by Mark Morris
On the opposite side of the broad paved area was the domed concrete structure he had seen from below, with a painted roof designed to resemble ice and snow. It had once housed penguins. The only flightless bird remaining was the worn, sad and peeling stone creation he’d seen above the treetops. From this angle, age and rustication had made its one visible eye mad with what looked like panic.
The doors to what was called the Arctic Arena were long gone, but the stench that wafted from out of the darkness overrode Jason’s curiosity to see beyond the aperture.
When he called out for Electra again, he wasn’t answered by a shriek from the treeline, but his cries did incite the repetitive scrape of what sounded like the raking of dry leaves from inside the Arctic Arena. Whatever was disturbing the most recent leaf fall was not, he was sure, his date.
The area below and around him felt neither stable nor safe. Having now burned right through his patience and any reasonable and reliable sense of where he now was, when he tried to push on to locate his date at the very summit, he tripped over his feet twice. His breathing was ragged, his thoughts hapless. His clothes were sopping and his throat was salted with a terrible thirst.
Up. Some deep and rarely used instinct told him she would be up there, waiting at the top. He continued upwards.
* * *
He found Electra at the summit.
She sat at one of a score of metal picnic tables, arranged outside a boarded-up restaurant with a red roof. She looked preoccupied, if not bored again, like she did at work. Her lovely pink lips had been freshly glossed and were parted as she gazed at the one-storey reptile house on the far side of the outdoor dining area. She’d crossed her legs and allowed the hem of her skirt to slither back to a pair of golden stocking tops, each welt impressed with short suspender clips.
Her companions were nowhere in sight.
Jason could not readily find the will to speak, and had his thoughts unlocked from the stupefied paralysis brought on by his fatigue and fear, he could not be sure of what he might say to her about his experience below.
More than the sudden presence of Electra, it was the air temperature that brought him to a halt. A withering heat smouldered through the whitish vapours above him and sank upon the dining area. He stripped his overcoat from his shoulders and arms. Sweat clouded his shirt and jeans. The heat of his body may actually have steamed into the thick atmosphere. He couldn’t be certain.
“You took your time,” Electra said with a cruel smile.
“Where… the others?” Jason blinked the sweat out of his eyes and looked at the sky; there was no sun.
“You want to know why it was done?”
“Sorry?”
“I’ll show you the way.”
“What?”
Electra screamed out,“We’re ready!”
Behind the closed metal doors of the reptile house, something began to thump and thrash itself against the walls, the ceiling and the floor. The sounds suggested an impressive weight and size. The occupant then made a circular swishing sound in what might have been sand. The metal doors shook within their frames.
Jason fell as much as turned to the bench where Electra sat, but pulled up short when the girl stood and raised the hemline of her tight skirt to her waist. What would have been a shocking though arousing exposure, in other circumstances, now struck Jason as crude and unpleasant. Electra’s hairless sex was barely concealed by the transparent black underwear she wore, cut like shorts around her shapely buttocks and tummy. Her strong legs shimmered in nylon.
“We’ve got to be like beasts to go with the others. Quick. Do it quickly,” she said, and dropped her head back as if she were already in the throes of ecstasy, or suffering a fit.
Despite his revulsion, Jason’s penis thickened and unfurled like some insensible python, motivated alone by scent and instinct.
The girl was offering herself, but whether it was to him, or something else, he wasn’t sure. What he took for her anticipation of an imminent appearance from within the reptile house, and of whatever it actually was that coiled, writhed, and butted against the old metal doors, made Jason whimper like a child. Electra’s moans were either caused by her own fear, or arousal, or both.
Beneath the summit erupted a din of bestial shrieks, bellows and roars as if the zoological gardens were full again, and anticipating a long overdue feeding time. The treeline around the leaf-strewn picnic area began to thrash like a clash of arms in some ancient battle. Heat from an invisible sun beat Jason’s uncovered head more intensely and boiled his thoughts into higher spikes of panic and terror.
“Come on. Let him into your heart. Into your heart,” Electra said, as she lay back upon the picnic table and widened her thighs.
Jason fled for the mouth of the path that must lead down and away from the summit.
A much older female voice cried shrilly from behind the shuttered ice-cream counter of the derelict restaurant. “Lie down with the little black lamb!”
Jason tried to look in that direction but lost his balance and fell, cutting both knees and hands. The pain sobered him enough to get back to his feet.
The double doors of the reptile house were broken apart from within. They grated horribly across the paving. A great hot stench of rotten meat and chitin belched like poison gas across the summit.
Two painfully thin women in dusty black gowns came through the opening and staggered across the paving. As they stumbled forward, they batted the sides of their heads as if to concuss the very horrors concealed within their skulls.
Electra thrust her sex higher into the air, as if eager for penetration.
The two haggard female spectres fell to their knees and wept. Between them leapt a thick black form.
Propelled out from the reptile house and into daylight it came, like a horrid tongue. A girth as thick as a soil pipe flopped heavily against the dirty ground. The thing’s head slapped the paving just short of Electra, a head covered in soiled bandages that were open and reddish at their conclusion. What Jason glimpsed of the form’s black hide appeared as sandy as that of a dead leviathan found upon a beach at low tide.
Jason fled over the lip of the hill.
A great turnstile ground behind him, or somewhere within the low, hot clouds above. He bit through his tongue and kicked off both shoes.
Halfway down the hill, he climbed over the wall of a reeking enclosure once intended for brown bears, and then squashed himself deep inside the open cage at the rear of the pen. The occupant within, half-buried under the dead leaves, appeared even more frightened than he felt.
ROUNDABOUT
by Muriel Gray
Danny decided it was time to shift The Dark Thing on the Blowbarton roundabout.
“I’m going to shift The Dark Thing.”
Armaan and Bill looked at each other.
“Pffft,” snorted Armaan.
Bill leant back in his chair, took a slurp of tea, then wiped his mouth.
“Good luck with that, mate.” And then snorted too.
“I’ll take the truck.”
Armaan opened the desk drawer, fumbled, then slid the van keys across the desk.
“Keep the hazards on. It don’t like the hazards.”
* * *
The lads in the depot had once tried to guess when, exactly, the trees on the Blowbarton roundabout were planted, on account of them being so very thick and so very tall.
“S’jungle in there,” said Eddie, once, back in the day, when he’d returned, overalls ripped.
To settle the matter Danny had phoned the Traffic Department, but Traffic doesn’t share information with Parks and Leisure.
“Dunno, mate,” the bored guy had said. “Be on the council website somewhere, won’t it?”
Instead, being garden labourers, they worked it out. Goat willow, hazel, few tall limes and some wide-spreading sycamores. Bit of self-seeded birch and rowan and there it was. Proper bit of woodland. Thick round the edge with cotoneaster. Layers of vicious lon
g-thorned berberis and hawthorn. Twenty years at least they calculated. Maybe twenty-five tops. That’s when planning had made the new retail park build this roundabout. It was very large indeed. Five intersections all meeting. To bypass or join the motorway.
But if they couldn’t say exactly when it was planted they could certainly remember when they’d stopped mowing it. It had been after The Public Art Project. Well, more specifically, after The Public Art Project had been cancelled and cleared away.
* * *
It was Bill who’d decided.
“Let’s stop mowing it,” he’d said.
“They’ll notice,” said Danny.
“Pffft,” said Bill. “Not round the edges like. Course they’d notice that. Keep that trim. Just the middle. You know?”
They’d all nodded.
“Yeah. That’ll work,” said Danny.
And it did. Long as you kept the hazards on.
* * *
Danny didn’t have a plan. He realised it soon as he bumped the truck up onto the grass. Stupid time of day to choose, frankly. The traffic coming off the motorway was already solid and the four exits were queuing back fifteen car lengths or more. But it was still light. That’s what mattered. Sun still up there in the sky, somewhere beyond the grey blanket of cloud. Doing enough of its thing for this part of the north to qualify as still being in daylight.
Drivers didn’t normally honk at the truck when it slowed and stopped on roundabouts. Parks and Leisure. Who honks at Parks and Leisure? The big ride-on mower in the back, few shovels, wheelbarrow, all pressing up against the wire mesh cage. What’d they expect? It’s going to stop isn’t it? But then there’s always one. And there was. Coming fast round that blind arc and having to brake like crazy. Leant on the horn like he’d slumped over and died at the wheel. Red and shaking and stabbing a finger out the window as he accelerated past Danny’s green truck, parked minding its own business half on the verge, engine idling, hazards already flicking orange. Danny just looked back. That chump’s going to have a heart attack one day, he thought. Keep shouting and honking like that? He’ll slump over and die at the wheel. You see it all in this job.
* * *
Just over an acre, Blowbarton. When you took in the three-metre strip of grass circling the whole thing, the bit they still mowed, maybe a bit more. Since he didn’t have a plan, and it was lunchtime, Danny thought he’d have a sandwich. Agnes had made them with meat paste today. He unwrapped one and chewed at it as he looked around. This side, on the west, the foliage only let you see two exits round the edge of the curve and then down onto the north-bound carriageway of the motorway. On the north-east though, you could see the boundary of the new estate, over the bridge. Just the roofs, mind.
“Can’t have that,” Armaan had said when that had started getting built. They’d agreed.
“Too close.”
“Still can’t get at it on foot though, can ya?” said Eddie. “Not across six lanes.”
“Kids, though. They can cross the motorway. Over the bridge an’ that.”
“Kids get everywhere,” said Danny.
“Yeah?” Bill had nodded. Everyone had thought about it for a while.
“They want hanging baskets.”
“Who?” snorted Bill.
“The new estate,” said Armaan.
“Pffft,” said Bill.
“They ain’t getting ’em. Not council, is it?”
“That’s what I told ’em.”
“Good,” said Bill.
They’d been quiet that day. Thinking. Next morning Bill got the whiteboard out of the cleaner’s cupboard, knocking over some mops and spilling a box of hoover bags. He’d drawn a plan of the roads round Blowbarton and the new estate, where the old abattoir used to be. But the blue and red wipe-clean felt tips had run dry, so it didn’t look quite right with just two colours instead of four.
He put it away and nobody mentioned it again. Except the cleaner. She asked who’d been in her cupboard and nobody was man enough to own up.
* * *
Danny looked at the biscuit in his hand and decided that the meat paste sandwiches had been enough. She made good sandwiches, Agnes. Nice salty white bread. Wanted him to eat fruit for a while, but he left it in the bag, so she stopped. He checked the time on his mobile phone to see if lunchtime was officially over, then put it down on the seat while he slid the plastic lunch box back under the seat. He looked into the dense undergrowth.
Without a plan this could be tricky. They all knew it needed shifting, but nobody had thought of anything clever yet. Eddie had once spent a morning collecting all the skulls and bones at the edge you could reach by just sticking your arm in, and loading them into the wheelbarrow. He’d waited to see what would happen, sitting on the lowered tailgate of the truck reading his whole newspaper, back to front at least twice, and smoking a couple of fags. But The Dark Thing didn’t budge. It might have rustled a bit, he’d said. Over on the east, under the limes. Or maybe it had been the wind. Or a car transporter. They could whip up a tree something fierce as they passed, the height of those things. But if he was honest, The Dark Thing didn’t seem to care. So he’d just brought back the bones and they’d all looked at them. A lot of foxes. And rabbits, obviously. But also a roe deer. Head off, ribs snapped and sucked dry of marrow. That caused some interest.
“That’s come a way,” said Eddie.
“Nice beast,” said Bill.
“My uncle shoots ’em,” said Armaan. “Got a gun licence. Cause he’s got a field he lets out near Drub.”
“Where’s that then?” asked Bill.
“Near Cleckheaton.”
“That ain’t helping.”
“S’nice. Got an ’orse in it.”
They decided to grind down the animal remains and use them for bonemeal. They mixed it all into the planters outside the new leisure centre. Begonias were lush that year.
* * *
Danny got out of the cab, zipped up his green boiler suit and put on his yellow high-visibility waistcoat. He leant on the door and peered into the dark, thick mass of foliage under the trees. If you knew where to look you could still see the stump of The Public Art Project. They were supposed to have taken the whole metal rod out, but they’d been given the task in December. So obviously it got a bit ropey in there, the light fading at four, a whole hour before they were due to clock off. So Eddie had taken a buzz saw to it and chopped it off at the weakest point, just below shoulder height. Just so they could get out of there quicker. While the sun was still up.
“Won’t see that from the road,” he’d said.
Bill had driven round twice to check.
“Can’t see it from the road,” he’d confirmed.
Now the ragged top of the metal post was smooth, wreathed in brambles and quite hidden by the bushes in front. But the shape was still there. If you looked hard. That was only three years ago. Nature worked fast.
Danny tried to remember the name of the artist but he couldn’t quite place it. It was one name. Like famous people who didn’t need two. But he remembered he was from London, because Danny had been one of the crew handling the installation of The Public Art Project, and the artist with the one name had shared a fag with him. Well to be honest the artist had been smoking a joint, while the stone-carved animal thing was being winched up off the low-loader. With its hazards on.
That had reminded Danny of once, back in the day, when the orange hazard lights on their green truck were flashing in the gloom of dusk outside the gates of the crematorium. Armaan had said,“S’like a campfire, innit?”
“Ya wha’?” said Bill.
“Campfire. Them flickering lights. Like flames. Comforting.”
“Pfft,” said Bill.
“Fire. Used to keep the wolves off. Cavemen an’ that.”
“Keeps the cops off us, don’t it?” said Bill.
“Yeah,” said Armaan.
Danny had asked the artist what was it like in London then, and the artist had
said it was all right. But he’d not been there much because he’d been in the army, and that he’d had the carved animal thing brought back from Afghanistan or somewhere like that after he’d found it in the desert, buried in the sand. Then he’d come home and decided to be an artist instead of killing people.
He’d asked him how much flats cost in London now compared to Bradford and the artist looked bored and said he didn’t know, because he lived in a commune where material things didn’t matter. Danny wasn’t sure what that meant but he’d nodded and they’d just smoked and watched The Public Art Project coming off the truck.
Danny couldn’t really decide what it was, but then he didn’t know much about art. It wasn’t very big; about the size of two large watermelons. The artist had made a big long metal pole, the one that Danny and the boys had dug into the middle of the roundabout, just next to the biggest sycamore with the thick healthy bole. They’d thought of using a mini digger but Bill said no, because they’d have to take down the big trees to get it in, and you didn’t take down trees in Parks and Leisure unless you had a felling order from the council.
They didn’t have a felling order, so they dug it in with pickaxes and then poured cement, and none of the trees got damaged except for a few snapped branches here and there. At the top there was a big oval shape, made out of wood, like a giant egg cup, and that was where the carved stone thing was going to fit into. Like an egg into an egg cup.
* * *
It wasn’t very nice. It was an odd misshapen thing and looked like a kind of damaged horse. But with overlong, sharp, bared teeth and crazy eyes in the front of its head instead of the side. One of the eyes was painted with flaky red stuff, and Danny thought the other one had been too, but the paint must have come off and it was just kind of stained maroon. It looked very old and broken. Nobody, except the artist, liked it.
“What you reckon that is when it’s at home then?” Armaan had said.
“Waste of money,” said Bill. “That’s what it is.”
“Can’t even see it proper,” said Eddie. “Not if you’re coming off the west junction.”
