by Gary McMahon
But how can that be? he thought. How can we be outside and inside at the same time?
The light flickered through the gaps in the greenery. The shape – the figure, because that’s surely what it was – moved at the periphery of his vision, more slowly this time, as if it wanted to be seen.
“What is that?” Simon moved a couple of paces to his left and raised his hand. The green light dappled his skin. “There’s somebody there.”
Brendan moved, too: he turned and faced the two of them. “It’s a girl,” he said, his face reflecting green. “It’s the girl. It’s Hailey.”
The space in which they stood seemed to surge and swell, as if the revelation had triggered some kind of response. The area grew larger, its boundaries pushed away to allow them more room to manoeuvre. The darkness was forced back where it could not reach them.
The girl’s face manifested in the leaves, becoming clearer as Marty stared. It was as if her features were forming from the vegetation, her eyes and nose, her small, curved mouth, her hair, all coming together organically from the life around her. She was smiling. Her eyes were green, like tiny round leaves.
“Hello again,” said Simon. His hand – still raised – hovered in the air like a bird: a pale, pink hummingbird.
The girl’s smile grew wider.
“It’s been a long time.” Simon sounded relaxed. It seemed that he was taking all this in his stride, simply accepting the weirdness in a way that Marty could only envy. He clutched at his side. His passenger was moving again, straining at the envelope of his skin.
“Hello, boys,” said the girl. Her voice held the traces of a faint buzzing sound. Again, Marty thought about the sound of hummingbird wings – a light rasping quality which was not at all unpleasant. He’d definitely heard that voice before; the same words had come from her mouth twenty years ago, when she’d appeared at their side, holding back the darkness just as she was doing now, but by less sophisticated means.
“What are we supposed to do?” Marty said.
“I’m afraid you’re stuck there.” She smiled again.
“Stuck where? Where exactly are we?” Brendan said.
“Where you are isn’t where I am. I’m here on one side, and you’re on the other. But the place you’re standing is in between. It’s not one place or another. It’s no place, really.” She moved backwards, and only then did Marty realise that the soft buzzing sound was not in her voice: it came from her wings. The girl – Hailey – was hovering in place on oversized hummingbird wings, but they were the same colour and texture as the trees behind her.
“How can we get where you are? We have business over there, you see.” Again Simon’s voice was calm; he must have detached himself from the moment in order to deal with the situation.
“You need a doorway. The last time, you were the doorway – all three of you. Your hurt and your pain, the fact that you all yearned for something more than what you had, something better, allowed you to set foot here.” She was still smiling. It was beautiful. “But that doesn’t work this time. It needs something more.”
“And where is ‘here’?”
She shook her head. “Oh, where I am has many names. I suppose the best way to explain is to tell you a little story.” She moved closer towards them, away from the screen of trees – which, Marty now realised, was thin, only two-dimensional. “Are you all listening?”
Marty nodded. His friends did not speak, so he assumed they’d done the same. They were all hypnotised by this beautiful girl, and her wondrous smile, and her amazing wings...
“Listen,” she said. Then she told them her tale:
“When the first man dreamed, this place was born. It has no name, yet mankind has called it many things. We who dwell here call it Loculus – ‘little place’. There are no other places, not really. There is only here.
“Loculus. The little place.
“This place is a container for dreams, a burial niche for them when they have nowhere else to go. Whenever you have a dream, or an idea, and nothing comes of it, that energy comes here. All energy is neutral in Loculus, and for a long time a sense of balance was achieved. Then human dreams turned sour; as Man evolved, became stronger, his dreams turned grander, and more foolish, and more easily spoiled. A lot of them went sour, like a vat of milk left out in the sun.”
Marty felt a small, empty part of him fill up with this knowledge. He knew that the girl’s story was true.
“Who, or what, is the Underthing?” His mouth was still dry, but he made himself heard. He had to know. “Is it Captain Clickety?”
The girl’s smile was sadder now; it contained a capacity for misery.
“All energy is neutral in Loculus, and for a long time balance was achieved.” Her smile faltered, fell away. “Then human dreams turned bad; as Man evolved, became stronger, his dreams turned sour. Pollution entered this place; all this became tainted.” She hovered backwards, raising her arms. “That’s what the Underthing represents. He is the result of that pollution.
“Loculus is Heaven to some and Hell to others; freedom to one, a prison cell to another. It is nothing and it is everything.
“The Underthing is, in many ways, a prisoner of paradise. He wants to escape to the hell of the world in which you men live – a world I used to know. Loculus is held together by balance, two halves operating as a whole. The Underthing collects twins, clutching them to him in the hope that he can upset the balance – separate the two halves, split the two worlds and sneak in through the gaps. Not many twins are born in the Grove. In here, in Loculus, if there is the possibility of a set being conceived, he smells it through the fabric of the place, and he is drawn to it.”
Twins.
Marty glanced at Brendan, who had clearly come to his own conclusions.
“He wanted me all along... because of the twins. He knew I could have twins. He smelled them on me when I was ten years old...” Brendan was crying. Tears streaked his long, pale face.
Hailey spoke again, through the trees: “Captain Clickety is an avatar. The Underthing cannot leave this place, so he sends out tendrils. Once there was a man who tried to enter Loculus... a plague doctor, a man who hid his lusts behind the mask of medicine. The Underthing uses him occasionally, to walk abroad out there, in the Concrete Grove. Like a tentacle reaching for something shiny, Captain Clickety goes out looking for ways to upset the balance.”
“How do we get over there?” said Simon. “How do we get into this ‘Loculus’? You mentioned that before, when we were kids, we were doorways. What about now?”
She shook her head. “I’m afraid that time is gone. This time I have sent you a new doorway. I can’t do anything more. Last time I made myself known to the Underthing, and he’s been aware of my presence ever since. I have no special power. I’m just a mediator – all I can do is show you the way to go.”
At that moment something moved to Marty’s right. He spun around, adopting a defensive stance – guard up, covering his face, feet pointing forward, knees bent – and saw a small, thin man with a white mask over his face walk out of the tree-screen.
“This,” said Hailey, “is Banjo. He is your doorway. It’s why he’s here, what has kept him alive. He has this one job to do before he can be free of his nagging body and escape the demands of the world.”
Banjo stood there, in his stained clothes, his white mask – which Marty now saw was made of bandages – shockingly bright under the strange, diffuse green light.
“Go ahead, Banjo.” Hailey’s voice had adopted a gentle, motherly tone. “You know what to do.”
Banjo reached up and took hold of a loose flap of bandage, and then he proceeded to unwind the wrappings, turning the bandages round and round his head and gathering them in his fist. He kept on going, revealing yet more layers of white, until finally he uncovered what was hidden beneath.
The man’s face was badly scarred. The scars were old, shiny, and reflected the green light like plastic. His eyes were open, and the li
ds were thin and tattered, like paper. He had no lips, just nubs across the top and bottom of his mouth opening. He looked like he was grinning: he was the man who grinned forever, but who never quite got the joke.
His raised arm moved around his face with mechanical regularity, removing the remaining bandages. Marty expected the movement to stop when his ruined face was fully exposed, but it continued after that.
In fact, when Banjo reached the end of the gauze dressings, he kept on going, unwrapping strips of his damaged skin in the same long, loose coiling motion. It was like peeling an orange: the flesh came away easily, like rind, and fell to the ground. Next was the bone, which was stripped away in the same manner. And beneath that, inside the man’s skull, was a cluster of leaves. The dried leaves fell, falling to earth in a slow, spinning drift, and as Marty and the other men watched, something strange happened... Banjo was no longer there, and in his place there appeared an opening in the trees.
The screen had vanished; this was here, real.
Real trees; a real wood, and on the other side, a small, open space: a peaceful grove, within which they had once been bound and had pain inflicted upon their ten-year-old bodies.
All at once, and without hesitation, the Three Amigos stepped back into the ancient oak grove. There was no longer any doubt; each man wanted to be here, to settle old scores and put his ghosts to rest.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
JANE SAT BY Harry’s bedside, crying into her fists. She had been unable to contact Brendan. She felt helpless, a useless part in a machine that had gone spinning out of control.
The doctors – the same ones who’d sent him home – didn’t have a clue what was wrong with Harry. His vital signs were all strong; the tests they’d run had come back negative. All the apparatus of modern medicine seemed to agree on the same result: Harry was fine, he was fit and healthy and should not be lying in a hospital bed in what was, for all intents and purposes, a coma.
“I need you,” she said, not sure if she meant her son or her absent husband. “Please come back.”
The heart monitor at the side of her son’s bed beeped rhythmically and steadily.
Jane closed her eyes and wished: she wished that Simon-fucking-Ridley had not come back into their lives; she wished that Brendan had never been friends with those other two boys; she wished that she could do something to save her son, her family, her very existence.
The machine continued to beep.
Harry did not move. His face was serene above the bed sheets. His hair was neatly combed into a side parting – she’d done it earlier, just to occupy some time and get rid of the nervous energy rushing through her body.
The hospital ward was busy. The nurses had pulled the curtains around on their rail to give her and Harry some privacy, but this was still a public ward. The family had no private health care; they had to accept whatever they were given. She could hear the hushed voices of other visitors, the soft-soled nurses’ shoes as they brushed across the tiled floor, the frightening sounds of other medical machinery. Somebody was speaking on the phone at the nurses’ station. They laughed, and then remembered where they were and began to whisper.
Jane reached out and took Harry’s small hand in her own, above the covers. There was no response from his body; his muscles did not even twitch. She felt empty, as if he’d turned his back on her, ignoring her show of affection. She knew this wasn’t true, that she was being silly, but it did not help. Her son didn’t even know she was here, at his side, crying for him.
“I need you to come back,” she said, this time speaking to them both – Harry and Brendan. Isobel was still at a friends’ house gearing up for the sleepover, ignorant of the hell Jane was going through. How did you tell a ten-year-old that her twin brother might die, and nobody could do a thing about it because they had no idea what was happening to him?
She closed her eyes, and for a moment – a second, at most – she thought that she heard Harry making a strange clicking sound, as if he were pressing his tongue against the side of his mouth the way he did whenever he saw a dog on the street or in a neighbours’ garden.
She opened her eyes, but of course Harry was just the same: he had not made a sound.
Jane let go of his hand and stood. She took out her mobile phone and checked it for messages. There were none. She went to the nurses’ station and told them that she was stepping outside to make a call, to see if she could contact her husband. The nurses smiled and nodded, and their eyes were filled with pity. Poor soul, they were probably thinking. He’s probably out at the pub, or in the betting shop.
Jane went outside. When she made the call, and there was no answer, she felt like smashing the phone. She leant back against the wall and wished again: but this time she wished her husband dead... and instantly regretted the thought, tried to take it back.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
IT WAS A seamless transition from standing in that small, cramped, green-lit place to being here, beyond the screen of oak trees, just inside the grove. Simon accepted the passage with an unfamiliar calmness. It felt like some kind of Zen moment: his mind and body acted as one, unified against the strangeness that was showing more of itself to him at every twist and turn of this journey. He’d gone beyond fear. He wanted to embrace horror – the horror he’d always felt should belong to him.
Hailey was nowhere to be seen. Now that Banjo, their doorway, had helped them enter the place she’d called Loculus, she had fled the scene, leaving them to their own devices. She did not seem to have any power here. He wondered if she’d exhausted her energies that first time, when she’d helped them escape.
He glanced at the two boys he’d known back then, who had become men he barely knew at all, and wondered what it was they were meant to do – why they were here. They were all present to face their fears, he knew that. But at a deeper level, unknown forces were warring. The three had become pieces in a game that none of them could understand.
He recalled his most recent dream, when the Angel of the North had been bowed and broken, and a weeping woman had cradled the body of her children – her twin babies. It all made sense now, in a grim kind of way. That dream, he realised, was a prophecy, a glimpse of how things might be if they failed here.
Twins.
Two parts of a whole.
Yin and Yang: opposing forces.
Comedy and tragedy. Darkness and light.
This place, he thought, must exist in a state of turmoil: the balance shifting, constantly moving back and forth between opposing points. The Underthing – whatever it was – had sniffed out that Brendan was capable of producing twins and tried to claim him early, to tip the balance in its favour. That was why they’d been brought here twenty years ago; that was why they’d been examined by uncaring hands. It had not been sexual abuse, but a sort of medical examination, meant to find out which one was the future twin-maker. Then, before things had reached their terrible conclusion, Hailey had stepped in and helped them to get away.
He remembered, now; he recalled more than he ever had before.
Standing here, in the grove where they’d been tormented, he had a mental flash: Hailey standing between them and some huge, shapeless shadow, waving her arms, flapping her weird wings, and shouting, screaming, distracting it to give them a chance to get away. He could not remember who had managed to struggle free from the leafy bonds first, but after that, they’d acted together to break out and run free.
They had acted together. As a single unit... three separate parts, joining together to form a whole.
That was important to remember.
And that was all. He could recall nothing more. He probably never would. But at least, for now, he had his horror to hold – the sordid excuse for a life that he’d led could be traced back to an actual event, rather than the scattered fragments of shattered memory.
“Look.” Marty was pointing with one hand while he gripped his side with the other. He seemed to be in pain. His face was pale, his mouth tw
isted into something that came as close to a snarl as Simon had ever seen on a human being.
“It’s come back. It still wants us...” Simon watched as a great shadow roiled in the space beyond the trees, moving away from them like a mobile stain across the land. “Let’s go and give it what it wants.”
Simon led the way out of the grove of ancient oaks and into an open area. The sun hung miles above them, as still as a picture, and the hills rolled away to other patches of woodland, most of them burned and blasted. To the west, across a vale of green and grey, he could see the ruins of some kind of city. Cradled between two hills, in a shallow valley, the blackened buildings waited like a ghost of shelter. “What the hell is this place?”
It was all from his dream: a possible future, where everything was ruined.
Brendan turned in a slow circle, surveying their surroundings. “I don’t know, but we’ve been here before. This land – it knows us. It can sense that we’re here. Can’t you feel it?”
“Yes,” said Marty, still clutching his side. “It feels like we never really left.”
Simon nodded. The truth of his friend’s words dug deep, piercing his heart; and in a way, they never had left this place, not really. All they’d done was peek outside the boundaries of a prison and pretend that their lives were part of another world, a place where people killed each other for money, fucked each other for company, and bobbed and weaved like fighters inside a ring, never stopping, not even pausing for breath before they reached the grave.
Ahead of them, at the base of the slope on top of which they stood, the earth began to heave. Above them, the sky turned dark, as if a huge shadow was passing above them.
Simon looked up, and what he saw there scared him more than anything else he’d seen since returning to the Grove. The sky was filled with hummingbirds. There were millions of them, just hanging there, hovering in the air about a mile above the three men, waiting for something to happen. They stretched out like a patterned sheet, covering the sky for mile upon mile – so far, in fact, that he could barely see the blue edges.
