Beyond Here Lies Nothing (The Concrete Grove Trilogy)

by Gary McMahon

  He stepped into the other room. The window blind was closed but Rose had turned on a small table lamp that was positioned on the floor in the far corner. It cast dim light across the room, creating a creepy atmosphere that wasn’t helped by what was waiting at the centre of the room.

  On a large plinth or table, and taking up most of the room, there was a scale model of the Concrete Grove estate. Marc stood and stared at it, hardly able to believe what he saw. He remembered a boyhood friend whose father had been obsessed with model railways. The man had created a system of tracks and fields, and even a small village, in the basement of their house. As a boy, Marc had been fascinated by the sight; as he grew older, he began to think it was all a bit sad and obsessive.

  This reminded him of that guy and his model railway. A similar level of detail was displayed here, but possibly to an even greater degree of ambition. He recalled Harry’s milk-bottle-top replica of the Needle. Had it been a practice model, a warm-up or a template he’d completed before tackling the real thing?

  He moved towards the model, unsure of what to do in the presence of such a thing.

  “Impressive, isn’t it?”

  He glanced at Rose, nodded. “Yes... and it’s a bit scary, too. He must’ve spent hours in here, working away at this thing. It’s too lifelike... know what I mean?”

  “Yes, I do. It’s creepy. Nothing like this should exist. It’s... It’s unhealthy.”

  Marc leaned across the table and reached out towards the replica of the Needle, the ugly tower block that stood at the centre of the estate. This one was not constructed from foil bottle tops.

  “I think it’s made out of cement, or maybe even proper concrete. He must’ve cast it himself, mixing the materials, constructing a little mould...”

  Marc’s hand had paused in mid air. He moved it forward, brushing his fingertips against the side of the tower. It was hard and rough, unpleasant to the touch.

  Rose sounded troubled. “Cardboard I could understand. Even balsa wood. Perhaps some MDF off-cuts from a DIY store. But cement? That’s going a bit too far.”

  Marc remained silent as he inspected the model. He didn’t know what to say.

  The estate was designed to form a series of concentric circles, each street wrapping around the one before. The plan view, looked at in this way, was weird. It looked like a magic circle, or a form of pentagram. Marc knew this was nonsense, but his gut instinct suggested otherwise. Why build the estate in such a specific layout? What was the purpose behind the circular pattern?

  There was no furniture in the room; no shelves on the walls; no carpet on the floor. Just bare plaster and varnished boards. The model took centre stage. It was the reason this room existed. Nobody but Harry Rose had ever been in here until it had been discovered by his brother – Marc could sense it. The man had worked on his model every night, adding and subtracting tiny elements, making repairs and replicating alterations carried out in the real world by builders or council workmen. It was an ongoing project; his life’s work. He must not have told anyone about the model. It was his secret. He had kept it all for himself.

  But now that Harry Rose was dead, the seal had been broken: eyes other than his had taken in this small-scale urban wonder.

  Some of the houses were made from the salvaged parts of plastic model kits. The vehicles on the streets were almost certainly bastardised toys and model kits; the tiny people were plastic toy soldiers that had been moulded and altered by the application of heat and a sharp craft knife, then dressed in perfect little clothes that Harry had fashioned from scraps of material.

  The grass, when he touched it, felt like pieces of Astroturf. White lines had been painted by hand onto the road surfaces; drainage gullies and gutters had been fitted into the kerbs. No detail had been missed. Marc had no doubt that Harry’s model matched the real thing down to the tiniest detail. He could tell by the painstaking work the man had put in that there was little margin for error. It was obvious how much love, dedication, and sheer hard work had been carried out in this room.

  Then he noticed the flags.

  They looked like minuscule versions of the kind of flags found on a golf course, the ones used to mark the holes. Or football corner flags. A cocktail stick topped off with a triangular cutting from a sheet of cotton had been used for each pole. As he looked closer, he saw that each of the flags had a name and a number written onto the material.

  Connie 7

  Alice 8

  Fiona 9

  Tessa 10

  He knew what these were immediately. They were the names and ages of the Gone Away Girls, and each flag was positioned in the place from which they’d vanished. He made a mental note to look up the information, just to collaborate his hunch, but he knew he was correct.

  Connie’s flag was stuck in the grass at the sorry excuse for a children’s playground the locals called Seer Green.

  Alice’s flag was in the car park of the small supermarket to the east of Grove Lane.

  Fiona’s flag had fallen over and lay flat inside the skateboarding park.

  Tessa’s flag stood forlorn and lopsided on the pavement outside a sweet shop near Grove Corner.

  “What does this mean?” Marc turned and looked at Rose.

  “I’m not sure. I think I’m too scared to even think about it.”

  “You noticed the names?”

  Rose nodded.

  “Do you know what they are? Do you know who those flags are meant to represent?”

  “I do. It’s those poor little girls, the ones that went missing.”

  Marc licked his lips. He didn’t even want to think about this too deeply, but he needed to ask the question. “Do you think... do you really think that Harry could have been involved in their disappearances? Is there any way that he could have been responsible, or at least that he might have known who was?”

  Rose didn’t speak for a few seconds. He stared at Marc, then looked quickly away and examined the model. When he looked at Marc again, his eyes were moist. “In all honestly, I don’t really know.”

  BACK DOWNSTAIRS, IN the small, neat kitchen, they drank coffee and stared at each other across the table.

  “Here.” Rose reached into his jacket pocket and took out a key. He placed it on the table in front of him, alongside the keys to the attic rooms. “It’s for the front door. Use this place as you please. I have a feeling all that stuff upstairs might help you with your book, and if you can shine any light at all on Harry’s possible involvement with those kids, I’d be grateful. I can’t stay here – can’t even come here. It feels... wrong.”

  Marc nodded and sipped his coffee. He reached out and took the keys, making a fist around them. “Thanks. I’m not sure what your brother was into, but I’ll be honest – my muse is sitting up and begging for more.”

  “Just keep me posted. Let me know what you find out. I... I can’t stay here. It’s too much for me. I’m not a young man. I need to get out and breathe.”

  Marc nodded. “I understand. And I appreciate this, I really do.” He opened his hand and looked at the keys. “I’ll find out what I can and keep in touch.”

  Rose didn’t take his eyes off Marc’s face. “Let’s just hope you find out that Harry wasn’t involved.”

  “What do we do if... well, if he was involved? How the hell do we tackle that situation?”

  Rose set down his cup. He placed his hands, palms down, on either side and made them into fists. “I don’t know. Let’s just see what you dig up first, eh? We’ll face that problem if it is a problem.”

  “Okay. We’ll see where the wind blows us on this. I’m pretty sure Harry wasn’t doing anything bad. I think I knew him well enough that I’d be able to recognise something... you know, if he was a bad man.” He paused. “And you were his brother: you’d at least have a slight inkling if he was some kind of child abductor. I doubt we’re going to find any bodies buried under the cellar floor.” He tried to smile but it was a struggle. “Worst case scenario: he
knew a lot more than he ever let on, and something scared him enough that he kept quiet for all these years.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping.”

  Marc nodded. “Yeah. Me, too.”

  LATER, BACK DOWNSTAIRS, Marc stood at the front window of Harry Rose’s lounge, watching the sky grow dull and leaden. Like time lapse photography, the clouds moved quickly across the heavens, darkening the area, cutting it off from the sun. It was an unusual effect; he had never seen anything quite like it before. When he’d been up in the attic rooms with Rose, he’d glimpsed similar dark clouds out of the attic window, but these were much more expansive. He’d thought of those earlier clouds as harbingers of a storm, and still the idea felt right. But the oncoming storm was not one caused by atmospheric conditions; it was more of a spiritual upheaval.

  Marc was not a religious man. Depending on what day he was asked, he would tell people that he was either an atheist or agnostic. He certainly didn’t believe in the God his parents had prayed to. Look what that had achieved for them... nothing; nothing at all. Just a slow, painful, drawn-out death in front of their son.

  He watched the darkening sky, his skin prickling as if tiny ghost fingers were pitter-pattering across every inch of his body. He felt cold. The hair on his arms and on the back of his neck was bristling. It was a sensation he’d only ever read about in books, but now that it was happening to him he realised that the physical experience – like most clichés – was based in reality.

  “Jesus...” He reached out and closed the window blinds, then turned to face the room. He didn’t feel comfortable here. Not on the estate or in this house. Everything seemed vaguely hostile, as if his presence was unwelcome.

  When Rose had left, Marc had gone straight back up to the attic. After studying the model of the estate for a little while, he’d crossed the landing to the library. Ignoring the sensation that there was still someone in there, standing in the corner and watching him, he’d browsed again through the volumes. On a shelf near the door, he found another notebook. He’d failed to notice it the first time, but this time it was as if his eyes had come to rest immediately upon it, deliberately seeking it out. He refused to believe that it had not been there the first time, and someone had placed it on the shelf for him to find when Rose wasn’t around.

  The two notebooks were now on the coffee table. He crossed the room, sat down, and picked up the second one again. It was old, the cover creased and stained, yet unmarked by any kind of writing.

  There wasn’t much content inside this one, but on the first page was stapled a faded copy of an old-fashioned print or woodcut of a plague doctor. The name Terryn Mowbray was written underneath in Harry’s neat, small script.

  “Terryn Mowbray is Captain Clickety...” Even as he said the words, he appreciated their inevitability.

  He turned the page and read the words over, trying to understand them more fully this time. There were scribbled footnotes at the bottom of the page, and Marc could at least see the shape and structure that Harry had been attempting to impose upon the writing.

  In 1349, during the Black Death, a plague doctor was summoned to the village of Groven1 in the northeast of England. King Edward III himself was said to have given the man his orders. Groven, it was said, had managed to avoid all signs and marks of the Plague. The Black Death had not crossed its borders; the people who lived there were fit and healthy and oblivious to the darkness that had fallen over the rest of Europe.2

  The plague doctor, Terryn Mowbray, was around thirty years old. There is no record of his existence prior to his mention here, and even this was difficult to piece together from various unreliable sources. He apparently arrived in Groven sometime in May. What he found there (here?) enraged him. The people of the village had embraced ancient rites and rituals and even created new ones of their own – normal pagan beliefs had been supplanted by something stranger, like a mutated, nameless religion. They prayed to unnamed deities and Mowbray claimed that they offered up children – twins were thought to be the most prized – as a sacrifice. The children were stabbed to death at the centre of a grove of oak trees, their blood left to soak into the earth. A path of black leaves is said to have led the way from the village to the grove.3

  Mowbray apparently noted many strange sights:4 visions of a tall, grey structure at the centre of the grove of trees, birds that hummed and flew backwards, a young girl with multicoloured wings, and animals that he could not name – a horse with a single truncated horn, like a mutilated unicorn, dogs with the faces of humans, a large, bloated snake that smelled of offal and was drawn to the site of the bloodshed. He called this giant serpent the Underthing.5

  Mowbray was enraged. He ordered the village cleansed. People were hung, burnt in bonfires, and quartered by his men. After the massacre,6 he and his men slept one more night in the village.

  The rest is sketchy7 at best. Some say that a great number of ghostly twins appeared in the village, and others say that it was a pack of ravenous human-faced dogs. I was even told by one drunken old-timer that it was giant hummingbirds.

  However it happened, Mowbray’s men were killed, their skinned bodies hung from the branches of the oaks. Only he was left alive. An envoy sent by the King arrived a few days later and found Mowbray, starving and filthy and jabbering, sitting at the centre of the grove of oaks, surrounded by the rotting, flyblown remains of his men’s bodies. He spoke about other worlds, and gateways, and secrets that should never have been disturbed. He whispered the words Croatoan and Loculus. Upon his face and body, beneath the mask and the cloak, were the buboes and postulant sores of the Plague. He had brought it here, to the place that had previously remained untouched. His spirit had polluted the sanctity of Groven, first with the sin of his banal evil, second with the blood of the villagers, and then finally with Black Death itself...

  The only whisper I heard about what happened next makes little sense out of context. Apparently Terryn Mowbray stood, bowed, and started turning in a slow circle upon the ground. He disappeared as if he were sinking into the earth, corkscrewing away into infinity, chanting a single word over and over again: Loculus.8 All that was left in his place was a small mound of blackened leaves.9

  The King’s envoy was imprisoned, a gibbering idiot after what he’d found. The King said he was a liar and a heretic. The man killed himself in his cell three years later.

  1Groven – Grove – the Concrete Grove.

  2Edward Plantagenet clearly hoped that some great and hidden knowledge would be revealed to him if he discovered why the village of Groven remained Plague free.

  3Surely a metaphor?

  4I could find no trace of these notes. I assume they went with him, wherever he vanished to.

  5I have no idea what this means. Could it represent the nameless forces the villagers worshipped?

  6There’s no record of how many victims there might have been.

  7I got some of this story from obscure Fortean literature, and the rest has been told in the back rooms of certain pubs for decades, changing, like a game of Chinese Whispers, with each telling.

  8Again, this word. This place. Where is it? Is it here, in the Concrete Grove? How does one find it, and how to gain access? Was this the secret knowledge King Edward, through Terryn Mowbray, was seeking?

  9What’s with the black leaves again?

  Marc set the notebook down next to him on the sofa. He leaned back and tilted his face up towards the ceiling, closed his eyes. It was madness. None of this could be true – it was all myth and hearsay, local legend given the kind of attention that it surely did not deserve. He opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling. There was a large cobweb in one corner; he could see the fat black body of a spider, motionless against the white plaster ceiling. The spider seemed to be watching him. Or perhaps it was dead.

  “Why the hell didn’t you get yourself a computer, Harry?”

  Harry’s system was difficult to follow. The books in the library were kept in some kind of highly
personal and esoteric order, and he had found no more of the slender notebooks on the shelves. There wasn’t much written down. It must all be in Harry’s head, burned to ashes along with his body.

  “What else did you know?” The spider moved; it was alive after all. The web shuddered. The spider was no longer there. But something was... and not just in the corner of the ceiling. Marc became convinced that it was everywhere, inside and outside the house; all around him, trying to get inside him. Something was coming.

  “What is it that you were keeping from me, and are you trying to tell me now that you’re dead?”

  He thought about the Pollack twins, and the Northumberland Poltergeist. He’d always known there was more to the story than a simple urban haunting, but who the hell would believe any of this? His publisher would laugh at him; they’d send him away without an advance. It was fantastic, improbable... more than that: it was fucking insane.

  Other worlds, demonic plague doctors, links to a famous case of vanishing New World settlers, a monster called the Underthing... the more he dug, the more incredible all this seemed.

  He closed his eyes and tried to pin down the facts. But facts were thin on the ground here; all he had to cling to was a bunch of ghosts and stories within stories.

  Only one thing was certain. Doors were opening, or being opened.

  Something was on its way.

  Something was coming.

  mummy went out to pub and daisy like a flower a sleep. sumbody else in the house wi me. i here him breething. captain clickety comign for me. he see me all the time even when he not here. he everwhear not just in the house. he all over the estate like grass and roads and houses. he lives in the needle but he can see through walls. he wants me and daisy like a flower because we look the same. two things the same make him stronga. two things the same fill him up like food. this time he bring others with him. they clothes are funny like old style in the museum or wot scarycrows have on. they smiling. some have blood on them clothes and faces. they hungry. I be food for them. me and daisy like a flower. a humingbird fly in the room. i go to play with it. keep it away from baby.