The Concrete Grove cg-1

by Gary McMahon

“She went home. It’s late.”

  “What time is it? I… I must’ve fallen asleep again. I’ve been very tired today. Exhausted, but I’m not sure why.” Her hands fidgeted on top of the bedclothes, exploring like pale stick insects. Her eyes were wide and wet and slightly imbecilic.

  “It’s almost nine o’clock. I’m really sorry for staying out this long.”

  Helen shivered. “No. It’s fine. You need to work, to bring in the money. I know that.” She looked like a plastic doll, rigid and unblinking.

  “Just lie back down and go to sleep. I’ll clean up and have an early night myself. It’s been a long day. Tiring. I need to catch up on a lot of work tomorrow, so will probably be up and about early.”

  One of her flailing hands settled on top of both of his. Her fat fingers enveloped them, spreading out across his knuckles like a jellyfish. “Okay, Tom. I love you.” Her voice was filled with a desperation that he found offensive, even frightening. She said it because she wanted him to say it back — she needed to hear him say the words, to reassure her, to put her mind at rest. He hated it when she got like this, and he despised himself for begrudging her the slight demonstration of affection.

  More guilt for him to carry, and it always prompted him to give her what she needed.

  “I love you, too,” he said, through tight lips. The words sounded like someone else was in the room, speaking for him.

  She squeezed his hands and then relaxed her grip. He pulled his hands away, just about resisting the urge to wipe them on his shirt, as if she had left a residue, a taint that he could not bear to feel against his skin.

  “I had a strange dream,” she said as she nestled her head back against the pillows. Her eyes were open. Even in the darkness he could see the pulse in the side of her neck jerking like a jumping bean.

  “Don’t worry about that now. Just tell me in the morning, when we’re both less tired.”

  “But I might forget.” Her eyelids were flickering shut. The pulse in her neck was slowing, its movement becoming less frantic. “What if I forget it, Tom?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said, adjusting his position on the bed so that he could get up without disturbing her. “It’s nothing, just a dream. And dreams can’t hurt you.”

  “The TV people told me.”

  Tom felt his limbs stiffen. His eyes widened in the dark and his shoulders tensed.

  “They said that you were with someone — another woman.”

  He stared at her face, her slack cheeks and her closed eyes. Her small, hard nose. Her slit of a mouth and the multiple chins beneath.

  “I don’t mind. I know you have needs. You’re a man, still a young man, really, and you can’t deny your desires.”

  She was asleep now: he could see that she was. He knew her well enough, and had spent so many years by her side, that he could not fail to recognise when she was no longer awake. Yet her speech was crisp and erudite. She was speaking lucidly, unhurriedly. Her words were as clear as the sound of falling water.

  “But they said she’s dangerous. The TV people. They told me that she’ll hurt you. Something’s going to happen, and everyone will suffer. We’ll all pay a price, a debt that’s owed. We’ll all get hurt because of her.”

  She’s sleeping, he thought. Talking in her sleep. She does this all the time — don’t get freaked out. She knows nothing.

  But he was freaked out. In fact, he was terrified. How could she know that he had been with a woman, and one whose very presence made him weak and senseless with desire? It wasn’t real, couldn’t be. This was some kind of fluke, a random circumstance. There was no way on earth that Helen could know, and there certainly were not any people inside the television to divulge the information.

  He looked over at the screen, needing to keep an eye on it, to watch it more closely. The static was going crazy. It was like a swarm of monochrome bees trapped in a jar, bouncing off the glass walls, confused and trying to get out, get free, back out into the open.

  “She’ll break everything. Cause damage. They told me this, the TV people. They had skinned faces and long, bent-back legs. There were tiny birds with bright wings hovering around them and landing on them, sitting in their open palms.”

  The television screen bulged. Just once, like an air bubble. Then it went dark. Reflected for a moment in that jet black surface, Tom saw something that could not possibly be his father’s face, no matter how much it resembled the man’s features.

  “She’ll open doors that should stay closed.” Helen’s voice was drifting now, growing weaker, quieter. “She’s going to let them out, and… she doesn’t know… it.”

  Then she went quiet, apart from her ragged breathing, and the faint sound of her little snores.

  Tom prepared to get up and leave the room. The face in the television screen — the one that he refused to acknowledge looked like his dead father — was no longer visible. He shifted his weight on the mattress, causing it to creak and rock slightly beneath him.

  I’m seeing things, he thought. That’s all.

  Helen sat bolt upright, her eyes open wide. They were all white: no pupil. Just big white marbles stuck into the pale dough of her face. Her mouth dropped open, her tongue lolling like a fat dead worm. “Kill me.” She said. “You deserve better.” Her eyes were normal now; the pupils were dilated but at least they’d gone back where they were meant to be. Her face had regained some of its firmness, and looked less like the face of a corpse. “I know you want to, Tom.” She slipped back onto the pillows, her eyes closing. “I know it’s what you want.”

  Tom stood and backed away from the bed, terrified that he might disturb her and the whole performance would start up all over again. He moved towards the door, keeping one eye on Helen and the other on the dead television screen.

  “Maybe I want it, too.”

  He could not be certain that she said the words, but he heard them anyway, inside his head. The stale air in the room buzzed with energy, like the air before a storm. Helen’s statement — whether real or imagined — was stuck in his head, refusing to budge. The words hung there like dead animals nailed to a wall: a reminder of something bad, the first bloody act in a chain of events that could not be prevented from running its course.

  He backed out of the room and tried to shut the door. He could not remove his fingers from the handle; they were glued there by fear. Perhaps if he remained where he was, with his hand on the door, then nothing Helen had predicted would happen? Perhaps he could stop the world, simply by standing there, unmoving.

  Or perhaps the world would simply keep on turning without him, unaffected by his ridiculous protest, and the damage his wife had spoken of would still destroy them all. One by one, like diseased trees falling in a dying forest, or plastic targets put down by gunshots.

  Maybe nothing he did would ever matter, not any more. Not now.

  Because what if his life was already over — if in fact it had ended ten years ago, right after the accident — and since then he’d just been playing catch-up?

  He shut and then re-opened the door — just an inch or two, the way Helen liked it. When he leaned in close and peeked through the gap he saw a large, grey hairless mass on the bed. Fins twitched above the covers like the legs of a dog dreaming of the run. At last the sea cow was sleeping…

  …then it was her again: it was Helen, asleep on the bed, her nightdress in disarray. His wife: the person who depended on him so completely. The woman he was meant to love.

  As he moved away from the door, Tom had the terrible feeling that he was leaving behind one kind of darkness only to enter another.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  HAILEY IS DREAMING again, but this time it’s different. She is not naked, for a start, and her surroundings are not at all familiar. She is standing barefoot in a dense wood, wearing sheets of flesh still warm and bloody from whatever animal they have been sliced from. She looks down at her body beneath the pelts, and sees that there are designs painted upon her swollen st
omach in blood.

  Signs and sigils; numbers and letters in a language she does not recognise.

  A spell, a hex: some kind of protective charm?

  She rubs at her skin with her fingers, trying to remove the blood, but it has already dried and marked her like indelible ink. She cannot remove the writing; it has made of her a book, a bible: a living chart filled with vague rules and instructions.

  “Hello. Is anyone here?” Her voice lifts into the air, hits the canopy of trees, and then falls back towards her. The words fade, become silence.

  Silence.

  It strikes her all at once that she can hear nothing, not even the sound of her own breathing. Her voice was the only thing able to penetrate that wall of silence, and even her words could not survive for long once they left her mouth.

  She feels as if she is standing in the middle of a movie scene with the volume set to mute. Her ears ring with pressure, but she cannot even hear an internal sound. There’s just a dull soundless throbbing, a gentle ache that is not entirely unpleasant.

  She takes a few tentative steps forward and her feet make no noise on the leaf-coated ground. She feels her bare feet sinking into the mulch, the cold mud seeping up between her toes.

  The pelts hang heavy around her, like a royal cloak. Their warm and clammy underside presses against her sin.

  The air touches the exposed parts of her flesh, making her tingle where the blood-words have been written.

  Her grotesquely distended stomach hangs like a sack of offal. Whatever she carries inside her is still, unmoving. She fears that it might be dead. The bloated flesh sways as she moves, its weight trying to drag her down towards the earth.

  As she walks through the woods she begins to make out strange shapes high up in the trees. Weird stick-figures made of twine and twigs, tied and knotted and placed like decorations. They hang suspended from the branches, their tinder-stick limbs twitching in a breeze she is unable to feel: rudimentary bodies twirling, spinning, like children’s mobiles.

  “Can anybody hear me?” The sound of her voice is shocking, but it makes no impact on this space, just bounces off invisible walls and falls to the ground, defeated. It feels as though there is a sheet of glass between her body and what she sees — and she is trapped, unable to break through and get inside.

  The breeze ruffles the grass and fallen leaves but still she cannot feel it against her skin.

  Something large and cumbersome moves through the undergrowth directly up ahead, turning a large, shaggy head to glance in her direction. Its haunches are wide and muscled; the flanks have been skinned: pink meat shows where strips of the creature’s hide have been cut away. It stops, turns, and looks at her. The face she sees is hairless and vaguely human in aspect. It blinks heavy eyelids, licks its lips with a fattened tongue.

  As she watches it opens its mouth to speak, but she cannot hear what is being said. Its teeth are huge, yellow and glistening. These are the jaws of a monster.

  The writing on her body begins to liquefy and run, the blood dribbling in narrow streams across her body. The pelts shift as if they are alive, tightening around her shoulders, and she begins to feel even more trapped.

  The creature smiles; it is a sad, almost mournful expression. Then the beast walks away on all fours, like a great brown bear. Its humanoid face, in profile, looks fat and unwell, as if labouring beneath the weight of ills and agues.

  Where the creature stood only a moment before, a thin, naked body now hangs. Upside down, arms dangling limp and lifeless, the body has been tied with lengths of hemp at the ankles and suspended like slaughtered game from the trees above. The body turns slowly, smoothly, and as she draws near she begins to recognise its shape, the tone of its skin, the colour of its hair.

  “Mum?”

  Her mother’s corpse spins slowly to face her. The torso has been cleaved, the rib cage forced apart like the white-barred doors of a cage. The stomach contents have been removed and the cavity stuffed with dry oak leaves. She is close enough now that she can reach out, take hold of a clump of that makeshift stuffing and pull it out. The leaves are attached, like a rope of handkerchiefs being drawn from the secret depths of a magician’s sleeve.

  She does not weep. She is calm, existing at a place beyond grief. This is a normal thing, a natural event. Her mother has died and been taken into the bosom of nature, and then reinvented as a part of this enchanted place.

  Acorns pour from the savage wound, dislodged by the motion of leaves as she tugs them aside. More acorns than could possibly fit inside her mother fall from her belly, released from where they have been stored in her womb: countless mutant babies waiting to be born into a world of wonder.

  She looks at her mother’s face and the eyelids flicker open. Her eyes are acorns, too; highly polished, and smoothed down as if by a steady, nimble hand wrapped in emery cloth. Her mother’s mouth hinges open and vomits a stream of filth: dead bugs, the gnawed bones of small mammals, and hundreds of tiny wood-dwelling isopods that move in a single wave across her pale face, forming a crisp brown mask.

  She drops to her knees and throws her arms around her mother’s neck, basking in that fountain of grime. Her mother’s skin feels rough as bark, and cold as all the lies she has ever told.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  FRANCIS BOATER WAS used to waiting. He had been waiting for something good to happen for his entire life, and still the much-anticipated event was yet to arrive. Whatever it was — and Boater didn’t really know what that thing might be or where it would come from — he was still waiting.

  “Is she gonna be long?” He stared at the skinny barman, flexing his massive chest in a way that he knew intimidated people. Boater used his bulk like other people used words: he hid behind it, communicated with the mass of gone-to-seed muscle that had turned to heavy fat. He couldn’t remember a time when he had been anything but big — but at least when he was younger, in his early twenties, his physique had been hard and knotted, like a stocking filled with conkers. Now that he was in his forties, he looked like an ageing mountain — or, as he thought on bad days, a stockpile of lard.

  “I’ll just go and check.” The barman — what was his name again? Terry? Trevor? Some soft-shite student-type name, anyway — put down the glass he’d been cleaning and hurried through into the back room, where he vanished up a narrow flight of wooden stairs.

  “Fucking bitch,” said Boater, necking almost his full pint of lager. He knew about bitches: knew them well, in fact. His mother had been the biggest bitch of all, and she had created what she lovingly referred to as her Own Little Monster when she fucked with his mind during childhood. He remembered coming home often to find her rutting on the sofa with strangers; sometimes she’d even told him to stand and watch, staring at him as her latest beau thrust into her, his eyes closed and his wet mouth pressed against her neck. On these occasions, her smile was like a razor: sharp and dangerous.

  Even with intelligence as limited as his, Boater knew that the woman had deliberately twisted him, turning him into what he was today: an enforcer, a man who enjoyed hitting people more than he did simply touching them; a violent sociopath more comfortable in a fight than a lovers’ embrace. Yes, even he was aware enough to realise these facts. He’d read enough true-life crime books, and seen too many documentaries on men of violence not to know the limits of his own broken mind.

  He glanced around the bar, willing someone to give him a wrong glance, or speak out of turn about him to their drinking partners — a word passed behind a raised palm, a glance held too long or not long enough. But there were no takers; everyone knew who he was, and even if they didn’t, his musk was strong enough to scare them. He was a fighter, a warrior, a barely caged tiger. He was Monty Bright’s top man, and his reputation went before him like a sword thrust into the darkness.

  “She’ll be just a couple of minutes.”

  Boater turned back to the bar, glaring at the stupid little bastard who’d come back with the message. Boate
r hated the bloke’s thin forearms, his pale skin unsullied by prison tattoos, and the keen brightness in his eyes. “Another pint. Now.”

  The man scurried the length of the bar to use the pump farthest from Boater. This made him smile. Other people’s fear always did.

  He drank his next pint more slowly, and felt the alcohol dull his rage. No doubt it would flare up later, after a few more beers, some cheap shots, and whatever drugs he could score during the course of the evening. But for now he felt calm and easy. He was out on a promise, and the girl he was waiting for was just about worth the delay.

  A few minutes later she came sashaying out from the doorway behind the bar, wearing a skirt so short that it looked more like a belt, a little leather jacket over the top of a low-cut vest top, six-inch heels, and an orange tan from a bottle.

  “You look great,” he said, leaning towards her and almost swallowing her in his bulk.

  “Ta. You look fucking massive, but that’s just how I like them.” Her smile was plastic, a warped Botox grin, and her eyes were as flat and lifeless as those of a sex doll.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here. I hate this shite-hole.” He grabbed her tiny hand, swamping it in his warm flesh, and dragged her towards the door.

  “Hey, my dad loves running this place. It’s his private little hidey hole from the world. Just him and the hardcore drunks.” She began to laugh, almost manically, and Boater was confused about the reason why. What was funny about the words she’d said? He just didn’t get it, but he rarely got anything these days. Sometimes he felt that the work he did, the life he had led, made him different from everyone else. Another kind of human; one not entirely in step with the others he saw around him. A man apart; a breed not fit for the company of others.

  “Where are you taking me, then?”

  They emerged from the grotty little pub under the Tyne Bridge. Boater glanced up, at the steel and concrete underside, and for a fleeting moment he realised that the sight represented the prison bars of his life. Then, shaking off such idiocy, he thought about how he was going to shag this bitch until she screamed. Maybe leave her blackened and bruised; her own private tattoo, to remember him by. Where was he taking her? Right up the arse, that’s where.