You Will Grow Into Them

by Malcolm Devlin

  'Mick Dawson saw it first,' Jan says. 'He always takes the stairs going down, never the lift. Thinks it keeps him fit, though he always gets the lift going up.'

  He pushes open the door to the stairwell and holds it wide so Ellie can go through.

  'See how far down you can get,' he says, and he grins at her. A spoiler: You should be so lucky, he's saying, you're not going to get far at all.

  Ellie frowns. She still feels a little dozy, like the sleep is still hanging from her, like she's been dragging it around and if she stays still for too long, it'll wrap itself around her again and drop her where she stands. She peers down the stairwell. It all feels like some sort of silly game, one she's in no mood to take part in. Is someone down there, ready to jump out at her?

  Such bullshit.

  But Jan's still got that grin on his face. He's daring her to prove she's not chicken and that's bullshit as well.

  She glowers at him as she strides past and skips down the stairs, her hand lightly tracing the banister rail. She doesn't see what's changed until it's impossible for her to miss.

  About halfway down to floor 14, the stairwell is blocked with a mass of thick roots, knotted together across the turn. They come through the wall on one side, they burst out from the floor, they disappear through holes punched in the outer wall. In the cracks around them, she can see woozy filaments of the night sky. The roots are bulky, mature; they clog the space, pressing against themselves, deforming and choking each other.

  Ellie turns back and sees the evidence she missed before. Those lines snaking up the walls? They're not cracks in the plaster, they're exploratory shoots. Those pipes criss-crossing the ceiling? They're not pipes, they're more growths feeling their way.

  The stairwell smells of mulch and dew, there's a thin whistle of wind through the holes in the walls. Ellie steps back, she imagines how the roots might grow further should she turn her back on them; she keeps them in view as she backs up the stairs and away.

  Jan and Klee are waiting for her. Now she sees how Jan looks worn and unshaven, how Klee looks wide eyed.

  'What happened?' she says. She's panting. She says it again: 'What happened?'

  Jan shrugs.

  'One minute they're not there, the next they are.'

  'We're trying to get through to the lower floors,' Klee said. 'No one's picking up. The engaged tone sounds like birdsong.'

  'What about the lift?'

  'The engines spin but nothing comes.'

  'Mick Dawson's got a crowbar. He and his boys are going to jimmy open the doors, see how it looks.'

  Ellie turns to look down the corridor. Her neighbours hang in their doorways, looking from one to the other expectantly. Crisis has made a delicate community of them.

  'We leaned out the windows to look down,' Jan says. 'I don't see any movement down there. No lights, nothing.'

  'Cell phones are out,' Klee says. 'Televisions are down. Radio's just white noise.'

  'What about Google?'

  He looks at her, his expression pitiful. 'That too,' he says.

  Ellie looks to Jan for confirmation. Klee would describe the internet as white noise no matter what was happening, but this time, Jan shakes his head a fraction.

  'That too,' he says.

  Ellie tries her phone anyway. She calls her mum first and then her dad. She calls Louis' mobile. She even calls Auntie B. Each time, there's a click as though someone answers, but she hears only the sound of wind in the leaves. She has to raise her voice to leave a message. She feels like she's shouting into a hole.

  They go to the roof and while the fresh air is welcome, darkness robs the view of scale. Far below them, the chains of streetlights have been extinguished like birthday candles. Higher, half the city looks like it's been blacked out with marker pens. But the city's reaction to this change of state feels far too subdued. There are no shouts, no sirens, no cries of alarm. Instead, the city seems content to remain muffled in its darkness.

  Ellie looks up. A fat moon hangs round and pink behind the city skyline. It's so close; she can feel it tug at her. As though it has caught her on a fishhook, and is slowly reeling her in.

  Klee leans over the railing, staring down into the gloomy estate, which seems darker and deeper than Ellie has ever known it.

  'It's everywhere,' he says.

  Jan snorts and joins him at the rail.

  'Since when could you see in the dark?' he says.

  Klee looks at him. His eyes catch the moonlight in a way Ellie hasn't seen before. For the briefest moment, they glow like lanterns, then darken again.

  He turns back and points.

  'Look,' he says. 'There are roots everywhere. There are trees growing in the middle of the street. The vines. My god, the vines… '

  Jan shakes his head and turns away, his nose wrinkling.

  'Sure,' he says.

  The rooftop is filling with others from the tower. Ellie wonders if the same thing is happening anywhere else. She pictures all the city's rooftops crowded with their inhabitants, staring blindly into the darkness, waiting for something, anything to happen; waiting for something to make sense. She thinks of the way birds congregate on building sites and rooftops. One loud noise, she thinks, and everyone will fly away.

  *

  Jan won't fly. Jan is turning into a squirrel, and while it's still early days, so far he doesn't look like the flying type. It takes a few days for Ellie to see what's happening to him, but now his face bristles with whiskery hair, his eyes have darkened into little black marbles and his head bobs with sharp, nervous movements. He's growing a tail too but he's pretending he isn't. He keeps it stuffed down the back of his tracksuit pants; he reverses out of doorways because he thinks people won't notice.

  He's not the only one changing. Since the first night, most of the residents of the tower have left their doors open. The fifteenth floor has become one flat with many rooms, and each of Ellie's neighbours is becoming something else. People are becoming deer and mice and birds and stick insects.

  Klee is becoming an owl. His eyes are fixed wide and luminous. He leaves trails of downy feathers wherever he goes. They slip from the legs of his trousers, from the sleeves of his shirt. Gold and tawny and white. He complains it itches, but when he scratches, he only sheds more.

  Mrs Kiesmoski is turning into a rabbit or maybe a hare. Her ears flop down on either side of her head. She isn't ashamed of them; she ties a bow around them to draw attention to how they have grown. She plays her music louder still because she says she hears it differently now. Sometimes she sings along.

  The city is barely a city any more. The estate has a beauty to it now. Where it had once been coloured in shades of concrete and steel, it is now a rich and wide expanse of browns and greens. The tower blocks are wrapped in roots and vines. They grow branches that stretch high. The tarmac at street level has been shattered into jigsaw pieces by the growth from beneath. It is now chaotic and uneven: roots and mosses and trees and shrubs. Broom and bracken, tangling and knotting through the avenues, softening the edges of what were once the rigid lines of the estate's streets.

  Ellie spends a lot of time on the roof. She leans over the railing and watches the city become consumed.

  She is not changing. She checks every day, standing naked before the mirror in the bathroom, inspecting every inch of herself for a sign she is becoming something new.

  She wonders where her family is. Mum, Dad, Louis, Auntie B. She wonders if they have found each other. Without them, she feels unmoored, like she could just drift up into the sky and disappear. Does she miss them because she loves them? Or does she miss them because she needs them? Because her family grounded her and she is angry with herself for letting them go.

  She thinks of that look on her mother's face, that pent-up fury, that stepmother scorn. She thinks of her father shaking his head. He tried, he seems to be saying, God knows he tried his best.

  She wonders if they are changing too. Maybe they can turn into something
new. Something that can fly or run or crawl, something that will help them find their way back to her? She appreciates how strange and selfish a wish it sounds: change into something that will make me less lonely. Change into something that will bring you home.

  Because she wants to change. Everyone else is becoming something different, but Ellie is left as she has always been.

  'I am the least loved person in my block,' she says to the city-as-was.

  A blackbird rustles past. She wonders if it's a real blackbird, or if it was once someone she knew. It ignores her and arcs away, drifting lazily, then flapping fast and strong to gain the height it lost.

  Ellie watches it wheel once then disappear, a tiny black speck vanishing into the avenues.

  *

  At night the city sings where once it screamed. No sirens, no shouts, no alarms. No roars of machinery or screeches of tyres. The song is one of birds and animals, the chittering of insects and the new and wilder lives of the city's residents. Its tone is uncertain, lacking fluency: it is the sound of a city learning a new tongue.

  Ellie does not sleep. She lies curled up on her bed and refuses to dream because she doesn't trust her dreams to stay where they should be. She pictures them leaking out of her and infecting the world outside. She tells herself stories to keep herself awake. Once upon a time, she and Louis would play together in the park Mum used to take them to. In her story, they have the place to themselves and they play on the swings and they study the little duck pond and they pretend it's their own island which no one else can touch. All of this was true once, years ago, before Louis became a brat who preferred to play with his own friends than with her. In her story, he stays in awe of her. She tries to believe it would be better, but his attention creeps her out. He follows her around with this dumbstruck look on his face. She rolls over and thinks of something else.

  She wonders if dream and reality have got mixed up somewhere, the one flipped tip-over-tail from the other. Opposites attract, they say. It's true of magnets; it's true of lovers. Mum and Dad argue like they've been together too long. The years have ground away the things that made them first fall in love and now they politely push each other apart.

  Flat 1513 has become like a nest. It smells of damp fur and fresh-cut grass. Jan has stopped hiding his tail; it looks like he has a feather duster jammed down the back of his jeans. Klee can turn his head around way too far and stares at Ellie with his big amber eyes. When she reacts, he laughs, but his laugh gets all caught up with hooting coughs, which just make him laugh even more.

  Jan says her name. His whiskers flicker when he talks.

  'You need a haircut, girl,' he says.

  She frowns. You need a shave, she almost says. A haircut! It seems like the very least of her concerns. The only people who have seen her for weeks are the upper floors of a tower block full of chimeras whose own concept of personal grooming is diminishing by the day. But when she looks in the mirror, she decides he's right after all. Her hair has grown long, so much longer than it had been when she checked herself only the day before. Then it came down to her shoulders, now it comes down to her lower back.

  She traces her fingers through it, combing it gently. There is a charge within it: a pent up thrum like something electrical. If she really listens, she can almost hear it grow.

  She borrows scissors from Jan and starts to hack it back. When she was smaller, she would have done anything for long flowing hair. Today she feels like being more practical. But there is little room for the practical in this newly shaped world. The scissors get stuck, they don't close over the hair no matter how few strands she stuffs between their blades; even thinned down to a single thread, it has become as strong as hardened steel.

  The scissors break before the hair does; the pivot snaps and the two blades separate in her hands. She stares at them dumb with surprise, and casts them clattering into the sink. When she looks back at her reflection, she sees how she has changed after all.

  The length of hair she hacked at with the scissors has bruised and thickened. It has swollen from a pale, yellow-blonde strand, to a darker, thicker, green-brown tendril. She reaches up to it and snatches her hand away again. There are thorns there, unbending silver threads as sharp as bee-stings.

  She finds a comb and spends the next hour combing the thorny knots away. They soften as she combs them, but the motion only makes her hair grow further. She is in tears once the last thorn has been dispelled.

  Jan holds her as she cries.

  'Let it all out,' he says. 'All of it. Let it all out.'

  The hair grows faster over the next few days and she twists it into braids and plaits. Whenever she tugs it too roughly, whenever it catches on something as she drags it around the flat behind her, it bruises and swells into thorny gorse that she has to spend time combing soft and straight.

  It is becoming far too much for her. Her flat is filling with her own hair. It gets caught on furniture, on books, on toys, and her movements become frustrating and limited. She sits on her bed telling herself not to be frightened of it. She imagines herself being buoyed up to the ceiling, she imagines it drowning her. She drags her hair behind her and imagines that if she were to stay still for too long, it might wrap itself around her and drop her where she stands.

  *

  Ellie walks around the upper floors and her hair follows, blindly retracing her steps at one remove. The weight of it forces her shoulders back; she has never stood so straight. Her mother would be so proud.

  She explores every inch of the flat she grew up in. She opens cupboards and drawers as though she might find a door to some magical world she missed. Buried in the dresser by her mother's side of the bed, she finds a wad of paperwork drawn up by a divorce lawyer, phone numbers highlighted with a pink pen. Unsigned, undelivered, her mother never was one to make a scene.

  Each morning, she binds the new growth with string. She does it gently so as not to bruise it. The ends have long since turned to scrub and she no longer has the patience to comb the thorns away. Instead, unattended, they blossom and thrive. They scratch through the cheap carpet and paintwork in the hallways as she wanders through the block like a ghost.

  Come nightfall, she gathers the length of her hair and coils it in her flat, so it lies beside her like a wicker basket. She goes to bed earlier and earlier each night because it takes more and more of her time to prepare.

  The residents of the block have all changed by now; they're settled in their new selves, they're comfortable and content. The rooms and hallways are full of skittering and squeaking noises as they go about their business.

  Ellie's own changes shows no sign of slowing down, her hair grows faster every day, longer every minute; it is intolerable. She opens her window wide, then moves her bed so it is positioned beneath it. Climbing onto the mattress, she looks down to the forest below and acknowledges one final time that it is beautiful. She looks out, as far as she can see. She takes in every detail of the changed world and stores it safe inside of her. Then she reaches for her gathered hair and begins to feed it out, into the city below.

  The animals, her neighbours, they see what she is doing and they understand. They gather in her room to help her. They tend her like nursemaids. They crawl across her, gathering coils of her hair amongst them; they spin them from the open window like rappelling wires. Some are rougher than others. She sees bristling briars cast from the window as well as delicate threads.

  Eventually the weight of it is too much. She turns and lies on her bed, facing upwards while the neighbours continue the work.

  She wonders how the scene must look from the outside. A tangle of golden threads, curling and twisting from the fifteenth floor window like autumn grasses in a current of floodwater. It is a wonderful image, she decides, and this gives her contentment.

  'Thank you,' she says. My friends, she would add if she wasn't afraid the word might drive them away from her.

  Her neighbours retreat; she sees them gathered in the doorway wa
tching her and she smiles at them. She tries to lift her head to see them more clearly, but the weight of the hair and the brambles makes it impossible to move her head any further. She tells them she loves them all and it is absolutely true.

  She closes her eyes and sleeps. Even the movement deep within her cannot make her stir; the movement of something flexing and stretching and growing strong.

  She dreams she is Auntie B, immobile at the foot of the stairs. Facing her, nose-to-nose, she sees Louis. His cap has fallen off halfway down the stairs, leaving his hair mussed in a way that would embarrass him if he knew. His head lolls, like it had been cut off, then carelessly set back in place. His eyes are closed and he might be peaceful, but Ellie screams and cries and shouts because she has never felt so alone.

  *

  She doesn't sleep all the time. Sometimes she lies awake, staring at the dark stains spiralling across the ceiling like inexorable waves climbing a cracked and peeling shore. But there is little purpose for her to be awake. She can barely move, after all.

  The neighbours tend her, all of them, Jan most of all. He scuttles up and over her, corralling the others to do as he bids. There are so many of them. They feed her, clean her, care for her. They take care of all those tiresome earthbound needs. Sometimes Jan sits on her chest, his eyes black like watermelon seeds, his whiskers flickering and alert.

  They don't speak any more but, somehow, they understand each other well enough. Jan looks at her intently and the dark, mouldering shapes in the ceiling shift and resolve themselves into dancing shapes which illustrate what he wants to show her. He tells her about the forest the city has become. He scuttles down the walls of the tower to scavenge in the undergrowth below. Klee circles overhead, scouting the way, but he doesn't look at Jan in the same way he used to, and Ellie worries he will one day succumb to his new shape's predatory instinct.