by Gary McMahon
“Where is she?” She stared at the huge mound, not expecting it to be capable of speech. She knew that she should be afraid – indeed, the person she used to be would have been terrified – but all she felt now was a deep sense of pity. This man – this torturer and rapist – had been exploited by the forces here and then left to be absorbed into the fabric of the place. It was a correct end, she supposed, yet still there was something rather sad about his prolonged demise.
A sound came from the mass. Like a breathy whisper.
Lana went down on her knees and leaned in close, pressing the side of her head to the damp, mossy lump.
“I protectssssssssssssssssssssssssss…”
“Thank you,” she said, and got back to her feet. “Thank you for watching over her, you piece of shit. Thanks for that, if nothing else.” She backed away, repulsed by the thing that had once been a man, or had at least called itself a man.
Daggers of sunlight pierced the foliage, slipping between the leaves and branches of the big, old trees. At the outskirts of the grove, something moved, slowly stalking her. It padded in a wide circle, biding its time, waiting for the right moment to reveal itself to her.
“Hailey? Is that you, baby? I’m here. I’ve come to get you.”
The air inside the grove began to darken, as if a dense black cloud had crossed the sun. Shadows crept into the open, sliding through the gaps between the trunks and out from beneath low-lying foliage.
The thing outside the grove started to move inward, making its way through the trees. It was huge, bulky and covered in thick, dark fur. Like a bear, it moved first on all fours and then reared up on its hind legs to clear felled trees and other random obstacles.
“Oh, no…” Lana looked around, but there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. The beast had seen her; it knew exactly where she stood and how vulnerable she was.
The thing dropped and loped on all fours into the clearing, with its large, shaggy head turned to one side. The creature’s flanks were huge and glossy and blood-flecked. Its heavy paws were large and threatening. Sharp claws curved like sickles from the ends of its rudimentary fingers; they scraped across the bases of the trees, cutting out swathes of bark.
“Please. Don’t.” Lana was powerless. Finally, she was afraid. She saw now the stupidity of coming here, of trying to bring back her daughter from a place that did not want to let her go. In fact, how did she even know that Hailey wanted to leave? What if she had been coming here for months, seeking solace and some kind of communion with the dormant forces that were now beginning to awake? Perhaps she had found her true home here, among the lost and ruined artefacts of other people’s dreams.
At last the beast turned its head towards her. Its face was human; she knew it would be, and even whose features she would see.
It was Timothy: her dead husband. His eyes stared at her from above grizzled, hairy cheeks, and he frowned as if in vague recognition.
Lana stood there and waited for him to come to her. She had been waiting like this for such a long time.
Standing on his back legs, Timothy lurched towards her, slashing at her with those long, lethal claws. He roared; the air shook. Birds took flight around them, rising from the underground to take to the sky. Lana felt slick warmth at her belly, and when she placed her hands there blood flowed across her fingers. She grabbed at the wound, trying to stop the flow, but it was no good. She was already dying.
She closed her eyes and felt her body being hauled into the air. She flew, slung up into the branches of the nearest tree, and then once again she felt those claws go to work on her stomach, slicing away her sense of self.
What felt like hours later she opened her eyes. The world was upside down. The bottoms of the trees were at the top of her field of vision; the rustling canopy was the ground. Her ankles ached. Her belly was empty. There was nothing there, just a cool breeze across the exposed inside of her gut. Steam drifted past her eyes, from the upside-down ground and towards the tumbledown, loosely-packed sky.
A small upside-down girl stood several yards away, fumbling with the hem of her dress. She was wearing the tattered remains of a school uniform, but her legs and feet were bare. Her small toes were filthy with soil. The trees and the foliage closed around her, keeping her beauty and her innocence close. The air held her like a gentle hand. She was part of this place now, and would never again be forced to endure the concrete agonies from which she had finally escaped.
“Goodbye, Mum.” Her voice was like music; the sound played on and on, repeating even after the girl had turned around and begun to walk away, into the trees, heading into the world beyond the grove. Lana recognised the song; she just couldn’t place the name of the singer, or join in with the words.
“Not yet,” she breathed. Then the world – this one, and the one outside, where she never again wanted to set foot – went dark and the relentless sound of humming filled the emptiness that had always been inside her, taking away the fear at last. “Yes,” she whispered. She was ready to go now. There was nothing left to keep her here.
EPILOGUE
HAILEY WALKED AWAY from her mother, remembering the dream she’d once had – the dream that had now become real. She entered the dense shadows between the oak trees, and was lost in darkness for a little while. But when she came out on the other side, free from the grove at last, she was bathed in bright sunlight.
It’s like a dream. I don’t hurt anymore.
Far off in the distance, down a vast hill and across an expanse of low-lying open woodland which lay at its base, there was a dense forest of younger oak trees. And beyond that – who knew? Perhaps there were vast cities to explore, deep oceans to navigate. Monsters she might need to fight. Or perhaps all that existed was the eternal forest, and the primeval oaks, and the baleful shadows they cast.
Beautiful, she thought. It’s beautiful.
Finally Hailey realised that none of this really mattered. Whatever was out there was out there, and all she needed to do was be willing to discover it all. There was nothing left for her where she had come from; all she had, everything she would ever need, lay ahead of her, in the trees and the shadows of her new home.
She had somehow come upon the central truth of this place, this grove within the Grove. At last it all made sense, and she repeated what she had learned silently inside her head, like a mantra to keep her company on the long journey that lay ahead of her:
Everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE CONCRETE GROVE does not exist, but it is in fact based on several council housing estates I’ve known, lived on, or lived near during my lifetime. The Needle, for instance, is based on the infamous Dunston Rocket in Gateshead, Tyne & Wear, and the idea for the circular layout of streets in the Grove was pinched from an old Scottish estate long since demolished.
I’ve tried to keep the geography of the North-East as true to life as possible, with only the occasional cheat invented to serve the mechanics of plot. Northumberland is, to my mind, the most beautiful part of England. Despite the fictional horrors I’ve placed there, I can’t recommend the area enough for a visit.
The people in this novel are real, every single one of them. They had different names when I met them, and their circumstances might not have been 100% the same as the ones in the novel, but I’ve known and mixed with the real-life counterparts of Tom, Lana and Hailey, Francis Boater, Terry, and even Monty Bright. If anything, the real characters were more outlandish than the versions I’ve created for the story.
Gary McMahon
Leeds
2011
Coming April 2012
SILENT VOICES
Gary McMahon
Twenty years ago three young boys staggered out of an old building, tired and dirty yet otherwise unharmed. Missing for a weekend, the boys had no idea of where they’d been. But they all shared the same vague memory of a shadowed woodland grove... and they swore they’d been gone for only an hour. Welco
me back to the Concrete Grove. The place you can never really leave...
Title
Indicia and Dedication
Acknowledgements
Grove Map
Hummingbirds
Part One: Shades and Shadows
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Part Two: People Under the Influence
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Part Three: Faces
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Part Four: The Killing of a North-East Loan Shark
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Epilogue
Author's Note
'Silent Voices' by Gary McMahon