The Narrows

by James Brogden

  Two men stood in the middle of the lawn, their shadows stretching long towards the building. The taller was dressed in a long coat that curled about his ankles, and in his hand he carried a staff, which gleamed copper-red. As Andy watched, the tall man placed the end of the staff against the ground, and with the heel of his hand pushed its entire length into the earth with apparently no more effort than as if it were a drawing pin.

  One by one and without any fuss, the security lights began to go out.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said slowly, through a suddenly dry mouth. ‘Something like them.’ He watched darkness flood across the grass with the fascination of a drowning man watching the tide come in. ‘It’s a Narrow,’ he realised. ‘Dear god, he’s dropped this whole building into a Narrow.’

  ‘You can’t know anything about this,’ insisted Bex. ‘It’s impossible.’

  ‘What – me knowing anything about it or him doing it?’

  ‘Both.’

  Bex saw that outside the fading light’s periphery, squat creatures prowled and loped. The shorter man, who looked nothing more remarkable than the average skinhead, made a commanding gesture with one arm, and as the final light was extinguished, the skavags boiled towards the building.

  The entire block of flats gave a sudden, bone-shuddering lurch which threw them off their feet at the same time as the electricity failed, and the sudden darkness was filled with the creaks and groans of shifting masonry, the crashes of things breaking in distant rooms, and the terrified screams of other residents. For a moment the only light came from Bex’s flashing Santa earrings. She fumbled in her rucksack for a torch and snapped it on, picking out Andy’s wide eyes and white face with its jittering light.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked, shocked. Plaster dust had drifted in his hair like madness.

  She ignored him. ‘Ways out of here? Fire escape?’

  He shook his head. ‘The block’s only three storeys – it doesn’t have one. Just the stairs.’

  They ran to the open front door. The stairwell landing light was swinging crazily and long, deep cracks were opening up in the brickwork. From below came the sound of breaking glass, more screams, and strange ululating cries looping upwards. Bex tried to slam the door, but it had been left open when she’d come barging in, and now its frame was twisted out of true; it wouldn’t shut properly, never mind lock.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he repeated.

  ‘Monsters are eating your neighbours,’ she replied harshly. ‘You really want to stop asking me that question.’

  ‘Windows!’ he shouted, snapping out of his paralysis. ‘The bedroom windows are on the side of the building. There’s just some bushes and then the fence into next door.’

  ‘But that has to be two storeys, and they’ll be down there too. God I hate flats.’

  ‘You have a better idea?’

  She thought furiously. ‘Where’s your kettle?’

  ‘You want to make tea? Brilliant! Why don’t we distract them with some fucking fairy cakes as well!’

  ‘Andy, you’re becoming hysterical. Don’t make me slap you.’

  Bex made it into the kitchen as half a dozen skavags emerged onto the landing. They sniffed around briefly before scrambling into the flat, hooting triumphantly.

  Andy slammed the lounge door shut and dragged the settee across it, piled both chairs on top for good measure, and retreated to the kitchen. He attempted to barricade the door there too, but there was nothing anywhere near as heavy and the best he could do was to brace his back against it.

  Thuds and crashes reverberated through the flimsy wall; it sounded like his barricade was holding for the moment, but he had a sick feeling that it might not be for very long. Bex had put the kettle on and was tapping a foot impatiently. ‘Damn these bloody eco-boil things.’

  There was a stupendous noise in the other room, an apocalyptic rending and splintering of wood. It sounded like they were clawing through the very walls. The kitchen door was rammed from the other side, making him lurch to keep his balance.

  ‘Sod it,’ Bex said. ‘That’ll have to do.’ She climbed up onto the draining board, kettle in one hand, and booted at the lock of the window above the sink. It crashed open in a blast of frigid air and broken glass and she peered downwards, offering a quick prayer of thanks to the god of cheap double glazing.

  Something in the darkness below stared up at her hungrily with flat, shining eyes.

  The kitchen door was rammed again, harder this time, and began to open slowly against Andy’s weight. His trainers lost their grip and slipped against the linoleum floor. Claw-tipped arms snatched and flailed in the gap.

  Bex upended the kettle out of the window and the skavag below gave a bubbling screech, thrashing away into the shrubbery. She turned to grin crazily at Andy, laughed ‘Remember, only boil as much as you need!’ and dropped out of the window.

  He was too busy wondering if she’d injured herself in the two-storey fall to defend himself from the skavag which burst through the door and reared up at him, howling.

  Its wrinkled snout lunged at his throat, but he got his hands up in time to grip its head even as it overbore him and drove him against the edge of the sink. Pain flashed in his kidneys. Its flesh felt cold and slick, like old boot-leather, and its mismatched teeth stank of garbage. Claws were opening up his shoulders. More leaping shapes clustered in the doorway, eager to join the bloodletting but frustrated by the confined space.

  All he could think to do was squeeze its head as hard as he could and maybe try to gouge out those glittering, obsidian eyes with his thumbs. He imagined his fingers as teeth (or grey stones, socketed in flesh; where had that come from?) and pushed inwards as hard as he could, not just physically but with the strength of his terror and rage, until it felt like his fingers had penetrated its very skull, and there was a sense of tremendous pressure building rapidly to such an intensity that things deep inside the creature began to twist and rupture. It immediately tried to escape, keening in agony, but Andy held it fast as its limbs twisted and snapped, thrashing as it died, and finally it slid off him in a misshapen mass.

  The creatures in the doorway paused, uncertain. Breathing hard, he climbed backwards up onto the kitchen counter, his eyes riveted on them. You too, he promised. Every single one of you.

  Then his foot caught on the draining board, and he fell backwards out of the window.

  ***

  They clambered over the fence beside the row of garages and into the alley beyond. The darkness behind them was filled with the noise of confusion more than pursuit, but they both knew that the respite was only momentary.

  Bex looked left and right, trying to get her bearings.

  ‘Northfield, Northfield, Northfield,’ she muttered to herself, and then turned to him: ‘How far are you from the Rea?’

  ‘What ray?’ he panted.

  ‘The River Rea!’ Her voice was heavy with scorn. ‘Oh of course, why would you know anything about where you live?’ Turning right, but only because it seemed slightly more downhill than the alternative, she trotted away.

  ‘Birmingham doesn’t have a river,’ he protested, following.

  ‘It has three!’ she snapped over her shoulder.

  It only took him a dozen paces for him to realise that running was out of the question; the best he could manage was an exaggerated loping limp. He tried to wipe his hands on his jeans as he went. They were covered in filth from the dead skavag.

  More dark creatures bounded over the fence behind them, and terror gave new strength to his legs.

  They came out of the alley onto a residential street, still in Narrows territory – houses dark, streetlights dead, and a cloud-shredded night sky the only source of illumination. Yet even here the skavags shunned such openness, flitting in the shelter of house porches, leap-fr
ogging over gates and hedges. They began to outflank Bex and Andy easily. The only thing that helped him was the fact that they were heading steadily downhill.

  Bex sped ahead, little more than a scrap of shadow. Not again, she prayed. Not this time. Not him too.

  Without warning she dodged left, between two houses. A skavag leapt at her. She ducked on the run and it overshot by inches, claws whickering where the nape of her neck had been, and sprawled in the next driveway along. Andy fled through the gap.

  Another back garden, another fence, and suddenly they were plunging down through a narrow belt of trees, then knee-deep in freezing water, and collapsing on the far bank of a stream.

  Andy – wide-eyed, with his breath coming in hysterical, hitching gasps -immediately scrambled to his feet to continue running, but Bex grabbed his arm. ‘It’s okay,’ she panted. ‘They can’t follow us. Look.’

  On the other side of the stream, which itself was only ten feet or so wide, the skavags were leaping and keening in their frustrated blood-lust. They would dart at the water and then recoil, stymied and enraged, and turn on their fellows instead.

  ‘It’s the water,’ she explained. ‘Free-flowing water carries a lot of ch’i energy. It burns them, I think. They won’t even jump it, and they could make this distance easily. They’re creatures of decay, the skavags. Entropy on legs.’

  ‘How long until they find another way across?’

  ‘We could always stick around and find out, if you’re really that interested.’

  It turned out that he wasn’t.

  ***

  Carling raged over the contorted remains of his creature. He was barely coherent, screaming his fury at the appalling injuries which had been inflicted on one of his pack and taking it out on the flat’s contents. Barber thought he was well on the way to causing more damage than the skavags themselves. It wouldn’t have surprised him. The boy had – what did they say these days? Issues.

  At issue for Barber was a number of disturbing questions. The death of this creature, for a start. It was nothing so very far removed from what Barber himself could do – and had indeed done in the past, when he had been honing his skills – but even so, such damage would properly require hours of work, and this appeared to have been achieved in seconds. For such power to have suddenly arisen in a place as mundane as this – so strongly, so quickly – was unprecedented, verging on the miraculous. It could not be coincidence. There had to be antecedents.

  Then there was the fact that his quarry had escaped. He had taken them out of the world and sealed them off so that even if they had somehow contrived to flee the building alive, they should never have been able to get beyond the boundaries of the lacuna. And yet they had.

  The very nature of who ‘they’ were, even. He’d assumed that the tampering had been the girl’s work, yet Carling’s beasts had followed the blood-scent here, and this was most definitely no Narrowfolk squat.

  ‘Carling!’ He summoned the boy from his tantrum. ‘Make yourself useful. Find out who lives here.’ Or used to, he added to himself, looking around at the devastation with grim satisfaction. There was no coming back to this place.

  11 To Market, To Market

  Bex and Andy threaded their slow way through the press of Christmas-shopping crowds on New Street, aimless. In the first chaotic dash to escape the flat, there’d been no thought of where to go except away, but Bex had soon hit on the German Market as their destination.

  ‘First thing, we need to get lost,’ she’d said, leading him at a punishing pace through the evening rush-hour streets. ‘I don’t know whether they’re following you or me, but we need to mix our trail up with a lot of other people, fast. I’m not leading those things back to Moon Grove. Then we need to get you the price of a bed for the night, because you’re sure as hell not sharing with me.’

  He didn’t know what to make of that last remark but lacked the breath to argue.

  The German Market in Birmingham City Centre filled Victoria Square and the upper reaches of New Street like a child’s jewellery box crammed to overflowing. It was an artificial Christmas village dazzling with tinsel and lights, arranged in narrow streets through which shoppers meandered shoulder-to-shoulder. They passed small wooden huts offering craftware in an eye-bewildering variety, from brass nativities to woollen jesters’ hats, and an even stranger mix of edible goodies: old-fashioned gingerbread, toffee apples, slabs of glassy peanut brittle which needed to be smashed with small hammers before being carried away in crackling paper bags. And then treats with more outlandish names like gluwein, stollen, and lebkuchen, the very sound of which conjured up images of pine-haunted Bavarian alps and gothic castles.

  Even at this early hour of the evening, groups of drinkers were standing around small tables with plastic pints of lager, and lines of bouncing, heavily muffled children were queuing with their parents for the great carousel which gleamed in baroque splendour in front of the Council House.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked. He realised that he was ravenous and said so.

  They sat on the low fountain wall next to the statue of the River Goddess – which Brummies, with their instinctive appreciation for urban art, had nicknamed The Floozie in the Jacuzzi. A pair of harrassed-looking parents and their three boys were all were working on tipping themselves over the line between fat and clinical obesity by attacking several huge German sausages in hotdog buns. The smallest was whinging that he didn’t like it, it was too spicy, and after some irritated snapping at each other, the family moved on, leaving it behind.

  ‘Grub’s up,’ she said and helped herself, tearing it apart and offering him one half.

  He looked at it. ‘You’re joking, right?’

  Through stuffed cheeks,~ she replied ‘Dugh uh luk lukum juhkung?’

  ‘But that’s just… unhygienic!’

  She swallowed. ‘No. What it is is hot. Suit yourself – more for me.’

  Andy dug out his wallet and went to buy his own. He also searched for a phone booth, but the few that he found were all either vandalised or out of order.

  They strolled as they ate, letting the market’s light, colour and noise temporarily drive from their minds the shadows of that day’s horror. When they finished, she startled him into a near heart-attack by linking her arm with his.

  ‘Come on then, big spender,’ she said, waggling her pierced eyebrows. ‘Take a girl on the carousel?’

  ‘What? No!’ He pulled away. ‘I have to go home! Laura will have got back from work by now – Christ alone knows what she’ll have found. And what if there are more of those skavag things waiting? I’ve got to warn her!’

  ‘What if there are?’ Bex answered coldly, crossing her arms. ‘What exactly do you plan to do? What if there aren’t, and they’re following you, and you lead them right to her? How stupid are you going to feel then, when your girlfriend’s being eaten in front of you?’

  ‘She’s actually my…’

  ‘I don’t give a toss who she is!’ Her sudden anger took him aback. ‘The fact of the matter is, Andy, that if you care for her at all, the best place you can be is as far away from her as possible, at least until we figure out what’s going on, and the best thing you can do is talk to the people who know about the Narrows. I can help you with both of those – I can get you a safe place to stay and put you in touch with a guy who knows pretty much everything. For god’s sake, I’m not trying to have your babies – all I’m asking for is a ride on a frigging merry-go-round!’

  He hesitated, indecisive as ever, and hating himself for it. As ever. She hadn’t mentioned what to Andy seemed like an even worse alternative: what if nothing happened at all? What if he went back, explained everything to Laura, got his life back on an even keel, and this strange, dangerous, incredible world never touched him again?

  ‘Oh, go on then,’ he said at last.
She grinned and ran to join the queue.

  ***

  ‘The thing is,’ she said, as they headed away from the market, further down New Street, ‘you have to pay your way.’

  ‘Sounds fair enough to me.’

  ‘But you can’t use cash, and no, we don’t take Visa.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She stopped, blowing cigarette smoke at him in irritation. She was smoking a roll-up of what she called ‘street-mix,’ the collected scraps of tobacco out of a million discarded butts which she kept in a drawstring leather pouch. It smelt absolutely evil. ‘Look, if you’re going to ask ‘why’ every time I say something, two things are going to happen. One, I will hit you very hard. And two, you will be sleeping rough tonight. In that order. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Okay, then.’ They resumed their course, heading downhill past gleaming shopfronts towards the Rotunda and the huge Bullring Centre. Shoppers and pedestrians passed, ignoring them, just two more vagrants arguing with each other. The Rotunda was a twenty-storey cylinder of plush, inner-city apartments rising up on their right. ‘So we’re going to the market to see if we can find you something to trade for your night’s kip.’

  ‘But we just came from the market.’

  ‘That? It’s about as close to being a market as this is to being a Cuban bloody cigar. No, I mean the real markets. The Bullring.’

  ‘But they’re closed at night. I didn’t say ‘why not’!’ he added in a rush as she turned on him again.

  ‘Yes they are,’ she agreed. ‘But there’s all kinds of closed. What can you do?’

  ‘What do you mean, what can I do?’

  ‘Do you have a trade? Are you skilled in anything? Can you build a wall, fix an engine, plumb in a sink – that sort of thing?’