by Gary McMahon
The separate pieces of some huge plot were slowly moving together, shifting slowly, like tectonic plates. Royle suspected that he would never be able to see the full picture, only these separate sections. But hopefully that would be enough to take care of things, to rearrange into the correct order those parts of his life that were currently misaligned.
He rushed to the fire exit and down the stairs, heading for the Casualty Department. Just as he arrived there, on the ground floor at the rear of the hospital building, there was a lot of commotion. Two white-coated men were pushing a sheet-covered gurney through the reception area, followed by a nurse shouting orders. He followed them, pulling out his ID.
“Police! Who do you have there?”
The nurse turned towards him, her face slick with sweat and her lips pressed together in a thin line. She was breathing heavily. “She’s one of yours... from the lab at the station. There’s severe trauma to the lower abdomen and limbs. You really don’t want to know...”
“I’m afraid I have to know. Is she conscious?”
“Unbelievably, yes... She should be dead, but she’s managed to hang on. Fading fast, though, so if you don’t mind we need to get her prepped for immediate surgery.”
He jogged after them through the building, and waited outside when they entered an examination room. Shortly, a young doctor joined him. The man was Asian, with short hair and bushy eyebrows.
“Can you tell me anything, doctor?”
The man sighed. “She’s in a bad way. She’s lost a lot of blood and the mutilations are... well, I’ve not seen anything like this before. It’s sick.”
Royle took a step closer to the man. “What do you mean? Nobody’s told me anything. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Shit.” The doctor wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “She’s had the lower part of her body removed, everything severed from the waist down, and the wound cauterized by massive heat.”
Royle couldn’t understand what he was being told. He glanced at a clock on the wall but failed to register the time. Movement caught his eye over the doctor’s shoulder: a door swung open, someone scurried along the corridor clutching a bloody sheet or towel draped over some kind of container, perhaps a small bucket.
“I’m not sure what to tell you, here. This is... unbelievable. In crude terms, someone’s torn off her legs at the waist and stuffed a broom handle into the wound, making her into some kind of doll. She was found crawling along the street, dragging her shattered spine and the broom handle behind her. She should be dead, but somehow she’s still alive.”
The doctor wouldn’t meet his gaze. “Can you save her?”
The doctor looked away, staring at the wall. “I’m not sure. We’re doing all we can in there, believe me. She should be...”
“Yes, I know. She should be dead. But she isn’t.”
An hour later he was allowed into a side room, where Wanda had been put in a single bed under the window. She was wearing an oxygen mask, IV tubes were sticking out of her arms like skinned veins, and a heart rate monitor beeped by the side of the bed. Her body was covered with sheets, and there was some kind of raised chicken-wire structure encasing the lower half of her body – more specifically, the part where her legs should be.
Royle went to her and sat down in the chair at the side of the bed. He groped for her hand. She grabbed his fingers, squeezing lightly, with all the strength that she had.
“What happened to you?”
The heart rate monitor increased in volume, the beat becoming more erratic. Wanda let go of his hand. She reached up, to her face, and removed the oxygen mask.
“No, don’t...” He tried to replace the mask, but she turned her head on the pillow. Her face was white. Not pale, but white.
“Royle...” Her voice was barely much more than a whisper. He could hear her pain; he knew how difficult it must be for her to speak. “Go back... go to the Grove... something... coming... stop it... stop it and save your baby... the last... Gone Away girl... go to her family...”
Her body went limp, her mouth hung open. She was dead. She’d hung on for as long as she could, until she could see him and pass on this oblique message. He was meant to go back to the Concrete Grove, to witness whatever the hell was going on there and somehow prevent events that he could not understand.
He had no idea why this all seemed to revolve around the Gone Away Girls, but it almost made sense. In terms of his failure to solve the case, it made a lot of sense. But still it was difficult to believe that his personal obsession should make such a tangible impact on the world. There was something larger than his own despair going on here, but he was only being allowed glimpses: tiny snatches, like weak light through a broken window.
Somehow he needed to suspend his disbelief and find some faith in himself, because if Wanda was right, the life of his baby depended on what he did next.
Royle closed Wanda’s eyes with a gentle stroke of his hand across her face. “Thank you,” he said, and left the room to try and take care of things – just as his wife had asked.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE FIRST POLICE car arrived about fifteen minutes after the shot had been fired. Then, pretty quickly, the street outside Abby’s house was cordoned off and several more vehicles arrived on the scene – three more police cars, a Black Maria van and an ambulance.
Erik watched from the bedroom window as the TV news crew set up their cameras. Some pretty blonde woman in an expensive suit delivered a to-camera update. She kept turning to indicate the house, lifting her head, tossing her hair, and Erik started to realise that he was about to be famous.
“Don’t fucking move.” He stood before Abby, grinning. She couldn’t move, of course; he’d tied her to the radiator with packing tape after he’d watched her get dressed. Then he’d gone down to the car to fetch Monty. He hadn’t made a very good job of the bindings, because he’d been in a rush, but they had held her long enough for him to get back here.
He turned and left the room, ignoring for now the ruined shrine and the motionless bastardised figure that was standing in the corner, watching in silence. He went downstairs and checked the front door again. He didn’t want anyone coming in; didn’t even want them walking up the path to the doorstep. He knelt down, lifted the letterbox, and shouted to the gathered crowd: “Anyone comes near this door and she’s dead. I’ll shoot her in the fucking face.” He wasn’t sure if he meant it, but the proximity of Monty’s mutated remains made it difficult to focus. Everything was fuzzy, as if he’d been on a day-long alcohol binge and somehow managed to drink himself almost sober.
As one of the police officers outside started speaking through a bullhorn, Erik let the flap of the letterbox drop back into place and retreated further inside the house. He went into the living room and stared at Monty, who was curled up like an ugly house pet on the sofa in front of the television. Images of Erik’s face flashed across the screen. The text beneath the photographs described him as a ‘local gangster’, a ‘psychopath’ and a ‘danger to society’. Perhaps he was all of those things; perhaps he was none of them. It didn’t matter now, because events had begun to take on a momentum of their own, and nothing he did would matter.
“Is this what you wanted, Monty?”
It’ll do...
“What do we do next?”
Monty slithered off the sofa and across the floor, like a snake with a human face. We wait... that thing upstairs; it’s my way back to Loculus. We need to wait until it’s fully formed, and I can hitch a ride back there.
Even now, Erik wasn’t certain that he was actually hearing the voice in his head. He seemed to sense the words, to feel them, more than hear them. It was a strange experience, and not at all unpleasant. The voice was like a huge, warm hand stroking the rear of his brain. He could just sit back and let it tell him what to do.
He looked at the gun in his hand and wondered how it had got there. Not the physical act of picking it up, but the progress
ion of events that had led him here, to this juncture, where he stood armed and dangerous with a police siege taking place outside the house.
Had it started with his friend Marty’s stabbing, all those months ago? Certainly things had changed soon after that. Marty had subsequently gone to London to help raise another man’s child, leaving behind him that same man’s corpse with a knife wound in its belly. Or had the catalyst been much earlier than that, when he’d gone into business with Monty Bright, a lost, damaged man who always seemed to be looking for something that didn’t exist, not in this world anyway?
So many different roads had brought him here, and he could have avoided none of them. Everything was sucked into the orbit of this big black hole. People, thoughts and memories, ideas... inexorably, it all ended up here, in the Concrete Grove, where it would be devoured by whatever monsters lived behind the scenes.
“Can’t I stop now?” He fell to his knees, cradling the gun like a baby.
No, it’s gone too far. You were never in charge, anyway. You were simply used, as we all were. Great forces have been wrestling over this site for centuries. Men and woman have tried to gain access to another world, a place where hummingbirds act as messengers, where trees are alive, and where ancient races of creatures once lived. Now it’s just a wasteland, a place of diminishing power... but whoever can harness what’s left of that power might be able to salvage something from it. That’s all I ever wanted... power, real power.
This was the longest the voice had spoken, and it made the inside of Erik’s head itch. It felt like there were insects in there, crawling around on the surface of his brain. He sensed the black hole at the centre of things flexing, opening up like a cosmic vagina to either ejaculate energy or suck it deep inside. He was no longer sure of which event would occur. But whatever happened, it would be a form of birth... of creation.
A phrase came to him, unbidden: the Concrete Grove is the doorway to Creation.
Where had he come across those words? Was it something he’d read, or something that had been said to him, long ago, like an old nursery rhyme whose meaning has been forgotten? The words resonated, vibrating along the channels of his being, turning to glass and shattering at his core.
He stood, holding on tightly to the gun. That’s what this was all about: creation. Not destruction. That would be too obvious, too easy. The true test of a man was his power to create, not his willingness to destroy.
Erik looked at the pathetic remnant of his friend and he made a decision.
“I don’t know what’s happening here, but it all has to end.”
Go back upstairs. Kill the woman. Let the other thing grow...
“No.”
He raised the gun, trying not to think about anything beyond the moment. All he had was his instincts. Let other men puzzle over what happened here after it was done. He would simply act as his gut told him.
No. This is wrong...
He pointed the gun at Monty; the small, twisted shape began to writhe on the carpet, its appendages flailing, grasping at nothing but empty air. The bond was broken – he could no longer influence Erik’s actions. Because Erik wouldn’t let it happen. In the depths of this darkness, he had finally found himself... and he knew exactly what was required of him.
No.
“Yes.” He pulled the trigger.
Monty’s tiny upturned face disintegrated into a cloud of red powder. The body bucked and writhed, the limbs and tentacles clenching, clutching, and then going limp. The small, compressed body began to change, flesh becoming fluid, changing into a succession of faces that screamed silently as everything withered, becoming as dust.
Erik knew that these were the faces of every person Monty Bright had ever trapped when he was still in business as a loan shark; they were his debtors, the people he had controlled and finally absorbed, making them a part of his monstrous whole. They were free now; their debts were finally paid. Their recession of the spirit was over.
He walked across the room and peeked through the gap in the curtains. Nothing had changed; they were all still waiting for him out there, wanting him to come out. They were demanding blood, and they would not rest until they had it. His blood, primarily, but the blood of a hostage would suffice. It would give them a good story for the evening news.
He turned away and went back upstairs. Abby was sitting against the radiator, shivering. She’d managed to scrape away most of the tape, releasing her hands. She rubbed silently at her reddened wrists.
“We’re trapped,” he said.
She looked up at him, into his eyes. Her face was battered; dried blood was smeared across her cheeks; the area around her left eye was swollen. “You did this... you trapped us.”
“I know. I had no choice. I’m weak... a weak man. All my life I’ve pretended to be strong, but I’m not. Never was. My father used to beat me and masturbate over my shaking body. My mother would sit in the chair, drinking brown ale, and laugh about it. My brothers were all maniacs, and I followed them down that path. Nobody here gets out alive. This place – all the places just like it – is toxic, a waste dump for humanity. All of our dreams, our hopes, are rotted away. This is the end of the line and none of us asked to be here...” He faded, unsure of what he was trying to say. “This is all there is. Beyond here... there’s nothing. Even the place Monty wanted to get back to, it’s just shit: another world of shit that exists inside this one.”
“Let me go, Erik. Finish untying me, and I’ll take our daughter downstairs. We’ll get you some help. I’ll tell the police that you lost your mind for a little while, but you’re better now. You’ll get therapy. They’ll mend you. We can be together again.”
He sank to his knees and placed the gun between his thighs. “I wish I could believe you. That would be nice. But you’re lying, I know you are. I can smell the lies on your breath.” He shook his head. “You don’t understand. We’re all monsters. None of us chose this route, we didn’t do it deliberately, but the world turned on us and changed us into beasts. Nobody out there gives a flying fuck about any of us. They demonise us in the news and in TV shows. They call us names and give us hoods to wear. And we accept the role they force upon us – we adapt and we take it on, sucking it all down, because we don’t have anything else. All we have is their disdain, their hatred, and we fucking lap it up like beaten dogs.”
His breath was coming in short little hitches, like that of an asthmatic. He could barely speak, so he stopped talking. He bowed his head and looked at his hands. They were cupping the gun, feeling its dread weight. The barrel of the gun was a tiny, endless black hole, sucking him down: a reflection of the black hole around which they all orbited.
“What are you going to do now?” She shifted against the radiator, loosening the tape around her ankles.
Erik remained silent. There was nothing left to say.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
HE SHOULD HAVE come here earlier, right at the start. This was where it all began, at least for the Pollack family. It was where they had lived with their ghost, and where they had finally given in to the pressure it had brought them.
This was where he’d been raised... perhaps even where he’d been born.
He’d tried to get to Abby’s house first, to ask her if she’d come along with him to the Needle. But the road had been blocked: police tape and official vehicles, TV news vans and spectators. There was something going on, and it looked to him as if Abby might be in trouble. It didn’t take a genius to realise that her ex was involved – that fucking gangster Erik Best. He hoped that Abby got out of it in one piece. The last thing he wanted was to go to her funeral.
He stood outside the main entrance to the tower, looking up at the building. It loomed above the construction hoardings, a battered monument to man’s failures. The sky was dark around its apex, as if storm clouds were concentrated there, drawn to it by strange energies. Small birds hovered outside the upper floor windows, making dark patterns against the charcoal sky.
“I’m here,” he whispered. “I’m home.”
Home...
He knew the truth now. He had always known it, deep down inside, where he could never quite reach the information. Marc was the baby that he’d read about in Harry Rose’s notebook. He’d come here looking for a story to write up, and had instead found his own lost plot strands, the loose threads of his existence.
He was the baby; the third Pollack child, the only one to have survived the unknown horrors the family had endured here, inside the Needle.
There were no memories of ever having lived here, just a large blank spot, as if someone had wiped that part of his brain clean. His earliest childhood memories were of the car crash that had killed his parents, and then of Uncle Mike.
He’d left Uncle Mike as soon as he was old enough to look after himself, gone to University to study journalism, blotting out his fractured childhood, fabricating new memories to smother the ones that didn’t exist anyway. He’d been successful, until now. Harry Rose’s notebook had opened up a crack in his mind, allowing images to seep out: a bare room with a crib, an uncarpeted floor, two dirty-faced young children, a man with a beak for a face... and there was nothing more, just the grubby taste of fear at the back of his throat.
“It’s me,” he said, confirming the fact, trying to make it stick. “I’m the baby... I was there, in the flat. I was haunted.” And in many ways, he still was: haunted by the past that he could not remember, and by the screams of the siblings he had never known. Little Jack and Daisy-like-a-flower; the twin sibling who had never lived: he detected a trace memory of fondness for his brother and sister – much in the same way that he loved the characters in all the best books he’d read as a child.
Of his parents, if indeed that’s what they had been, there was no clue.
Then, as the cracks opened slightly wider, he had a glimpse of something else: a man and a woman, dressed in dark robes, kneeling beside a television set draped with a black cloth. Lying on the cloth was what looked like a hen or a chicken, but it was covered in blood. The man and the woman were chanting, rocking back and forth, and the shadows around them looked alive, not like shadows at all...