by Gary McMahon
Then the noise starts.
It sounds like distant helicopters, but she knows exactly what it is: it is the sound of a million hummingbird wings. They fly out of the hole in the cave wall as a single mass, a solid blur of motion. Her eyes struggle to cope with the sight and she reels backwards, falling to the ground.
The hummingbirds pass directly over her head, only inches from her moist upturned face. An endless flock, they are not interested in Abby; they are heading elsewhere, summoned by a silent song, answering a call that she is unable to hear. She lies on her back and watches them, praying to a god in whom she has never believed, hoping against hope that amid this feast of miracles she might just get the one she’s always wished for: she might just get to see her daughter again.
She waits for the thunder to pass. It takes a long time. This storm has been brewing for millennia, and now that it has broken there will be no stopping what destruction shall be wrought.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
NURSE BENNETT STOOD over the bed, looking down at the policeman’s wife. There was something strange about the woman, and he couldn’t quite place what it was. He’d been nursing for fifteen years, and in all that time he’d never had a patient quite like her. The way she lay there, so quiet and calm and unconcerned, as if she knew something that the rest of them didn’t. The angle of her body, the way she tilted her head to the side, as if staring at the plain white wall... it was weird, but it was also oddly comforting.
Yes, that was it: she was a comfort. The ward had never been this quiet, not for as long as he’d worked here. The other patients seemed to take some kind of strength from her presence, too. He’d even caught a few of them casting sly glances her, as if she were something special.
As he stood there, pondering these things, the ward went dark. The lights remained off, not set to come on until later that evening, and he glanced at the window. The sky beyond was filled with squirming black clouds; they seemed alive, writhing over themselves like a nest of snakes.
The patients started to sit up and ask questions. Chatter buzzed around the room. But the patient below him – the calm, comforting policeman’s wife – did not move. The sky outside continued to darken, turning to black. There’d been no freak weather conditions mentioned on the radio, so he had no idea what was going on.
He strained his eyes to make out what was happening up there, and slowly began to realise that the shapes in the sky were not clouds. They were birds. Millions upon millions of birds had come together to form a canopy over the hospital, and over the area beyond. The streets outside were cast into darkness. No lights came on; the false night was vast and threatening. Car alarms went off, wailing in the blackness. Figures hurried indoors, trying to get to safety.
The canopy of birds blotted out all daylight. They were coming from the direction of that shit-hole estate – the Concrete Grove.
There was a sound behind him, a noise other than the rising panic of the patients and the running feet of the other hospital staff: a loud, harsh rustling, like that made by stiff plastic sheets shifting across a tiled floor.
He turned and saw that the policeman’s wife was sitting up, her knees raised and her legs open. Shadows were streaming from between her legs and scuttling across the floor, heading towards the door. For the moment, no one else could see what was happening. They were all caught up in the excitement of this unnatural nightfall.
Nurse Bennett did not know what to do. Was the woman actually giving birth to the tumours they’d detected inside her?
The woman’s eyes were closed. She didn’t seem aware of what she was doing.
Nurse Bennett took a single step forward and then stopped, entranced by what he saw. The shadows were solid; they were corporeal. When he turned his head slightly to one side, he made out small, skittering creatures, made of dust and darkness and empty spaces held together by strings of atrophied matter. When he looked directly at them, they were shadow; if he used his peripheral vision, they became much clearer...
These were not tumours. They were something else... something incredible.
“What are you?”
“The Slitten,” he said, answering his own question in an unfamiliar whisper. He had no idea where the word had come from; it just appeared in his head. But he knew, beyond all doubt, that it was the name of these things. He also knew, somehow, that they were not to be feared – they had been summoned for a purpose, and it had something to do with that sky full of birds.
The Slitten.
He knew what they were called, and that they had come to help. What he didn’t know, was where they had come from.
Then, as the woman who’d birthed them settled back against the mattress to sleep, they were gone.
TOM STAINS WAS drunk again. He was always drunk, but that was okay. Being drunk was how he handled the world; or, rather, how he liked to keep it at bay. Ever since his disabled Helen had killed herself he’d been aware of the world – of stinking humanity – reaching out to try and grab him by the throat. Helen had somehow managed to drag herself out of bed and throw herself down the stairs, snapping her neck. Some days – especially when he began to doubt his own memories of the incident – he wished that he had the guts to emulate her.
So, drunk and shambling around the first floor of his house on Grove Road, he at first thought the sight of all those birds blocking out the daylight was another one of his whisky-fuelled delusions. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and was forced to admit that this was real. None of this was inside his head. Not this time.
He reached out and tried to turn on the light, but the bedroom remained in darkness. He stumbled out onto the landing, and then into the back bedroom. The sky at the back of the house was the same: it was filled with birds, forming a screen of black against the sunlight, cutting it off, trapping him down here, in the pitiless dark.
He glanced down, at his tiny rear garden, and saw a figure standing outside the gate. But there was something wrong with the figure... It had no legs. No, that wasn’t quite right: it had one leg, a very thin one, upon which it was balanced.
He pressed his fingertips against the window glass. He rested his forehead against the cool pane. Downstairs, more figures joined the first one, hopping along on those thin, rigid appendages.
“Scarecrows,” he muttered, hardly even believing what he saw. “Fucking scarycrows.”
He watched in stunned awe as they headed off along the street, in the direction of the Needle.
He ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time as he headed down to the kitchen. On the kitchen work bench, there was a bottle of whisky, only half full. He snatched it up and took a large swig, then another... before he was done, the bottle was almost empty. He thought about poor dead Helen; the Sea Cow, that’s what he’d called her when she was alive. He missed her sometimes. Not all the time, because to think about her too often brought strange memories to the surface... memories he’d managed to block out for a long time. Something about a woman and a girl and the things they’d done together.
He’d always known this day would arrive. Deep down inside, he’d been waiting for the monsters to come. They’d been here before, many times, and they would come again. They never stopped... but now everyone else would see them, and not just him.
There was a loud noise from outside, like thunder... like an earthquake. Tom moved through the ground floor rooms, watching as his trinkets and knick-knacks rattled on the shelves. He pulled open the front door, too drunk to even think about his own safety, and looked on as the surface of the street rippled and writhed, curling around and breaking, snapping as it was torn to pieces and the ground beneath surged and swelled, as if something were approaching from below.
He imagined a monstrous sea cow smashing through and rising above him...
The first tree broke the surface and shot up out of the road, its branches clenched like a fist, and then opening, spreading, coming to life. This tree was followed by others, springing up like crazy f
ilm-set props, as if they were on springs. Geysers of water erupted from shattered pipes, soaking the fronts of buildings and flooding the gutters. Car and house and distant shop alarms bleated, creating a deafening cacophony. And the trees kept growing; they rose from the ground almost comically fast, smashing through the man-made skin of society and churning up the earth.
Tom smiled. He backed away, leaving the door wide open. He stumbled, fell, and watched in silent awe as the uppermost branches of a mighty oak tree shattered the pavement right outside his house and the gnarled trunk began to rise, rise, rise, like the long, straight arm of a god reaching up towards that darkened sky, fingers unfurling to grab at whatever it could catch.
He smiled. This was it. They were here. Nothing would ever be the same again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
HIS MIND BUCKLING under the force of the revelation, Marc knelt on the floor in the grubby room and breathed deeply, as if he were underwater. One hand rested palm-down on the floor by his feet; the other gripped his side, where a stitch had developed. He opened his eyes and stared at the peeling walls, dotted here and there with obscene graffiti, the boarded window, the floor upon which tatters of carpet still clung like stubborn scabs. Someone had painted the word Flange on a wide skirting board; six-inch-high letters, bright red against the scabbed white paintwork. The floorboards in one corner were curled up, like a row of tongues.
“I’m the baby,” he said, breathing normally again. “I was there... I was here... I’m the baby.”
This explained his reticence to really commit to the book he was writing, and the fact that he found it so easy to create excuses not to write, not to research too deeply. Harry Rose had been a distraction. That was the truth. Rather than being drawn to the man because of the information he had (which turned out to be a lot more than he’d ever hinted at), Marc had used the old man to divert his attention from the actual work of writing his account of the Northumberland Poltergeist.
His parents had not died in an accident. They’d driven off the road deliberately, to end whatever nightmare they had started when they refused to offer baby Marc as a sacrifice. That was why the memory of the crash had always seemed so unreal: he’d filled in the blanks himself, giving a context that was false. They were holding hands when his mother swerved the car off the road. They were in it together; it was a suicide pact.
He stood, shaky and exhausted. His body felt bruised, the result of a massive force rocking him to the core. He stood at the centre of the room and wondered what the hell he was supposed to do with this new-found knowledge. He had an entire history of which he’d previously been unaware; a whole new aspect of his life had opened up like a dark flower.
He stared at the walls, at the flaps of wallpaper. He recognised the pattern on a strip that hung down like a window blind: pale yellow sunflowers, with thin stems and oversized heads. A sudden flashback assaulted him: he was lying in his crib, crying. The television was blaring; his small, chubby hands were reaching for those pale flowers...
A sound distracted him: somebody was moving around downstairs. He heard crunching footsteps, a door banging open and then shut, and more footsteps slowly climbing the stairs.
Slowly, he backed towards the door. The sounds grew louder; whoever it was, they were heading for this exact spot. Fear gripped him, holding him in place. Who was this coming for him now? Who even knew that he was here, at the very heart of the story he’d been so reluctant to tell?
He turned around to face the door. A figure loomed into view. It was a man, average height, stocky build. He was wearing a black woollen balaclava over his face and carrying a wooden baseball bat. The man stood in the doorway, legs apart, and hefted the bat. One hand gripped the handle; the other opened to receive the wide end of the bat.
“I...” Marc didn’t know what to say. This whole situation had become unreadable. He’d been flung from grimy reality into loathsome fantasy and then back again, and now he was so unmoored from the world that he felt unable to react to anything. “I’m sorry,” he said, not even knowing what he meant, what he was apologising for, or to whom he was speaking.
“Erik Best says hello.” The voice was flat, heavily-accented, and held the trace of a smile. More figures crowded behind the first, having reached the landing. They each had a similar bat in their hands.
“What do you mean?” Marc walked backwards, going deeper into the room.
The first figure stepped over the threshold, the bat swinging at waist level. He whacked it into the door frame and dust clouded at knee level, moving like a light mist. “Erik Best says hello,” he said again, as if that explained everything.
And in a way, it did.
Hadn’t Erik Best already threatened him once? He certainly didn’t seem like the kind of man who would repeat himself, or who gave second chances. This was what he got for messing with the wrong woman. It was his payback for sleeping with Best’s beloved. He should have seen it coming, but the truth was he’d been so caught up in events around the estate – and in particular those at Harry Rose’s house – that he’d failed to see the signs. This was the only language these people knew; the dialect of violence, or revenge and repercussion. It was always the same: you do what you’re told or you get smashed.
“I didn’t mean it...”
The other man laughed, entertained by Marc’s pathetic excuse. Marc laughed, too, getting the joke. But his laughter was mirthless. It was heavy with despair, the laughter of a doomed man.
There were three other men, and they too had entered the room. The four of them stood there, the bringers of some abstract apocalypse, and stared at Marc. They were calm, collected; clearly they were used to such acts of aggression.
“I can give you money.”
The lead figure shook his head slowly. He raised the bat and swung it through the air, sending off a warning shot. He took another step forward. Marc took two steps back. It was like some idiot dance, a warm-up for the choreography of busted heads.
Shadows moved around the room, splashing the ceiling, staining the floors. Marc watched them as they shifted across the boards, climbed the plaster walls and made strange patterns on the remnants of old wallpaper. There was a strange humming sound in his ears. He wondered if everyone who was about to be killed heard this: a muffled sonic boom, the soul’s implosion?
Then he realised the sound was an external one. It was coming from outside his head... outside the room.
He turned to the boarded window, his gaze drawn by the busy shadows. There was something out there, on the other side of the boards. He stared at the edges of the timber. The shadows bled through the gaps, like a thick fluid. The boards began to rattle, and then to shake. In what seemed like a couple of seconds, the boards were being torn away and a chaotic display of flapping wings surged into the room, filling all the spaces, swarming around his assailants and causing them to panic.
They were hummingbirds, and there were hundreds of them. But they stayed away from Marc, choosing instead to attack the other men in the room. He watched with difficulty through the screen of madly blurring creatures, amazed at the sight of the four grown men being pushed down to their knees. Hummingbirds pecked at them, pulling away strands of clothing and then of flesh. Screams mingled with the sounds of humming, and Marc turned away, appalled by the sight of so much madness.
When he turned back, the men were still. They lay on the floor, crumpled, broken and torn. The baseball bats were harmless now, discarded in the melee. The hummingbirds were silent – they hung in the air, unmoving, as if time had stopped, reality had frozen in place. Even their wings were motionless, as if someone had taken a photograph and this was the resultant image.
Marc walked forward and raised his arm. He opened his fingers and grasped at the flat, static image. He touched one of the birds near the front of the group, stroking its hard little beak with the tip of his forefinger. It felt like a stuffed bird: lifeless, essentially unnatural. He moved along the wall of birds, enraptured
by their colours – at first they’d all seemed black, but now he could see that they were many-hued, things of beauty. He could hear no further sounds, even from outside the Needle.
When he reached the other side of the room, he stopped and turned around. As if drawn to the exact space where he was looking, four or five birds darted out of the frieze and flew headfirst at the back wall of the room. Sounds rushed in to fill the void; his ears popped. From outside there came deafening sounds of explosions, as if buildings were falling, roads and pavements were being torn up.
The birds hit the wall, backed up, and then flew at it again. Upon each kamikaze impact, the plaster cracked a little more; the cracks widened and set off a chain reaction. They crazed the wall, becoming deep zigzagging fissures. The wall split, the joints in the mortar turned to powder. Chunks of plaster, and then brickwork, fell away. Instead of revealing another room behind, the wall peeled away to show him something else, something that he could hardly believe. Thick tree roots mingled with the ruined brickwork, knotted and shredded.
He walked over to the damaged wall, stepping over the now dead birds that had sacrificed their lives to open up this wonder. He peered through the cracks and the dead roots and saw an expanse of flattened grass surrounded by the broad bases of huge oak trees. He bent over and stuck his head through the largest of the cracks, then stepped through, into the centre of the grove of ancient oaks that waited beyond.
As he climbed through, the trees spun away and he followed a trail of black leaves. The trees were replaced by what looked to be the base of a cliff. The cliff face was littered with openings which led into dark caves, and inside the mouth of one of these caves there stood four young girls dressed in raggedy clothes. He knew who they were immediately. They were the Gone Away Girls, and they were waiting for him.