The Narrows

by James Brogden

  ‘I saw what happened to your flat,’ Rosey replied conversationally, ‘If you like, I think I can probably help you work out why it happened and what’s going on.’

  Andy simply laughed as he began to retreat across the rubble to where Lark was waiting for him.

  ‘Please understand,’ Rosey pressed, ‘I haven’t been sent by anyone. I’m not with the police or social services or anything like that. I don’t want anything from you. I really just came to see…’ he laughed. ‘It’s going to sound stupid.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The plain truth of the matter, Andy, is that I’ve just been looking for you to make sure you’re alright.’

  Andy hesitated at that. ‘But you don’t know me from Adam.’

  ‘That’s true. Although we did meet once, a very long time ago.’

  ‘When?’

  Rosey glanced around, taking in the dereliction; the littered streets and lurking shadows. ‘With all due respect,’ he said, ‘I don’t really think this is the best time and place, do you?’

  Andy conceded the point. ‘I can’t take you back in with me, though,’ he added. ‘The others would kill me.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Rosey nodded, still careful not to push his luck. ‘I can always come back. I can meet you here any time you like.’

  Behind him in the empty street, he’d left his car with the engine running to keep the heater going, and its side-lights on so that he could better see to treat the girl’s cuts. Now, suddenly, the engine coughed and died, while the lights faded to a sickly amber colour.

  ‘Fuck me, but I love family reunions,’ called Carling from the darkened mouth of the cul-de-sac. ‘It almost makes me not want to kill every last one of you.’

  At that, the shadows behind him surged into life.

  Humped and glistening skavags boiled past him, filling the street from one side to the other just as their weird ululating cries looped upwards, echoing between the blank rooftops and boarded up windows.

  ‘Fetch that one!’ Carling’s roar rose over the din, and his outflung arm pointed at Andy. ‘Kill the others!’ And he laughed with utter delight. This was what he was made for.

  Rosey stayed only long enough to see a pack of creatures which defied reason tearing the doors and wheels off his Astra before turning to chase after Andy and Lark, who were both running for their lives back across the vacant lot. He caught up with them as they scrabbled through the overgrown bushes and hid against the sagging wooden fence at the very rear.

  The skavags bounded across the pavement and up into the rubble. It did not matter to them that their prey had found cover; their sense of smell was acute. Carling, striding behind, shared snatch-glimpses of sensation with the more sentient of them, and felt an upwelling of pride as he watched his pack at work.

  ‘Andy,’ panted Rosey, ‘those things…’

  ‘I know. Shut up – I’m trying to think.’

  ‘Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast,’ suggested Lark, her eyes wide in a pale, blood-streaked face.

  ‘It’s okay. I’ve done this before. Sort of.’

  ‘Sort of?’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘Andy, what are those things?’

  But he couldn’t hear them any more. ‘Big picture, got to see the big picture,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Straight across, cutting the lines, not such a good idea. Perpendicularity sucks, we know this. It’s basically a big spirally, circley barrier thing, so let’s go with that. Of course – of course!’

  He grabbed Rosey and Lark, grinning like a madman. ‘It’s the Pattern – the grain of the universe. Cut across the grain and you get splinters, don’t you? Go with it and you can carve any shape you want!’

  The skavags, who had slowed as they sniffed out the cowering humans, were nevertheless halfway across the lot. Rosey decided to take matters into his own hands – or rather feet – and started to kick at the fence panels behind him. They were rotten and quickly began to collapse.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Lark was close to becoming hysterical. ‘We’ve got to get out of here!’

  ‘Exactly! We’ve got to go around, not through! Around the edge! Follow the spiral! That’s the way back in!’

  ‘Go back out there? You’re insane!’

  The fence panel collapsed in splinters, and Rosey took each of them by an arm. ‘Right, you two,’ he ordered. ‘Out. Now.’

  ‘No!’ Andy twisted free. ‘We can’t outrun them. We have to go out and around. I know it doesn’t make sense but it’s the only way. You have to trust me. And we have to go now!’

  Rosey shook his head firmly. ‘Not going to happen. You’re crazy, lad. Let’s go.’ He started to push Lark through the hole in the fence.

  ‘NO!’ Sudden fire burst from Andy’s fist where it still gripped the iron stake, and the other two flinched away. The same fury which had seized him first on Gramma’s boat and then again when he’d killed the skavag in his kitchen was burning through him once more. Why did nobody ever listen to him? Why must he always be in the wrong? Traceries of blue fire crawled along the stake and crackled from each end with the smell of thunderstorms.

  The skavags, only yards away, felt the power in his anger and paused, milling uncertainly. Carling sensed it through them and didn’t like it. Something was amiss.

  ‘I don’t know who you are,’ Andy growled, ‘and I couldn’t give a toss. Go wherever the hell you like; you’re no concern of mine.’ He turned to Lark. ‘But you are. I’m taking you home.’

  He grabbed her hand and they ran.

  After a moment’s agonised indecision, glancing through the hole in the fence to the escape offered there, Rosey followed.

  The three of them burst from the bushes right into a knot of skavags, who scattered in alarm. Andy laid about wildly with the stake, lacking any kind of skill, hitting entirely through luck. Bright blue-white detonations flashed where he hit them. To their eyes, already half-blinded by the glare of watery midwinter daylight, he appeared unbearably incandescent, and for a brief second they fell back.

  ‘No, you fuckers!’ screamed Carling. ‘Kill them! Tear them apart!’

  Then the skavags’ terror of their master caught hold once more and they swarmed forward across the open ground towards the running figures. His prey must have lost their senses, because they seemed to be trying to escape by the supremely stupid method of just doubling back around the outside. They were heading almost straight towards him. He changed direction to intercept them, his momentary worry eclipsed by the triumphant joy of imminent blood-letting.

  That moment’s hesitation had been enough for Andy to cover maybe a quarter of the lot’s perimeter, and even though he could see that he was heading right for where the press of creatures was thickest, each step took him not just forward but fractionally deeper, following the curving track of ley energy which Walter had bent to hide Moon Grove.

  He just had time for a sudden nauseating doubt to twist his guts (I’ve killed us oh shit oh christ I’ve killed us) and then he was surrounded by a nightmare of flailing claws and tooth-filled muzzles. But even as they tore at him they were little more than feeble, futile clutches at his clothes, and the howls were getting fainter as the air thickened and brightened. There was that sensation again of being buffeted by cyclonic winds – except this time they were coming from behind, because he was following their track instead of cutting across it – and then the three of them were stumbling into the bland sanctuary brightness of Moon Grove.

  9 Erosion

  The closest thing that the Grove had to an infirmary was the kitchen – not because it was any more hygienic, simply that, due to the Kitchen Tarts’ methods of cookery, it was where most of the cuts, burns and minor injuries occurred.

  Rosey sat on a stool before a huge Aga stove which seemed to be p
roviding heat for the entire building, while Kerrie cleaned up his wounds with iodine and a complete lack of sympathy for his hisses of pain. His hesitation in following Andy and Lark had cost him a row of shallow but painful claw wounds down his left side.

  ‘Sure, and you’re just a big baby,’ she tutted and launched into a lecture on the deficiencies of men in general – the idiocy of the young and the feeblemindedness of the older ones for letting them get away with it in the first place. It didn’t seem to matter to her that Rosey was a complete stranger; she treated him with the same disdain as she did everybody else. But the look she gave Andy as she packed away was clear: your guest, your mess.

  Mess. Pardon his French but what a fucking understatement that was turning out to be.

  The house was buzzing as news of Andy’s return evolved from rumour to gossip and then hotly contested debate all in a matter of minutes. Kerrie had shooed the crowds out of the kitchen in short order, and Lark was currently the centre of attention out in the dining room, but it was only a matter of time before Walter appeared, and then the really awkward questions would begin.

  She stood looking at them both, arms folded over a disapproving bosom.

  ‘You’ve got five minutes,’ she said. ‘And if my mince pies burn, you’ll be in the next lot.’

  She swept out, into the clamour of a dozen shouted conversations.

  Andy sighed and fidgeted with the dressings on his hands. ‘So. You came with something to tell me, but I’m sort of thinking you probably have more questions now, right?’

  ‘Where do I start?’ Rosey laughed and immediately regretted it. There was a slight edge of hysteria to the sound which he didn’t like at all.

  Andy shrugged it off. He didn’t want this conversation, or this man’s questions. He just wanted him gone. ‘Sorry, but no. Any answers I could give you would just suck you in deeper, and you really don’t want that. Believe it or not, I’m trying to do you a favour. I told you not to follow me.’

  ‘Not that I had much choice,’ Rosey pointed out, ticked off by the boy’s attitude.

  ‘A less sympathetic soul might suggest that it was your own bloody stupid fault for butting in where you weren’t wanted, but who am I to judge? I think I know what you’ve come to tell me, and sorry, but I’m not interested.’

  ‘Due respect son, but I don’t think you have the first idea why I’m here.’

  ‘Really? Try this, then. You’re from NORCAP – the adoption people. Someone’s come forward and said that she’s my birth-mother and wants to get in touch, so you’ve come to make First Contact. Well you can forget it.

  ‘I went through all of this when I was eighteen. Mum and Dad were always completely open with me about being adopted, so there was no big soap opera moment or, you know, ‘I am your father, Luke’ kind of thing. But still, it had to be done, so I phoned your people and they told me that there were no details of my birth parents. None at all. Hard enough being adopted normally, whatever that means, but a foundling? No chance. I hate that word, anyway. Makes me think I should be wearing a big floppy cap and dancing around singing ‘Food, Glorious Food’ or some such bollocks.

  ‘So anyway, I did the very-angry-young-man thing for a year or two, helped along by a fair amount of recreational drugs and general silliness involving completely buggering up college, before I finally came to the realisation that it didn’t matter. It just didn’t matter. I am the person I am not because of whose DNA I carry but because of what I’ve done and how I’ve been raised – which, incidentally, was by two fantastic people who are just Mum and Dad. They’re not ‘foster’ or ‘adopted’ or anything. They’re just my folks. And I’m not in the market for any more.’

  In the strained silence that followed it occurred to Rosey that Andy had a lot of steam to blow off about something which he claimed to be reconciled with, and almost felt apologetic about having to let him down. ‘I don’t know who NORCAP are,’ he admitted, ‘or what they do. I’m not from them. Sorry.’

  ‘So…’ Andy shoved his chair aside in angry confusion and stalked to the other side of the kitchen where he stood with his arms folded tightly. ‘What, exactly? You said we’d met before, a long time ago. What’s this all about?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t want me butting in.’

  ‘I don’t. But…’ Andy floundered. ‘You followed me.’

  ‘Yes, well. Obviously the situation is a lot more complicated than I thought,’ Rosey replied, picking at his dressings thoughtfully. He was seized with a sudden and inexplicable conviction that there was something incredibly important that he’d forgotten. It felt like being watched, or followed, and it made him nervous. Made him want to keep his mouth shut until he could better measure the consequences of anything he said. ‘I think I’m going to take your advice for now and keep my nose out of things. If you don’t want to explain anything about where we are or what those things were, then that’s fine by me. I’ll pick it up as I go along.’

  Rosey never knew what Andy’s response to this might have been, because at that moment the kitchen door swung open, and Walter strode into the room like a branch of forked, grey lightning.

  ‘Sumner,’ he demanded, ‘I need to know everything about what you did just now.’

  Then he saw Rosey, and his face crumpled in a look of shocked horror so sudden it was like watching something age a thousand years in timelapse photography. His mouth worked soundlessly, like a toothless old man chewing something tough and bitter.

  For some reason, Rosey wasn’t surprised at all. Walter Lyttleton was older than the last time he’d seen him by the best part of two decades, and the trenchcoat was long gone, but he was undeniably the same lanky streak of child-molesting piss he’d choked half to death all those years ago.

  ‘Well isn’t this a nice coincidence,’ Rosey observed.

  ***

  Carling forced one foot in front of the other as he stumbled through the Fane, scoured blind and deaf by its relentless battering. It tore at his back and screamed through his head, eroding coherent thought and leaving nothing but the single-minded bedrock of his predatory rage. He would bring Sumner to ground or die in the hunt, and that was just fine.

  It was preferable to whatever Barber would do to him for having lost the fucker a third time.

  He had no idea how long he’d been walking or how long there might be to go, but if it didn’t end soon, the Fane would kill him itself and solve everybody’s problems. He’d watched the two skavags which had been close enough to attack Penrose lope in after him – close enough to be overcome by their hunting instincts but too far away to follow with any accuracy, and as they plunged deeper, he saw the Fane catch them and tear them apart in long, shrieking streamers of flesh.

  But the blood-taste of Andy Sumner was strong; Carling was close enough to track him almost exactly, yet even so the unevenness of the ground and the squalling ley energy made him miss his step every now and then, and the Fane would snatch at the very substance of him.

  It was not, strictly speaking, a physical force – it didn’t scour the ground; it flung up neither dust nor debris, and the weeds which he moved past were completely unbent by it. However, he was at a level of the world where there was no clear distinction any more between the physical and the immaterial – and it felt pretty damned solid to him. It was quite literally eroding him.

  Every time he stumbled it took a little bit more, like a desert statue suffering a thousand years of sandstorms in a few minutes. In a previous life, some teacher had tried to make him learn a poem about a statue in the desert that had been all worn and beaten to shit, and he could remember something about ‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone’ but that was about it. It was funny what came back to you when you were dying, he thought. It got mixed up in his head with snatches of a Nine Inch Nails song which looped it won’t give up it wants me dead god
damn this noise inside my head over and over. If this nightmare didn’t end soon, it was likely that was all that would be left of him: blunt stumps and an endless, circling scream.

  His hair had been the first to go, shredded like smoke. His exposed scalp – and in fact every inch of exposed skin – was now pitted and cratered as the windless hurricane scooped out chunks of his flesh. He had his fingers jammed protectively in his armpits, because the last time he’d looked several of them were quite a bit shorter. Christ alone knew what was happening to his face.

  When he found Sumner, he’d tear the face from his living skull and wear it himself.

  …god damn this noise…wants me dead…

  Unable to see, hear, or sense anything properly beyond the blood of his prey which compelled him forward, Carling retreated into himself. His feet plodded forward on their own, and he entertained himself with fantasies of what he’d do to Sumner when he finally caught him. Then he reminisced over the glories of past violence; all the people he’d fucked up for acts of disrespect real or imagined. He revisited old arguments, thinking up better comebacks and more satisfying humiliations.

  But eventually these too were scoured away by the Fane, until he was nothing more than a knuckled-down thing setting one foot in front of the other, two trunkless legs which had forgotten their destination, and continued to move only from a mute inability to imagine stopping.

  …noise…

  He disappeared into the Fane, erasing himself one step at a time.

  ***

  ‘This is my house,’ said Walter, ‘and my children under threat, so you’ll both sit tight there and listen. There are things you need to hear,’ he directed at Andy, ‘never mind what you do or don’t want to know. If you abandon us, then so be it, but you’ve brought death to my door, and you’ll not leave ignorant of it. As for you, policeman,’ he turned to Penrose. ‘You have no authority here, so please, spare me your self-righteous judgement.’