The Concrete Grove

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE





THIS IS IT, thought Lana as she waited at the bottom of the steep, rickety staircase. No turning back, now. She stood in the gloomy little passageway and listened to the sound of footsteps on the wooden treads behind her. Light spilled from a few wall-mounted bulbs, but it wasn’t nearly enough to illuminate all the dark corners. Monty Bright and his man Boater were descending after her through the building, entering the belly of the beast… that thought almost made her smile, but then, when she thought about it, the image simply made her more afraid.

The belly of the beast, she thought. Monty Bright’s belly. He’s the beast. Or, if he was not the beast himself, then he was certainly in the service of a beast; a terrible creature ruled by laws of debt and lust and desire: an entity she suddenly and confusingly thought of as Moloch, the false god from the bible.

I will set my face against that man, and against his family, and will cut him off, and all that go astray after him…

Now where the hell had she dredged that quotation up from? She hadn’t studied religious texts since high school, in Religious Studies. Her mind was going into overdrive, throwing up insane thoughts and ideas and snippets of things she had learned a long time ago. Words and phrases that were meaningless in the context of what was happening right now.

It’s fear. That’s what’s doing it. Oh, God, I’m so afraid.

Was she really that clichéd, turning to God in her moment of terror? Why not turn to The Beatles? They’d be just as much use in a crisis.

“There’s a good girl.” Bright had finally reached the bottom of the stairs. He was standing behind her, with his body pressed up against hers. She felt sick; revulsion made her feel as if her skin were trying to turn inside out. She wished that she could peel herself like a piece of fruit and discard the tainted exterior that Bright had already pawed and tainted with his filth. “It’s good to see you being so nice and obedient, and waiting for me down here in the dark.” He laughed softly, but it sounded more like an expression of hunger than one of mirth.

Bright stroked his trailing hand across her backside as he pushed past her, moving towards a scarred wooden door on the right. It was almost identical to the other doors they’d passed. But this one was different in one major way: this was the one behind which she would find the face of her demon – the slobbering face of Moloch, the great and terrible beast.

She stared at the wall, at the peeling plaster, trying not to look at that closed door. She tried to empty her mind. All the sorrow and regret; the debt and the promises of violence. The only thing she allowed herself to see, in the darkness behind her eyes, was Hailey’s face: her beautiful child for whom she was putting herself through this nightmare.

Noises echoed down the stairwell, strange creaks and moans and popping sounds. The wooden stairs had many dark, dusty old landings, broken and jutting timber balconies that led nowhere, like viewing galleries. But they had only ever been heading to the bottom: right to the very base of Bright’s black pyramid. She’d heard the rumours about these basement rooms and corridors, but never had she expected to see them for herself. Nor had she expected those stories to be true – not really; not in a million years.

Standing there, in a shabby underground passageway with a panting man’s hand on her arse, she thought about the road that had led her to this point. Timothy’s mental breakdown had been the first step, but since then she’d had chances to alter the route she had taken. Surely there had been choices to make along the way – if she believed in anything, it was that. There was always, always a choice, and she had made the wrong ones far too often. Even now, in this squalid place, she was making yet another bad decision. But this time, unlike those other times, she really did have no other option. This was it, the pit, the private hell at the end of the road: a hell that consisted of this dark corridor, two grinning men, and a door to a room where she would have everything taken from her.

“Shall we?” Bright’s voice was soft, smooth, as if he were attempting to seduce her.

She set her jaw, tensed her body, and then forced her muscles to relax. “Let’s go,” she whispered. “Let’s get it over with.”

Bright nodded once, and then opened the door.

Lana was aware of the big man, Boater, using up all the space behind her, giving her no room to escape, should she even try. She took a step and turned right, into the room.

Inside there was not much to see. A single bulb hung from the ceiling, its paper shade too dirty to make out any kind of design or decoration. The walls were bare stone, with damp stains spread across them like dark, blotchy shadows. There was a double bed pushed up against the side wall, adorned with thin blankets and a solitary shapeless pillow. The floor was stone, like the walls, and there was a crude shower stall in one corner, like something from a book of pictures of a concentration camp she’d once seen. A man stood by the shower. She recognised him from before, when they’d visited her flat to give her Bright’s last warning. He’d been wearing dark clothes, then – threatening clothes. This time he was wearing nothing but black trousers and a vest.

More than the man himself, though, she recognised the single black leather glove he wore.

Terry, she thought. His name’s Terry. It was such a common name for a devil.

He’d been wearing two gloves the last time she’d seen him. This time he only wore the one; his other hand was bare… his prosthetic hand. It looked like some kind of out-dated contraption, with thin metal levers visible at the wrist and wide leather straps holding it in place on his forearm. He raised his arm as she stood there, standing just a foot over the threshold, and clenched his plastic fingers. Then, as she began to lose all sense of reality, he undid the leather straps and removed the false hand to reveal a shiny pink nub of flesh.

“Just wait ’till you see what he can do with that stump,” said Bright, standing right beside her. She turned and looked into his shiny face. His eyes seemed to have doubled in size and there was white spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth.

Terry, waving his stump around in the air, began to laugh. It was a quiet sound, almost polite: a gentle chuckle that was completely out of place given the situation.

She looked down, at his bare feet. He was wriggling his toes on the stone floor. For some reason the sight was more sickening than that of the naked stump, and Lana felt a wave of bile rising at the back of her throat.

She took another couple of steps, trying to impose herself in the weird isolated space that was the room, to exert some measure of control. She heard the door shut behind her. Then there was the sound of a key rattling in the lock, and then a series of blunt clicks as the only way in or out of that room was sealed, perhaps locking a part of Lana inside there forever.

“So, Lana Fraser,” said Bright, slipping off his jacket. “At last you deign to come and visit us, to offer us some kind of payment on your debt.” His body, beneath the jacket, was clad in a tight grey shirt. His arms were huge, the biceps oversized. He could barely even bend his arms to remove the outer garment without having to angle his body to aid its movement. He was deformed; a man made monstrous by the abuse of muscle-building chemicals and heavy weights. Like most small-time criminals, he had an obsession with physical strength, but his had become so acute, so outlandish, that it had altered his exterior to reflect, more or less, how he saw himself in his mind’s eye.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m here to pay it off. I want to bring this to an end, finalise the deal. Just like you said on the phone.”

Terry, still standing by the primitive shower stall, laughed again. He flexed his gloved hand; the leather creaked loudly in the silence that followed his abrupt laughter. He stared at her face, her eyes, and never broke eye contact even as he stripped off his vest. His torso was well-muscled, but not as barrel-like as his boss’s broad trunk. Blue-black prison tattoos – at least that’s what Lana assumed the crude, thick-lined renderings to be – decorated his upper arms. An odd-looking dragon draped its badly-drawn tail around his shoulder.

“Is that what I said?” Bright walked around and stood directly in front of her, cutting off her view of Terry as he began to loosen his trousers. Bright was pulling his shirttails out of his waistband. Then he began to undo the shirt buttons from the bottom up. “Yes, I suppose I did say that, didn’t I?”

“I know the score,” said Lana, trying to find strength from somewhere, anywhere. “I know what’s expected of me, and I’ll do it all. I’ll do you all, if it keeps you away from me in future, and away from my daughter.” She clenched her fists and refused to look away as he slipped off his shirt and folded it neatly before placing it on the floor, near the end of the stark double bed.

Beneath the shirt he was wearing what looked like a wetsuit. It clung to his oddly-shaped form like a second skin, accentuating the ugly, disproportionate muscle build-up around his upper body. Lana was so surprised by Bright’s ridiculous get-up that for a moment she forgot to be afraid, and a tiny smile flickered across her lips. She cut the smile short before it got out of control, wishing that she could have prevented it altogether. The last thing she wanted to do was antagonise these men: there was too much aggression in the room already; unless she was careful, there was the risk that they would lose all control and cause her some real physical damage.

They could f*ck her, by all means – she was just about prepared for that – but please God, don’t let them break her.

“Monty, I have some things to do… I’ll just go back upstairs while you sort things out down here.”

Sort things out, was that how they thought of it? What they called gang-rape? Lana felt her back stiffen as Boater brushed up lightly against her.

“Don’t be silly, Francis. We’re all taking part. We’re going to have some fun.” Bright smiled at her. “Aren’t we, Lana?”

She didn’t have it in her to reply, but she somehow managed to keep staring at him, pressing her gaze into his soft face. There was something going on here – something below the surface, a situation that was nothing to do with her but in which she seemed to have a pivotal role.

“But, Monty–”

“But nothing, Francis!” Bright’s eyes swivelled away from her and glared over her shoulder, at his mammoth henchman. “But nothing. We all stay here, and each of us takes our fill. We owe it to this kind lady, who has put herself to a lot of trouble to be here. Never, Francis, ever look a gift horse in the mouth.” He smiled but it looked all wrong, as if his face were splitting in two. “And don’t ever let a free f*ck go to waste.”

Lana felt her legs start to shake, but she fought to control the movement. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of witnessing her fear. She was strong; her mind and body were one. This bastard wouldn’t break her, not ever. She vowed to remain intact to the very end, even if she ended up dead. This f*cker would not see a single tear roll down her face, or hear a scream pass from her lips. She was stone. She was already dead.

“Are we ready?” Bright rubbed his hands together. His wetsuit absorbed the meagre light, glistening like the flesh of some hideous black lizard. “Are we all ready?”

“F*ck, yeah,” said Terry, moving forward, away from the shower stall. He was standing in his white wife-beater vest and underpants. She could see clearly that he was ready for action.

“Yeah,” said Boater, still standing behind her. There was something about the giant that Lana couldn’t fathom. It was obvious that he was having some kind of crisis of faith; she’d picked up on the fact that he was struggling with his own emotions. He’d almost turned against his boss. She felt it in the air: a sense of suppressed rebellion. Why couldn’t he have gone all the way and brought the fight out into the open, giving her some slight hope that this might not happen – that these men might not use her as a sex doll in this grimy basement room?

Terry’s pink nub of a wrist shone weakly in the dim light. Monty Bright grinned like a lunatic. And behind her, remaining out of sight for now, a silent giant took stock of his situation far too slowly to offer Lana any form of hope.

Bright took something from his trouser pocket: a thin black scarf. “Here.” He said. “Put this on.” He opened his fingers and let the scarf unfurl, holding one end between his thumb and the palm of his hand. It was not a scarf, it was a blindfold: a black silk blindfold.

Lana reached out and took the blindfold from his hand. His skin felt cold and clammy, but that might just have been her imagination, conjuring little tricks to transform a bad man into a demon.

“Put it on, now.” The playfulness had gone from his demeanour, leaving behind a blank, empty shell waiting to be filled by whatever he could take from her.

There was a pause. The room seemed to exist out of time for a moment, as if they’d all moved sideways into another state of being.

When Bright slapped her, without warning, it took her a second or two to register the pain. She heard the sound – quick, high and sharp – and had time to wonder what it was before her cheek started to burn. It was too late to even raise her hand and feel the spot where he had hit her. The pause between the violent act and her realisation of it was too great for her to react without feeling stupid. “Oh,” she said instead. It was an ineffectual remark; she wished she’d just kept her mouth shut. “Oh,” she said again, thinking, Shut the f*ck up!

Bright nodded. The walls closed in, squeezing her sense of spatial awareness until it lost all meaning. She realised why Bright had slapped her. The bastard had done it to sharpen her senses, to plunge her into the moment like someone jumping into a cold lake. To make sure she was fully aware when things got under way.

He wanted to ensure that she was trapped firmly in the present and not retreating into some inner chamber where she might distance herself from the outrage. The f*cker knew exactly what he was doing. He had done this too many times before to make silly mistakes and allow his victim – his debtor – even a scant emotional reprieve. Maybe his men were just along for the ride, but like most serial rapists, Bright was interested in mental rather than physical penetration.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” said Bright, softly, almost lovingly – as if he were savouring the taste of his catchphrase on his tongue.

Lana covered her eyes and waited for the suffering to start.





AFTERWARDS, WHEN IT was all over and done with, she stood in the shower stall and let the cold water chill her battered body. Hot water would have been too much of a kindness, and men like these were not known for their acts of generosity.

Lana ached everywhere, inside and out. The stink of semen clung to her. She had vomited so much in the shower that her belly felt mercifully empty. She had not taken the blindfold off. She didn’t want to see them again until she was clean. She faced the wall and let the sound of the water deafen her, but still she heard the door as it opened and closed, and the footsteps approaching across the hard floor.

“Hurry up. We have things to do.”

It was Terry’s voice. She would never forget that voice, even if she lived to be an old woman. He had whispered such terrible things in her ear as they’d used her body, entering every orifice. Such terrible, terrible things. He’d spoken of Hailey, and how she looked. He’d talked about her daughter’s young body, and what he would like to do with it. The words he’d used had been ones she’d heard before, many times, but in the situation she was in they became something new: another language, and one that expressed only depravity.

These were surely not men; they were animals. Beasts. They had no souls, no morals. They were demonic.

But, no. They were just men: Bad Men.

She fumbled for the taps and turned off the flow of water. Then, wincing as her limbs burned with pain, she took off the blindfold. Then she turned to face the one-handed man who had defiled her. He was fully clothed and his prosthetic was fixed back in place. He was once again wearing both of his black leather gloves.

“Put your f*cking clothes on.” The contempt in his voice was almost as hurtful as what they’d done to her. Almost, but not quite. Not at all, if she was honest. That was just another lie to tell herself, a flimsy barrier to wedge between her and the memory of what had been done here in this shabby little basement room she would always think of whenever she heard the word ‘hell’.

The door opened again just as she was putting on her blouse. She watched Bright walk in as she buttoned it to the neck and smoothed out the collars.

“So, are we done?” Her voice was hoarse. Her throat felt like it had been filled with cement. “Are we square?” She shuffled forward. Each tiny step made her thighs blaze, her crotch burn, her torn anus clench, and set off a series of dull explosions deep inside her lower abdomen.

I’ll need to get checked out, she thought. For STDs. AIDS.

This grim note of reality, even more than the acts she’d been made to perform and submit to, threatened to tear her apart. The aftermath – the thought of the countless small, intimate and desperately embarrassing tasks she would need to undertake before declaring herself clean and safe – were like daggers in her belly.

“Well?” She was amazed that she still possessed enough strength to raise her voice. She certainly wouldn’t be able to raise her hands to defend herself if one of the men chose to slap her again. Such physicality was beyond her right now, at least until she started to bruise.

“For now,” said Bright.

Terry laughed softly, but when Bright glanced at him he fell silent, and then lowered his head and left the room. He shut the door quietly behind him, as if that one look had caused him to fear even the slightest sound.

The games were over.

Bright was once again wearing his suit, but was not wearing any shoes. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a fat cigar – probably Cuban, thought Lana, madly, focusing on absurd details rather than the larger canvas of the picture taking shape before her. He lit the cigar and took a long drag. Smoke trailed from his lips; Lana thought it moved too slowly to be real.

“What do you mean?” Her hands dropped to her sides. She felt boneless, as if the men had filleted her on the bed. “You promised.” But she knew that any promises made by such a man were subject to the whims of his fancy. She’d been a fool to let herself believe that this would make any difference to her situation, but what else did she have to cling to other than foolish belief?

“I promised you nothing,” said Bright, looking at the cigar in his hand. The tip glowed bright red, like a single devilish eye. “Consider this visit a down payment. The way I figure it, you’ll have your debt cleared in, say, six to eight months. Even quicker if you bring the girl along next time. Nice and tight and pretty, isn’t she? I’ve seen her through the school gates, playing with her little friends. I think my friends would like to play with her very much.”

Lana knew that she should rush him, maybe go for the throat, the eyes: attack the soft parts, just like a cornered rat. But it was futile. He was too strong, and had always possessed the upper hand. Right from the start, he’d played her along, upping the odds until she came to him and offered him exactly what he wanted and could have taken at any point, if that had been his choice.

But Monty Bright did not want to take; it was the very act of offering that turned him on, made him shine.

Where’s your compassion?” she said, failing to penetrate his armour. “Where’s your basic human decency?” She hated the desperation she heard in her weakened voice, but it was all she had left to offer, the only thing she could dredge up from inside her poor, defiled wreck of a body.

Bright walked towards her. He was shorter than she remembered; he barely came up to her shoulder now that she’d put her pumps back on. His skin looked soft, malleable, and his eyes protruded like boiled eggs from a face as flat and round as a polished plate. Bright’s shoulders were hunched; his posture was awkward, as if the years of self-abuse disguised as exercise had mutated his basic geometry. He slowly raised his hands and began to slip off his shirt. He still wore the wetsuit underneath, as he had done during her ordeal, and she stared in horror as he slid his fingers under the neck of the garment and began to peel the material downwards, as if he were calmly removing a layer of skin. He extracted his arms from the rubbery suit and rolled it down towards his waist.

“For that, dear Lana, I’d have to be human.”

The blindfold and the wetsuit had prevented her from seeing anything before, and most of the time her arms had been pinned down or back behind her, but his naked torso was a mass of lumps and abrasions. More and more of this was revealed as he continued to drag the garment down over his belly. The malformations looked like ripe tumours: they dangled in grapelike clumps from beneath his armpits, clustered around his nipples and made a ribbed embossment down the faint seam of his hairless belly.

Even now, after everything she’d gone through, Lana felt sick to the stomach.

There were small mouths in there, amid the globules and curlicues of flesh, and bright little eyes that blinked uncomprehendingly. A nose or a sex gland twitched; snot or semen spilled from its shiny, puckered end. Here was a whole community of beings, perhaps even the physical representation of the souls of people he’d consumed as repayment for debts even greater than her own, loans whose rate of interest was infinite.

“Bring the girl next time,” he said, smiling around his cigar. “I’ll show her a whole new world of hurt.” The cigar’s fiery red eye winked: just once, but it was more than enough to ensure she got the message.