an inconvenience.
Not a living soul would mourn the dead. Men like Monty Bright, and his enforcer Terry, were never really loved. They were only ever feared, and when they died the communities they lived off like parasites let out a collective sigh of relief.
Maybe later, when all this was over and if she survived the night, Lana would return here to lay flowers for the poor junkie, Banjo. It was the least she could do, even if by sending him to his death she had shown him little mercy.
The air was hot as she jogged along Grove Side, towards the centre of the estate. She moved away from the blaze, and by the time she had entered the mouth of Grove Street, along which she could join the Roundpath, she was once again growing cold. She pulled the overcoat tighter across her chest, all-too aware that she was still half-naked beneath its thin covering. She checked the buttons, making sure that they were secure, and continued along the street to the end, where she slowed her pace once her feet crunched on the loose material of the circular pathway which ran around the perimeter of the Needle.
Pausing for a moment, she glanced up and looked at the tip of the building. A dark mass had gathered around its pyramidal glass peak: not smoke, not clouds, but hundreds of tiny birds. The air was filled with a distant humming; now that the crackling of the fire was behind her, she could hear the sound of the birds’ wings as they beat gracefully against the air.
Hummingbirds, she thought. More fucking hummingbirds.
Were these things guardians, or harbingers of some kind? She recalled one of the words she’d seen written across the map of the estate in Bright’s workout book. Psychopomp.
A soul conductor; a creature whose job it was to guide the souls of the recently deceased to the afterlife, the other side, the place that she had never believed in. Was that the role of the hummingbirds? Did they accompany people as they crossed over, journeying from this place to that other – from the Concrete Grove to the grove beyond?
Her mind was racing. This was all mad conjecture, but it made as much sense as the ravings of that crazy man Monty Bright – him and his alternative world, his parallel universe that existed within the estate. His rambling speech and the book – what little of its contents she’d had the chance to skim – both seemed to suggest that Bright had been searching for a fragment of Creation, a sliver of the Garden of Eden. But what if he was only partly correct and the garden he had been seeking for so long was actually a wood, a forest, a dark tree-filled land that acted as a depository for lost dreams and nightmares? And what if the doorway to that place was a grove of ancient oak trees, over which had been constructed a concrete tower block?
Hailey had found a key to unlock that door. Bright had called it a mixture of innocence and yearning, but whatever unique qualities her daughter possessed, they were currency here. Lana had always told Hailey that she was special, but had never really known it for sure, until now.
Something deep within her responded strongly to the theory: she felt that the place towards which she was now heading, the realm Monty Bright had died trying to find, was like a failing battery, powered by the dreams and desires of the people who gathered around it. And in a place like the one she’d left behind, a blasted, godforsaken pit like the Concrete Grove, the only charge this battery could receive was negative.
So the forces here had mutated, becoming toxic. They had changed, and sprayed out their waste like a buried nuclear core going into a slow, decades-long meltdown.
She ran towards the old construction hoardings that formed a barrier around the tower, looking for a way inside. There had to be one – a gap in the fence, a slight depression in the ground under one of the boards, or perhaps a couple of damaged sheets of timber panel through which she could force entry. Soon she saw a loose board, and not caring who heard or even saw her, she set to work on pulling it free. This took several minutes and she tore one of her fingernails, but finally she managed to tug the board far enough away from the makeshift barricade that she could squeeze through the gap.
She tore the sleeve of her coat, and one of her running shoes came off, but she didn’t stop to pick up the shoe. Instead she took off the other one and proceeded barefoot, stepping on sp
lintered timber and old nails, tearing the soles of her feet but barely even feeling the pain.
More sirens sounded a long way behind her. She didn’t turn around to see if the fire was out; she kept on going, heading towards the main entrance of the Needle.
This time she didn’t need to struggle to find a way inside.
Because the doors were open.
Something had been waiting for her to arrive.
Above her, the humming sound continued. Around the base of the tower block, thick roots squirmed and writhed, tunnelling into the earth and then emerging again, displacing the turned soil and the building debris. The earth was alive with motion; something was straining at the boundaries of her perception, trying to be seen.
“I’m coming, Hailey.” She walked into the Needle, and entered another world, passing from night to day in a heartbeat.
The floor was not concrete; it was soft earth covered in a layer of mulch. She felt it soak the soles of her feet and ooze between her toes, cold and invigorating, placing her in the moment. The sounds of the forest filled her ears; its rich, loamy smell invaded her nostrils. She was not inside a precast concrete frame building, she had instead entered some kind of woodland glade… no, not a glade: a grove.
Stood in a circle around her were several ancient oaks. Their rugged trunks were thick and imposing. The branches reached up, entwining, grasping, meshing, to form a dense canopy. Hairy conical nests hung from those branches, and hummingbirds darted in and out of the tiny entrance holes. The sky above the canopy seemed miles away, as if it had receded to a point where it was barely visible to the eye. All she could make out was a vast emptiness; a canvas upon which was painted thin, wispy clouds, behind which there burned a high, hazy sun. Lana turned her attention to the very centre of the grove of oak trees, and there, amid a small cairn of grey stones that might have once been part of a concrete structure, she saw a huge man-shaped mound of mossy ferns and leaves. The mound twitched as she approached, and when she stood before it she realised who it resembled: Francis Boater, Monty Bright’s redemptive hard-man.