by Gary McMahon
“Yeah… good times.” The smile slipped, fell. “I already suspected that this place was special, that there was something weird going on. I’d spoken to a few people, and even seen one or two things myself that I couldn’t really explain. Then, it was as if this book was meant to fall into my hands. I picked it up and flicked through the pages, and on page twenty-nine I found a hand-written notation. Do you want to know what it said? I’ve read that phrase so many times now that I see the words whenever I close my eyes.”
Boater didn’t want to hear. He really didn’t. But he found himself nodding, betraying some inner compulsion for self-torment. Even though he’d heard the phrase repeated a hundred times.
“The note said: ‘The Concrete Grove is a doorway to Creation’.”
The pause that followed felt vast and dramatic, and filled with so many different meanings that it made Boater’s head ache.
“That’s Creation, with a capital C. It was my first clue, my first pointer. After that it was just a matter of sifting through old books, listening to pensioners tell me their fucking crazy stories, the stories nobody else would ever take seriously. If a scientist wrote a book and made a list of all the ghostly sightings and unusual activity that’s gone on here, he’d see that it was well above the national average. It’s a melting pot of the supernatural, mate. A fucking melting pot.” He shook the book, making the pages flutter. “And I’ve made my own notes, in here, for years now. Lots of notes, and a lot of other weird shit I can’t even understand: signs and symbols from history books and parchment papers kept in old church crypts.”
Boater smiled. He didn’t know what else to do.
“I know, you all just think I’m a madman, using this as an excuse for some of my more extreme behaviour. Maybe you were right, at first. It was an appealing justification. But now, you unbelieving cunts, I know it’s all real.” He smiled, and his mouth seemed to open too wide, like that of a shark. His teeth were small and pointed. “It’s all real.”
“Monty…” Boater tried to bring his boss back down to solid reality. It was always the same when he did a lot of drugs, and those new steroids he’d got in from China were messing with him in a way that was particularly intense. “Lana Fraser. She’s waiting outside.” He really wished that he had not come here tonight. He could have been back at his flat instead, shagging that girl. The one whose name he couldn’t even remember. But he didn’t need a name to lay down with her; names weren’t important, not when all you wanted was a dirty fuck.
He wished he was there instead of here; he wished that he was balls-deep inside that girl, erasing all thoughts of Monty Bright and his twitchy madness, his unnerving talk of ancient powers and festering forces.
“Oh, yeah. Lana Fraser.” Monty stood, his crumpled suit looking cheap and vulgar in the dim light. “Bring the whore in here and we’ll start the fun.” He walked over to the wall and opened the safe, and then placed his beloved book on a shelf. He touched the book’s tatty cover once, with the very tips of his fingers, before shutting it away and locking the safe door. He placed the key in his trouser pocket and then turned back to face the room.
He walked right up to Boater, standing mere inches from him. Boater always noted the fact that Monty had a peculiar odour – he smelled of old paper and dust, as if the essence of that book was rubbing off on him.
The top of Monty’s head came up level with Boater’s chest. He was a small man, and his body was wrecked from years of drug abuse and punishing gym routines. But he was fast, and he was remorseless. Boater had once seen his boss bite off a man’s nose and spit it back into the victim’s open mouth. He had witnessed Monty laughing as he cut off a woman’s hand for refusing to pay a debt, either in cash or in kind. He had seen this man commit so many foul crimes, so much brutality. Rape and murder and mayhem. And in the past, Boater had liked it. He had enjoyed it. Maybe he had even needed it.
But not now. Not today, or for any time afterwards. Something had happened; a window had opened inside him, allowing in the light and a gentle breeze. When he closed his eyes he could see a grove of trees with acres of dense woodland beyond, and his nostrils were filled with the smell of damp foliage…
Something had altered. A transformation had begun. None of this felt right any more. He no longer enjoyed the vileness and vulgarity of his life. He didn’t want to hurt people, not ever again. He wanted to see that beauty, to hear the sound of the wind in the trees and lie on the soft earth beneath their branches – perhaps even sinking into the loam, becoming part of it, a part of nature.
“Bring the bitch in,” said Monty. “I’m ready for her now.”
He was not smiling.
Boater went to the door and opened it. He wanted to scream at the woman on the landing, tell her to run and never stop, to keep on going until she and her daughter were far away from here. “He’ll see you now,” he said instead. His back was sweating; his legs felt weak. This wasn’t right.
Lana Fraser walked into the room, trying to summon from somewhere deep within her an ounce of dignity. Her beauty was enough to make both men take a step back, giving her some space. Her face was her power, but all power, Boater knew, fell down in the presence of greater strength.
“At last you’ve come to see me.” Monty grinned. His orange skin creased around his mouth, forming multiple parentheses. His hair, slicked back with too much hair product, glistened like a beetle’s back. “I’m so glad you could… come.” The emphasis on the last word was not lost on any of them.
Boater wanted to leave, but he knew that he couldn’t. He was stuck here, right until the end. There was no turning back, not yet. But perhaps he could try to make amends later, after the fact.
“You mentioned on the phone that I could clear my debt.” Her voice was impressively strong. She didn’t falter. The words were spoken clearly, and without much inflection. It sounded like she was reading aloud from a written statement.
“Did I, now?” Monty walked across the room to a door located opposite the one she’d come in. He reached out and opened it, revealing a staircase beyond. “You’d better come down the back stairs, then, and meet my other associate. I’m sure we’ll all be fascinated to hear what you have to offer.” He stepped to one side, the mockery of a gentleman, and bowed slightly. “We work as a group here. We all like to join in. The last girl left with a face like a plasterer’s radio.” He was attempting to push her buttons, looking for her breaking point. Boater had seen it all before, and no matter how strong they seemed at the beginning, they all broke down at some point.
Lana Fraser walked purposefully towards the open door. She did not take her eyes from Monty’s face. She took in every inch of him – from his off-coloured solarium tan to his whitened teeth and his deceptively weak looking chin. Then she went through the door and stepped down into darkness.
Monty turned towards Boater, smiled, and winked. Then he followed her into the stairwell.
Boater waited for as long as he was able – thirty seconds, perhaps even as long as a minute – and then he, too, went through the doorway and started down into Monty’s hidden basement rooms. For a moment he felt that Monty himself was swallowing him whole, and sucking them all deep inside his mad, black heart.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THIS IS IT, thought Lana as she waited at the bottom of the steep, rickety staircase. No turning back, now. She stood in the gloomy little passageway and listened to the sound of footsteps on the wooden treads behind her. Light spilled from a few wall-mounted bulbs, but it wasn’t nearly enough to illuminate all the dark corners. Monty Bright and his man Boater were descending after her through the building, entering the belly of the beast… that thought almost made her smile, but then, when she thought about it, the image simply made her more afraid.
The belly of the beast, she thought. Monty Bright’s belly. He’s the beast. Or, if he was not the beast himself, then he was certainly in the service of a beast; a terrible creature ruled by laws of debt and lust and desi
re: an entity she suddenly and confusingly thought of as Moloch, the false god from the bible.
I will set my face against that man, and against his family, and will cut him off, and all that go astray after him…
Now where the hell had she dredged that quotation up from? She hadn’t studied religious texts since high school, in Religious Studies. Her mind was going into overdrive, throwing up insane thoughts and ideas and snippets of things she had learned a long time ago. Words and phrases that were meaningless in the context of what was happening right now.
It’s fear. That’s what’s doing it. Oh, God, I’m so afraid.
Was she really that clichéd, turning to God in her moment of terror? Why not turn to The Beatles? They’d be just as much use in a crisis.
“There’s a good girl.” Bright had finally reached the bottom of the stairs. He was standing behind her, with his body pressed up against hers. She felt sick; revulsion made her feel as if her skin were trying to turn inside out. She wished that she could peel herself like a piece of fruit and discard the tainted exterior that Bright had already pawed and tainted with his filth. “It’s good to see you being so nice and obedient, and waiting for me down here in the dark.” He laughed softly, but it sounded more like an expression of hunger than one of mirth.
Bright stroked his trailing hand across her backside as he pushed past her, moving towards a scarred wooden door on the right. It was almost identical to the other doors they’d passed. But this one was different in one major way: this was the one behind which she would find the face of her demon – the slobbering face of Moloch, the great and terrible beast.
She stared at the wall, at the peeling plaster, trying not to look at that closed door. She tried to empty her mind. All the sorrow and regret; the debt and the promises of violence. The only thing she allowed herself to see, in the darkness behind her eyes, was Hailey’s face: her beautiful child for whom she was putting herself through this nightmare.
Noises echoed down the stairwell, strange creaks and moans and popping sounds. The wooden stairs had many dark, dusty old landings, broken and jutting timber balconies that led nowhere, like viewing galleries. But they had only ever been heading to the bottom: right to the very base of Bright’s black pyramid. She’d heard the rumours about these basement rooms and corridors, but never had she expected to see them for herself. Nor had she expected those stories to be true – not really; not in a million years.
Standing there, in a shabby underground passageway with a panting man’s hand on her arse, she thought about the road that had led her to this point. Timothy’s mental breakdown had been the first step, but since then she’d had chances to alter the route she had taken. Surely there had been choices to make along the way – if she believed in anything, it was that. There was always, always a choice, and she had made the wrong ones far too often. Even now, in this squalid place, she was making yet another bad decision. But this time, unlike those other times, she really did have no other option. This was it, the pit, the private hell at the end of the road: a hell that consisted of this dark corridor, two grinning men, and a door to a room where she would have everything taken from her.
“Shall we?” Bright’s voice was soft, smooth, as if he were attempting to seduce her.
She set her jaw, tensed her body, and then forced her muscles to relax. “Let’s go,” she whispered. “Let’s get it over with.”
Bright nodded once, and then opened the door.
Lana was aware of the big man, Boater, using up all the space behind her, giving her no room to escape, should she even try. She took a step and turned right, into the room.
Inside there was not much to see. A single bulb hung from the ceiling, its paper shade too dirty to make out any kind of design or decoration. The walls were bare stone, with damp stains spread across them like dark, blotchy shadows. There was a double bed pushed up against the side wall, adorned with thin blankets and a solitary shapeless pillow. The floor was stone, like the walls, and there was a crude shower stall in one corner, like something from a book of pictures of a concentration camp she’d once seen. A man stood by the shower. She recognised him from before, when they’d visited her flat to give her Bright’s last warning. He’d been wearing dark clothes, then – threatening clothes. This time he was wearing nothing but black trousers and a vest.
More than the man himself, though, she recognised the single black leather glove he wore.
Terry, she thought. His name’s Terry. It was such a common name for a devil.
He’d been wearing two gloves the last time she’d seen him. This time he only wore the one; his other hand was bare… his prosthetic hand. It looked like some kind of out-dated contraption, with thin metal levers visible at the wrist and wide leather straps holding it in place on his forearm. He raised his arm as she stood there, standing just a foot over the threshold, and clenched his plastic fingers. Then, as she began to lose all sense of reality, he undid the leather straps and removed the false hand to reveal a shiny pink nub of flesh.
“Just wait ’till you see what he can do with that stump,” said Bright, standing right beside her. She turned and looked into his shiny face. His eyes seemed to have doubled in size and there was white spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth.
Terry, waving his stump around in the air, began to laugh. It was a quiet sound, almost polite: a gentle chuckle that was completely out of place given the situation.
She looked down, at his bare feet. He was wriggling his toes on the stone floor. For some reason the sight was more sickening than that of the naked stump, and Lana felt a wave of bile rising at the back of her throat.
She took another couple of steps, trying to impose herself in the weird isolated space that was the room, to exert some measure of control. She heard the door shut behind her. Then there was the sound of a key rattling in the lock, and then a series of blunt clicks as the only way in or out of that room was sealed, perhaps locking a part of Lana inside there forever.
“So, Lana Fraser,” said Bright, slipping off his jacket. “At last you deign to come and visit us, to offer us some kind of payment on your debt.” His body, beneath the jacket, was clad in a tight grey shirt. His arms were huge, the biceps oversized. He could barely even bend his arms to remove the outer garment without having to angle his body to aid its movement. He was deformed; a man made monstrous by the abuse of muscle-building chemicals and heavy weights. Like most small-time criminals, he had an obsession with physical strength, but his had become so acute, so outlandish, that it had altered his exterior to reflect, more or less, how he saw himself in his mind’s eye.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m here to pay it off. I want to bring this to an end, finalise the deal. Just like you said on the phone.”
Terry, still standing by the primitive shower stall, laughed again. He flexed his gloved hand; the leather creaked loudly in the silence that followed his abrupt laughter. He stared at her face, her eyes, and never broke eye contact even as he stripped off his vest. His torso was well-muscled, but not as barrel-like as his boss’s broad trunk. Blue-black prison tattoos – at least that’s what Lana assumed the crude, thick-lined renderings to be – decorated his upper arms. An odd-looking dragon draped its badly-drawn tail around his shoulder.
“Is that what I said?” Bright walked around and stood directly in front of her, cutting off her view of Terry as he began to loosen his trousers. Bright was pulling his shirttails out of his waistband. Then he began to undo the shirt buttons from the bottom up. “Yes, I suppose I did say that, didn’t I?”
“I know the score,” said Lana, trying to find strength from somewhere, anywhere. “I know what’s expected of me, and I’ll do it all. I’ll do you all, if it keeps you away from me in future, and away from my daughter.” She clenched her fists and refused to look away as he slipped off his shirt and folded it neatly before placing it on the floor, near the end of the stark double bed.
Beneath the shirt he was wearing what looked lik
e a wetsuit. It clung to his oddly-shaped form like a second skin, accentuating the ugly, disproportionate muscle build-up around his upper body. Lana was so surprised by Bright’s ridiculous get-up that for a moment she forgot to be afraid, and a tiny smile flickered across her lips. She cut the smile short before it got out of control, wishing that she could have prevented it altogether. The last thing she wanted to do was antagonise these men: there was too much aggression in the room already; unless she was careful, there was the risk that they would lose all control and cause her some real physical damage.
They could fuck her, by all means – she was just about prepared for that – but please God, don’t let them break her.
“Monty, I have some things to do… I’ll just go back upstairs while you sort things out down here.”
Sort things out, was that how they thought of it? What they called gang-rape? Lana felt her back stiffen as Boater brushed up lightly against her.
“Don’t be silly, Francis. We’re all taking part. We’re going to have some fun.” Bright smiled at her. “Aren’t we, Lana?”
She didn’t have it in her to reply, but she somehow managed to keep staring at him, pressing her gaze into his soft face. There was something going on here – something below the surface, a situation that was nothing to do with her but in which she seemed to have a pivotal role.
“But, Monty–”
“But nothing, Francis!” Bright’s eyes swivelled away from her and glared over her shoulder, at his mammoth henchman. “But nothing. We all stay here, and each of us takes our fill. We owe it to this kind lady, who has put herself to a lot of trouble to be here. Never, Francis, ever look a gift horse in the mouth.” He smiled but it looked all wrong, as if his face were splitting in two. “And don’t ever let a free fuck go to waste.”
Lana felt her legs start to shake, but she fought to control the movement. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of witnessing her fear. She was strong; her mind and body were one. This bastard wouldn’t break her, not ever. She vowed to remain intact to the very end, even if she ended up dead. This fucker would not see a single tear roll down her face, or hear a scream pass from her lips. She was stone. She was already dead.
