by Gary McMahon
...to scare her into loving him again.
When Erik stopped she was lying on the floor, curled up like a baby. There was blood everywhere. Still she chanted the rhyme, taunting him.
He was breathing heavily, as if he’d just done a tough workout. His gun hand ached, the knuckles were swollen. He raised his face to the ceiling and let out a wordless wail, an animal sound of pain and self-hatred. Then he returned his attention to the room, and what was in it.
Abby continued to mumble from the floor. She’d stopped chanting and was now trying to speak, but he couldn’t make out the words.
“Look what you’ve done,” said Erik. “This is your fault – you did this. I only wanted to scare you. You’ve made me into something that I despise.” He raised the gun and stared into the barrel. It would be so easy to end it all now: one bullet for her, one for him. Maybe that’s what had been coming all along. Neat and tidy: a smooth little suburban death. He pressed the end of the barrel to his cheek, and then moved it across to his temple. After a second, he pointed the gun at Abby, his finger tightening on the trigger.
“Please...” Her voice was weak. She was speaking through a mouthful of blood and shattered teeth. “Don’t kill me...”
“No, I’m not going to kill you. I love you... all I’ve ever done is love you. Can’t you see? Don’t you understand? I’ve loved you ever since I first met you, and when we lost our baby I would have kept on loving you, but you wouldn’t let me. Instead you went with other men and told me about it. You rubbed my nose in it, like a fucking dog that’s puked up on the carpet.”
“Sorry... hurting... everything hurts.” Her voice was unrecognisable.
For a moment he was acutely aware of the selfishness of his actions, the intensity of his feelings, but then he shoved that insight aside, ignoring it. Why the hell shouldn’t he be selfish? There was no one else to look out for him, to protect his interests. Ever since he was a kid, he’d been forced to look after himself. That made a man hard; it toughened him to the point that nothing could penetrate the armour he had worked so hard to put in place.
“You bitch... look what you did. Look what you did to us. We could’ve been happy. We were a family... a proper family...”
He could no longer bear to look at her, so he raised his eyes and stared across her collapsed body.
Behind her, there was movement. Thin silver branches, leafless and grasping, were slowly emerging from between the gaps in the conical mound of Tessa’s belongings. Like long, thin arms, the branches slid out, swaying in the air; gnarled twig-hands reaching for something that wasn’t there.
Erik tightened his grip on the gun. He approached the mound. The branches appeared to sense him and twitched towards him, turning from silver to brown. He raised the gun and took aim. His hand was shaking so he used the other one to steady the gun, just like he’d seen in the movies.
“No...”
Abby, still on the floor, was speaking to him. He turned around.
“Don’t kill it... our baby... our Tessa... she’s come back...” She spat out blood. There were gaps where a couple of teeth had been.
He swivelled and watched the branches. There were now patches of skin on them, like pale pink bark. As he watched, the patches grew, the skin, spreading like a stain to cover the rest of the branches. The branches became thin arms; the spindly twigs at the ends turned into small hands. Pieces of the construction fell away from Abby’s sculpture – jumpers, paintings, a My Little Pony duvet cover – and parts of a body were visible beneath. The sapling child was quickly transforming into flesh and blood, as if the process were speeding up because he was watching it happen. Like a low-rent Pinocchio, the lifeless simulacrum was gaining sentience.
His finger twitched on the trigger – a reaction that he was unable to control – and the gun went off. He managed to twist his wrist so the shot went wide, punching a hole in the wall near the window.
“Tessa?”
Her face formed quickly, like reversed footage of plastic melting, and he began to make out her lovely features beneath the mess of creation. What at first looked like a long, beaklike snout shortened to form her delicate little nose. The eyes opened, trailing strings like pizza cheese between the upper and lower lids. The eyeballs pushed outwards, and then settled back into the sockets. The eyelids blinked.
Erik dropped the gun. He fell to his knees and clasped his hands together as if in prayer.
The Tessa-thing stepped from out of the hollow cone, parts of her makeshift sarcophagus breaking away, the whole structure tumbling and falling to the floor. She walked towards her father and embraced him, enveloping him in her warm, damp flesh.
“Baby... my baby...” He was weeping now. He could hold back the tears no longer.
Abby had crawled across the floor and now lay at his side, reaching out towards them both. He felt her hands grabbing at his legs, and angled his body so that she could be included in the embrace.
The three of them, together again, reunited at last, right at the centre of the black hole.
The family unit was coming back together, reforming. The damage had been repaired. He had no idea what kind of magic this was, but he didn’t want to question it too deeply. In his experience, those kinds of questions usually led to trouble, and he didn’t want to wreck what had been made here, in a dim bedroom in a council house at the back end of nowhere.
This was not the kind of place where wonders were meant to happen. But here it was: here was wonder. Here was awe.
Then, weary and aching, he became slowly aware of a faint clicking sound.
He moved back, pushing Tessa away to create a gap between them, and what he saw made him question everything else he’d been thinking. The thing that resembled his daughter stood there, naked and genderless – with just a bare patch of skin between her legs and no navel or nipples –wearing a strange white mask in place of her pretty face. The front of the mask jutted out to form a hideous beak, and its eyes were hidden behind small black shades.
She raised her arms to the ceiling, spreading her legs and bending her knees to brace herself against the floorboards. Black leaves that fused together to become a long black cape or overcoat cascaded downwards, seeming to flow from her open hands, to cover her body, flapping at first like wings before moulding itself to her shape.
In one hand she was holding a short pointed cane.
It was only when she looked back down, staring directly into his eyes, that he realised the clicking sound was coming from Tessa. And then it occurred to him that this half-formed creature was not Tessa at all, but something that was using her image in an attempt to gain entry into this world.
He turned away from the image, unable to fully comprehend what he was seeing.
“Put on some clothes,” he said to Abby, trying to cling to anything that might represent normality.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
ROYLE RUSHED ACROSS the hospital car park, thinking the worst.
He’d received the call twenty minutes ago and had wasted no time in getting here. His car was parked at an angle, taking up two spaces, but he didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, he was lucky to have made it here without running someone down. He could remember none of the journey; he’d completed it on auto-pilot.
He barged through the main doors and headed towards the maternity wing. The hospital was quiet; people were pushing trolleys laden with breakfast into side rooms, a few patients wandered the halls in their dressing gowns, doctors and nurses with weary eyes and soft morning faces talking in low voices.
At the reception desk, Royle told a small, frail woman with thick spectacles who he was and why he was here.
“And we called you?”
“Yes,” he said. “I got a call not long ago to tell me that she was here.”
The woman checked her computer for the second time, the light from the screen reflecting in the lenses of her glasses. “What was the name again?”
“Mine?”
“No, the patient’s.”
“Vanessa Royle.”
Her eyes darted across the screen. “I’m sorry, but she isn’t on here... when exactly was she brought in?”
“She came in last night, with pregnancy complications, or so I was told. Listen...” He paused, trying to rein in his temper, and something occurred to him. “Oh, hang on. She might be down under her maiden name.” He shrugged when the woman glanced up at him, her face filled with tired pity. “Vanessa Mantel.”
“Mantel... ah, yes. Here she is. Ward Ten. Just go down the corridor there and turn right at the end.” A smile crossed her face, briefly but brightly, and then she dismissed him by peering over his shoulder at the other people milling about near her desk.
He walked through the doorway the woman had indicated and passed a couple of empty rooms, several closed doors, and a ward containing a group of pregnant women. When he finally reached the ward where Vanessa was staying, he paused and tried to gather his thoughts.
They hadn’t told him much over the phone, just that he needed to get down here because his wife had been brought in with complications. They told him not to worry, but to get here as quickly as he could. Not to worry... such stupid advice, especially when it came from someone at the hospital where your pregnant wife had been rushed in the early hours of the morning.
He remembered the sound he’d heard – or thought he’d heard – coming from her belly the last time he’d seen her. Hadn’t she also said that the baby had been kicking hard? Surely that was a sign that the baby was okay, that it was developing well. A dead baby couldn’t kick.
He closed his eyes, trying to banish such thoughts. But it was no good. This was his biggest fear, the terror that gripped him every night, part of the reason he reached for the bottle: that the baby would die, and it would kill his marriage when it did so. All he wanted, everything he needed, was in this building. He couldn’t face the idea of leaving it here, in a medical waste bag headed for the incinerator.
Fuck, why did he always have to think such negative thoughts... why was he so damned dark? Sometimes he blamed the job, but then he thought that he was probably drawn to become a police officer in the first place because of that darkness, which had always been at his centre: a hard little kernel of night. And wasn’t the alcohol just another way of trying to drown that seed, to render it powerless? Or was it just a way of watering it and helping it to grow?
He ran a hand through his hair, straightened his shirt collar, and pushed open the door.
He saw Vanessa immediately. She was in the bed nearest the door. Her face was so pale that she looked like a ghost of herself. She didn’t see him at first, so when he approached the bed she twitched in shock when he spoke.
“How are you?”
She smiled. “Okay. It’s good to see you.”
He felt like crying. He wanted to start punching and kicking the walls, tearing apart the place. “What happened?”
“Have you spoken to the doctor?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. I came straight up here, to the ward.”
A nurse walked over from her station. “Mr Royle?”
“DS Royle,” he said, not understanding why it was important to state his rank to this civilian. That wouldn’t help here. Death would not be scared off by official seniority.
“DS Royle... yes. The doctor asked me to let him know once you arrived. He’d like to talk to you, if that’s okay.”
He reached out and Vanessa’s hand found his. He squeezed it, looked down at her.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Go and see the doctor. I’ll be fine.” She squeezed him back.
He followed the nurse back out into the corridor, where she led him to a small, cramped room. The door was open and a middle-aged doctor sat behind a desk, squinting at a computer screen.
“Doctor Gable,” said the nurse. “Mr... sorry, DS Royle is here.”
The doctor looked up. He had a large, open face and a grey goatee beard. He blinked several times, smiled, and nodded. “Thanks, nurse. Please, DS Royle... won’t you come in?”
The nurse hurried away. Royle stood in the doorway for a couple of seconds, unsure of what to do, and then he stepped inside, leaving the door open behind him.
“Sit down, please.” The doctor leaned back in his chair. He had a big belly and thin arms. His medical coat was ill-fitting, as if they hadn’t quite been able to accommodate his odd shape.
“What’s wrong with my wife?”
The doctor grabbed a pen off the desk and rolled it between his palms. “As you know, she was brought in here a few hours ago. She called an ambulance complaining of pains and they wasted no time in getting her here. A woman of her age... well, we can’t afford to take any risks.”
Royle nodded. “Go on.”
“We did an ultrasound and found something unusual.” He paused.
Royle waited for him to continue.
“There’s a growth, DS Royle. It’s attached to the wall of her womb. At first we thought it might be an underdeveloped twin. That happens sometimes, one twin is stronger than the other and the weaker one expires.”
“Twins?”
“No. Not twins. That’s just what we thought at first. I’m afraid your wife has a tumour. We can’t tell if it’s benign or malignant at this stage, but one thing’s for certain – it needs to come out. We have to operate, and we have to do it quickly."
Royle stared at the window behind the doctor’s head. The sun was almost full up; the sky was lightening by degrees, the clouds parting. “How soon can you do it?”
“You have private health care. That means we can bump her up the list and do it almost immediately – certainly in the next twenty-four hours, here at the hospital. We need to monitor the situation first, get the results of a biopsy. We’re not sure how serious this is, but I need to warn you both that it might be very serious indeed. If the tumour is malignant... well, I’m sure you understand what that might mean.” The doctor stopped playing with the pen. He placed it on the desk, then touched it a couple of times with the tip of his finger, rolling it a few inches back and forth across the surface. “I’m sorry,” he said, almost as an afterthought. “We’ll do everything we can.”
Royle stood and backed away from the desk. “Yeah. Thanks.” He needed to get out of there, to get away from the hideous little man and his distracted demeanour. He couldn’t take it all in; the world was coming apart at the seams, letting in impurities from whatever lay beyond the veil. The dark seed at his centre was starting to flower.
He stumbled out of the room and back along the corridor, falling against the wall, dragging his feet along the tiled floor. He entered the ward and went straight to Vanessa’s bed, where he held her hand and stared into her eyes.
“I love you,” she said, simply and honestly.
“This is it,” he said. “This is the moment. This is what it all comes down to: you and me, in a hospital room, praying for the life of our unborn baby. Everything else is bullshit. The past cases, the crimes I could never solve, the drink, the stupid fights and arguments... none of it matters. Just this. This moment.”
She nodded, closed her eyes. “I’m sleepy, baby... take care of things while I have a little rest.”
He squeezed her hand. He knew exactly what she meant. For the first time in his life, he understood her completely. They were back together, just like he’d wanted. Every other problem in their relationship slipped away into the darkness, dwarfed by the immensity of this current situation.
Take care of things while I have a little rest...
He’d do that. He’d sort everything out; make it so that the world was ready for the arrival of their baby. Nothing else mattered.
Just then his mobile phone started to ring. He stood, glancing towards the nurse’s station, and fumbled it out of his trouser pocket. The nurse he’d spoken to earlier gave him a dark look. He shrugged, mouthed the word “sorry” and headed out of the ward, raising the phone to his ear.
“Where are you?”
It was Detective Superintendent Sillitoe, from the station.
“Sorry, sir, I’m at the hospital. It’s my wife... she’s been brought in. It’s an emergency.”
“Is she okay?”
“I don’t know, sir, but everything’s in hand. I’m just on my way back to the station."
“Don’t bother. Stay where you are. They’re bringing her in.”
“Who?”
“Ah, yes, you don’t know... it’s Wanda.”
“Miss Wandaful?”
“Yeah. She should be there any minute. She was found on Grove Road early this morning by a jogger, in a bad way. I don’t want to say much over the phone, because you’ll need to see this one to believe it... but she’s in a really bad state.”
“Okay, I’ll head down to Casualty now. That’s where they’ll take her.”
“If she’s talking, get what you can and report back here. There’s some weird shit going down, and I have a feeling this might just be the start of it. Remember that scarecrow?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well, it’s gone missing. And just to cap it off, this morning there was an identical one in the garden of each of the houses where the parents of two of those other missing girls lives... two of them: Jacobs and Warren. Royle, each of them has one of those fucked-up photographs taped to its face. It’s like some kind of twisted message. Like someone’s playing a game.”
“I’m on it, sir.”
“Let me know as soon as you know anything. It’s all kicking off at the Concrete Grove. We now have reports of gunshots on the estate. What is it with these fucking people?”
The phone went dead before Royle could respond.
Weird shit... what exactly did Sillitoe mean by that? He thought about the scarecrows and what they might actually mean. The first one could be passed off as a silly, tasteless joke, but all of them together could only be a message. Was the person who’d taken the Gone Away Girls back in town? Did he want to resume his work, and was taunting the police in the process? And what about those gunshots? Who the hell was firing rounds in the Grove, and why?