The Narrows

by James Brogden

  His words over dinner now seemed ridiculous and impossibly melodramatic, and Andy was suddenly angry – with the old tramp for trying to put the frighteners on him, but mostly at himself for coming close to believing any of it.

  ‘Holly King my arse,’ he muttered scornfully, turning away from the assembly and heading back through the house towards the front door. The building which had glowed with a welcoming warmth while he was tired and vulnerable was, he now saw, in reality a semi-derelict ruin; roof-tiles were missing, plasterwork was crumbling, and the woodwork was warped with damp.

  ‘Skavags. Laying Up. Narrows. Cosmic bloody onions.’ Walter was as mad as a box of frogs, and he’d taken the rest of them with him.

  Moon Grove was chaotic with people hurrying up and down stairs, stuffing bags and rucksacks with their belongings, and doing last-minute swaps and trades in the corridors before Walter completed his sigils and took them out of the circles of the world (‘Bollocks,’ said Andy to no-one and everyone. ‘Total bollocks.’) He shoved through them, out the front door and marched up the cul-de-sac towards where it joined the main road. Others were ahead of him; lone, grey individuals scurrying to be gone as quickly as possible.

  ‘Bye then.’ Bex was lounging against the graffiti-tagged wall of the off-licence on the corner, eating an apple. A few feet beyond her was the pavement, busy with bus-stops, two-for-one offers and all the grimy sanity of the real world. He craved it and the ignorance it enjoyed, as an insomniac craves sleep.

  Nevertheless, he stopped.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said fiercely. ‘But I can’t do this.’

  She shrugged. ‘Okay.’

  ‘None of this makes any sense. Surely you can see that?’

  ‘Mm-hm.’

  ‘I’ve got to get back to some kind of normality. This is all getting just way out of hand.’

  She waved him on with her apple. Relieved that this hadn’t turned into a scene, he made to pass her.

  ‘Yep, that’s probably right,’ she said, ‘but what are you going to say to her?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘“I’m sorry but I can’t do this”,’ she recited. ‘“None of this makes sense surely you can see that I’ve got to get back to some kind of normality.” That’s most likely what she’ll say alright. Your darling fee-yon-say.’

  He sighed. It was going to be a scene. ‘That’s not funny.’

  ‘It wasn’t meant to be. Have you got your story worked out, then?’

  ‘I don’t need a story.’

  She laughed in his face. ‘Oh, right. So you’re going to tell her the truth, are you? I can see that working. Good luck with it. Andy, there’s nothing you can tell her that she will either believe or understand. They’ll lock you up and throw away the key. Keen to marry a nutjob, is she?’

  ‘Fine then. I’ll tell her I’ve been staying with friends. Lie, in other words.’

  ‘Ouch. That one stung. You’re getting good at this.’

  ‘Sod off.’

  ‘Actually, I meant the story that you’re going to have to tell her when you’ve settled back all nice and comfortable in suburbanland and the dark men finally find you and send every monster in the world through your front door. That is, assuming you’re able to tell her anything once the screaming begins.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen,’ he said, trying to sound convinced.

  ‘Why not?’ she scoffed.

  ‘Because none of this is real. It can’t be. It doesn’t make sense.’

  She slapped him. She did it so hard and fast that at first he didn’t realise what had happened; like a razor cut, the pain came after a long moment of dull shock. Then she tore off her jacket and threw it at him. ‘What do you think made those holes?’ she yelled, ‘Fucking moths?’ He was astounded to see that she was suddenly crying. ‘People are dead, you insensitive shit! People I love! We’re fighting for our lives, and you come swanning in with some kind of miraculous ability which nobody understands, and you could help us, but oh no, none of this is real, is it?’

  She stormed away back to Moon Grove, leaving Andy standing at the very edge of the street.

  He would leave it up to the Pattern, he decided. That at least was something you could rely on. He had absolutely nothing: no money, no phone, no way of contacting anyone or travelling anywhere except by his own two feet. Nothing felt right, so the only direction remaining to him was to turn left. Which he did. Why not? He had no reliable way of making decisions except on the most spurious, random grounds.

  ***

  This is how it works: find the tell-tale hints and flicker-glimpses which show how the grain of the universe runs. Head down, don’t look up, don’t see how far you’re walking, don’t plan ahead so much as a footstep because planning falls into the Narrows too. Scuff one toe, so scuff the other to balance it up. Count every car coming towards you as a plus and every car going away as a minus and see if an answer comes to you when they balance out at zero. Read the licence plates for significant dates or initials. Catch music from shop doorways and listen for messages in the lyrics. Focus on the middle distance, a point in empty mid-air several feet ahead. Assign a number to every letter in Laura’s name, total it up to seventy-seven and compare that to…

  … a phone booth next to him rang, precisely once, and fell silent again.

  He stared at it. It was derelict, its glass panes smashed, and there were weeds growing all around the base – including one tall, straggling, dead black nettle.

  He entered. The interior was worse: stinking and vandalised beyond repair. He lifted the handset, expecting it to be dead too, but wasn’t really surprised when the small rectangular LCD display lit up with the message Out of order. Please report Fault #77. The handset was purring with a quietly patient dial tone.

  Andy felt the Pattern threading itself within his flesh, strands of pins and needles coursing up and down his limbs and torso before shimmering out of his fingertips and into the telephone receiver where he grasped it.

  He punched in the number of Laura’s mobile.

  ‘Hi, Laura, it’s me.’

  There was a pause – a little too long for comfort – before she replied: ‘Andy. I was wondering when you’d call.’ Not the gushing exclamation of love and concern – or even anger – he’d been expecting.

  ‘I tried calling last night. You were out.’

  ‘I spent most of the evening at a police station. Amongst other things, I was filling out a missing persons report. Andy, where have you been?’

  ‘I’ve been staying with… friends. I just wanted you to know that I’m alright. To not be worried. Are you okay? What did the police say?’

  ‘Never mind them. Where were you? Were you there when it happened? Why didn’t you wait for me?’

  ‘I was there,’ he said carefully. ‘It all happened very suddenly. I suppose I was sort of in shock afterwards, not thinking straight. Are you at your parents’?’

  She sighed as if suddenly very tired. ‘Yes. No, the police were good. There were quite a few of us there – people from the flats, I mean. You know old Mrs Taylor from downstairs?’

  ‘Sure.’ They fed her cats when she went to visit her grandchildren in Coventry.

  ‘She heard me talking with the policewoman about the missing persons report and she said she’d been out doing her shopping and seen you walking home from the station in the middle of the afternoon, if that helped.’ An ice-age of silence stretched out after her words. Andy hadn’t even noticed the old dear. ‘She also said that you were with a girl. I said yes, thank you, that really helped a lot.

  ‘Who is she, Andy?’

  There was that feeling again, of being both present and absent at the same time, of being a thousand miles away inside his own head, hearing himself talk without the conscious ac
t of speech.

  ‘There’s nothing I can tell you that you would believe or understand,’ he found himself saying.

  ‘Oh I don’t know. Quite a few things are starting to make a lot of sense now. How about you try telling the truth for once?’ She was angry and close to tears now, but unlike Bex, who wept out of rage and frustration, this was just plain fear – fear of being left alone, fear of a love’s death – and he suddenly felt both desperately sorry for her and more appallingly impotent than ever in his life. ‘Andy, are you having some kind of…’ she couldn’t bring herself to say it, so whispered: ‘…breakdown?’

  The truth? If he had a clue, he just might. His hollow laugh echoed in the shabby phonebooth. ‘No, I’m not going mad.’

  It was almost funny – he’d called with the intention of trying to patch things up but, as ever, events were forcing him into almost precisely the opposite course of action. If he told her the truth she would think he was losing his mind, which might lay to rest her fear that he was cheating on her, but the flip-side was that she would then be forever living with the false hope that he would one day get ‘better’, and that was a lie which he wouldn’t inflict on her. Better that she hate him for being a shit than pine for him as a lunatic. ‘What’s happening is weird, but it’s real.’

  ‘Well then, I’m sorry,’ she said fiercely, ‘but I can’t do this.’

  ‘Okay.’ Even though it was everything but okay.

  ‘I’ve got to get back to some kind of normality. This is all getting…’

  ‘…just way out of hand. I know.’

  ‘Goodbye, Andy.’

  ‘Goodbye, Laura.’

  He hung up the phone and walked back to Moon Grove, where Bex was waiting for him.

  ***

  By the time that Andy returned, Walter was finishing the last of his sigils in multicoloured spraypaint on the surface of the road outside Moon Grove. It was the last of four, each set at the cardinal compass points in a circle around the house, and its intricate knotted design was fully nine feet wide.

  Those inside the circle saw hazy wisps of white mist begin to seep out of the ground around its circumference. They drifted in a slow clockwise rotation, gradually thickening like strands of candy-floss as the diverted ley energy precipitated water vapour out of the damp air, and hardening in opacity until a blank white wall surrounded everything: the house, the vegetable gardens, chicken coops, greenhouses, toolsheds, and a curving slice of tarmac at the front.

  The Narrowfolk children ooh-ed and aah-ed, and immediately wanted to run off and play hide-and-seek in it. Their parents held them tightly, warning them again, as they so often had, that if you strayed out, you would never find your way back in.

  The adults regarded the blank white wall with a mixture of relief and dread. On the one hand they would now be safe while the earth-ch’i was in spate over the midwinter solstice, and the malice of the Holly King raged. On the other, it seemed to only accentuate the danger of the outside world, now that it could not be seen.

  Anybody standing outside the circle when Walter completed his sigils would not have noticed anything quite so dramatic. It would have seemed like a trick of the eye, or the product of an overtired brain, because one second the house and its grounds were there, and the next second it simply wasn’t.

  4 Laura

  When the front doorbell rang, Laura was sitting at her mother’s glossy ten-seater dining table with a drift of paperwork arrayed before her like the world’s biggest game of solitaire.

  She was appraising, prioritising, planning. School had let her end the term early – it was only Christmas word games and DVDs at this time of year, anyway, which anybody could cover – but after a morning of drifting aimlessly through the immaculately vacuumed expanse of her parents’ home, being made endless cups of tea and enduring the terrible sympathy of a woman who had never really believed that her daughter was capable of making her own decisions (but, heaven forbid, would never actually say so) – well, being busy was what kept Laura going.

  The insurance claim forms were a lifeline, and the police reports helped her sleep at night. Strangely, working through the minutiae of detail about the incident with the flat helped her to keep at bay the truth of what had really happened.

  It definitely helped her to stop thinking about Andy.

  Her father was at the office, and her mother was at a charity lunch, or possibly a satanic black mass, so she answered the door herself, despite the fact that company was the last thing she wanted. She could no more disobey the manners that had been bred into her than she could change the colour of her eyes.

  ‘Excuse me, miss, but are you Laura Bishop?’ The man was large, fortysomething, with thinning, close-cropped hair and a politely neutral expression.

  ‘Yes? Are you from the police?’

  ‘In a roundabout sort of way, yes, I suppose so. My name is Penrose; I’m working with Detective Sergeant Fallon. I was wondering actually if I might have a word with Andrew Sumner, if he’s in?’

  She looked at him. ‘You have got to be joking.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You’re not, are you?’ Laura was incredulous. ‘Are you people really this incompetent? Last night I spent an hour having a nice police-woman explain to me very patiently how they can’t file a missing person’s report unless he’s been gone for a week, and have I tried ringing around his friends and relatives? Well I tried that – it didn’t take very long, as it happens – and no, they haven’t seen him, and now you’re here asking the same stupid questions! Who are you, Mr Penrose, and what do you want?’

  Deciding to take a risk, he asked ‘How much has Andy told you about his childhood?’

  It would have been so easy to just shut the door in his face. Far easier to accept the simple and painful truth that Andy no longer loved her, had cheated on her, and left. Andy had always said that he had no interest in his birth parents, and as far as she knew had never made any attempts to find them, saying that he was the child of Beth and Pete Sumner, and everything else was just an accident of genetics. She was inclined to hold him to that, to the responsibility for his actions as a grown-up, and childhood influences be damned. She believed in actions, not excuses – but that was her mother talking.

  ‘I think you should probably come in,’ she said and opened the door wide.

  ***

  Rosey sipped his tea and got Laura to tell him everything he needed to know by using one of the oldest and most effective techniques which his younger colleagues, with their modern methods of policing and counselling, seemed to have forgotten: that of keeping his mouth firmly shut.

  He looked around the kitchen, impressed despite himself. The leafy upper-middle-class suburbs of Solihull were way beyond his normal stamping grounds; most of the ground floor of his own house would have fit in this room. It must have taken a lot of guts for Laura Bishop to move into a two-bedroom flat on the outskirts of Northfield with her drop-out boyfriend – or so her parents would have seen it. Father was most probably something in finance, and Mother was clearly a lady who lunched. The flat had been a young woman’s fierce declaration of independence from her well-heeled family, and coming home had almost certainly been seen as a gesture of defeat, though never acknowledged as such.

  He wondered how the engagement had been received in the first place, whether there had been earnest conversations about the young man’s suitability, his prospects, and he wondered especially how Andy’s disappearance was being taken. Not well, he suspected. She would be defending him to the hilt as part of herself and her own life. There would have been arguments before it happened; things that she was keeping from parents and the rest of the world, as a defence against the I-told-you-so’s which would strip her right back down to being a little girl again.

  ‘Sorry about earlier,’ she said, picking up the th
read of her thoughts. ‘The last twenty-four hours have been ever so slightly stressful. Did you say you were retired?’

  ‘Pensioned off. Bad back.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Not very dramatic, I’m afraid.’

  ‘It’s just that, and I don’t want to be impolite, but if you’re not on active duty, or, you know, whatever the word is…’

  ‘Why am I here?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  He hesitated, unsure of how much to tell her – or, more precisely, unsure of how much Andy had already told her. ‘I can tell you why I’m not here,’ he said. ‘I’m not investigating a crime; I’m not interested in getting Andy in trouble.’

  ‘Well that’s something of a relief.’

  ‘I suppose you could say I’m something like an old friend of the family.’ Half-truths, the most credible kind of lie. ‘I feel like I’m wasting your time, really. Typical of my bad timing to try and get back in touch the day after this happens to you. Stupid coincidence.’

  ‘Andy had – has – this theory about coincidences. He says that events follow patterns like a grain in wood, and if you follow the coincidences – work with the grain rather than against it – life goes a lot more smoothly for you. I’m sorry, that probably sounds stupid to you.’

  ‘When I was in uniform, I saw so much random stupidity and coincidence that I’d have agreed with his theory. But then I have a friend who’s been a Detective Sergeant for a while now, and his whole ability to do his job relies on there being reasons for everything and connections between things, no matter how vague or deeply buried they are.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Better minds than thee and me, eh?’

  Very quietly he added: ‘I think that it doesn’t matter which way you look at it. I think the important thing is that a person takes responsibility for their own actions, don’t you?’