The Concrete Grove

by Gary McMahon

  As he lay there he pictured Lana, naked. Her soft curves were cupped by shadow, and the visible parts of her skin were almost luminescent. She stroked herself with her fingertips, running a hand across her breasts, down towards her stomach, and then to the dark patch below. A large shadow loomed behind her, stretching like a black sheet around her body…

  Tom reached down and began to fondle himself. His hands were clumsy; there was little response to his self-attention. He tried to masturbate but couldn’t quite sustain enough focus. That shadow – a vast billowing presence behind the imaginary Lana – was too distracting. He knew what the shadow was, what it meant. It was the shape of her debt, a crude representation of what she owed to that man Monty Bright.

  Angry and frustrated, he got out of the bath and stood, dripping wet, before the mirror. His reflection was smiling again, but this time he felt the expression mirrored on his face. The smile was bitter, cynical: there was not a trace of humour evident, just a cruel trace of thwarted desire.

  He grabbed a towel and dried himself off, feeling as if he were tending to someone else – a man who was sick and not completely sane. His last ten years spent as a carer – a person whose sole aim in life was to appease the needs of another – had changed him in many ways, and some of them only ever peeked above the surface during times of great stress or anxiety. Sometimes he viewed the world as a place filled with those needs, and he felt as if he’d been cast adrift in a landscape of pain and disability.

  He put on his night clothes and went back out on to the landing. The house was quiet; he couldn’t even hear the ticking of a clock, or the sound of traffic passing by on the street outside. He glanced at his watch. It was almost 2 AM. Even the night people had quietened down.

  He walked to the top of the stairs and peered down into the dimness. It looked like the darkness was a sea. He imagined creatures swimming down there, in the shadows, perhaps even his wife had floated out of her bed to ride the night-time currents, her mouth gaping and her hands grasping.

  Tom descended, gripping the handrail tightly. He realised that he was tense, perhaps even afraid. His strange experience in the bathroom had wrong-footed him, making him feel as if he and Helen were not alone in the house. He felt as if a stranger was moving through the rooms below, silently examining their belongings, picking up and inspecting the minutiae of their lives and judging them as worthless.

  When he reached the bottom of the stairs he saw the stone wall in the hallway. He knew immediately that it was a portion of Hadrian’s Wall – perhaps even the same section where he’d picnicked with Lana and Hailey. It had emerged from the front wall of the house, near the front door, and looped around the door to return through the same wall on the opposite side, forming a barricade to prevent him leaving.

  I am dreaming after all. So there’s nothing to fear.

  But that was a lie. Everything was a source of fear: terror hid in every corner, and was displayed on every shelf and surface.

  He stared at the crude segment of the wall. It was a surreal image: the arrival of something ancient in his home, the stone dirty and with patches of fungus spotted along its length. He wasn’t afraid of the wall. His feelings towards it were more complex. He experienced a rush of strangeness, a thrill of exhilaration at the sight of the old stone. Then, at a deeper level, he felt honoured that such a vision should present itself to him, a normal man, a struggling husband and potential adulterer. What had he done to deserve this? Why had he been singled out for such a reward?

  Then, as he watched, the section of wall slithered, moving like a great, dry serpent. The old folk rhyme returned to him, and he recited it once again in his head:

  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

  But there were no eyes on this worm. It did not even possess a face. It was a long, shifting portion of the ruined Roman wall, and its presence here was simply an indication of a deeper mystery.

  The wall moved continually now; a moving barrier, blocking his way to the door. He knew it was meant to keep him inside, to hold him hostage. There was a grinding sound, stone upon stone, and he remembered Hailey’s comment about baby bones being buried beneath the foundations.

  “Dreaming,” he said, feeling more awake than he had in days. If this was a dream, then it was a lucid one, and rather than succumb to the logic of the dream he would be required to act, to move freely through the dream and not simply become part of its story.

  The door to Helen’s room was wide open. Darkness bulged from the doorway, pressing through the frame like oil. He watched it for a while, wondering if he should feel more afraid – his fear was slight now, like a vague notion of how people were supposed to react when confronted with the unknowable.

  Without thinking about what he was doing, he began to walk towards Helen’s room. It felt right; part of the dream. He was meant to see inside that room.

  As he drew closer to the open door he began to make out sounds: a soft, smothered grunting noise, like a pig snuffling at a trough; creaking bed springs; a gentle slap-slapping of flesh on flesh.

  It sounded like someone was having sex in there.

  That Man, he thought, wildly. Is it his ghost, returned to finish what he and Helen started? To finally consummate the relationship that was cut short by his death and Helen’s paralysis?

  He stood before the door but could not see inside. The darkness was solid. Slowly, he reached out and pressed the tip of his index finger against it. The darkness bulged inward, like a balloon. Yes, that was it: a huge black balloon. But he was stuck inside the balloon and Helen was on the outside, in the real world.

  Still he was not afraid enough to turn away, and even if he could, there was nowhere to go. The wall was still blocking his exit. He could either continue on, into the room, or return upstairs to confront his rogue reflection.

  He stepped inside the room, his face pressing against the surface of the balloon, stretching the material, forcing it past its elastic limit… and then, with an audible popping sound, he was through and standing on the other side of the darkness.

  The sounds were louder now, unfiltered as they were through that cloying blackness. Helen’s lamp was on, so there was enough light to see what was happening on the bed.

  The bed.

  Helen’s bed.

  The same gathering of fists he’d seen at Hadrian’s Wall was inside the room, hovering above and around Helen’s bed. The fists were huge – each one the size of Tom’s head – and they formed a loose netting around something that was twitching and bucking at their centre. The fingers moved liked birds’ wings, flapping slowly; their motion was odd and slightly nauseating. Then, simultaneously, they all tightened once again into hard fists.

  It was a flock of hands, all gathered above the thing in the bed. A flock? Was that even the right expression? What was the collective noun for fists, anyway? A pummel? A flight?

  No, a flock: that sounded best.

  He was using his frantic, panicked thoughts to delay his reaction to the sight on the bed. He could barely understand it, let alone absorb what he was actually looking at.

  There was a sea cow on the mattress, a floppy grey manatee. It was huge, flabby, and grotesque. The fact of its existence was bad enough, but the juxtaposition of this fat, struggling mammal lying on its belly on Helen’s normal, everyday bed made the image seem even more nightmarish… and Tom knew that he was responsible for this representation of his wife’s inability to move, her utter acceptance of defeat. He always thought of her as a sea cow, and here it was, the metaphor made flesh.

  But it got worse. Much worse.

  Within the enclosure of floating, disembodied fists was a barely formed figure, a large, bulky rendering of a man. The man was naked, and he had his hands on the sea cow’s bulk. He was thrusting himself into the manatee, ravaging it from behind. His hands moved
away from the thing’s plump body, and he began to strike it – slow, hard blows to the sides. Stinging body-shots, just like Tom’s father had done to his mother all those years ago, during the dimly remembered episodes of marital rape.

  The beast writhed and jerked, but it slowly dawned upon Tom that these movements were not an expression of struggle. The animal was participating in the grim, abusive events: its frantic movements were actually spasms of pleasure. The man and the manatee were making love.

  He was witnessing an act of mutual desire, a violent, blasphemous coupling of man and beast.

  The ghost-fists shimmered with motion, rising from the bed. The inchoate figure at their core moved with them, carried by their awkward flight. The manatee tried to flip itself over onto its back, but its weight and the fact that it was out of water, stranded in an unnatural element, made the task all the more difficult. Finally, struggling for air, it gave up the fight and just lay there, sprawling and spent on the bed. But during that brief attempt to turn, Tom had seen its face: Helen’s face, on the body of a slobbering beast.

  “Let it come,” said a voice that sounded familiar. “You’re almost there, but not quite. It’s reaching for you.” The hands parted, creating a shell-like hollow in the air, and Tom’s father stepped out from the fisted enclosure. “It’s reaching out for all of you.”

  His father’s image was degraded, like damp tissue paper: his edges were soft and flaking away as he stood there; his pallor was ghastly. His mouth didn’t move as he spoke, and as Tom glanced down, taking in the full sight of this shoddy spectre, he saw that the man’s form was unfinished. There were no genitals; his sex act with the phantom manatee must have been nothing more than what, as a schoolboy, Tom and his friends had called a ‘dry hump’.

  He tore his gaze from the ghost and looked over at the bed. Helen was herself again, and she was sleeping. Her skin looked slightly grey in colour. The folds of her bare skin glistened with sweat. The horror he had seen, the sight of the insane coupling, was just another phantom: a ghost of a memory mixed with the detritus of his insomniac mind.

  “She used to like it, you know. Your mother.”

  Tom looked back at his dead father. His face was crumpled, a bloodless mass of deconstructed tissue.

  “She enjoyed the pain and humiliation. And then, afterwards, she would go into the bathroom and cut herself.” The figure wobbled slightly, threatening to topple forward, and then righted itself. Flecks of it fell away from the central mass; a slow fall of ghastly snowflakes. “She hated herself for what she saw as unhealthy desires. But I just loved all that dirty sex.” There was laughter, but it seemed to come from all around the room, emerging from every corner. Parts of the apparition’s face slipped away, falling to the ground but vanishing before they reached the carpet.

  “Ectoplasm,” said Tom’s father. “The shit of the spirit world.”

  Tom backed away; a single step.

  His father took an equal step forward. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

  “Then, why?” Tom was surprised at the sound of his own voice. It was stronger than he had expected. “Why are you here? In my dream.”

  “It’s not a dream. Not really.” The figure’s shape was becoming less solid. Whatever kind of matter had formed the likeness of his father, that stuff was now losing its adhesive qualities. “This is the space between dreaming and waking. It’s where the old place exists – the oak grove and whatever lies beyond. There’s a doorway here, and it’s starting to open – just a crack, mind. But it is opening.” The voice had become faint.

  “I don’t understand.”

  His father shook his head. More of it came away, his features sliding off like crumbling meringue from a rotting cake. “There is nothing to understand. You’re there and I’m here. The other place, the one that’s reaching out to you and your new friends, is somewhere else. It’s simple, really. True Creation is always simple. It’s destruction that’s the tricky part.” Again, the smile; the rumpled, degrading smile. “Because nothing can ever be fully destroyed. There’s always traces, detritus, left behind.”

  Then, before Tom had the chance to say anything more, the vision was gone. Small flecks of something white remained on the carpet, like crumbs from a midnight feast. Tom walked over, bent down, and tried to pick them up. They dissolved in his hand.

  “The shit of the spirit world,” he said, quietly. That sounded just about right. It described his father perfectly: the man had only ever been shit, a composite person made of several kinds of human waste. Something better off flushed down the pan.

  Tom stood and walked over to the bed. Helen was sleeping soundly. He adjusted the duvet, tucking her in. Part of him wanted to lean down and kiss her, but another part of him wanted to walk away and never come back. Again, he felt like a man split down the middle.

  “Sorry,” he said, not really knowing what he was apologising for. Then he left the room and closed the door behind him. The snake-like segment of stone wall was no longer there. The darkness had lifted. Everything was normal again, if that word even meant anything now. He suspected that normal was no longer an option; the world had turned, his perception had shifted. That other place, the one he’d been sensing lately, and that his dead father’s bespoke phantom had spoken of, had noticed him, and nothing could ever be remotely normal again.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  IT WAS TIME. It was coming. She could feel it.

  Her belly was swollen, the skin there pulled so taut that it seemed as thin as tissue paper. When she peered down at those areas of her stomach that were visible between her clutching fingers, she could see rapid movement beneath – a frantic motion in her belly, like scrabbling hands. There was no pain; she was beyond that now. All she felt was a strange hunger, a terrible emptiness despite the thing –

  Or things; what if there was more than one? Like twins?

  – that was rapidly filling her stomach.

  Hailey was lying on her bed, staring up at the bedroom ceiling. Her eyes stung. The back of her neck was burning. But still she felt these sensations as an outsider, an observer. Everything that was happening right now was taking place inside her – the external didn’t matter. Her existence had wound tightly around whatever was stirring at her core.

  “Come on,” she whispered, almost cooing the words. “Come on out and see me.” She stroked the mound of her belly, feeling the hot, damp skin shift. “Come out, now.”

  The hands responded by fluttering again. She knew there were no hands in there – not really – but that was how she had now begun to think of the movements within her body: quick-clutching hands, scrabbling around her internal organs.

  The radio was on and voices were debating car crime in Newcastle. It was a late-night phone-in show, one that had won national awards because of its cutting edge approach. The radio was not Hailey’s – all of her stuff had been taken by the men who had come to intimidate her mum while she was out at school. She had found the radio in the bottom drawer in the kitchen. It was an old model, like something out of a film: black plastic and with a single tape deck built-in. Hailey only knew what a tape deck was because she’d seen them in magazines, in features on retro fashion and accessories. Like everyone her age, she listened to downloaded or pirated music on her MP3 Player.

  At least she had done, before those bastards had taken her stuff.

  The pressure on her stomach increased. Whatever was inside was straining to get out.

  Hailey knew from physics lessons at school that there were forces constantly being exerted upon the world, the solar system, even the entire universe; pushing and pulling, acting and counteracting: a delicate balance of forces, both cosmic and prosaic. There were forces everywhere, shaping the very nature of reality with their endless activity.

  But what if there were also forces that were not generated in this world, forces from somewhere else? A place beneath the world she knew. Somewhere with its own physical laws, which acted against our laws rather than a
longside them? A place that was always looking for a way in, a breach in the walls between worlds…

  And what if the thing (or things) inside her was a part of all that? A spore or a seed from that other place, something she’d picked up somehow, getting it under her skin. What if that seed were growing? And what if she, Hailey, was to be its way into the world?

  The thought, however odd, didn’t trouble her as much as she expected it to.

  She knew that she should be afraid, but she felt as calm as a prayer. Her mind was clear. All she was able to focus on was the movement inside her body, and she was unable to think of it in any terms other than the contents of an egg. A huge egg, its shell pure and white, and with the suggestion of something moving inside.

  “I’m an egg,” she said, talking to the empty room, the white walls, the cheap-papered ceiling. “I am an egg, and this thing is growing inside me.”

  She listened to her voice but the words didn’t seem like they belonged to her. Not for the first time, she felt like someone else was speaking for her, shaping her lips.

  She pressed her hands against her belly once again. This time the movements inside became more frantic, responding to the heat transmitted through her palms.

  “It’s coming,” she said, and this time the voice was hers. It could not possibly have belonged to anyone else. She recognised the longing, the desperation that hid behind the words – the same emotions that she detected whenever she said her father’s name, late at night, as she stared at herself in the mirror.

  She wanted this. She really did. She desired it more than anything – apart from having her dad back, her old life returned to her. But this was the next best thing. It was the best that she could hope for.

  New life. Of a sort. Hunger. Need. Maybe even a saviour.

  Perhaps what happened here tonight would save her and her mum.

  The movement inside her stopped. Silence filled the room. Then she heard a low humming sound. But the room was empty, she was all alone. None of the electrical appliances were on in the other room – the vacuum cleaner had been taken by those men, the washing machine too. Nothing was switched on that would make a noise even remotely like this one.