The Concrete Grove

by Gary McMahon

Lana turned towards the front of the car, the direction in which the expletive had come from. Banjo was now weaving so violently that he looked like he might fall down at any minute. His feet remained fixed on the ground but he was now bending forward at the waist, as if performing a weird little dance. He was thin, snake-hipped, and able to manage a wide range of movement. It looked strange, like the beginning of some drug-fuelled urban dance recital. His fingers moved like pincers. He had long, dirty nails. They looked sharp as knives.

  “Fuck!” He screamed the word this time, white foam flecking his lips. “Gerroff me!” His face was pale, bloodless, and his lips had peeled back from his teeth to give him a feral expression. “Fnugh!” Speech was deserting him; his throat was convulsing too violently to produce language. Lana watched in fascination as his Adam’s apple bobbed like a ping-pong ball caught in a python’s gut.

  “Oh, shit. Get in the car.” She glanced at Hailey, who by now had moved around to the other side of the vehicle. She was closer to Banjo than any of them. “Get in, Hailey. Get in now.”

  “Wait a second, Mum. We should call an ambulance, or something.”

  Banjo leapt, pushing himself forward like a giant cat attacking its prey. His lower body slammed into the bodywork, and he rolled along the car’s left wing. This gave Hailey enough time to back-pedal, and Tom moved his body between her and the gibbering junkie. He stood firm, hands clenched into tight fists.

  “Hailey!” Lana ran to her daughter, pulling her away from the car. She fumbled inside her purse for her mobile phone and thumbed the emergency number.

  “Just stay back,” said Tom. “Keep the fuck away.” He took a single step backwards, stumbling slightly.

  Banjo was wailing now, like a baby demanding food. His mouth was lathered in foam; his eyes were weeping blood. His hands were still raised in front of his face, and he turned his palms inward, twisting his thin fingers into hooks. Then, still moaning wordlessly, he began to claw at his cheeks with those long, guitar-picking fingernails.

  “Oh my God. Do something. Shit, do something!” Hailey’s voice had risen to such a high pitch that it sounded like she was singing.

  Lana screamed into the phone: “Grove Court! There’s a man killing himself, send help, now!” The operator tried to calm her with words she could barely even hear, and she just yelled her request over and over again in the hope that it would be answered. “Send someone now!”

  Everything seemed to freeze apart from Banjo, and what he was doing. The others just stood there and stared, incapable of anything but watching the horror as it happened.

  Banjo’s fingernails had gone in deep. Lana saw flashes of white tooth or skull amid the red, and the man’s cheeks already hung from his face in fine tatters, like thin slices of Parma ham. He had stopped crying and worked now in silence, raking the loosened flesh away from muscle, the thick muscle away from bone.

  The man slumped to his knees, his hands still working furiously at his ruined face, as if controlled by an external force. His fingers pushed through into his oral cavity; Lana could see them wriggling in there when he opened his mouth in a gurgling scream. He tore away the flesh, hooking his bottom lip between finger and thumb and tugging it like a fattened maggot from a feast of rotten fruit. By the time the sirens were audible, wailing across the estate like a bunch of harpies, he had taken off half of his face.

  Lana didn’t think it was possible to cause this much damage to your own body without losing consciousness, but somehow the fucked-up drug-head had managed it.

  When the ambulance pulled up at the kerb and ejected two paramedics from its rear doors, Banjo was slumped against the side of the car and still pulling away the flesh directly under his chin. Blood decorated his shirt like a bad dye job. His legs twitched against the tarmac, his shoes slapped the kerb. His features were obscured by the dangling raw-meat mask he now wore. He had stopped screaming and worked in a strange, almost formal silence.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THEIR TRIP WAS delayed, but they were determined to continue with their plans. The ambulance crew took away the injured and sedated man, strapping him to a gurney, and they were told to wait until the police arrived. There was not much to say when the officers questioned them, just a précised version of the facts, and they were asked to call in at the local station as soon as it was convenient to give a formal statement.

  Nobody seemed to care that much about Banjo; the emergency personnel went about their business in a calm, detached manner. He was just another junkie who’d lost his mind, overdosing on cheap smack, and turned his emotions inward to cut himself.

  The area was full of people just like him, and the police seemed unimpressed even by the manner in which Banjo had done himself harm. They’d seen it all before. It was part of the job, another aspect of their day-to-day existence: self-harming junkies, street drugs, and common-or-garden madness. Just one aspect in a grim parade of extremity, the same as every other event they were trained to deal with.

  “Are you sure you still want to do this?” Tom glanced into the rear-view mirror as he drove out of the estate. He knew what he wanted to hear, but didn’t want to prompt a reply she was reluctant to give.

  Lana sat with her arms around Hailey’s shoulders, but the girl remained oddly unmoved by the experience. “What do you think, honey? Shall we still go, or would you prefer to go home?”

  Hailey shook her head. “We’ll go. What have we got to go back for? There’ll be blood on the road and questions and gossip from the neighbours. I’d rather stick to our plans.”

  “Only if you’re sure, baby.” Lana stroked her daughter’s hair. Her eyes remained locked on Tom’s in the mirror. Her lips formed a tight line across the bottom of her face, as if underlining the event.

  “He was just a drugged-up loser, Mum. Who cares?”

  Lana’s hand stopped moving on Hailey’s scalp. “Okay, honey.” She stared at Tom.

  Tom nodded. “So we continue, then: to Hadrian’s Wall. It might do us all a bit of good, actually, just to get away from all that madness back there.”

  “Can we have music on? Please?” Hailey was sitting up straight. She’d folded her arms across her chest and moved away from her mother, pressing her body against the inside of the door. She seemed to have forgotten about the horror they had witnessed.

  “Yeah. Sure we can.” Tom reached out and turned on the radio. He noted that his hands were shaking, even as he turned the dial. The radio was tuned to a local station; they were playing a pop tune he vaguely recognised from a television commercial. He wasn’t sure what kind of product the ad was selling, but he knew most of the words to the song’s hideously catchy chorus.

  “That’s good. Thanks.” Hailey smiled as she looked out of the side window. Her eyes looked empty, bereft of anything but the reflection of daylight.

  He drove west, towards Hexham, taking the A69 – a road which followed the route of Hadrian’s Wall. Green fields were pocked with strange pools of light and shadow. Small tumbledown stone walls barricaded dirty sheep and kept them from the roadside. The occasional fell walker waved as they drove by, raising red-cagouled arms to indicate some kind of bond they did not share. Tom drove in silence until they reached the signs for a place called Greenhead, where he turned off the main road and followed the signs for the Hadrian’s Wall Path.

  Tom parked the car on a patch of gravel. The sky was turning dark, clouds were bloated and shuffling. A few other people – pensioners, on a day out – were milling around, putting on or taking off their walking boots, sorting out rucksacks and packed lunches.

  “I brought a picnic,” said Lana. She was buttoning her coat against the chill.

  Tom nodded. “That’s nice. I’m sorry, the weather’s turning bad, and that thing back at the estate... It seems like something doesn’t want us to have a good time today.”

  Hailey was walking away, towards a low fence. She sat down on the top bar and stared back along the road.

  Lana moved towards
Tom, placing her hand on his arm. “I want us to have a good time,” she said. “What happened earlier doesn’t matter. It’s what we did yesterday that really counts.”

  Tom placed his hand over hers. She was warm, and her long, thin fingers moved against his, rubbing his thumb. “I want us to enjoy this, too,” he said. “All of it.” The sky churned above them. A large bird – black, and with a huge wing span – flew over their heads, cawing loudly. It was like an omen, but Tom refused to let its message inside his head.

  “Come on, let’s go for that walk.” She squeezed his hand, and he felt brittle, like calcified bone. If he stopped for even a moment to think about all of this, he might snap into a million pieces, his skeleton shattering and the broken bones spilling across the hills and dales.

  They walked together to the spot where Hailey was sitting, her legs tucked up under her bottom and her hands pressed flat against the wooden fence. “Come on, we’re going to work up an appetite.” Lana brushed her fingers across Hailey’s cheek, and the girl flinched away before getting to her feet and following them across the flat, wet grass.

  They crossed the fence using a wooden stile, and headed up a long, gradual rise. The gravel path soon became a hard-packed dirt trail, and the bushes and trees thinned out the higher they climbed. Scrawny lone trees stood like sentinels, surrounded only by flat stretches of grass. Old rock falls had created shallow caves, and the roots of old trees clasped the stone walls of these strange natural constructions.

  Soon they reached the tip of the hill, and went through a gate to follow part of a bridle path. As they turned to follow the tip of the rise, the partial remnants of the great Roman wall came into view.

  The uneven stone spine of the wall stretched away from them, dipping into small valleys and then rising to rocky peaks. The route was no longer steep, but it did undulate dramatically, so that the wall itself resembled the sculpture of some great stone serpent. Tom recalled with passing fondness the legend of the Lambton Worm, and the old folk song they used to sing at school when he was a small boy:

  But the worm got fat an’ grewed an’ grewed,

  An’ grewed an aaful size;

  He’d greet big teeth, a greet big gob,

  An greet big goggly eyes

  This particular worm, the one whose back they were following across the ancient landscape, hoping that it might lead them to a glimpse of something better than they already had, was made of stone. But no, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t the wall that would lead them to better things, it was their own ambition, and the strength of any plans they made.

  “We learned about this at school, in Mr. Benson’s class.” Hailey had drawn level with them. Her eyes were still blank, dreamy, but she seemed a little more focused than before.

  “What did you learn?” Tom thought that a mellow discussion about the history of the place might divert her mind from darker thoughts, and even help him to stop thinking about his increasingly uncertain future.

  “Well, Emperor Hadrian built the wall. I think it was in AD 122, at least that’s when he started. It took – I think it was six years to build.”

  “Well remembered,” said Tom. Lana gripped his hand. “Anything else?”

  “It was built as a fortification to keep out trouble from Scotland.” She chewed on her lower lip between sentences, as if lost in thought. “But it was also meant as a symbol of Roman power, according to Mr. Benson. He reckons it was like the Romans flexing their muscles. Telling everyone else not under Roman rule to keep back, or they’d get a good kicking.”

  Tom laughed. “Well, yes, that’s a fair point. The Romans certainly knew how to give folk a good kicking.”

  “Something else, as well: we read this article from a science magazine, and apparently back in the Sixties someone dug up a portion of the wall and found human bones. Baby bones. Newborn children were buried alive under the foundations as a sacrifice, to protect the wall.”

  “Jesus, Hailey… do we really need to talk about that?” Lana shook her head. “What the hell gets into your head, girl? Sometimes, I just don’t think I know you at all.”

  Hailey’s voice turned petulant, the tone low and uneven. “It was in the magazine. I didn’t make it up.”

  “Okay, that’s actually very interesting.” Tom turned to face them, walking backwards across the stony ground and trying to avert the threatened row. “The Romans were a pretty nasty bunch, and they had very demanding gods.” Something caught his eye. A small, almost dainty movement far behind them, somewhere back along the route they had taken. It looked like a scrap of white sheet, or perhaps a piece of paper, flapping in the wind. Tom stared back along the trail, but nothing else moved. Even the hikers they’d seen in the car park were absent.

  “What is it?” Lana looked in the same direction, and then at Tom. “Are you okay?”

  Tom nodded. “Yes, fine. I just thought… I dunno. Something just spooked me.”

  “Yeah,” said Lana. “Probably all this talk of dead babies. So I think that’s enough of that.” She glared at Hailey, who continued walking at a slow pace, watching the ground at her feet.

  They followed the relatively straight line of the wall, clambering over small rocky outcroppings and plodding up and down the sudden dips and rises. In places the grass was so worn that it looked bald, as if transparent ice were forming and hardening the ground. The air was chilly – but not cold enough to support the idea of snow – and the slight breeze was stirring, becoming stronger.

  Tom kept glancing over his shoulder, trying to catch sight of whatever he had spotted moments before. Each time he turned his head, something twitched at the edge of his vision. But by the time he had focused on the location, there was no longer anything to be seen. It was as if something were teasing him, drawing his attention before ducking back out of sight. The thought unnerved him, and he remembered the weird visions he’d been having lately: the dog with a boy’s face, a figure that may or may not be a visual echo of his dead father’s abuse.

  “How about we stop for a bite to eat?” Lana pressed her body against him. It was warm, firm, and reminded him of reality rather than stupid dreams and visions.

  “That would be good. Hailey – what do you think?”

  “Whatever.” The girl stopped and sat down on a large, damp rock that was sticking out of the ground like a giant’s tooth. She picked up a twig and started stripping the bark, rolling it off between her fingers like the rind of some strange fruit.

  Lana put the cooler bag on the ground and sat on a nearby cluster of stones. Slowly she began to take items out of the bag: a small checked blanket, bags of sandwiches, a thermos flask filled with what Tom assumed must be coffee. She lined up these things neatly, as if it were important that everything was just right.

  “Can I help?” Tom made a move to sit down beside her, but she glanced up and shook her head.

  “It’s fine,” said Lana. “Be done in a minute. The grass is still a bit wet, but it’ll be okay if we stay on these rocks.”

  The sky was now grey as slate, and the dense clouds resembled a layer of dull, dirty plaster across the ceiling of the world. Tom stared upwards, trying to make out the sun behind the billowing mayhem. He saw glints, tiny fragments of brightness, but they were swallowed instantly. “Hope it doesn’t piss it down,” he said. And when nobody answered, he trudged over the grass towards a low section of the wall.

  The stone was old, chipped, and light grey in colour. It poked up above the grass like a giant fossilised spine. He approached the ruin, glancing along it in the direction they’d been heading. Then, as his hand pressed against the cold stone, he looked the other way, trying to pick out the route they had come along.

  Something shifted in the grey air, partly obscured by the dimness and the distance. It was a mere flicker, like the sudden twitch of a fish’s tail twisting and vanishing into deep, debris-filled waters. The motion filled him with a heavy sense of dread, and he wished that he had not seen it.

  Tom
kept looking at the same spot, but the movement failed to reoccur, and nothing solid appeared out of the dull, heavy air.

  He felt a weight pressing down on him, as if the air above him were turning to stone, like the wall, like the attitudes of the people on that damned estate. His shoulders began to ache from the imaginary burden, and if felt as if he were being pushed down into another world – one that existed either directly beneath or alongside this one. He ran the palm of his hand across his forehead and it came away damp. The sweat was cold, like the perspiration from someone suffering a fever. His vision burred; the churning air far ahead of him shimmered with the promise of more movement.

  “Who’s there?” he whispered the words, afraid to speak them louder.

  Then, fading into existence like a slow-dissolve image on a cinema screen, something took shape a few hundred yards down the track. It hovered in the air, twisting and bucking, filled with an energy that was both frightening and invigorating. It seemed to Tom that he was watching many hands, chopping, punching, and picking at the substance of the air, as if trying to use those small, condensed acts of violence to break through the barriers of reality.

  “Who?” Again, it was a whisper. He didn’t want Lana to hear.

  The hands darted like birds; they opened like wings and then folded shut again, forming solid fists that pummelled the air. Tom heard their impact in his mind, but he knew that the sound was not audible in the real world. Only in that place he had felt shifting beneath and around him, that one that was still trying to open up and pull him in.

  He was trapped here, mute and helpless before those rampaging fists – the fists that were now moving closer to him, seeking him out, drawn to his anxiety.

  It was like a pocket or envelope of air had closed around those barely visible fists, and they were trying to fight their way out. They were large, bony and monstrous: bigger than life, yet so much less than living. He saw now that there were scores of them, packed in tight like creatures caught up in gossamer netting.