The Narrows

by James Brogden

  Andy picked up the toilet brush and waved it playfully. ‘Hey boy, wanna play fetch? Wanna chase the stick? Do ya? Yes you do, don’t you? Go on boy, good boy, fetch the stick!’ He threw it over the dog’s head and into the narrow passageway behind.

  Spike didn’t even follow it with his eyes. If anything, his expression became rather pitying.

  ‘Shit.’ There was another game that he knew dogs liked, but it was one which Andy was reluctant to play. It was called tug of war. What choice did he have, though?

  He reached slowly for the hand-towel which hung by the small sink and wrapped each end around his fists so that it stretched between them like a thick garotte. The dog watched his every movement, growling softly. When Andy stood up, Spike leapt to his feet, the growl rising to a snarl.

  ‘Let’s play this, then,’ said Andy grimly through his teeth, and took a step forward. ‘Come on, boy. Come on then if you think you’re – holy fuck!’

  The dog surged forward and Andy barely got his hands up in time. Its jaws closed around the thick towelling between his fists, but still the momentum of its charge slammed him back against the toilet cistern, then it dragged him forwards, thrashing his head as if worrying at a slipper. Andy was thrown from one side of the doorframe to the other, barely able to keep his grip, let alone his balance. The dog hauled backwards again, dragging him out into the passage, all the while keeping up a steady, clenched snarling. He’d no idea an animal could be so strong. He was terrified that it would make a lunge at his throat, but, bred with a bite that could not be broken, it was betrayed by its own instincts and now it couldn’t let go of the towel even if it had wanted. Just so long as Andy held on. Another savage thrash. Andy bounced off the passage wall, cracking his skull. The problem was that as soon as he slipped, or let go, or dropped the towel to run, he was dead meat.

  He began to give ground (truth to tell, he had very little choice in the matter) and Spike backed up, maintaining a continual loose, rattling snarl very much like the narrowboat’s own engine. Into the galley, yanking him from side to side so that he fell against the furniture and was hit by falling objects. It felt like his arms were being twisted from their sockets like chicken legs.

  Despite this punishment, a sliver of hope began to grow: if he could keep this up, and the dog continued to back up along the length of the cabin and out the door, back towards its kennel at the front of the boat, he might be able to make a dash for it – leap over the side and possibly make it to the canal bank.

  He gave ground again. Yank. Thrash. Snarl. This could actually work.

  Then he slipped.

  One of Gramma’s mismatched rugs rucked up and slid out from underneath his foot. His knee twisted in hot liquid agony and he went down awkwardly, crying out and letting go of the towel.

  Suddenly released, the dog fell backwards, and Andy had just enough time to register that this was it, he was going to get mauled and very possibly killed, before it scrambled back onto all fours and threw itself on him. Its jaws fastened on the meaty flesh of his left calf, below where his trouser cuff had ridden up in the fall, and shook him again like a doll. There was no pain at first, just a terrible, bone-deep wrenching sensation and a growing warm wetness in his shoe. Neither was there room for fear amidst the sudden shock. What he felt, as he watched the animal worry at his leg, his blood on its chin, was incredulity and a swiftly growing rage.

  Bite me? You’d dare bite me? For some reason he heard Nurse Barton saying ‘Little scratch…’

  Power burst from deep in the flesh where Spike’s teeth had penetrated. It raved straight into the dog’s mouth and illuminated its gullet in red, and for a second Andy fancied he saw it burning from the nostrils and from around the edges of the eyeballs, as if its entire head were filled with fire. The dog jerked like it had been electrocuted and tried to pull away, yowling around its mouthful of his leg, but this time it was held fast by something stronger than its jaws.

  Bite this, you mongrel. Andy rammed the power deep into the dog’s head with a dark and gleeful savagery. It howled again, and then without warning Andy was looking at himself lying spreadeagled on the floor. There was blood on his teeth and the maddening stench of human terror-sweat in his nostrils, and he knew that somehow he was inside Spike’s head. He knew too that the dog had simply been obeying his mistress’ command, that he bore no conscious animosity towards Andy and was simply trying to be a Good Dog as well as he could. Suddenly sick at himself, Andy let go, and Spike collapsed in a twitching heap.

  He dragged himself to his feet and started hobbling forward along the cabin, towards the door.

  ‘What have you done? My poor boy, what have you done to him, you monster?’ The anguished cry of the old woman came from behind; she’d left the controls at the sounds of fighting and was kneeling aghast over the convulsing body of her pet. ‘What have you done?’ she sobbed.

  The narrowboat, unsteered, shuddered into the canal bank and Andy fled, driven by the power of her cries and the horror of what he had done, as much as by what had been done to him. He limped along the towpath into the stagnant emptiness of the Narrows and didn’t stop until the sound of her anguish was replaced by the normal murmur of traffic, and the night sky had turned a more comforting shade of orange.

  7 Traces

  The Gates stood ready.

  Thick swathes of silver-grey duct tape held the girl in a cruciform position between two upright girders. The needleman worked with calm, untheatrical efficiency: dozens of bristling needles damming and redirecting and channelling her ch’i into the structure which rose half-built around him, and the glimmer of her dying was reflected in the shining black eyes of the creatures which squatted in the surrounding shadows. It was possible that he may have been humming to himself a little.

  ‘My dear,’ he said ‘in a little while you’re going to want to start screaming. I think that’s a very healthy instinct, so you go ahead and scream. As much as you want. Let the world know how much it all hurts, how wrong this all this. This isn’t a good way to die, and there’s no reason for you to try putting a brave face on it, is there?’

  There was no congregation this time, however. No floor show. Those influential men and women were bound to his service as well by one sacrifice as a dozen, and he actually found the whole ceremonial circus – while a tedious political necessity – to be quite distasteful. The pseudo-mystical mumbo jumbo demeaned both her and the cause for which she was dying, though of course it was unreasonable to expect her to believe that he genuinely bore her no malice. So when she spat in his face and cursed him with the foulest of invective, he didn’t hold it against her. In the modern parlance, he knew where she was coming from.

  He drove the first knife into the base of her spine, where her muladhara chakra stood open and energised by the preliminary work that his needles had accomplished, and prepared himself for the upwelling of energy, ready to channel it upwards with the remaining knives as her body incinerated itself from the inside out.

  Nothing happened. She simply… died.

  ‘What?’

  Her body hung limply from the girders. No longer a gateway. No longer an incandescent, vital conduit for the powers that would ultimately elevate him to godhood. Just dead flesh.

  The skavags, sensing his mounting consternation, began to murmur and shift uneasily.

  ‘Carling!’

  The younger man snapped out of his open-mouthed shock as if lashed. ‘Yes, boss?’

  His master didn’t deign to reply. For a moment the mask of easy-going bonhomie dropped, and Carling found himself staring into eyes which were as inescapable and pitiless as twin black holes. Something had gone wrong.

  Nothing ever went wrong.

  ‘I’ll find out,’ he managed to say.

  ‘Do that.’

  ***

  As Andy struggled up the s
tairs from the canal, it seemed for a moment that his first few steps away along the pavement were harder than they should have been, as if he were wading through water or being held back by some kind of magnetic force acting on the very iron in his blood. Then he was free and, feeling utterly drained, he retraced his steps home. When he emerged from the row of garages behind their block of flats, he saw that the living room light was on and cursed himself all the way up the stairs and through the front door.

  Laura was waiting for him in her dressing-gown, seated at the dining table with her head propped up on one hand and a cold cup of tea untouched in front of her. She raised her eyes to regard him coldly from under a mussed-up fringe.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘Laura, I – ‘

  ‘Where have you been?’ she yelled, slapping her hand on the table with a report loud enough to rattle the cutlery on its hanger. It jingled mindlessly as she glared at him. ‘Jesus Christ, Andy, I was worried sick!’

  ‘I just went for a walk…’

  ‘A walk? A walk?! Andy, look at you! I wake up in the middle of the night to find you gone, and you stagger in at four o’clock in the morning looking like – like -’ Lost for words, she got up, stalked into the kitchen and started banging some plates around. He limped to the phone and dialled 999.

  She stalked back out again. ‘No! I’ll tell you what. If this is something to do with the wedding, if this is you getting cold feet and deciding to show me that you’re still some kind of free-ranging male spirit thing…’

  Then she noticed all the blood.

  ***

  Carling stood on the towpath in the gathering dawn, chucking bits of gravel one at a time at a floating styrofoam cup. He was tired, angry, and his aim was crap, which only made his temper worse.

  splish

  Shouldn’t be here.

  He’d been up to the gate and found it re-opened, just as he’d thought. It wasn’t a major one, hadn’t needed one of those big blood-letting jobs, just your bog-standard iron stake wrapped in copper wire and hammered into the ground. They’d sunk hundreds of the things all over the city. He didn’t understand how just one of them going tits up way out here could cause such a failure, but there it was. He just did what he was told.

  Nothing seemed to have been tampered with. No new graffiti to show that the Narrowfuckers had been sniffing around again – and yet there it was, wide open and alive.

  Shouldn’t -splish- fucking -splish- be here.

  ‘Sink, you bastard thing.’

  The skavags suddenly set up a mewling chorus, which told him that they’d finally found something. Running, he found them clustered in a knot far down the tow path. They cowered away as he arrived, their black eight-ball eyes rolling in fear, and when he saw their discovery his heart leapt.

  Blood. Tacky, almost dried, but quite definitely a spattering of blood which trailed off along the path. There were lots of ways to track a man, Carling knew – by foot, by rumour – but far and away the best was by his blood. Carling straightened up, put his red-tipped fingers in his mouth, and sucked thoughtfully. With the taste of a man’s blood in your mouth, he could never ultimately escape you.

  He gave assent to the skavags, who set to the red trail with their long whip-like tongues, licking it clean as they went, and when it petered out they scattered, hooting joyously, looking for more. Hunting for the source. Carling watched them go with something approaching affection.

  As he strolled back on his way to deliver the good news, he rolled the salt-gritty taste around his gums and wondered if maybe his line of work wasn’t starting to get to him a bit.

  8 The Bollard Game

  When the Accident and Emergency doctor started to stitch up his leg, Andy was so dizzy with shock that at first it didn’t occur to him to try and stop the man.

  ‘Better make sure you’re wearing rubber-soled shoes,’ he wanted to joke. He got as far as ‘…’ but the action of raising his head from the pillow to speak caused the big strip-lights over his head to dance in fragmented prisms, and he sank back with a groan. When someone else came in and gave him what he assumed was a tetanus shot, he just let them get on with it. They were professionals – they could look after themselves. Whatever it was that had come out of him seemed to have dissipated for the moment, and nobody suffered any kind of freak electrical attack, so he allowed himself to relax.

  In between there were questions, forms, telephone calls.

  Throughout the whole process, and including the two-hour wait on hard plastic chairs, he expected Laura to explode at him again. He would have welcomed it, almost. Not that he felt he deserved it, but at least it would have broken the tension. She had dragged on a pair of old sweat-pants and her leather jacket over the nightshirt she’d worn last night – which felt like a million years ago – and he thought she’d never looked more gorgeous. But all she said when he was finally discharged, limping with his jeans-leg rolled up to the knee and his calf swathed in bandages, was ‘Come on you, let’s get you home.’

  ‘Laura, look, I’m really, really sorry,’ he started, but she shushed him with a smile.

  ‘It’s fine. Honestly. Get your coat on. I’m just glad you’re alright.’

  Now he knew she was pissed off.

  She drove him home in silence through the pre-dawn twilight, along deserted roads. He had to slide the passenger seat right back so that he could prop his injured leg straight out ahead, and so had a good vantage point from which to watch the muscles in her jaw bunching and unbunching themselves as she chewed the inside of her cheek.

  She was really pissed.

  They returned home, and she headed straight to get showered and dressed for school while he changed painfully out of his filthy and bloodstained clothes. By the time he’d made her a conciliatory cup of tea, she’d finished putting her make-up on and was gathering folders into her big shoulder-bag.

  ‘Oh, hon,’ she said as she saw him. ‘Thanks, but I don’t have time. I can just about make it to work if I leave right now. Kate said she’d cover for me, but you know how mad it gets. Really sweet of you, though.’ She put a hand gently to his face. ‘Plus, you need sleep. When I get home we’ll sort all this mess out. You can look after yourself, can’t you?’ She stole a quick swig of tea and left, closing the door quietly behind her, and he listened to her calm footsteps recede down the stairwell.

  Yes indeed, he was a dead man.

  Fully intending to make amends by cleaning the entire flat from top to bottom, he crashed out on the sofa and fell instantaneously asleep. This time, there were no dreams. Or if there were, he was able to outrun them.

  ***

  The phone woke him up a little before ten. He stared blearily at the clock, his first panicked thought being that he’d slept right round and into the evening. When he understood that it was still morning and he’d had less than three hours’ rest, he couldn’t decide which was worse. He limped into the hall and fumbled the phone out of its charge socket.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Andy? Nigel.’ His boss, having to raise his voice over what sounded like a very full, very busy shop.

  ‘Nigel, hi, yeah. Look, did I call you from the hospital earlier?’

  ‘Yes, you did. How’s the leg?’

  ‘I may never play the violin again.’

  ‘Good, good. Listen, I need you to come in.’

  ‘Sorry, can’t be done. Doc says no exercise for at least twenty-four hours.’

  ‘I know. You said. But I absolutely must have you in this morning, Andy. It’s stock day – I’ve got dozens of boxes stacked up in the office, full of games I can’t sell because I’ve got no spare hands to check the invoices.’

  ‘Nigel, I’m really, really sorry…’ and as the same apology came out of his mouth for the second time in a hand
ful of hours he realised how much he hated the sound of it. He felt like he’d been spending half his life apologising for one thing or another. But Nigel was in full flow.

  ‘… know, don’t you, that it’s only three weeks before Christmas? Your little adventure has gone and played silly buggers with this place, I hope you realise. You know how mad it gets. Still,’ he added in aggrieved tones, ‘I’m sure you can look after yourself, can’t you?’

  Laura’s words. There it was again: the Pattern unscrolling before him, like a wall of graffiti seen from a train window.

  Nigel was wittering on in the background about how stock-checking meant that he could sit down all day and not worry about his leg, but for Andy the decision had already been made. He’d have to leave early and get home before Laura did or there would be hell to pay if she discovered that he’d been disobeying doctors’ orders.

  ‘Okay. I’ll come in.’

  ‘Thank Christ for that. You’ve saved my life. Owe you one, buddy.’

  ***

  Andy wasn’t above rubbing Nigel’s nose in the fact that he was doing him a favour, and so hobbled in wearing jeans and a hoodie – aside from anything else it made it less likely that the boss would change his mind and put him out on the shop floor.

  The Games Barn was a seething press of confused-looking parents and hygiene-challenged, adolescent males shuffling amongst the shelves, half-distracted by big plasma screens repeating garish, violent trailers for games, all to a background of seasonal muzak. He managed to avoid it altogether by reaching the shop via the labyrinth of service corridors which ran behind the shopping centre’s retail units, dodging large, flat delivery trolleys and piles of crushed cardboard boxes.