by Gary McMahon
He barely even recognised himself.
Captain Clickety fell into a heap of greasy sticks and rags on the ground. The avatar was no more; he had been torn apart by the simple act of sacrifice, a show of friendship that monsters like him would never, ever understand. To love was human, not divine; to hate was simply monstrous.
The Three Amigos would live to ride another day, and everything that came after this would be different, cast in a new and uncertain light. Rather than a band of three, each would set off into his own sunset as his own man, liberated, freed at last from the terrible bondage of a shared past.
“What happened?” Brendan rose from his knees, topless, his shirt cast aside, his skin scratched and torn by his own fingernails. “Has it gone?”
“I’m not sure,” said Simon. “I’m not sure about anything.”
Marty staggered upright, to complete the group. He was bleeding from a gash in his side, stitches pulled free and dangling like threads. “Did you see it?” His face was ashen. He was crying openly, unconcerned by his show of what he usually saw as weakness. “Did you see Humpty-fucking-Dumpty?”
Simon shook his head. “I don’t know what I saw... or what I’m seeing now.” He looked up, at the brightening sky. A few straggling hummingbirds flew in circles above them, watching over these final few moments. “But I want to go home.”
They turned around and walked towards the grove of oak trees, no longer afraid of what they would find at its centre: just the shadows of forgotten youth, frayed lengths of rope, and husks of memories that even now were losing their power over them.
For a moment, he thought he saw a ghostly outline of three small boys, holding hands as they stood in a row before the trees. Their outlines shimmered and they were gone; he had seen nothing, after all.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“WHAT THE FUCK happened in there?”
They were standing on the Roundpath, outside the Needle. Simon had locked the gates and was returning the keys to his pocket.
“What the fuck happened?” Marty was clutching the remains of Brendan’s shirt to his side. The blood was still flowing, but slowly.
“Would you do me a favour?” Brendan, still topless, turned around and presented his back to the group. “Tell me what you see there, on my back?” He still sounded afraid, but it was fear of a different kind.
Simon stared at his friend’s back. It was scratched and bloody, but nothing more. “Just a few scratches.”
“You sure? I mean really sure? I’ve suffered horrendous back acne my whole life. If what you’re telling me is correct, I’m cured.”
Simon walked over and touched Brendan’s back. His skin was hot and damp, but apart from a few old acne scars, it was clear of any kind of blemish other than the ones caused by the man’s own hands. “I promise,” he said. “The only marks on your back are either very old or the scratches you gave yourself.”
Marty hobbled over. “I still don’t understand any of this. What did you do in there? Did you defeat the... the monster? Is it dead?”
Simon shook his head. “No. I don’t think so. I think we just sent it away for a little while. How do you kill something that was never alive in the first place? It won’t bother us again, though. It’s done with us. We have nothing else that it can take.”
“It... it sniffed you. Hailey said that it could smell twins. Are you a twin?”
Again, Simon shook his head. “There are no twins in our family. I was an only child. Whatever the hell it smelled on me, it wasn’t that... maybe it just caught a whiff of my spirit, and decided that the fight was no longer one it could win? Who knows? I don’t have a fucking clue.”
The sky was dark. Night had fallen. He wasn’t sure how long they’d been inside the tower, but it felt like days had passed in the outside world. He remembered that time had no meaning in there; in the place Hailey had called Loculus – the little place, where dreams went to die.
“Let’s go home. Back to Brendan’s place, check on Jane and the kids. I have a feeling they’ll have their own story to tell, and it’ll make as much sense as ours.”
Brendan’s head snapped up. “What do you mean? You think they’re in trouble?”
“Not any more,” said Simon. “While we were fighting our demons, they had to contend with one of their own. But I’m certain they’re all okay, now. We won, didn’t we?”
The three men went silent for a moment.
“Did we? Did we win, I mean?” Marty looked like he might collapse at any minute.
“Let’s get you both seen to, eh? Then we can either talk about this until dawn and try to figure out what we just did, or fucking forget about the whole thing and move on with our lives. It’s your call. I’m too tired to even think about it.”
They moved off, away from the Needle, with Simon in the lead, Marty in the middle, and Brendan bringing up the rear, dragging his mobile phone from his pocket and checking the messages. He stopped in his tracks, the phone held against his ear.
“Oh, shit...” He listened to every message before allowing them to move off again.
“It’s Harry. He’s been ill again. But... well, according to the last message, he’s okay now. Jane’s still at the hospital, but she says he’s fine. They just want to keep him in a couple of days to keep an eye on him.”
Simon smiled. “He’s fine. The boy’s fine.”
Marty said nothing.
Brendan called Jane’s mobile and asked a lot of questions as he walked, promising her that he’d go right to the hospital once he’d cleaned himself up. He seemed a lot happier when he hung up, although he was crying. He even smiled.
“Yes, he is fine. He’s eating fucking ice cream and flirting with the nurses.”
Simon laughed, and turned back round, to look where he was going. He saw the figure only briefly, as it darted out from a ginnel that led to Back Grove Crescent.
Just before he felt a sharp punching sensation in his stomach, and fell to the ground, he recognised the baseball cap with the Scooby Doo badge on the front. The hat fell from the kid’s head as he ran back into the ginnel, palming the bloodied knife.
Simon smiled. What else could he do?
He realised now that they’d never really escaped when they were children. Time had no meaning in Loculus; twenty years in the real world might be a few days in the little place. Captain Clickety, and by extension the Underthing, had simply let them leave. Because it knew – it had always known – that they’d come back.
Take me, he thought. Take me back home, to a time when the world was smaller, the days were brighter, before the monsters were real and the damage was done...
Simon died with that ironic smile still on his lips. He tried to speak. To tell Marty something, perhaps even to explain the joke, as the other man cradled him in his arms. But he didn’t have the strength. He closed his eyes and accepted the onrushing darkness. Somewhere within it – from deep inside all of that vast black night – he heard a faint clicking sound, as if something approved of his passing.
The sacrifice had been accepted.
And still he did not know the reason why, or the full extent of what he had offered to save his friends.
WHAT COMES AFTER, WHEN THE SILENCE HAS BEEN BROKEN
TWO DAYS AFTER Simon’s death, Marty is on a train to King’s Cross. Brendan badly wanted to make the journey with him, but Marty told his friend to stay at home and look after his wife and kids. Harry is fighting fit, but he still needs a father’s attention. Jane needs some attention too, and even a woman that brave must be close to breaking point after everything she’s gone through.
If he is honest, he also doesn’t think Brendan’s in the right frame of mind. He is stronger than he looks, but Marty is stronger. Marty has always been proud to call himself a bastard, and it is a bastard’s errand upon which he finds himself.
The train pulls into the station. Marty disembarks, throwing his rucksack over his shoulder, and makes his way along the platform. The jostl
ing hordes remind him of some of the crowds at the fights he’s been in, and it makes him feel slightly nauseous to be surrounded by so many people.
He has only vague memories of the mutant Humpty Dumpty creature emerging from the wound in his side, and of fighting it on the ground in that... other place. The place he now knows as Loculus. He tries not to think of it, but he knows that it will return to him always, in dreams. Loculus is a defective storage pen for such dreams; it is like a leaking battery, and the energy of dreams runs both ways, in and out of its borders.
He knows this now. It makes things easier to deal with.
He also knows that Simon Ridley somehow managed to save them all. The details aren’t clear, but the feeling that Simon has been a hero is embedded deep inside him, like a seed in fertile ground. And he hopes one day that seed will produce the flowers of memory. Then he can pay proper tribute to his friend, his saviour: the boy he wishes he could have known better as a man.
Marty turns left outside of the station, and follows the route he has memorised from Google Maps. The address was in Simon’s notebook back at the flat on Grove Court. Marty was forced to break in to salvage Simon’s belongings, because he had not been able to find the keys on the body.
The kid who murdered Simon is still out there somewhere. When he returns from this short trip to London, Marty has plans to track down the bastard himself. He’s already spoken to Erik Best, and there are a couple of good lads on the case. Hopefully, by the time he gets back to the Concrete Grove, they will have found him.
Then it will be Marty’s turn to play Humpty-fucking-Dumpty...
He finds The Halo easily. It is on a street corner, and the sign outside the pub is pretty hard to miss – a tiny transvestite angel with a big glowing circle around its head. He smiles as he glances up at the sign. Then he steps inside and heads straight for the bar.
“Excuse me,” he says to the man standing behind the bar reading a paperback thriller. “Are you Mike?”
“Depends on who’s asking,” says the man, grinning.
Marty decides that he likes this man. He can see already why he was Simon’s best – only – friend. “I’m Marty. We spoke on the phone.”
The grin falls away. “Shit, yeah. Fuck... Marty. Good to meet you.” He sticks out his hand and Marty takes it, gives it a quick shake.
“I’m sorry I had to break the news to you that way. How’s Natasha taking it?”
Mike shrugs his narrow shoulders. “Not good. I’ll go and get her. Like I said on the phone, she’s been staying upstairs, in my spare room, for a few days. She hasn’t had any visitors, or even spoken to anyone she works with. She needs to get her head together before the funeral. We both do.”
Marty sits at a table and looks at his hands. His scars are livid today; his knuckles look like conkers in a bag.
“Hello...”
When he glances up from the table, she is there, standing at his side. He was not even aware of her as she moved across the room. Perhaps it is part of her training as a model, that ability to glide rather than walk.
“I’m sorry,” he says again. It is something he finds himself saying a lot lately. “I tried to help him... but... but he died.”
“In your arms.” Her face is thin and pale, the skin of her cheeks as delicate as paper, fluttering as she speaks. Her pronunciation is slow and deliberate, as if she is trying desperately not to stumble over the words. Marty likes her accent.
“In my arms,” he says, trying not to cry. “This is why I came here. To tell you face-to-face that... that I tried to save him. And that he saved me.”
He stares at her impassive face for a little while longer, and then his gaze wanders down to her belly. She isn’t showing, not yet; but Mike told him the news when Marty telephoned the previous day and arranged to come over and see her.
“How many months are you gone?” He nods at her stomach.
“Not long. Just eight weeks. I was going to tell him when he got back. I could not tell him something like that over the phone. That’s why I was so desperate to see him. I almost came up there, to the northeast. I nearly came to see him before... well, you know.” Her eyes are shining. Tears look good on her; she wears her grief well. Natasha is a true model; a natural.
Marty doesn’t know what else to say, so he falls back on small talk, hoping that some day he can speak to this woman properly, tell her the truth – or at least as much of it as he can understand. “Do you know what you’re having?” He flexes his hands on the table. They’re stiff; his fingers ache. “I mean, would he have been the father of a boy or a girl?”
Natasha licks her lips. Her left eye twitches slightly. Not much, but it is a crack in the façade, a gap through which the depth of her grief can be glimpsed, like fire, if only briefly.
“Both,” she says, her voice as low as a whisper. “I’m having twins. There are twins on my mother’s side of the family, and it seems I got them, too.”
Marty closes his eyes. Darkness floods in, drowning him.
Now, at last, he realises what Captain Clickety must have sniffed out on Simon, and what had happened right at the end, when a deal was struck.
He knows why the sacrifice was accepted, and how it might now be claimed.
“Twins,” he whispers, and in that black moment the word becomes forever associated with absolute horror.
IT KNOWS WHERE YOU LIVE...
Imagine a place where all your nightmares become real. Dark urban streets where crime, debt and violence are not the only things to fear. Picture a housing project that is a gateway to somewhere else; a realm where ghosts and monsters stir hungrily in the shadows. Welcome to the Concrete Grove.
This deprived area is Hailey’s new home, but when an ancient entity notices her, it becomes something much more threatening. She is the only one who can help her mother as she joins in a dangerous dance with loanshark Monty Bright. Only Hailey can see the truth of Tom’s darkest desires as he tries to become part of their family. And only Hailey can lead them all to the heart of the estate where something older than this land stirs and begins to wake...
‘The Concrete Grove is McMahon’s most accomplished work to date. A compelling novel of extremes.’
Mark Morris, author of The Deluge
‘There’s a new wave of brilliant horror writers, and McMahon’s right there at the top of them.’
Andy Remic, author of Kell’s Legend
‘McMahon’s visionary sense of the supernatural makes The Concrete Grove one exciting read.’
Steve Rasnic Tem, co-author of The Man on The Ceiling
www.solarisbooks.com
HOME IS WHERE THE HORROR IS...
The tread on the landing outside the door when you know you are the only one in the house. The wind whistling through the eves, carrying the voices of the dead. The figure glimpsed briefly through the cracked window of a derelict house.
Critically-acclaimed editor Jonathan Oliver brings horror home with a collection of haunted house stories by Lisa Tuttle, Stephen Volk, Terry Lamsley, Adam L. G. Nevill, Weston Ochse, Rebecca Levene, Garry Kilworth, Chaz Brenchley, Robert Shearman, Nina Allan, Christopher Fowler, Sarah Pinborough, Paul Meloy, Christopher Priest, Jonathan Green, Nicholas Royle, Eric Bown, Tim Lebbon and Joe R. Lansdale.
“Jonathan Oliver is the hottest new horror editor to come out of the UK since Stephen Jones, and I have high hopes for House of Fear.”
– Jonathan Strahan, Locus award-winning editor of Swords and Dark Magic
www.solarisbooks.com
Imagine there was a supernatural chiller that Hammer Films never made. A grand epic produced at the studio’s peak, which played like a cross between the Dracula and Frankenstein films and Dr Terror’s House Of Horrors...
Four passengers meet on a train journey through Eastern Europe during the First World War, and face a mystery that must be solved if they are to survive. As the ‘Arkangel’ races through the war-torn countryside, they must find out:
What
is in the casket that everyone is so afraid of? What is the tragic secret of the veiled Red Countess who travels with them? Why is their fellow passenger the army brigadier so feared by his own men? And what exactly is the devilish secret of the Arkangel itself?
Bizarre creatures, satanic rites, terrified passengers and the romance of travelling by train, all in a classically styled horror novel.
www.solarisbooks.com
Pilot Paul Roan is in command of a Boeing 777 involved in a near miss. Nerves shot, he opts for a new life running a B&B in a coastal village with his girlfriend, Tamara. Not long after they arrive, Paul is involved in a serious accident.
Emerging six months later from a coma, Paul discovers that Tamara is gone and a child killer is haunting the beaches. The villagers, appalled by Paul’s cheating of death, treat him as a sin-eater. They bring him items to dispose of, secrets far too awful to deal with themselves. At least he has local nurse, Ruth, to look after him. And Amy, a damaged soul with a special gift. She befriends Paul and together they unearth clues that might explain the shocking history of the village, and suggest the murders are anything but.
Meanwhile, Paul begins to suspect there is more to Tamara’s disappeareance than meets the eye...
