Silent Voices

by Gary McMahon

  He handed Isobel to Jane and headed for the stairs, taking them two at a time. When he reached the first floor, he moved quickly to the kids’ room. He pushed open the door and saw Harry kneeling on the floor at the end of the bed, his arms ramrod straight, his shoulders hunched. He was retching, dry-heaving, his little body jerking and spasming as his stomach muscles worked overtime.

  “Oh, God... Harry. What is it, son?”

  “Daddy!” Harry screamed the word and then went into another convulsion. There was dull yellow vomit on the floor, inches from his face. He turned his head to the side, and in that moment Brendan saw that his son’s throat was swollen. His neck was actually bulging, already twice its normal size; his cheeks were puffed out, as if they were filled with hot air. He tried to speak again, but his voice could no longer get past the constriction.

  “Harry!” He went down on his knees and grabbed the boy’s shoulders. Harry’s skin was hot and his pyjamas were soaking wet. “Oh, God...”

  “What is it?” Jane was behind him, standing in the doorway. He looked back and saw Simon there, too, holding Isobel’s hand. His daughter’s face was pale, almost white. She looked like a ghost.

  “Harry!” He turned back to his boy just in time to witness another convulsion, and this time Harry was bringing something up, a small, lumpen mass that Brendan could make out rising in his throat. The boy’s neck fluttered; his eyes rolled back in his head, and his mouth opened, opened...

  The soggy object was forced out between his wet lips, and dropped onto the floor, right into the pile of fresh vomit. Harry slumped sideways, possibly in a faint. The small lump began to twitch. Brendan thought it was a giant moth, ready to break out of its sticky pupa.

  Nobody moved. For a moment – and that was all it took – none of the three adults could even speak. They all remained locked into position, bound by their fears.

  The object rolled on the floor, and then it began to transform. Tiny wings twitched outwards, unfolding from the body, and a tiny head emerged from beneath one of them. The thing made no sound; it just started flapping its wings, slowly at first, and then fast, faster, until they were nothing but a blur of motion. And the hummingbird floated up from the floor, soundless and graceful and totally out of place, an alien object in Harry and Isobel’s bedroom.

  Brendan turned his head to follow the bird’s progress, and watched as it flew past Simon and Jane – both of them stepping back from the doorway to allow it out of the room – and into the rest of the house. The sight of the thing triggered a chain of detonations, submerged memories exploding at random inside Brendan’s head, but they went up in smoke before he could grab them.

  Then, snapping back into the moment, he bent down and cradled Harry in his arms, moaning and stroking the boy’s sweat-damp head. “Call an ambulance,” he said. “Do it, quickly.”

  Outside the bedroom, on the cramped landing, Isobel began to weep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  SIMON SAT DOWN on the bed and tried to make sense of everything that had taken place this evening. He was tired and his head throbbed, yet he still felt drunk. Things were changing so fast. Everything was fluid; he could not lock his thoughts in place, not even long enough to examine what they meant.

  When he’d first arrived at the Cole house, things had been tense. He had been unable to settle down after the violence he’d perpetrated upon the kid in the burnt-out building, and it seemed to him that Brendan had something of an attitude – which was understandable, really, the way that Simon had been pushing the man.

  Jane’s presence, however, had made all the difference: she had calmed the situation simply by being there, and they had all slowly relaxed into an almost pleasant groove. When she had made her revelation regarding all the stuff she’d sent him over the years, things had threatened to become tense all over again, but she’d handled it beautifully.

  He still couldn’t understand why she’d been sending him those updates – not fully. Yes, it was a way of anchoring him to the Grove, of forcing him to remember – or, rather, not to forget – that he’d left the other two Amigos behind to live with the mess they’d all made, but somehow he felt that there was something more to it. She did not know what had happened when the boys were ten years old; nobody did, not even the boys themselves. So why would she put her marriage at risk to keep her claws in his life?

  It was all too complex, an emotional assault course that he was nowhere near fit to complete. He was out of shape; his stamina was gone. The truth was, he had not been in good enough shape for this kind of onslaught for years.

  He lay back and kicked off his shoes, wriggling on the sheets until he found a comfortable position. Outside, a dog barked, children laughed, a distant siren made a tune to which the city danced. The darkness behind his eyelids writhed.

  Jane. He could see her now, emerging from that darkness.

  He would be lying to himself if he thought that he did not still find her attractive. Her youth had faded, there were lines and blemishes where once her skin had been smooth and flawless, but still there was something about the woman that drew him, sent his blood pumping too quickly around his body. There was a homely quality to her beauty that intrigued him. Natasha didn’t have that. She was too perfect, too model-like: zero body fat; a flat chest; porcelain skin; a way of carrying herself that suggested she was always aware of people watching her. Whereas Jane moved naturally, with an almost slovenly gait. She didn’t give a damn who was watching, or if nobody was. She was her own woman; nobody could own or rent her image. She was real. She was a beating pulse under the skin of life.

  When he’d first seen her this evening, his initial reaction had been base: he wanted to fuck her. He felt ashamed of himself for having these thoughts, but that didn’t negate them. Jane was his one regret: back in the day, they’d never made it past the heavy petting stage – a feel of her tit through her lacy bra cup, a hand on her warm, moist pudenda, but only over the top of her knickers. Once she had grabbed his crotch when they were kissing in the back of somebody’s car. He remembered it now; he had been breathless, his chest hitching and his legs shaking. She had never done it again.

  He wondered how often she and Brendan made love. He tried to imagine what her body looked like beneath the baggy, unflattering clothes she wore. Was it full, voluptuous, like a real woman, rather than thin and scrawny, with the bones jutting through her paper-thin flesh, like Natasha?

  He realised that he was rubbing his cock. He was hard as steel.

  He stopped and turned onto his side, feeling obscurely guilty, like a schoolboy fantasising about his best friend’s mother.

  She had kids. They had kids – Brendan and Jane. They were a family, a solid unit; he could not come between them, even if he tried. It was all just make-believe, another way of trying to hold on to a past that he had never really owned in the first place. Of trying to identify what was missing, what had been taken from him when he was ten years old and the world had seemed so large and filled with promise.

  Kids...

  What on earth was going on with those two kids?

  The ambulance had arrived in five minutes, and two paramedics had inspected Harry’s throat for blockages, massaged his tiny chest, and pushed an oxygen mask over his face. By that time, the worst of it was over. The hummingbird – had it really been a hummingbird? – had flown, and the boy was breathing easier, but they had not taken any chances. Jane had gone with them in the ambulance and Simon had called a taxi for Brendan, insisting that he pay the fare when it arrived.

  It had all happened so quickly; the whole scene had played out faster than he could recall. He barely even had time to register how he felt, what it all might mean in terms of the reasons for him being in the area. It was all linked – he knew that, could not deny it – but he didn’t understand how, or why. The dots were there, all over the page, but he was unable to connect them.

  A hummingbird...

  Small, silent, and forcing its way out of the
boy’s throat, being born into the world.

  A hummingbird...

  Just like the ones he could remember from the Needle, when he and his friends had been imprisoned there. With his eyes closed, he could remember the sound of their wings beating: a hushed whisper in the darkness. He could see the colours of their feathers, the multi-hued blurs they had become as they darted across the room, emerging from conical nests high up in the branches of the old trees.

  There had been a forest in there: inside the Needle. There was a forest indoors, but he could not imagine how that might be true. It was impossible, a child’s daydream. Trees growing indoors; one world enveloped by another; wheels within wheels; stories within stories. A fairytale...

  Other, darker memories remained out of reach, backing off from him, not allowing him access to the secrets they might reveal. All he had, all that he could recall, were the trees and the hummingbirds... and the girl. The girl called Hailey: the same girl from the newspaper report, the girl who had gone missing last year on the estate, along with her mother. The girl with the hummingbird wings.

  But how could they be the same person? How could that girl – the one who had lived on the Grove so recently – be the same as the winged phantom he had seen inside the Needle twenty years ago? It made no sense. They must be two different people. Perhaps they were related.

  Surely that was it. Mother and daughter, or aunt and niece, perhaps they were even grandmother and granddaughter. But then, it seemed, time was somehow elastic inside the Needle; it looped back on itself, creating cracks and fissures where bad things might scuttle through. Perhaps their childhood selves were still in there now, going through the same nightmare he’d already experienced twenty years before...

  Sleep stole over him, moving across his body and carrying him away. When he opened his eyes he was in another place, yet he knew that he was still somewhere in the Concrete Grove, lost in a fold in the fabric of the place, paused at a point where all things converged and time lost all meaning.

  Time lost all meaning...

  The low, fat clouds were dark brown, the colour of old bloodstains, and the sky beyond them was black. There were graduations in the blackness, but he could see no stars: just an endlessly folding darkness, an overpowering sense of nothingness.

  The Grove was a wasteland: buildings had fallen, roads were shattered, chunks of tarmac lay strewn across the dirt, and broken paving stones littered the scene like the forgotten building blocks in a child’s game. Something had happened here – something devastating. An apocalypse had taken place, and as far as Simon could see, there were no survivors. The houses had all been flattened, taken apart, and the burnt-out shells of vehicles resembled the abandoned carapaces of giant dead beetles.

  Up ahead, the Needle was in ruins. It had fallen like some mighty citadel, an ancient fortress from a storybook battle. The concrete looked like old stone, and had taken on less modern forms. Like ruined castle ramparts, the concrete walls and lobbies had been destroyed and reshaped.

  Upon a pile of rubble he saw a familiar giant figure. The Angel of the North sat like a chastised schoolboy, its legs drawn up against its chest, its arms down by its sides and its hands resting on the concrete block upon which it was perched. There were manacles at its wrists; it had been bound and left to die.

  Simon walked closer, drawn to this curious sight. He was afraid, but his curiosity compelled him to get a closer look, now that he was certain the creature could not harm him.

  The Angel’s head was bowed, the cold steel face hidden between its knees. The mighty wings were folded back; rust had broken away from the lattice framework, settling like strange dandruff onto its broad shoulders.

  A woman sat at the Angel’s side. She was tall, a giant, but not quite as large as the Angel. She was naked, and across her thighs were draped the bodies of two children, a boy and a girl.

  As Simon drew closer to the group, he saw that the dead children were twins: they had the same dark curly hair, pale flesh, and each had a trio of acorns tattooed across his or her narrow back. The boy lay looking up into the woman’s face, staring into her eyes. The girl was draped face-down across the woman’s legs, her buttocks sallow and flaccid.

  “What is this?” Simon’s voice sounded strange. The intonation was flat; the words bounced back at him, as if he was bounded by thick walls. “What does it mean?”

  The woman turned slowly to face him. Her hair was long and dark. Her breasts were saggy, empty bags laid across her ribcage. Her nipples had been removed. There was no blood, just flat, cauterised flesh. Her body was young, but it was battered, and her face was so very old. She mouthed words to Simon, but he could not hear. He stood and watched the silent mummer’s performance, wishing that he could help, that he could take on at least a fraction of the woman’s burden. If he could help her, he thought, then might not he also be able to help himself? It was an odd thought, based on nothing but intuition, but it felt like the truth.

  The woman was crying soundlessly. Tears of blood ran down her lined, wrinkled face. She did not wipe them away. She just clutched her children, her poor dead children, and tried to convey a message he would never understand, no matter how long he remained here.

  The Angel did not move.

  The Angel was broken.

  Simon looked to his right, his gaze drawn by a subtle movement, a flicker at the edge of his vision. The dark earth began to rise and fall, and then to churn. Like the woman’s weeping, the motion was soundless. He watched as the ground shuddered and was torn apart, and something broke the surface. What rolled into view was not unlike the back of a whale, or perhaps the flank of an elephant wallowing in cool mud, and it appeared only for a moment. Then, his mind clear at last, Simon thought it had resembled more the segmented flank of a giant maggot burrowing through the topsoil. Now that the shape was gone, he had the impression of boils and tumours on its hide, splits and cuts in the thick flesh which had oozed yellow fluids...

  He turned again to the woman, the bereft woman and her dead twins.

  She was mouthing a word – the same word, over and over again. Simon glanced back over to where the earth had been disturbed, but this time there was nothing to be seen. He looked back at the woman. She was still mouthing the word.

  He stepped forward, approaching her. Her eyes were white, with no pupils, and her lips were thin, like blades. Silently, she repeated the same word, again and again and again... the same single word.

  Doors swung open inside Simon’s memory, and a wind gusted through the empty halls of his mind. It was coming; something was on its way now. So he waited. Bracing himself against this alien earth, watching a giant woman as she repeated a silent warning, and wishing that the Angel would move, just an inch, he waited for whatever was coming.

  Underthing.

  He heard the word as if it had been spoken, but not by the woman. By someone else, twenty years ago... a girl, a young girl called Hailey.

  Underthing.

  This was the thing that had taken him, taken them all, the foul creature that had stolen their youth, tainted their future, and torn apart the foundations of their friendship. This was what had called him back to the estate, and finally, after all these years, he recognised the monster they had followed into the Needle, the beast with no name, just a description:

  The Underthing.

  Simon knew that this was a dream, but if he allowed it to happen, and the events whose aftermath he could see took place, nothing would ever be the same again.

  The doors in his mind stayed open, and his worst fears came lumbering through, wearing so many masks that he could not help but realise they were still hiding, still concealing themselves. One mask at a time, piece by piece, Simon began to discover what had been hiding in his darkness.

  TWENTY YEARS AGO, WHEN THE DAMAGE WAS DONE

  THEY ARE WAITING on the platform, huddled beneath an old tarpaulin they discovered folded under some bushes not far from the old Beacon Hill railway platform. The s
heet smells of piss and alcohol; when they found it, Marty said it must have been used as a tramp’s bedding. They all laughed at that, but still they hauled the sheet back to their base camp to use as a cover.

  The night is clear. Thin clouds are just about visible, high up in the seamless black of the sky. The moon is somewhere between half and full, and it shines down like a spotlight upon the area where the boys have made their den.

  Night birds sing in the dense undergrowth, or hop between tree branches. When they close their eyes and keep quiet, not making a sound apart from their breathing, the boys can almost fool themselves that they are not on the outskirts of a grey conurbation, but somewhere out in the countryside. For a moment, anyway, before the sounds of distant engines and alarms intrude upon their reverie and spoil the lie. Then reality comes flooding back, and something inside them dies.

  “Can you hear something?” Brendan’s voice is low, timid. He does not move.

  “Like what?” Even Marty sounds cautious. “I didn’t hear a thing.”

  “Shush...” Simon pulls the tarpaulin down and peers over its edge, scanning the ground below the tree.

  Something rustles in the bushes to the right of their position, making them shake. Then, softly, a low clicking sound begins to build, rising gradually from near silence to a soft, low, ratcheting noise.

  “What is it?” Brendan tenses beneath the sheet; they all feel it, the fear that has crept up on them, taking them by surprise. Like the arms of a drunken parent, it clumsily envelopes them, making them feel unsafe.

  “I dunno. Sounds like a rattlesnake.” Simon moves slowly across the platform, towards the edge of the plywood base. He lies down on his belly and gently pulls himself towards the platform’s roughened lip, staring down at the ground. Low branches shudder; the sound builds, dies down, and then builds again.

  “Captain Clickety,” says Brendan, his voice now not much above a whisper.