by Gary McMahon
“In here,” he said, pulling up short at yet another ordinary door. The paint had peeled. The wooden surface was pocked with small abrasions. “This is where I keep them.” His focus had drifted again, like it sometimes did when he spoke about the knowledge he had learned and the things he had written in his worn copy of Extreme Boot Camp Workout. Monty’s voice sounded like it was coming from miles away.
Boater was on the verge of turning around and making his way back above ground, where he could breathe some fresh, clean air, or at least the air that passed for clean and fresh in the Grove.
“Let’s get this show on the road,” said Monty, with a rehearsed air. Indeed, Boater had heard him use the phrase many times, usually in the moments before someone was beaten or cut or raped. Sometimes it even preceded a killing blow.
Monty unlocked the door, pushed it open, and blackness pulsed in the room beyond. Boater followed his boss inside, wishing that he had walked away after all. He didn’t like the feeling he got when he crossed over the threshold. It felt like someone had died in there.
“This is what I wanted to show you.” Monty reached out a hand and flicked a light switch. Dim light spilled down the walls and crept across the floor, failing to fill the far corners but illuminating the very centre of the space like a spotlight on a shabby stage. “I wanted you to meet my secret council.”
Boater looked down at the floor and saw a bunch of old television sets. Most of the screens were cracked; some of them were partially shattered. Each set was of a type that was now rarely sold. There were no flat screens here; no HD-ready plasma models. Just a lot of old, busted television sets like the one his mother used to have in the parlour when he was growing up.
“Monty…” But he didn’t know what to say. This was too weird. None of it made any sense.
“This is where I get my information. Can you see them in there? They tell me things: the bad stuff that’s going to happen unless I do something to prevent it.” Monty was down on his knees in front of the first row of televisions. He was reaching out a hand and brushing the screen with his fingertips, as if he were cleaning the surface of dust. “They help me. They advise me what to do.”
The screens were all dark. These television sets had not worked in years, maybe decades. Even Boater could see that. There was no doubt in his mind that nobody had watched anything on these things since the days when there were only three terrestrial channels available through a roof-mounted aerial or antenna.
“These are the lords of all I survey. They see everything. Their eyes are all around the Grove. They travel to different places, to people’s homes, through the airwaves and they spy on my debtors. Then they bring back snippets of news, like little carrier pigeons.” There was an element of awe in Monty’s voice, but also one of love.
“I see,” said Boater. “That’s… good. It’s handy, isn’t it?” He backed up slowly, making sure that he was close to the door. Just in case Monty flipped. He gripped the neck of the bottle tighter.
Monty turned his head. He was still down on his knees in the dirt, as if praying before the host of broken television sets. “You don’t, do you? You don’t see them.” He smiled, and for a moment Boater thought that he saw cold, flat TV light play across his features.
“No,” said Boater, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, but I don’t see a fucking thing. There’s nobody there, on those screens. The TV sets can’t talk to you.” He held out his hands, a placatory gesture. “They aren’t even plugged in.”
“Not on the screens, Francis. In the screens. They’re inside there, like baby birds waiting inside their eggs. They hatch out sometimes, but only to feed. They take back the sights that television has given us, and when it happens they leave behind a blank slate. People are nothing without their borrowed visuals, their hand-me-down ideas. When they’re removed from the great glass tit they become empty very fucking quickly…” He turned back to the televisions, as if they’d all come on together to show him the different channels they could receive.
Boater was locked in place. He couldn’t move. So he just stood there, and he watched.
“That’s what happened to that stupid druggie thief, Banjo. They stripped him clean, taking back the visions and washing his brain as clean and smooth as a baby’s arse.”
Boater remembered the guy, that junkie. They’d brought him down here and beaten him, and then Monty had told them to leave him alone with the fucker. That was the last Boater knew of him until he saw a report on the local news, stating that the junkie had been found walking the streets trying to rip his own face off. If he remembered correctly, Lana Fraser and some bloke had seen it happen.
“That rotten little bastard got what he deserved. He got wiped clean, retuned to an empty channel.”
The longer Boater stared at the TV screens the more he thought that he could see something behind them, coiling in the darkness. It looked like snakes made of smoke, or limbs of mist. A writhing mass comprised of long, twisting shapes was packed in behind the broken glass, and they were slowly becoming clearer, gaining resolution. Then, as though a visor had been lifted from before his eyes, he caught sight of huge, twitching, insect-like legs, folded over and stuffed tightly into the spaces behind the screens. “I think I see something,” he said, taking a few steps forward, into the room. “They’re in there, aren’t they? They’re really in there.”
“Yes, they are.” Monty stood and walked to Boater’s side. He laid a hand on his forearm. “They told me to take the girl.”
Boater glanced at him. “What girl?” But he knew; of course he did. He’d been keeping an eye on her for almost a fortnight now, since Monty had asked him to swing by her school a couple of times a week, and perhaps follow her home every now and then. If she had ever seen him, all she would have noticed was a fat man in a car parked by the Arcade, or some burly bastard standing outside the Dropped Penny pub waiting for someone.
“First they told me to watch her, and I put you on the job. Now they’ve said that I need to take her. That Fraser woman, she’s going to try to kill me. She’ll come back here very soon, and perhaps she won’t be alone. I need an insurance policy, a little leverage, some collateral on the remainder of her loan.” He gripped Boater’s arm. His fingers felt like steel rods. “Get the girl for me, Francis. Get that cunt’s daughter and put her somewhere safe.” His eyes were manic, filled with an energy whose intensity was terrifying.
Boater’s head felt like it was expanding, and a strange droning noise filled his ears. He watched Monty’s lips move but he could barely hear what was being said.
“Get her and hide her until I tell you it’s safe to bring her back out into the open.”
Even though his hearing was impaired by the keening sound inside his head, Boater understood completely what he was being ordered to do. The only problem was he didn’t know if he could go through with it.
“But first,” said Monty, smiling again. “You can help me carry these fucking televisions upstairs.”
LATER, AS HE sat in his car outside the gym, Boater stared at his tired reflection in the rear-view mirror. He looked different; his features had altered subtly, as if he were trying to physically become someone else. But then the light from passing headlights briefly illuminated the interior of the car and he was once again the same old Francis Boater, with his bloated face and his small eyes. But for a moment there, in the shadows, he had almost been able to convince himself that he was a different person entirely.
He thought about the girl, and what Monty had told him to do. He pictured all the times he’d seen her recently, walking along on her own, heading either to or from her school. She was always alone; she never walked with friends. Like Boater, she seemed to travel through her life alone.
Right then, sitting motionless in his car on a darkened street, he decided that this time he was going to make his own decisions. This time, whatever he did he would do for the right reasons.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
TOM HAD
NOT slept; he had merely dozed in the armchair, grabbing eagerly at the promise of rest yet gaining only scraps. So when he opened his eyes he knew immediately that he wasn’t dreaming. Not this time, anyway.
The first thing he saw was a scruffy dog walking slowly across the doorway, left to right. The dog was huge, more like a wolf, and as it turned to look at him he saw by the lamplight that it had the face of a boy. It was a familiar face: it was his face, but when he was much younger. The dog, and its stolen features, had once stalked him through the rooms of his father’s house, warning him off, shepherding him away from sights that he should not be allowed to see, and now it had returned to resume its role as guard dog to Tom’s psyche.
Tiredness allowed him at last to see this truth. Exhaustion had opened his eyes and shown him the reality that was hiding behind the illusion.
All this time he had thought the dream-dog meant him harm, but it had actually been trying to save him. The realisation made him simultaneously sad and afraid.
“I’m sorry. I never understood. I always thought you were a monster. I didn’t realise that you were just a part of me.”
But the dog was gone. The doorway was empty. Not even its shadow remained.
He got up and walked out into the hall. The darkness there had form and substance, like a cluster of earthbound clouds. He felt like he was dreaming awake — it was a sensation he now recognised as being a signal that he was partly in that other state, the one he had sensed so keenly during the day trip with Lana and Hailey. When he turned to face the front door, he half expected to see another animated section of Hadrian’s Wall slithering in and out like a serpent through gaps in the building. But this time he was awake, and the vivid dream imagery was nothing but a memory.
Something moved on the stairs behind him. It was a slow, heavy sound, like someone dragging themselves on their belly across the floor.
He glanced at the door to Helen’s room. It was open. He crossed the hallway and peered inside. The television was on, tuned once again to the static between channels. It bathed the room in an eerie light, and showed him that the bed was unmade and empty. But Helen had not been out of bed in years.
So where the hell was she now?
Tom turned to the bottom of the stairs. In the dimness he could make out a trail of moisture leading upwards. The carpet was wet; each step glistened, as if a giant slug had made its way up to the first floor.
He began to climb the stairs, keeping to the edge nearest the wall and clinging to the handrail. The light receded, staying down on the ground floor, but there was enough illumination bleeding in through the upstairs windows for him to see by. When he reached the top of the stairs the sound was much louder: a slow, moist slithering. He turned on to the landing and saw it there, hauling itself towards the bathroom at a slow, monotonous pace. A patch of light from the window at the end of the landing seeped towards it, like a yellow puddle. Its heavy grey body moved slowly; the large, clumsy fins pressed weakly against the floor and failed to get much traction as the animal inched along the floor.
The sea cow’s journey was agonisingly slow, but it at least had intent and purpose.
Tom walked along in its wake, watching the oversized mammal as it made its way towards the open bathroom door. The taps were running, filling the bath with hot water. One of the small lights above the mirror was on. Tom had no idea who had started to run the bath — certainly it couldn’t have been the manatee: that was impossible. Maybe he had done it, in his drowsy state. He could believe anything right now. He could even believe that a sea cow was hauling its massive bulk along his upstairs landing towards a bath-full of water.
“Helen.” His voice sounded tiny, so he said her name again. “Helen.”
At first the sea cow didn’t register his presence. Then, abruptly, its fins ceased their awkward movement on the carpet. The beast started to hitch its body around, pivoting on its belly and swivelling through 180 degrees to face him. It seemed to take ages for the thing to turn, and when finally it did the beast stared at him with tiny black, baleful eyes from a square, grey face that looked somehow familiar. It opened its black-slit mouth and made a strange hollow clicking sound. Its tongue was long and thick. The teeth in its upper and lower jaws were huge and jagged, like fragments of rock stuck into its gums.
Are they meant to have teeth like that?
The clicking sound came again. He’d heard it before; the other night on the telephone when no-one had spoken. On that first occasion, Tom had put it down to a wrong number or a crossed line, but that damn clicking sound had blocked his thoughts… just as it was doing now.
Clickety-clickety-click…
“Is that you, Helen?” Tom felt ridiculous, but at the same time he knew that the animal was indeed his wife — somehow, once again, Helen had become in reality exactly as he thought of her in his mind, taking the physical form of his imagined insult. But this time it wasn’t a dream; this time it was part of the waking world. The two elements had clashed, and this creeping horror was the result.
A fracture had appeared between the states of waking and sleeping, living and dreaming, and what crawled through that rift was the stuff of fantasy. The mental power utilised during the usual dream-state was finding another outlet, and Tom knew, without having to question the thought, that something was using that energy as fuel. Some thing was trying to break through, to open a doorway and move from one realm to the other.
He remembered his father’s warning and the phantom flying fists. The way the old man’s ghost had abused his bed-ridden wife, as she had taken the form of the manatee. It all meant something, but he was unable to solve the equation. This otherworldly form of mathematics was beyond him. He didn’t have the skills; the numbers would not add up.
The sea cow lurched in his direction, moving faster this time but still slow enough that he could easily outmanoeuvre it as the beast rocked towards him across the landing, clickety-clickety-clicking like a broken spindle. Only when he stumbled on the top step and fell badly, momentarily trapping his left leg in the gap between two stair rails, did he begin to fear what the sea cow might do if it caught up with him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
HOW THE FUCK did that happen?
Lana was sure she’d walked along a narrow ginnel that should have brought her out somewhere near The Dropped Penny pub, but somehow she found herself standing on top of the Embankment and facing in the wrong direction entirely. She stared down the slope and into the shadows at the bottom of the old railway cutting, picking out the broken timber railway sleepers in the sodium-tinted darkness.
The route she’d taken should have delivered her outside the pub. She knew that; it was a fact, non-negotiable. So what the hell was she doing here, at the opposite end of the Grove, and facing the wrong fucking way?
Her stomach ached, her legs hurt. Her insides felt battered.
“Keep calm.” She spoke out loud in an attempt to dispel the fear that was creeping up on her from behind, wrapping its arms around her shoulders like an old lover. Time was slowing down. She felt like she’d been out here for hours when in reality she’d only just left Bright’s grotty little gym.
She turned around and stared at the domineering shape of the Needle. This was the closest she’d been to the building in ages. She didn’t like how it looked; the phallic tower made her nervous in a way she could not easily define. It was worse now, at night, and standing so close to its graffiti-covered walls. Out here, in the cold darkness that was bruised by yellow street lights, she could imagine that the place had a consciousness — that it was sentient, and that it was watching her just as closely as she had watched the impassive tower block from her window, night after night, hating it for what it represented, her new life at the bottom of the pile.
“Bastard,” she said, directing the curse at both the building before her and the rotten excuse for a man she’d just left.
She knew what had to be done now. There was no other way. She had offered herself
to Monty Bright and he’d taken his fill. Then the fucker had reneged on his end of a bargain he claimed had never been struck. Bright had proven himself to be a liar, a rapist, and a welcher. And in some ways this last was the worst of all.
He had never intended to cancel her debt, nor had he meant to leave her alone once she had given him what he wanted. This debt, she now realised, would never be paid. It was forever. He had his fingers in her life right up to the knuckle joints, and there was nothing that she could do to break his grip.
She started walking again, past the silent frontages of darkened houses and towards other buildings that had been boarded up and abandoned. Trying to ignore the pain, she kept her eyes on her surroundings. She didn’t like it here, at the centre of the Grove. The air felt different from that on the outskirts. It was as if the callousness that dwelled here had its source on, or under, the very streets she now walked.
Another narrow alley opened up like a mouth in the darkness, a street light picking out its redbrick sides and showing her the way. She headed for the opening, glancing back over her shoulder, and then ducked inside. The alleyway was long, the walls on either side of her were smooth and covered in the same kind of graffiti she saw everywhere around here: badly drawn sex organs, phone numbers and promises of gratification, declarations stating how big someone’s cock was and how deep someone else’s vagina. These primitive designs and renderings all seemed to focus on the subject of sex, as if that were the only language the artists knew how to use. There was nothing erotic about this paintwork, as there might be in true art: there was only crudity and banality, a strange, dull obsession with body parts and their basic functions.
When she emerged from the opposite end of the alley she found herself this time at the south end of the Embankment. She’d been heading east, yet somehow she had ended up facing south. This was wrong; it couldn’t be possible. She felt like she was becoming lost in familiar streets, and each time she tried another route the arrangement of the maze reconfigured itself to strengthen the delusion.