The Concrete Grove

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE





LANA STOOD BEFORE Monty Bright as if she were some kind of Old Testament avenging angel. She held her arms out and thrust her hips forward. The Slitten gripped her nipples with their jaws, pinched loose parts of her flesh with their teeth and claws, clinging limpet-like to her body. She could barely even feel them – there was very little sensation, as if the whole of her skin had been anaesthetised.

“I called and they came.” It was true: these things had answered her plea, rallying to her side from the dark places, the spaces between love and hate, fact and fiction… and they were the only weapon she had.

In a moment, they leapt from her body and moved like zephyrs across the floor. Monty Bright barely had time to react before they were upon him, snapping at his legs, his balls, his belly, and tearing at his flesh. She watched with her head turned slightly, so that she could have a clear and unimpeded view of the carnage – she was owed at least that. If she looked straight on, all she saw were dusty shadows converging on a man whose clothing and the skin beneath seemed to shred for no apparent reason.

“Monty!” Terry moved away from the wall. “What the f*ck?” To him, this was clearly madness. Lana knew that he could see nothing of his boss’s attackers. All he witnessed was the rending of flesh from bone.

Tom acted quickly, which surprised her. He was so far gone by now that she’d expected him to just stand there, like a lost little boy waiting for his mummy to come and save him. But he moved quickly, heading off Terry’s assault. The two men came together, colliding at a point to the right of Bright’s desk.

They went down fighting. Lana watched as Tom rolled on top, grabbing at his opponent. Terry put one arm – the prosthetic – up to ward off the blows, but Tom’s movements were so savage, so compelling, that the arm started to come loose from his stump. The straps gave way; the plastic limb slid down his jacket sleeve, and Tom was left holding it. He stared at the glove-clad hand, the thin metal pistons and the plastic casing, like a child shocked by the complexity of a new toy.

Then, reacting quicker than Terry, who was still wedged beneath him, Tom began to beat the other man about the head and shoulders with his own artificial limb. Under different circumstances, it would have been a comical sight: one man straddling another, and hitting him with a plastic arm. But here, now, sharing a room with monsters, both human and otherwise, Lana felt anything but the urge to laugh.

She turned away when Terry started screaming. Blood washed across his face, into his eyes, his mouth, and rendered his features meaningless.

The Slitten had not taken their time on Monty Bright. Their actions were quick and decisive. He was down on his knees, clawing at the shapes that were crawling across his ravaged body. His suit was torn to shreds, and the wetsuit he wore underneath his outfit and been peeled away in several areas, putting on show his distorted physique.

The faces on his chest squirmed, opening their mouths in silent screams. Arms and legs, hands and feet, knees and elbows, popped in and out of the slashes and gouges in his body. There was no blood beneath the upper layers of muscle: whatever fluids had once kept Bright alive were long gone, and his veins had shrivelled and frayed like liquorice root. His muscle-mass fell away beneath the onslaught of so many small claws, sharp teeth, and Lana saw flashes of dull white bone.

As he fell forward, pitching face-down onto the carpet, the television screens exploded, sending shards of glass in a brittle shower across the room. Burnt, toughened flesh, like scorched leather, sprayed in chunks from the cavities left behind. Whatever monsters Monty Bright had allied himself with were now dead to this world. Perhaps they’d gone back to that other place, the one he spoke of so fondly. Or maybe they had never existed in the first place, and all Lana was seeing were the remnants of Bright’s bad dreams as they turned to filth on the office floor.

Calmly, she picked up her coat and put it on, and then walked past Bright’s twitching form to pick up his book from the desk. The volume had clearly meant a lot to him, so she thought it might contain some useful information.

Bright made a few noises – like high-pitched farts – but then fell silent. The Slitten were receding now, going back to the dust and the darkness. Their job here was done, and she no longer needed them, so the fuel of her desire was spent.

“Thank you,” she said, gripping the book in her hands, pressing it against her chest. She had no idea what kind of power Hailey had invoked, or what kind of monsters their need and desperation had summoned, but at least the beings had not meant them harm. She had the feeling that the energies at work in the Grove were wild, untamed, and only certain individuals could harness them. Hailey had done so inadvertently, but what if Bright had eventually learned a way to purposefully control these forces? For that reason alone, never mind all the rest, he was better off dead.

Flames billowed from the televisions. Each one was like an open kiln, giving off an enormous amount of heat.

“What do we do now?” Tom was standing over Terry. The man wasn’t moving, but she didn’t think he was dead. Not yet.

“Let it burn, she said, feeling nothing. She walked over to Bright’s liquor cabinet and opened several bottles of fine whisky, rum and brandy.

Then she started to pour the fluid over anything that was flammable, even Terry’s supine form. “Let it all f*cking burn.”

The flames spread quickly, and as she and Tom left the room Lana heard the sound of someone stumbling to their feet. She let Tom walk out first and then turned around. Terry was down on one knee, holding on to the edge of Bright’s desk. His bloody face was pointed at her, his wide white eyes imploring, asking for mercy.

Lana stepped back into the room and picked up one of the discarded whisky bottles. She held it by the neck and approached the kneeling figure. Then, entirely without guilt or remorse, she pulled back her arm and clubbed him with the bottle across the side of his head, sending him crashing back to the floor. Flames caught at his trouser legs; he tried to kick them away, but it was too late, the fire was climbing towards his midriff. He opened his mouth to scream, but all that emerged was a dry, rough rasping sound, animalistic in its intensity. His eyes were empty – there was barely anything left of him to burn.

Lana turned around and left the heat of the room, closing the door behind her to hold back the fire for a little longer, just until they could make it down the stairs.

Tom was waiting for her at the door. He was standing with his head bowed, his forehead resting against the doorjamb. His eyes were closed. “What have we done?” he asked, as if he were talking in his sleep. “What have we done here?”

“We’ve taken care of business.” She went to step past him, entering the cold night. The air felt good against her skin; it tightened the flesh on her face, drawing it around her skull, and made her feel like a different person.

She was just about to walk away when a hand gripped her shoulder. Spinning around, with both arms raised, she saw a figure lurching towards her out of the smoky darkness inside the gym. Eyes that were all big, black pupil loomed into her field of vision, a bleached white face hung in the greying air.

“Get off me!” She pulled away, back-pedalling in the doorway and falling out into the street. Tom was already outside; he had moved aside as she had come stumbling out backwards.

The man stood in the doorway, hands grasping the frame. He was bobbing from side to side like a drunkard.

Lana suddenly realised who he was.

It was the junkie, Banjo. His face wasn’t ghostly white at all; it was the bandages, the dressings pulled taut across his ruined features. She recalled the news report about his escape from the hospital and reasoned that he must have made his way back here, back home, and come to the last place he could ever remember being before he lost his mind. His hair stuck out of the bandages in random tufts. His eyes rolled. Those huge dark pupils looked like marbles pressed into the front of his head.

“Go on, now,” she said, coaxing him as if he were a child. “Go back inside, out of the cold.”

He swayed there, uncertain, trying to focus on the sound of her voice. He was empty: a gap in the shape of a man. Whatever had been done to him it had hollowed out his mind, leaving his head as empty and draughty as an abandoned room.

“Go back in there.” She pointed over his shoulder, and finally he seemed to glean some kind of understanding. Lumbering like an injured beast, he turned clumsily on his heels and staggered back inside, closing the door behind him. Smoke billowed out around the edges of the door, and Lana felt no guilt for sending him away to burn.

It’s for the best, she thought. What the hell kind of life could he ever have? He’s ruined; this place has ruined him, just like it ruins everyone.

They walked quickly back to Tom’s car with the sound of sirens slicing the air, cleaving it like blades as the emergency services raced towards the estate. Someone – a rare concerned neighbour – must have noticed the smoke or the flames and called the authorities. The sirens drew closer as they reached the vehicle, and when they closed the doors they could still hear them clearly, as if the windows were rolled down.

“What do we do now?” Tom started the engine.

“We get away from here. I need to look at this book, see if it gives me any clues to where that fat bastard might’ve taken my daughter. It’s all I have to go on. He won’t hurt her, I know that now. From what Bright said, the fool seems to think that she’s his only shot at salvation. Funnily enough, she’s probably safer with him, wherever they are, than she is with me right now.” She smiled, but there was no humour there. It felt more like a scowl.

They drove away from the Grove, heading out towards Far Grove.

“Where are we going?” Lana stared through the windscreen. She could see firelight reflected in the glass.

“My place is less than five minutes away. You can look at the book there, and it’s my turn to show you something.” He was gripping the wheel so tightly that his knuckles had turned white.

Lana turned over the book in her hands, inspecting it: Extreme Boot Camp Workout by Alex ‘Brawler’ Mahler. It sounded ridiculous, like something you’d buy on a satellite TV shopping channel. The binding was frayed and dirty and the edges of the pages were worn thin by Bright’s fingers. She opened a page at random, and saw an extract from an A-Z pasted across the middle pages of the book, obscuring the text and several printed diagrams of a man performing exercises.

The glued page was a map of the Concrete Grove, and someone – probably Bright – had handwritten words over certain areas. ‘Skeights’ was one word, this one scrawled over the section representing Beacon Green. ‘Croatoan’ was another. These words looked simultaneously familiar and utterly alien – like historical artefacts found under the soil in a backyard. She’d seen the second word before, but couldn’t recall where.

A thick arrow, marked in blue ink, pointed off the page in the direction of the council refuse tip close to the old Near Grove train station. There were other words, other phrases, some of them in what looked like a foreign language. Lana couldn’t make out what any of this meant, but she knew it all added up to something important.

‘Twins’ (this one gave her a twinge), ‘Channels’, ‘Captain Clickety’, ‘Hummers’… all words that must have added to and expanded upon Bright’s private mythology of the Grove: keywords and buzzwords signifying events and knowledge that had died along with him.

Located at the centre of the page, directly over the centre-fold of the workout manual, was the Needle. Someone had drawn crude shapes that were meant to be trees. They’d even coloured in the leaves a dark shade of Crayola green. A big red cross had been inked there, and gone over so many times and so heavily that the pen had torn through the paper. ‘Locus?’ said the word – which was also a question – written next to the cross.

Suddenly she knew where the fat man had taken Hailey.

“Stop the car,” she said, turning to face Tom. It all seemed so obvious. She couldn’t believe it had taken her so long to make the connection.

“I am. We’re already here.”

She glanced up through the windscreen. The house was in darkness. “Why aren’t there any lights on?” Tom had pulled up in the middle of the road.

“I told you,” said Tom, taking the keys from the ignition and opening the car door. He stepped out and crossed to the kerb. “I need to show you something.” His voice was strange: low and husky, as if his throat had tightened.

Lana got out of the car and followed him across the road to the front of the house. She left the book in the car but didn’t even notice its absence. The book had given her all the information she required. “Tom, she’s in the Needle. He has her in that f*cking tower. Come with me, help me get her out.”

He walked along the drive and stopped outside the front door. Then, without saying anything, he took out his key and opened the door. He turned to her, smiling, and motioned for her to follow him inside. Then he stepped into the house, leaving the door wide open.

Lana knew that she needed to go back to the Grove, to get to the tower block while everyone else in the area was distracted by the fire. The sirens were still wailing, but they had stopped moving. The fire brigade and police must have reached Bright’s gym and begun the process of extinguishing the flames. But still, she walked along the drive and stood at the open door, with one foot resting on the doorstep as she peered inside.

“Tom?” She called into the house, but there was no reply. It was dark in there, but she could make out a figure in the entrance hall, standing at the bottom of the stairs.

Lana took a step inside. “Come on, Tom. Let’s get Hailey, and then we can get away from here. We can hide out up in the Highlands, or somewhere. Find a place where they’ll never catch up with us.” She knew she was lying: there was no way out of this, not now. The best she could hope for was to save her daughter. Little else mattered.

Tom was standing over the body of a very large woman. She was motionless, and lay face-down at the bottom of the stairs, her nightdress hitched up to show her massive, creased legs and her saggy, crumpled buttocks. Her head was twisted brutally to one side, forced around at an unnatural angle.

“It attacked me,” said Tom, staring down at the woman’s corpse. She was clearly dead: her face was as white and crumpled as old linen sheets. “I fought with it, and we fell down the stairs. Powerful beasts, these things. So, so strong… like a f*cking ox, or something.”

“Tom… what are you talking about, Tom?”

His head spun around to face her. His eyes were huge, eating up the residual light in the room. “This,” he said. “The f*cking sea cow.” He kicked the corpse but it barely moved. It was too heavy. “Clickety-clickety-click.”

She ignored that last part, unable to even grasp at its meaning. “This… this is your wife?”

He shook his head. “Don’t be stupid. I don’t know where Helen is. This is the sea cow. It took her place, and it attacked me. Up there.” He raised a hand and pointed up the stairs.

How the hell had she managed to get up there? She was paralysed from the waist down. Had he dragged her out of bed and up the stairs only to throw her down? “Tom, I think you need to take a look at her and try to focus. Really look at her. Look at your wife.”

He was crying now. “I wish I knew where she was. I need to find her, to make sure she’s okay, and then we can leave. You, me and Hailey. We can leave all this shit behind us and start a new life.”

“Tom.” She was losing patience now. The old Lana might have taken the time to talk him down, to make him realise his mistake, but the new Lana, the warrior woman, couldn’t spare the time or the effort. “I’m going now, Tom. I’m going to get my daughter. You’ve killed your wife, do you hear me? You killed her. I can’t help you, not with this. There isn’t the time.”

He sunk down to the floor, onto his knees. Slowly, with great care, he reached out and began to stroke the dead woman’s fleshy cheek. Her eyes were open. White foam was dried around her mouth, like a crust of salt. “Where’s Helen? Such gentle creatures when you see them on telly, but you’re not gentle, are you? You stole my wife.”

Lana turned away and made her way slowly to the door. When she stepped outside, emerging into the cool night air, she reached behind her and shut the door firmly, making sure that it was tight to the frame. She could at least do this for Tom: give him some peace and some time to figure out what he had done.

In the distance, over the estate, the sky was bright with reflected flames. She could see the Needle beyond the capering yellow light, sticking up like a thick, grey finger pointing towards the stars.

“I’m coming, Hailey,” she whispered as she started to run. “Mummy’s coming.”