The Narrows

by James Brogden

  ‘It’s alright,’ she replied. ‘None of it’s mine.’ And she began to laugh hysterically, in great wracking whoops which sounded too much like sobbing for Andy’s liking.

  ‘Oh, hey, look…’ He was so completely taken aback that he started searching for a hanky before he realised that he’d never carried one in his entire life, and he cast around desperately for any support, or even any acknowledgement, from just one of the other passengers, but he and the girl seemed to have become both invisible and inaudible. ‘I think I should call the driver or something. You look like you need a doctor.’

  ‘Never mind what you think I need, mate.’ Then she clocked his badge. ‘Andrew, sorry. I don’t need rescuing. All I need is to catch my breath for a bit. Not a sodding conversation.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Andy watched in discomfort as, rather than calming down, she became increasingly more agitated. She stood with her forehead pressed up against the glass, eyes darting to and fro, searching the shadows, tap-tapping a nervous staccato with her marker pen and repeating under her breath a phrase from a song he almost recognised: ‘Welcome to paradise… welcome to paradise…’ With a cold shock he finally realised the truth: she was a junkie. He was standing next to an honest-to-goodness, down-to-earth, real-life, likely-to-stab-him-in-the-guts-for-another-rock-of-crack-or-whatever-it-was junkie. The best thing to do was to just stand very still, try not to draw attention to himself, and when she pulled a knife, hand over his wallet as manfully as possible.

  But as the train finally started up again, she relaxed visibly. The muttering died away, the tapping pen slowed and stopped. Andy began to suspect that he might just survive his journey home after all. Nevertheless, when she turned to him and said ‘So, Andrew, where does this train stop?’ he jumped as if shot.

  ‘That was an interesting noise,’ she observed. ‘Again, in human?’

  ‘Five- Five Ways,’ he stammered. ‘University, Selly Oak, ah, Kings Norton, I think, then…’

  ‘Cheers. Five Ways’ll do.’ Humming that song to herself again, she started doodling absent-mindedly on the wall next to her. This apparently was worth noticing by the other passengers, many of whom sighed, tutted, and snapped their newspapers in disapproval. Bex ignored them and finished tagging her sigil. Escaping onto a railway had been a big mistake, even if it had saved her life, but some habits were impossible to break, even in an alien world.

  ‘Um,’ said Andy.

  She glared at him. ‘What?’

  ‘Well…’ he added.

  Very deliberately, she reached over and tagged the front of his briefcase, the large strokes gleaming black on its cheap brown leather. The locks popped open and papers slithered onto the floor. ‘This?’

  He looked down at it, too stunned to be properly angry. Plus, he was a little embarrassed. He didn’t know what Telegraph Man carried in his own expensive-looking briefcase but he fancied it was probably more sophisticated than this month’s issue of Empire magazine and the game cheats to Homicidal Harlots IV. Andy was also uncomfortably aware of the intensity of the girl’s stare – she had incredible blue-grey eyes, flecked with amber and gold. ‘No, I suppose not,’ he finished lamely.

  ‘Good.’ She got up and opened the door. Cold air blasted in, and he became aware of huge dim shapes rumbling past outside. Brickwork and straggling weeds flashed briefly into existence in the patch of light thrown by the open door, and disappeared just as quickly. They hadn’t reached Five Ways yet; did not, in fact, even seem to be slowing down for it. He knew he was going to warn her against jumping, futile though it was. He could feel the words starting up his throat, completely beyond his control, ready to usher him into a whole new world of public embarrassment. It was simply what you did. You helped young mothers with push-chairs down the stairs, put your litter in the bins provided, always washed your hands after flushing, and warned people (including, he supposed, half-crazy and gore-covered junkies who had just vandalised your briefcase) that throwing themselves from a train wasn’t a Good Idea.

  But by the time all this had flashed through his brain, she’d gone, and his words died in the night-torn air. So he did the only thing he could, which was to gather up his scattered papers.

  ***

  Two slices of darkness in the shape of men stood atop the gravelled railway embankment and watched as the train pulled slowly away, its doors closing on their prey. The taller of the two leaned on a long copper staff as his shorter companion recalled the skavags and tried to calm them; having lost the scent, they were restless and twitchy, snapping at each other in their frustration.

  ‘Carling,’ said the man with the staff.

  ‘Yes, boss?’

  ‘She cheated.’ The voice was light, as if discussing the weather.

  ‘I don’t follow you, boss.’

  ‘The Narrowfolk don’t use trains – or planes, or automobiles, for that matter. They barely even use roads. It’s against their rules.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  ‘So that was really quite naughty of her, wasn’t it?’

  Carling didn’t reply. For one thing, he was still trying to subdue his pack – they definitely were not happy creatures. For another, he never knew half the time how to take his master’s moods, so it was often safer to simply stay quiet until he was asked a direct question. Even that was no guarantee. He hoped that this one was rhetorical.

  ‘Carling.’

  ‘Yes, boss?’

  ‘You know how much I hate loose ends, don’t you?’

  Definitely not rhetorical. ‘Yes, boss. Leave it to me.’

  ***

  On the way home from the station, Andy picked up a curry, because it was his turn to cook, and walked the rest of the way in something of a daze. It seemed impossible that his late-shift routine could resume as if nothing had happened. Mr Nawaz at the Sundarbon produced his chicken korma, beef madras and two naan perfectly calmly; further down the street heavy industrial music was thumping from the upstairs window of number forty-seven, and when he elbowed the intercom of his flat because both hands were too full to find his keys, Laura buzzed him up without a word of enquiry because of course who else would it be?

  Up the stairs to the third floor landing, where a sorry collection of pot-plants were being communally neglected, he found the door to their flat open. This was, again, nothing at all out of the ordinary, but for some reason this evening he found it profoundly irritating.

  ‘You know you really shouldn’t leave this open,’ he called, slamming it shut with his heel. He stopped long enough to dump his briefcase in the spare bedroom (graffiti-side down, not that it mattered, he told himself, it was just that he didn’t really want to face the interrogation that would inevitably follow). He rustled his steaming carrier-bags down the hall and into the kitchen. Through the doorway opposite, Laura sat on their sofa surrounded by small blue exercise books, ticking them rapidly with a red pen. Her iPod speakers were thumping out Green Day. When he heard which track was playing, a cold shudder of deja-vu ran down his spine, and he switched them off.

  ‘Fine, thanks,’ she replied. ‘How was yours?’

  ‘I’m serious!’ He opened cupboards and rattled plates with more noise than was strictly necessary. ‘I could have been anyone!’

  She followed him into the kitchen and, as she passed him on her way to the fridge, kissed him lightly on the back of the neck. ‘No you couldn’t.’

  He stared after her. ‘I think I should be offended by that.’

  ‘What – that I don’t think you’re capable of being some kind of sick home-intruder rapist?’ She shrugged as she poured them both a glass of wine. ‘Be offended if you like, but I think you’re probably overreacting.’

  He followed her back through into their tiny living room – glass in one hand, plate in the other. ‘All I’m saying is that you should be mor
e careful. You can’t take things for granted like that.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll be paranoid suburban flat-woman creature from now on. I’ll demand to see identification from everybody, including the postman. I’ll become a recluse, the weird old hermit lady on the third floor surrounded by cats and smelling of wee.’

  Andy nodded, chewing. ‘Mm-hm. Sounds fair enough.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll give me my own episode of “A Life of Grime”.’

  ‘And then finally you will have the fame and attention you’ve always deserved.’

  ‘Eff off, commuter boy.’

  They ate watching Millionaire with the sound turned down, sitting on the sofa because the drop-leaf table by the kitchen door was covered in Laura’s textbooks, folders, and marking – all of which stood neatly stacked in their appointed piles. It was hard to say whether the work which college set her as part of her teacher training course was any greater than what she was bringing home from her placement school – Andy knew nothing about the job other than what he’d loathed about it at the receiving end – but he was pretty sure the school shouldn’t be just dumping work on her like she was actually employed by them. Still, she seemed to be keeping on top of it.

  In fact, everything did seem to be so completely normal that he was actually able to forget about the incident on the train for some time, until he was washing up and she’d had to move some of his clutter in the spare room to find…

  ‘What happened to this?’

  Ah. She leaned into the kitchen, his briefcase dangling off one finger like a dead fish. He glanced at it and resumed scrubbing industriously at a perfectly clean plate. ‘Looks like somebody’s drawn on it,’ he muttered.

  ‘Smartarse. How did it happen? Who did it?’

  ‘Some kid. Kids.’

  ‘What kids?’ She was now enunciating each word as sharply as broken glass, and he knew this one was going to be bad. The briefcase had been a present from her back when he’d been applying for ‘proper’ jobs, i.e. ones in offices, but he still carried it with him every day despite the fact that all he ever kept in it was movie magazines, comics and game cheats. Sometimes he suspected that she secretly thought he was making fun of her by doing so.

  ‘Druggies. Homeless, it looked like. They, uh, they sort of attacked me on the train.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Andy!’ She was staring at him, aghast. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because it was more embarrassing than anything else. Oh, and I’m fine, by the way. Thanks for asking.’

  ‘Don’t try to turn this around on me. How did this happen?’

  For which, read: How could you let this happen? It was his turn to stare. ‘What do you mean? You somehow think this is my fault?’

  ‘Well I don’t know, do I? You haven’t told me a word about what happened. You sit there next to me and eat dinner and then do the washing up and it’s been – what? Three hours? And not one single bloody word. Were you even going to tell me? And anyway, that’s not what I meant.’

  ‘Look. It’s simply not worth making that much of a fuss over. There were some kids, they were mucking about, yes it freaked me out a bit but they were just being stupid. I wasn’t hurt. And before you say it, no, I am not going to go to the police. It’s a stupid piece of minor vandalism, and it’s not worth bothering anybody about, okay? Can we just leave it? Please?’

  Laura left it. But only, he suspected, in the sense that it had been filed away to be dragged out the next time he did something stupid. For God’s sake, he thought with sudden resentment, all he’d try to do was help someone. Except he hadn’t, really, had he? It was only after the girl had got the doors open herself that he’d plucked up the courage to help; he’d been more than happy to just leave her to begin with. And leave her to what? What had he even seen?

  The song that had been playing through Laura’s iPod speakers had been Green Day’s classic slacker anthem ‘Welcome to Paradise,’ the same song that the girl had been humming as she jittered by the door and watched out for whatever was chasing her.

  Andy Sumner didn’t believe in random. He had long since become used to his life being controlled by such coincidences as this. Except that ‘controlled’ wasn’t really the right word for it. They simply happened to him. Time after time, all the time. He’d wake up with a tune in his head and it’d be the first thing he’d hear on the radio that morning – he supposed that was the sort of thing that happened to everybody once in a while, but every morning for a week, without a break? He’d attend a job-centre interview and find himself sitting opposite an old school friend he hadn’t seen in years – not only that but the conference room where the interview would be held would have the same name as their old form teacher. That sort of coincidence. All the time. He’d found as a child that that if he allowed these coincidences to inform his decisions life was a lot easier, and often luckier. So he’d buy the album he heard on the radio that morning and maybe find a twenty pound note lying on the shop floor. Or he’d go along to the old school friend’s barbecue and meet a gorgeous, bossy, and frighteningly intelligent young woman called Laura Bishop who for some reason known only to the gods actually fancied him enough to go out for a drink with him, and ultimately loved him enough to agree to marry him. He didn’t necessarily believe that any of this was pre-ordained or even controlled, but it was pretty clear to him that sequences of events fell into some kind of Pattern, and that if you took advantage of the clues that were dropped in your way, the Pattern would ultimately reward you.

  In which case, why did he feel like he was about to throw up? That sick, low-grade swirling sensation he’d been feeling all day thickened somewhere just below his ribcage. It felt like seasickness, like being trapped in the pitch-black cargohold of a ship plowing its way through a storm-swollen ocean: the feeling of being caught up in the movement of something huge and ponderous. He spent the rest of the evening watching the television with unfocussed eyes, seeing instead pale shapes scuttling in the darkness.

  ***

  Dodd awoke to crawling light and chanting voices.

  His mind was like a small flat stone skimming across a nightbound lake. He dipped briefly in and out of consciousness, but even when he closed his eyes, the light still crawled behind his eyelids, and the voices insisted.

  Really only one voice, but the echoes picked it up and bounced it around his head. And the echoes’ siblings, shadows, breeding cockroaches of light which squirmed under his eyes, over and through his skin. Echoes and shadows of vast concrete buttresses, and the slumbering shapes of heavy machinery standing sentry around the construction site where he was now dying.

  Skimming back up again…

  Dodd was duct-taped, naked and spreadeagled, to a pair of crossed reinforcing girders at the bottom of a deep pit, smelling oil and steel and the stink of his own flesh burning. None of it had been delerium. He was in actual fact crawling with light. At dozens of points on his anatomy, slender needles transfixed his flesh, and where they did so the skin glowed, searingly painful, like cigarette burns. Motes of light crawled from these needles to coalesce in large multi-floreate patterns at his belly and chest, and to other points elsewhere up and down his body where he couldn’t see. It was as if his body were short-circuiting and burning itself up.

  ‘Geburah!’ the voice intoned. ‘The Fifth Path! Mars, grant us your strength!’

  ‘Grant us your strength…’ echoed a chorus of others, from all around him.

  A hand reached out of the darkness and planted a needle in the strained flesh where his left shoulder met his torso. New fire took root there and crawled in slow motes toward the flower which burned over his breastbone.

  ‘Chesed! The Fourth Path! Jupiter, lend us your wisdom!’ Yet another, this time in his right shoulder, burning from inside.

  The man in front of him looked for all the world like a
businessman, in a dark suit and long winter coat, except for the way it curled and flapped about him in an unfelt wind, like wings, and the lapels, which were ranked with still more needles to come. In one hand he clasped a long metal staff that crawled with static electricity. Other figures stood further off in a loose semi-circle, and beyond them still a retinue of squat creatures kept as far back in the shadows of the pit as possible.

  Voices and needles and monsters at his back.

  Beneath his feet lay a large, heavily-inscribed stone.

  ‘Lend us your wisdom…’

  The dark man leaned in closely and favoured Dodd with a conspiratorial smile. ‘To tell you the truth, this is all a lot of rubbish,’ he whispered. ‘But you know how it is. One must keep the congregation happy.’ He winked.

  ‘Wha… What are you… ?’

  A needle floated free from the jacket of its own accord and impaled itself at the base of his throat. He groaned as heat blossomed there. The dark man seemed to draw sustenance from this, inhaling as if pleased by the aroma of a fine meal.

  ‘I just need to know one little thing. Tiny thing. Hardly worth your trouble. I mean, given that you’re dying and everything. You’ve probably got a bit on your mind. It’s just – your girlfriend back there – you wouldn’t happen to know where she might have run to, would you?’

  Dodd made a noise which might have been fuck you.

  ‘Yes,’ the needleman sighed. ‘Still, I had to ask. Sorry. You carry on, there.’ He turned back to the assembled crowd – figures with expensive suits and avid eyes – and declaimed once more. ‘Da-ath! The Path which is No Path! Open for us the Abyss…’

  And so it went on, from the soles of his feet to the very crown of his head, until his bristling body was juddering and spasming as its vital energies were channelled into seven swirling vortices down its length, threatening to tear his very fibres apart. He felt as if he were brimming with molten metal. At length the needleman produced a knife, which he flourished high for his congregation, crying: ‘The Gates stand ready!’