The Concrete Grove

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE





TOM HAD NOT slept; he had merely dozed in the armchair, grabbing eagerly at the promise of rest yet gaining only scraps. So when he opened his eyes he knew immediately that he wasn’t dreaming. Not this time, anyway.

The first thing he saw was a scruffy dog walking slowly across the doorway, left to right. The dog was huge, more like a wolf, and as it turned to look at him he saw by the lamplight that it had the face of a boy. It was a familiar face: it was his face, but when he was much younger. The dog, and its stolen features, had once stalked him through the rooms of his father’s house, warning him off, shepherding him away from sights that he should not be allowed to see, and now it had returned to resume its role as guard dog to Tom’s psyche.

Tiredness allowed him at last to see this truth. Exhaustion had opened his eyes and shown him the reality that was hiding behind the illusion.

All this time he had thought the dream-dog meant him harm, but it had actually been trying to save him. The realisation made him simultaneously sad and afraid.

“I’m sorry. I never understood. I always thought you were a monster. I didn’t realise that you were just a part of me.”

But the dog was gone. The doorway was empty. Not even its shadow remained.

He got up and walked out into the hall. The darkness there had form and substance, like a cluster of earthbound clouds. He felt like he was dreaming awake – it was a sensation he now recognised as being a signal that he was partly in that other state, the one he had sensed so keenly during the day trip with Lana and Hailey. When he turned to face the front door, he half expected to see another animated section of Hadrian’s Wall slithering in and out like a serpent through gaps in the building. But this time he was awake, and the vivid dream imagery was nothing but a memory.

Something moved on the stairs behind him. It was a slow, heavy sound, like someone dragging themselves on their belly across the floor.

He glanced at the door to Helen’s room. It was open. He crossed the hallway and peered inside. The television was on, tuned once again to the static between channels. It bathed the room in an eerie light, and showed him that the bed was unmade and empty. But Helen had not been out of bed in years.

So where the hell was she now?

Tom turned to the bottom of the stairs. In the dimness he could make out a trail of moisture leading upwards. The carpet was wet; each step glistened, as if a giant slug had made its way up to the first floor.

He began to climb the stairs, keeping to the edge nearest the wall and clinging to the handrail. The light receded, staying down on the ground floor, but there was enough illumination bleeding in through the upstairs windows for him to see by. When he reached the top of the stairs the sound was much louder: a slow, moist slithering. He turned on to the landing and saw it there, hauling itself towards the bathroom at a slow, monotonous pace. A patch of light from the window at the end of the landing seeped towards it, like a yellow puddle. Its heavy grey body moved slowly; the large, clumsy fins pressed weakly against the floor and failed to get much traction as the animal inched along the floor.

The sea cow’s journey was agonisingly slow, but it at least had intent and purpose.

Tom walked along in its wake, watching the oversized mammal as it made its way towards the open bathroom door. The taps were running, filling the bath with hot water. One of the small lights above the mirror was on. Tom had no idea who had started to run the bath – certainly it couldn’t have been the manatee: that was impossible. Maybe he had done it, in his drowsy state. He could believe anything right now. He could even believe that a sea cow was hauling its massive bulk along his upstairs landing towards a bath-full of water.

“Helen.” His voice sounded tiny, so he said her name again. “Helen.”

At first the sea cow didn’t register his presence. Then, abruptly, its fins ceased their awkward movement on the carpet. The beast started to hitch its body around, pivoting on its belly and swivelling through 180 degrees to face him. It seemed to take ages for the thing to turn, and when finally it did the beast stared at him with tiny black, baleful eyes from a square, grey face that looked somehow familiar. It opened its black-slit mouth and made a strange hollow clicking sound. Its tongue was long and thick. The teeth in its upper and lower jaws were huge and jagged, like fragments of rock stuck into its gums.

Are they meant to have teeth like that?

The clicking sound came again. He’d heard it before; the other night on the telephone when no-one had spoken. On that first occasion, Tom had put it down to a wrong number or a crossed line, but that damn clicking sound had blocked his thoughts… just as it was doing now.

Clickety-clickety-click…

“Is that you, Helen?” Tom felt ridiculous, but at the same time he knew that the animal was indeed his wife – somehow, once again, Helen had become in reality exactly as he thought of her in his mind, taking the physical form of his imagined insult. But this time it wasn’t a dream; this time it was part of the waking world. The two elements had clashed, and this creeping horror was the result.

A fracture had appeared between the states of waking and sleeping, living and dreaming, and what crawled through that rift was the stuff of fantasy. The mental power utilised during the usual dream-state was finding another outlet, and Tom knew, without having to question the thought, that something was using that energy as fuel. Some thing was trying to break through, to open a doorway and move from one realm to the other.

He remembered his father’s warning and the phantom flying fists. The way the old man’s ghost had abused his bed-ridden wife, as she had taken the form of the manatee. It all meant something, but he was unable to solve the equation. This otherworldly form of mathematics was beyond him. He didn’t have the skills; the numbers would not add up.

The sea cow lurched in his direction, moving faster this time but still slow enough that he could easily outmanoeuvre it as the beast rocked towards him across the landing, clickety-clickety-clicking like a broken spindle. Only when he stumbled on the top step and fell badly, momentarily trapping his left leg in the gap between two stair rails, did he begin to fear what the sea cow might do if it caught up with him.