Beyond Here Lies Nothing

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

ERIK SAT IN his car outside Abby’s place and watched the sun as it started to rise. Faint, blood-red smears stained the grey wash, transforming it into a thing of savage beauty. He raised his hands and scrubbed at his face, trying to clear his head.

On the back seat, Monty Bright was silent, wrapped up in his blankets like a new-born baby. And wasn’t that an apt description? He’d been born anew into this world, passing through from some other place — a place he’d been searching for his entire life and had finally found. But the place had rejected him; it had sent him back here, where he no longer belonged.

Erik had watched that smug little writer bastard leave Abby’s place while it was still dark. Maybe he should have done something then, but he’d been unable to move, as if his rage had immobilised him. In the past, he would have got out, smacked the guy, and then dragged him into the car and taken him somewhere to teach him a lesson. But now he felt different. He couldn’t act; his limbs were tired, his brain refused to work in the same way. So he’d stayed here and watched the house, waiting for things to become clear.

Like the sky above him, he was caught up in the process of transformation. The only problem was, he couldn’t be certain regarding what he had been or what he was about to become.

No, he would let someone else sort out the bastard who was fucking his Abby. He wouldn’t get his own hands dirty on a secondary character in the tragic story of his life, not this time. There were more important tasks to deal with. He took out his phone and dialled the number of a kid whose particular skill set he’d used before, and who’d been primed to expect a call. This kid ran a tight little crew who knew how to swing baseball bats and exactly what to do with them when they did. It would cost him a couple of hundred quid, but the job would get done properly. There would be no mistakes. The pathway to Abby would be clear.

He made the call, feeling nothing at all: no doubt, no shame, and no sense of wrongdoing. When he hung up the phone he felt lighter, as if he’d shed several layers of skin.

After a short pause, he put away his phone, reached down under the passenger seat, and took out the plastic Tesco carrier bag he’d stashed there. He placed the bag on the seat between his knees and carefully opened the package. He took out the gun. It was a small-calibre handgun, something he’d confiscated from a drug-dealing chav a couple of months ago. Instead of disposing of the weapon, he’d kept it. At the time, he hadn’t known why he’d done so. Now he realised that he’d been hurtling towards this moment for a long time.

This moment; this place: Loculus…

The voice that spoke the word in his head belonged to Monty. Since he’d killed Hacky, the bond between them had strengthened, and they could communicate clearly like this: snatches of dialogue, words and phrases rolling around in his head.

We can go back there, together. Once you’ve tidied up your business.

He nodded, stroked the gun. The metal was cold. The plastic handle felt brittle, as if it might break under pressure. He was only going to scare her, and this would do the trick. For once, he’d wring some true emotion out of the hard-nosed bitch…

Erik got out of the car, stuffed the gun down the belt of his jeans, and walked across the road to Abby’s house. He was smiling. The sun was still rising. There was nobody out on the street but him. The world felt like it belonged only to Erik, and he could do whatever he wanted without risk of being seen.

He still had a key to the house. Abby didn’t know, but he’d taken a copy before returning the original to her when they’d split up. He didn’t use it often, just a few times a year, to sneak in and rummage around in her underwear drawer while she was out, or to lie on her unmade bed and masturbate. It wasn’t something he was proud of, but it helped to ease his pain.

Glancing around to check that he couldn’t be seen, he took out the key and unlocked the door. He stepped inside the house and shut the door behind him, feeling light-headed. His limbs were floppy but his core was solid, as if a thread of steel rope ran through his centre. His blood ran hot and cold. He didn’t know if he was about to laugh or cry, or even scream.

Slowly, he climbed the stairs and stood outside Abby’s bedroom door. The floorboards groaned quietly under his weight. He could hear a faint chanting noise, but was unsure in which room it originated. He pushed open the bedroom door and looked inside. As usual, the bed was unmade; the sheets were in a state that could only be caused by two people fucking. He wanted to close his eyes but he didn’t. Instead he walked into the room, approached the bed, and sat down. He ran his hands over the mattress. It was still warm. He bent over and smelled the sheets. The aroma of sex filled his nostrils: stale perfume, sweat and semen.

He stood and left the room. He followed the landing to what had once been Tessa’s room. The chanting was coming from behind the closed door. There was a sing-song quality to the chanting, like a nursery rhyme.

“Tessa, Tessa, Tessa… bless her, bless her, bless her… come back to me.”

The voice belonged to Abby. He would have recognised it anywhere.

He reached out and placed the palm of his hand against the door. It was trembling. But, no: his hand was trembling, not the door. He was afraid, but he could not identify the source of that fear.

Erik grabbed the handle, turned it, and opened the door.

Abby was naked and kneeling before a large pile of what he realised must be Tessa’s things — clothes, drawings, toys, photographs: all piled up into a conical mass, like a stunted tower of mourning.

“Abby… what is this? What are you doing?”

Loculus, said a voice in his head. He thought of Monty on the back seat of the car, and wondered if he should have brought him inside.

Abby ignored him. She acted as if he wasn’t there. She was rocking backwards and forwards, as if she’d lost her mind. Her skin was streaked with dirty sweat, there was mud and leaves in her hair. Her face was smeared with dirt, like primitive camouflage paint.

She continued to chant the rhyme:

“Tessa, Tessa, Tessa… bless her, bless her, bless her… come back to me.”

Erik walked over and grabbed her arm. She was limp, like a sack of flesh without bones. “Abby!” He pulled hard on her arm, turning her around. Her eyes were rolled up into her head: all he could see was the whites. He raised his free hand and slapped her across the face.

She didn’t respond.

He slapped her again, leaving a red mark on her cheek, and then tugged her, dragging her limp body across the carpet towards the door. Still she chanted; she hadn’t even paused for breath. She just kept saying those same words, over and over, a prayer to whatever dark urban gods she thought might be listening.

Erik felt power flood through him. It wasn’t rage, nor was it hatred. This was a purer force, and it came from somewhere outside his body. Like an alien sun shining down on him, the energy warmed his body, cleansing him like a balm.

“This is it,” he whispered. “This is where it all ends.” He tugged the gun out of his belt and clenched his right hand into a fist around the handle. He brought it down, hard, on the top of her head. The sound it made when the base of the grip struck her skull was like a hammer blow. He hit her again, this time with the barrel on the side of the face. He felt her cheekbone crack. Her skin split and blood spattered, splashing the carpet and even the weird tower she’d made at the centre of the room.

He only wanted to scare her…

Erik was blind. He could see nothing beyond the violence.

He hit her again and again, shredding the skin of her face, shattering the bones of her skull, and yet still she continued to chant those words, through mashed, bloodied lips, and even when her broken teeth began to fall from her mouth.

…to scare her into loving him again.

When Erik stopped she was lying on the floor, curled up like a baby. There was blood everywhere. Still she chanted the rhyme, taunting him.

He was breathing heavily, as if he’d just done a tough workout. His gun hand ached, the knuckles were swollen. He raised his face to the ceiling and let out a wordless wail, an animal sound of pain and self-hatred. Then he returned his attention to the room, and what was in it.

Abby continued to mumble from the floor. She’d stopped chanting and was now trying to speak, but he couldn’t make out the words.

“Look what you’ve done,” said Erik. “This is your fault — you did this. I only wanted to scare you. You’ve made me into something that I despise.” He raised the gun and stared into the barrel. It would be so easy to end it all now: one bullet for her, one for him. Maybe that’s what had been coming all along. Neat and tidy: a smooth little suburban death. He pressed the end of the barrel to his cheek, and then moved it across to his temple. After a second, he pointed the gun at Abby, his finger tightening on the trigger.

“Please…” Her voice was weak. She was speaking through a mouthful of blood and shattered teeth. “Don’t kill me…”

“No, I’m not going to kill you. I love you… all I’ve ever done is love you. Can’t you see? Don’t you understand? I’ve loved you ever since I first met you, and when we lost our baby I would have kept on loving you, but you wouldn’t let me. Instead you went with other men and told me about it. You rubbed my nose in it, like a fucking dog that’s puked up on the carpet.”

“Sorry… hurting… everything hurts.” Her voice was unrecognisable.

For a moment he was acutely aware of the selfishness of his actions, the intensity of his feelings, but then he shoved that insight aside, ignoring it. Why the hell shouldn’t he be selfish? There was no one else to look out for him, to protect his interests. Ever since he was a kid, he’d been forced to look after himself. That made a man hard; it toughened him to the point that nothing could penetrate the armour he had worked so hard to put in place.

“You bitch… look what you did. Look what you did to us. We could’ve been happy. We were a family… a proper family…”

He could no longer bear to look at her, so he raised his eyes and stared across her collapsed body.

Behind her, there was movement. Thin silver branches, leafless and grasping, were slowly emerging from between the gaps in the conical mound of Tessa’s belongings. Like long, thin arms, the branches slid out, swaying in the air; gnarled twig-hands reaching for something that wasn’t there.

Erik tightened his grip on the gun. He approached the mound. The branches appeared to sense him and twitched towards him, turning from silver to brown. He raised the gun and took aim. His hand was shaking so he used the other one to steady the gun, just like he’d seen in the movies.

“No…”

Abby, still on the floor, was speaking to him. He turned around.

“Don’t kill it… our baby… our Tessa… she’s come back…” She spat out blood. There were gaps where a couple of teeth had been.

He swivelled and watched the branches. There were now patches of skin on them, like pale pink bark. As he watched, the patches grew, the skin, spreading like a stain to cover the rest of the branches. The branches became thin arms; the spindly twigs at the ends turned into small hands. Pieces of the construction fell away from Abby’s sculpture — jumpers, paintings, a My Little Pony duvet cover — and parts of a body were visible beneath. The sapling child was quickly transforming into flesh and blood, as if the process were speeding up because he was watching it happen. Like a low-rent Pinocchio, the lifeless simulacrum was gaining sentience.

His finger twitched on the trigger — a reaction that he was unable to control — and the gun went off. He managed to twist his wrist so the shot went wide, punching a hole in the wall near the window.

“Tessa?”

Her face formed quickly, like reversed footage of plastic melting, and he began to make out her lovely features beneath the mess of creation. What at first looked like a long, beaklike snout shortened to form her delicate little nose. The eyes opened, trailing strings like pizza cheese between the upper and lower lids. The eyeballs pushed outwards, and then settled back into the sockets. The eyelids blinked.

Erik dropped the gun. He fell to his knees and clasped his hands together as if in prayer.

The Tessa-thing stepped from out of the hollow cone, parts of her makeshift sarcophagus breaking away, the whole structure tumbling and falling to the floor. She walked towards her father and embraced him, enveloping him in her warm, damp flesh.

“Baby… my baby…” He was weeping now. He could hold back the tears no longer.

Abby had crawled across the floor and now lay at his side, reaching out towards them both. He felt her hands grabbing at his legs, and angled his body so that she could be included in the embrace.

The three of them, together again, reunited at last, right at the centre of the black hole.

The family unit was coming back together, reforming. The damage had been repaired. He had no idea what kind of magic this was, but he didn’t want to question it too deeply. In his experience, those kinds of questions usually led to trouble, and he didn’t want to wreck what had been made here, in a dim bedroom in a council house at the back end of nowhere.

This was not the kind of place where wonders were meant to happen. But here it was: here was wonder. Here was awe.

Then, weary and aching, he became slowly aware of a faint clicking sound.

He moved back, pushing Tessa away to create a gap between them, and what he saw made him question everything else he’d been thinking. The thing that resembled his daughter stood there, naked and genderless — with just a bare patch of skin between her legs and no navel or nipples –wearing a strange white mask in place of her pretty face. The front of the mask jutted out to form a hideous beak, and its eyes were hidden behind small black shades.

She raised her arms to the ceiling, spreading her legs and bending her knees to brace herself against the floorboards. Black leaves that fused together to become a long black cape or overcoat cascaded downwards, seeming to flow from her open hands, to cover her body, flapping at first like wings before moulding itself to her shape.

In one hand she was holding a short pointed cane.

It was only when she looked back down, staring directly into his eyes, that he realised the clicking sound was coming from Tessa. And then it occurred to him that this half-formed creature was not Tessa at all, but something that was using her image in an attempt to gain entry into this world.

He turned away from the image, unable to fully comprehend what he was seeing.

“Put on some clothes,” he said to Abby, trying to cling to anything that might represent normality.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

ROYLE RUSHED ACROSS the hospital car park, thinking the worst.

He’d received the call twenty minutes ago and had wasted no time in getting here. His car was parked at an angle, taking up two spaces, but he didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, he was lucky to have made it here without running someone down. He could remember none of the journey; he’d completed it on auto-pilot.

He barged through the main doors and headed towards the maternity wing. The hospital was quiet; people were pushing trolleys laden with breakfast into side rooms, a few patients wandered the halls in their dressing gowns, doctors and nurses with weary eyes and soft morning faces talking in low voices.

At the reception desk, Royle told a small, frail woman with thick spectacles who he was and why he was here.

“And we called you?”

“Yes,” he said. “I got a call not long ago to tell me that she was here.”

The woman checked her computer for the second time, the light from the screen reflecting in the lenses of her glasses. “What was the name again?”

“Mine?”

“No, the patient’s.”

“Vanessa Royle.”

Her eyes darted across the screen. “I’m sorry, but she isn’t on here… when exactly was she brought in?”

“She came in last night, with pregnancy complications, or so I was told. Listen…” He paused, trying to rein in his temper, and something occurred to him. “Oh, hang on. She might be down under her maiden name.” He shrugged when the woman glanced up at him, her face filled with tired pity. “Vanessa Mantel.”

“Mantel… ah, yes. Here she is. Ward Ten. Just go down the corridor there and turn right at the end.” A smile crossed her face, briefly but brightly, and then she dismissed him by peering over his shoulder at the other people milling about near her desk.

He walked through the doorway the woman had indicated and passed a couple of empty rooms, several closed doors, and a ward containing a group of pregnant women. When he finally reached the ward where Vanessa was staying, he paused and tried to gather his thoughts.

They hadn’t told him much over the phone, just that he needed to get down here because his wife had been brought in with complications. They told him not to worry, but to get here as quickly as he could. Not to worry… such stupid advice, especially when it came from someone at the hospital where your pregnant wife had been rushed in the early hours of the morning.

He remembered the sound he’d heard — or thought he’d heard — coming from her belly the last time he’d seen her. Hadn’t she also said that the baby had been kicking hard? Surely that was a sign that the baby was okay, that it was developing well. A dead baby couldn’t kick.

He closed his eyes, trying to banish such thoughts. But it was no good. This was his biggest fear, the terror that gripped him every night, part of the reason he reached for the bottle: that the baby would die, and it would kill his marriage when it did so. All he wanted, everything he needed, was in this building. He couldn’t face the idea of leaving it here, in a medical waste bag headed for the incinerator.

Fuck, why did he always have to think such negative thoughts… why was he so damned dark? Sometimes he blamed the job, but then he thought that he was probably drawn to become a police officer in the first place because of that darkness, which had always been at his centre: a hard little kernel of night. And wasn’t the alcohol just another way of trying to drown that seed, to render it powerless? Or was it just a way of watering it and helping it to grow?

He ran a hand through his hair, straightened his shirt collar, and pushed open the door.

He saw Vanessa immediately. She was in the bed nearest the door. Her face was so pale that she looked like a ghost of herself. She didn’t see him at first, so when he approached the bed she twitched in shock when he spoke.

“How are you?”

She smiled. “Okay. It’s good to see you.”

He felt like crying. He wanted to start punching and kicking the walls, tearing apart the place. “What happened?”

“Have you spoken to the doctor?”

He shook his head. “Not yet. I came straight up here, to the ward.”

A nurse walked over from her station. “Mr Royle?”

“DS Royle,” he said, not understanding why it was important to state his rank to this civilian. That wouldn’t help here. Death would not be scared off by official seniority.

“DS Royle… yes. The doctor asked me to let him know once you arrived. He’d like to talk to you, if that’s okay.”

He reached out and Vanessa’s hand found his. He squeezed it, looked down at her.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Go and see the doctor. I’ll be fine.” She squeezed him back.

He followed the nurse back out into the corridor, where she led him to a small, cramped room. The door was open and a middle-aged doctor sat behind a desk, squinting at a computer screen.

“Doctor Gable,” said the nurse. “Mr… sorry, DS Royle is here.”

The doctor looked up. He had a large, open face and a grey goatee beard. He blinked several times, smiled, and nodded. “Thanks, nurse. Please, DS Royle… won’t you come in?”

The nurse hurried away. Royle stood in the doorway for a couple of seconds, unsure of what to do, and then he stepped inside, leaving the door open behind him.

“Sit down, please.” The doctor leaned back in his chair. He had a big belly and thin arms. His medical coat was ill-fitting, as if they hadn’t quite been able to accommodate his odd shape.

“What’s wrong with my wife?”

The doctor grabbed a pen off the desk and rolled it between his palms. “As you know, she was brought in here a few hours ago. She called an ambulance complaining of pains and they wasted no time in getting her here. A woman of her age… well, we can’t afford to take any risks.”

Royle nodded. “Go on.”

“We did an ultrasound and found something unusual.” He paused.

Royle waited for him to continue.

“There’s a growth, DS Royle. It’s attached to the wall of her womb. At first we thought it might be an underdeveloped twin. That happens sometimes, one twin is stronger than the other and the weaker one expires.”

“Twins?”

“No. Not twins. That’s just what we thought at first. I’m afraid your wife has a tumour. We can’t tell if it’s benign or malignant at this stage, but one thing’s for certain — it needs to come out. We have to operate, and we have to do it quickly."

Royle stared at the window behind the doctor’s head. The sun was almost full up; the sky was lightening by degrees, the clouds parting. “How soon can you do it?”

“You have private health care. That means we can bump her up the list and do it almost immediately — certainly in the next twenty-four hours, here at the hospital. We need to monitor the situation first, get the results of a biopsy. We’re not sure how serious this is, but I need to warn you both that it might be very serious indeed. If the tumour is malignant… well, I’m sure you understand what that might mean.” The doctor stopped playing with the pen. He placed it on the desk, then touched it a couple of times with the tip of his finger, rolling it a few inches back and forth across the surface. “I’m sorry,” he said, almost as an afterthought. “We’ll do everything we can.”

Royle stood and backed away from the desk. “Yeah. Thanks.” He needed to get out of there, to get away from the hideous little man and his distracted demeanour. He couldn’t take it all in; the world was coming apart at the seams, letting in impurities from whatever lay beyond the veil. The dark seed at his centre was starting to flower.

He stumbled out of the room and back along the corridor, falling against the wall, dragging his feet along the tiled floor. He entered the ward and went straight to Vanessa’s bed, where he held her hand and stared into her eyes.

“I love you,” she said, simply and honestly.

“This is it,” he said. “This is the moment. This is what it all comes down to: you and me, in a hospital room, praying for the life of our unborn baby. Everything else is bullshit. The past cases, the crimes I could never solve, the drink, the stupid fights and arguments… none of it matters. Just this. This moment.”

She nodded, closed her eyes. “I’m sleepy, baby… take care of things while I have a little rest.”

He squeezed her hand. He knew exactly what she meant. For the first time in his life, he understood her completely. They were back together, just like he’d wanted. Every other problem in their relationship slipped away into the darkness, dwarfed by the immensity of this current situation.

Take care of things while I have a little rest…

He’d do that. He’d sort everything out; make it so that the world was ready for the arrival of their baby. Nothing else mattered.

Just then his mobile phone started to ring. He stood, glancing towards the nurse’s station, and fumbled it out of his trouser pocket. The nurse he’d spoken to earlier gave him a dark look. He shrugged, mouthed the word “sorry” and headed out of the ward, raising the phone to his ear.

“Where are you?”

It was Detective Superintendent Sillitoe, from the station.

“Sorry, sir, I’m at the hospital. It’s my wife… she’s been brought in. It’s an emergency.”

“Is she okay?”

“I don’t know, sir, but everything’s in hand. I’m just on my way back to the station."

“Don’t bother. Stay where you are. They’re bringing her in.”

“Who?”

“Ah, yes, you don’t know… it’s Wanda.”

“Miss Wandaful?”

“Yeah. She should be there any minute. She was found on Grove Road early this morning by a jogger, in a bad way. I don’t want to say much over the phone, because you’ll need to see this one to believe it… but she’s in a really bad state.”

“Okay, I’ll head down to Casualty now. That’s where they’ll take her.”

“If she’s talking, get what you can and report back here. There’s some weird shit going down, and I have a feeling this might just be the start of it. Remember that scarecrow?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, it’s gone missing. And just to cap it off, this morning there was an identical one in the garden of each of the houses where the parents of two of those other missing girls lives… two of them: Jacobs and Warren. Royle, each of them has one of those fucked-up photographs taped to its face. It’s like some kind of twisted message. Like someone’s playing a game.”

“I’m on it, sir.”

“Let me know as soon as you know anything. It’s all kicking off at the Concrete Grove. We now have reports of gunshots on the estate. What is it with these fucking people?”

The phone went dead before Royle could respond.

Weird shit… what exactly did Sillitoe mean by that? He thought about the scarecrows and what they might actually mean. The first one could be passed off as a silly, tasteless joke, but all of them together could only be a message. Was the person who’d taken the Gone Away Girls back in town? Did he want to resume his work, and was taunting the police in the process? And what about those gunshots? Who the hell was firing rounds in the Grove, and why?

The separate pieces of some huge plot were slowly moving together, shifting slowly, like tectonic plates. Royle suspected that he would never be able to see the full picture, only these separate sections. But hopefully that would be enough to take care of things, to rearrange into the correct order those parts of his life that were currently misaligned.

He rushed to the fire exit and down the stairs, heading for the Casualty Department. Just as he arrived there, on the ground floor at the rear of the hospital building, there was a lot of commotion. Two white-coated men were pushing a sheet-covered gurney through the reception area, followed by a nurse shouting orders. He followed them, pulling out his ID.

“Police! Who do you have there?”

The nurse turned towards him, her face slick with sweat and her lips pressed together in a thin line. She was breathing heavily. “She’s one of yours… from the lab at the station. There’s severe trauma to the lower abdomen and limbs. You really don’t want to know…”

“I’m afraid I have to know. Is she conscious?”

“Unbelievably, yes… She should be dead, but she’s managed to hang on. Fading fast, though, so if you don’t mind we need to get her prepped for immediate surgery.”

He jogged after them through the building, and waited outside when they entered an examination room. Shortly, a young doctor joined him. The man was Asian, with short hair and bushy eyebrows.

“Can you tell me anything, doctor?”

The man sighed. “She’s in a bad way. She’s lost a lot of blood and the mutilations are… well, I’ve not seen anything like this before. It’s sick.”

Royle took a step closer to the man. “What do you mean? Nobody’s told me anything. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Shit.” The doctor wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “She’s had the lower part of her body removed, everything severed from the waist down, and the wound cauterized by massive heat.”

Royle couldn’t understand what he was being told. He glanced at a clock on the wall but failed to register the time. Movement caught his eye over the doctor’s shoulder: a door swung open, someone scurried along the corridor clutching a bloody sheet or towel draped over some kind of container, perhaps a small bucket.

“I’m not sure what to tell you, here. This is… unbelievable. In crude terms, someone’s torn off her legs at the waist and stuffed a broom handle into the wound, making her into some kind of doll. She was found crawling along the street, dragging her shattered spine and the broom handle behind her. She should be dead, but somehow she’s still alive.”

The doctor wouldn’t meet his gaze. “Can you save her?”

The doctor looked away, staring at the wall. “I’m not sure. We’re doing all we can in there, believe me. She should be…”

“Yes, I know. She should be dead. But she isn’t.”

An hour later he was allowed into a side room, where Wanda had been put in a single bed under the window. She was wearing an oxygen mask, IV tubes were sticking out of her arms like skinned veins, and a heart rate monitor beeped by the side of the bed. Her body was covered with sheets, and there was some kind of raised chicken-wire structure encasing the lower half of her body — more specifically, the part where her legs should be.

Royle went to her and sat down in the chair at the side of the bed. He groped for her hand. She grabbed his fingers, squeezing lightly, with all the strength that she had.

“What happened to you?”

The heart rate monitor increased in volume, the beat becoming more erratic. Wanda let go of his hand. She reached up, to her face, and removed the oxygen mask.

“No, don’t…” He tried to replace the mask, but she turned her head on the pillow. Her face was white. Not pale, but white.

“Royle…” Her voice was barely much more than a whisper. He could hear her pain; he knew how difficult it must be for her to speak. “Go back… go to the Grove… something… coming… stop it… stop it and save your baby… the last… Gone Away girl… go to her family…”

Her body went limp, her mouth hung open. She was dead. She’d hung on for as long as she could, until she could see him and pass on this oblique message. He was meant to go back to the Concrete Grove, to witness whatever the hell was going on there and somehow prevent events that he could not understand.

He had no idea why this all seemed to revolve around the Gone Away Girls, but it almost made sense. In terms of his failure to solve the case, it made a lot of sense. But still it was difficult to believe that his personal obsession should make such a tangible impact on the world. There was something larger than his own despair going on here, but he was only being allowed glimpses: tiny snatches, like weak light through a broken window.

Somehow he needed to suspend his disbelief and find some faith in himself, because if Wanda was right, the life of his baby depended on what he did next.

Royle closed Wanda’s eyes with a gentle stroke of his hand across her face. “Thank you,” he said, and left the room to try and take care of things — just as his wife had asked.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE FIRST POLICE car arrived about fifteen minutes after the shot had been fired. Then, pretty quickly, the street outside Abby’s house was cordoned off and several more vehicles arrived on the scene — three more police cars, a Black Maria van and an ambulance.

Erik watched from the bedroom window as the TV news crew set up their cameras. Some pretty blonde woman in an expensive suit delivered a to-camera update. She kept turning to indicate the house, lifting her head, tossing her hair, and Erik started to realise that he was about to be famous.

“Don’t fucking move.” He stood before Abby, grinning. She couldn’t move, of course; he’d tied her to the radiator with packing tape after he’d watched her get dressed. Then he’d gone down to the car to fetch Monty. He hadn’t made a very good job of the bindings, because he’d been in a rush, but they had held her long enough for him to get back here.

He turned and left the room, ignoring for now the ruined shrine and the motionless bastardised figure that was standing in the corner, watching in silence. He went downstairs and checked the front door again. He didn’t want anyone coming in; didn’t even want them walking up the path to the doorstep. He knelt down, lifted the letterbox, and shouted to the gathered crowd: “Anyone comes near this door and she’s dead. I’ll shoot her in the fucking face.” He wasn’t sure if he meant it, but the proximity of Monty’s mutated remains made it difficult to focus. Everything was fuzzy, as if he’d been on a day-long alcohol binge and somehow managed to drink himself almost sober.

As one of the police officers outside started speaking through a bullhorn, Erik let the flap of the letterbox drop back into place and retreated further inside the house. He went into the living room and stared at Monty, who was curled up like an ugly house pet on the sofa in front of the television. Images of Erik’s face flashed across the screen. The text beneath the photographs described him as a ‘local gangster’, a ‘psychopath’ and a ‘danger to society’. Perhaps he was all of those things; perhaps he was none of them. It didn’t matter now, because events had begun to take on a momentum of their own, and nothing he did would matter.

“Is this what you wanted, Monty?”

It’ll do…

“What do we do next?”

Monty slithered off the sofa and across the floor, like a snake with a human face. We wait… that thing upstairs; it’s my way back to Loculus. We need to wait until it’s fully formed, and I can hitch a ride back there.

Even now, Erik wasn’t certain that he was actually hearing the voice in his head. He seemed to sense the words, to feel them, more than hear them. It was a strange experience, and not at all unpleasant. The voice was like a huge, warm hand stroking the rear of his brain. He could just sit back and let it tell him what to do.

He looked at the gun in his hand and wondered how it had got there. Not the physical act of picking it up, but the progression of events that had led him here, to this juncture, where he stood armed and dangerous with a police siege taking place outside the house.

Had it started with his friend Marty’s stabbing, all those months ago? Certainly things had changed soon after that. Marty had subsequently gone to London to help raise another man’s child, leaving behind him that same man’s corpse with a knife wound in its belly. Or had the catalyst been much earlier than that, when he’d gone into business with Monty Bright, a lost, damaged man who always seemed to be looking for something that didn’t exist, not in this world anyway?

So many different roads had brought him here, and he could have avoided none of them. Everything was sucked into the orbit of this big black hole. People, thoughts and memories, ideas… inexorably, it all ended up here, in the Concrete Grove, where it would be devoured by whatever monsters lived behind the scenes.

“Can’t I stop now?” He fell to his knees, cradling the gun like a baby.

No, it’s gone too far. You were never in charge, anyway. You were simply used, as we all were. Great forces have been wrestling over this site for centuries. Men and woman have tried to gain access to another world, a place where hummingbirds act as messengers, where trees are alive, and where ancient races of creatures once lived. Now it’s just a wasteland, a place of diminishing power… but whoever can harness what’s left of that power might be able to salvage something from it. That’s all I ever wanted… power, real power.

This was the longest the voice had spoken, and it made the inside of Erik’s head itch. It felt like there were insects in there, crawling around on the surface of his brain. He sensed the black hole at the centre of things flexing, opening up like a cosmic vagina to either ejaculate energy or suck it deep inside. He was no longer sure of which event would occur. But whatever happened, it would be a form of birth… of creation.

A phrase came to him, unbidden: the Concrete Grove is the doorway to Creation.

Where had he come across those words? Was it something he’d read, or something that had been said to him, long ago, like an old nursery rhyme whose meaning has been forgotten? The words resonated, vibrating along the channels of his being, turning to glass and shattering at his core.

He stood, holding on tightly to the gun. That’s what this was all about: creation. Not destruction. That would be too obvious, too easy. The true test of a man was his power to create, not his willingness to destroy.

Erik looked at the pathetic remnant of his friend and he made a decision.

“I don’t know what’s happening here, but it all has to end.”

Go back upstairs. Kill the woman. Let the other thing grow…

“No.”

He raised the gun, trying not to think about anything beyond the moment. All he had was his instincts. Let other men puzzle over what happened here after it was done. He would simply act as his gut told him.

No. This is wrong…

He pointed the gun at Monty; the small, twisted shape began to writhe on the carpet, its appendages flailing, grasping at nothing but empty air. The bond was broken — he could no longer influence Erik’s actions. Because Erik wouldn’t let it happen. In the depths of this darkness, he had finally found himself… and he knew exactly what was required of him.

No.

“Yes.” He pulled the trigger.

Monty’s tiny upturned face disintegrated into a cloud of red powder. The body bucked and writhed, the limbs and tentacles clenching, clutching, and then going limp. The small, compressed body began to change, flesh becoming fluid, changing into a succession of faces that screamed silently as everything withered, becoming as dust.

Erik knew that these were the faces of every person Monty Bright had ever trapped when he was still in business as a loan shark; they were his debtors, the people he had controlled and finally absorbed, making them a part of his monstrous whole. They were free now; their debts were finally paid. Their recession of the spirit was over.

He walked across the room and peeked through the gap in the curtains. Nothing had changed; they were all still waiting for him out there, wanting him to come out. They were demanding blood, and they would not rest until they had it. His blood, primarily, but the blood of a hostage would suffice. It would give them a good story for the evening news.

He turned away and went back upstairs. Abby was sitting against the radiator, shivering. She’d managed to scrape away most of the tape, releasing her hands. She rubbed silently at her reddened wrists.

“We’re trapped,” he said.

She looked up at him, into his eyes. Her face was battered; dried blood was smeared across her cheeks; the area around her left eye was swollen. “You did this… you trapped us.”

“I know. I had no choice. I’m weak… a weak man. All my life I’ve pretended to be strong, but I’m not. Never was. My father used to beat me and masturbate over my shaking body. My mother would sit in the chair, drinking brown ale, and laugh about it. My brothers were all maniacs, and I followed them down that path. Nobody here gets out alive. This place — all the places just like it — is toxic, a waste dump for humanity. All of our dreams, our hopes, are rotted away. This is the end of the line and none of us asked to be here…” He faded, unsure of what he was trying to say. “This is all there is. Beyond here… there’s nothing. Even the place Monty wanted to get back to, it’s just shit: another world of shit that exists inside this one.”

“Let me go, Erik. Finish untying me, and I’ll take our daughter downstairs. We’ll get you some help. I’ll tell the police that you lost your mind for a little while, but you’re better now. You’ll get therapy. They’ll mend you. We can be together again.”

He sank to his knees and placed the gun between his thighs. “I wish I could believe you. That would be nice. But you’re lying, I know you are. I can smell the lies on your breath.” He shook his head. “You don’t understand. We’re all monsters. None of us chose this route, we didn’t do it deliberately, but the world turned on us and changed us into beasts. Nobody out there gives a flying fuck about any of us. They demonise us in the news and in TV shows. They call us names and give us hoods to wear. And we accept the role they force upon us — we adapt and we take it on, sucking it all down, because we don’t have anything else. All we have is their disdain, their hatred, and we fucking lap it up like beaten dogs.”

His breath was coming in short little hitches, like that of an asthmatic. He could barely speak, so he stopped talking. He bowed his head and looked at his hands. They were cupping the gun, feeling its dread weight. The barrel of the gun was a tiny, endless black hole, sucking him down: a reflection of the black hole around which they all orbited.

“What are you going to do now?” She shifted against the radiator, loosening the tape around her ankles.

Erik remained silent. There was nothing left to say.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

HE SHOULD HAVE come here earlier, right at the start. This was where it all began, at least for the Pollack family. It was where they had lived with their ghost, and where they had finally given in to the pressure it had brought them.

This was where he’d been raised… perhaps even where he’d been born.

He’d tried to get to Abby’s house first, to ask her if she’d come along with him to the Needle. But the road had been blocked: police tape and official vehicles, TV news vans and spectators. There was something going on, and it looked to him as if Abby might be in trouble. It didn’t take a genius to realise that her ex was involved — that fucking gangster Erik Best. He hoped that Abby got out of it in one piece. The last thing he wanted was to go to her funeral.

He stood outside the main entrance to the tower, looking up at the building. It loomed above the construction hoardings, a battered monument to man’s failures. The sky was dark around its apex, as if storm clouds were concentrated there, drawn to it by strange energies. Small birds hovered outside the upper floor windows, making dark patterns against the charcoal sky.

“I’m here,” he whispered. “I’m home.”

Home…

He knew the truth now. He had always known it, deep down inside, where he could never quite reach the information. Marc was the baby that he’d read about in Harry Rose’s notebook. He’d come here looking for a story to write up, and had instead found his own lost plot strands, the loose threads of his existence.

He was the baby; the third Pollack child, the only one to have survived the unknown horrors the family had endured here, inside the Needle.

There were no memories of ever having lived here, just a large blank spot, as if someone had wiped that part of his brain clean. His earliest childhood memories were of the car crash that had killed his parents, and then of Uncle Mike.

He’d left Uncle Mike as soon as he was old enough to look after himself, gone to University to study journalism, blotting out his fractured childhood, fabricating new memories to smother the ones that didn’t exist anyway. He’d been successful, until now. Harry Rose’s notebook had opened up a crack in his mind, allowing images to seep out: a bare room with a crib, an uncarpeted floor, two dirty-faced young children, a man with a beak for a face… and there was nothing more, just the grubby taste of fear at the back of his throat.

“It’s me,” he said, confirming the fact, trying to make it stick. “I’m the baby… I was there, in the flat. I was haunted.” And in many ways, he still was: haunted by the past that he could not remember, and by the screams of the siblings he had never known. Little Jack and Daisy-like-a-flower; the twin sibling who had never lived: he detected a trace memory of fondness for his brother and sister — much in the same way that he loved the characters in all the best books he’d read as a child.

Of his parents, if indeed that’s what they had been, there was no clue.

Then, as the cracks opened slightly wider, he had a glimpse of something else: a man and a woman, dressed in dark robes, kneeling beside a television set draped with a black cloth. Lying on the cloth was what looked like a hen or a chicken, but it was covered in blood. The man and the woman were chanting, rocking back and forth, and the shadows around them looked alive, not like shadows at all…

There was nothing more, just that single snapshot, like an isolated scene from a film.

They tried to give me to Captain Clickety.

The thought was like a knife through his heart. It could not be denied. It came with the image; a nice little package, all wrapped up in despair. He knew it was true — he felt it. His parents had tried to sacrifice him, as part of a deal to protect the twins. But something had gone wrong. Instead of him being taken, and the man and the woman rewarded with whatever it was they sought, the entire deal had fallen through. The ghost had left them… but it had taken with it something vital that he and the twins were unable to live without. Their souls, their life-force… whatever it was that made them who they were.

He didn’t think he’d ever find out what had soured the sacrifice, but none of that mattered now. His book would never be written, because he was a vital component in the plot. There was no way that he could write a story that was still happening, with no real ending in sight. He was a reporter, not a novelist; he dealt in cold, hard facts, not blood-hot fiction.

There was a section of hoarding that had either blown down in a wind or been vandalised. Marc made his way over to the area, keeping an eye out to make sure that he wasn’t seen. He had no idea who might be hanging around out here, but he didn’t want to be disturbed.

The fallen section was easy to climb over. He grabbed hold of a timber upright, hauled himself on top of the fence-like structure, and leapt nimbly over to the other side. As he did so, a strange sensation passed through him: it was like a cold breeze stirring up his insides, creating a chill at the pit of his stomach.

Don’t be so stupid, he thought, brushing down his trousers and walking towards the main entrance.

The double doors were open. He was expected. He paused outside, wondering if this wasn’t such a good idea after all. Who the hell had opened up the place, and why had they done so? Was this some kind of trap, or were there perhaps villains waiting inside, ready to mug him and give him a beating? Perhaps there was nothing at all supernatural about this situation, and he was simply walking into an empty building where a group of drugged-up maniacs would hurt him.

Why had he been so quick to believe that there was more to this situation than reality? He’d never believed in ghosts. He even questioned the motivation behind his quest for the truth about the Northumberland Poltergeist… a quest that, if he was honest, he’d never taken too seriously. For instance, this was the first time he’d been to see the building where it all happened. He’d had no idea about the baby—

(I’m the baby)

—until the spirit of Harry Rose had been forced to stick the notebook in front of his eyes.

He was an idiot; he had no clue what he was doing. He never had done.

But still he pushed wide the doors and stepped inside, crossing over the threshold from one story to another; one reality to the next. His skin seemed to quiver on the bone. His head was filled with the sound of humming.

The foyer was filled with hummingbirds, but the sound was inside his skull, not out here in the real world. The birds were motionless. There were hundreds of them, hovering silently in the air, perched on windowsills and standing on the floor. They all watched him with their tiny beady eyes. They were like windup toys; there was a strange, innocent beauty to them that both scared him and calmed his nerves.

“I’m coming in,” he whispered. The birds gave no response. They didn’t move.

Carefully, he made his way across the foyer, watching where he placed his feet in case he stood on one of the small birds. He thought about that old Hitchcock film: the final scene, with Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren making their way through a crowd of similarly silent and watchful avian antagonists. It was eerie. There was a sense of calm, but beneath that there was the suggestion of frantic movement, almost panic.

He moved slowly towards the stairwell and out of the foyer. At the bottom of the stairs, he stopped and took a moment to catch his breath. He’d not been breathing that entire time as he crossed the foyer, walking among the hummingbirds. His mouth was dry; his throat ached.

After a short while, he continued up the staircase, holding on to the handrail as he climbed. The steps were filthy; the stairwell smelled of old piss mingled with the coppery hint of blood. He didn’t want to be here but he was unable to turn around and leave. He had to follow wherever the story — his story, now — led him. There was no other option.

The flat was on the top floor. He remembered, even though he had no memories of ever having been there. He climbed slowly, reluctantly, but with a sense of purpose. It didn’t take him long to get there, but during the short climb it seemed that the seasons had changed; the world had turned, everything had altered subtly. When he stood on the top floor, bathed in sweat, it was as if he’d stepped into another place, perhaps a country whose borders messily intersected his own version of reality.

“I’m here. I’m home.”

The building was silent. The rooms were empty. There was nobody else here, just him… him and the birds.

Every door but one on the top floor was shut. The only one that was open belonged to the flat where the haunting had taken place. Again, he knew this instinctively, as if there was hidden knowledge stored inside him and only his emotions could read it. He listened for sounds of movement, but none came. He truly was alone here, inside his own lost past. There was no one else to help him, to hold his hand. His brother and sister were dead and he had no idea what might have happened to his real parents.

He was alone, and that made him happy.

He stepped softly across the landing, towards the open door. There was no light in there; it was pitch-dark, like the entrance to a cave. Sunlight lay across the walls and the floor out here, on the landing, but inside the room was only darkness. It was fitting somehow; he would not have expected anything else.

He stopped immediately outside the door, his breath coming in short, sharp jags. Sweat poured down over his forehead and into his eyes. He wiped it away with the back of his hand, but still his vision began to blur.

“Home.”

He took a step forward, and then another, and entered the place where it had all started.

Darkness swallowed him. Then it receded, and he finally saw what had happened all those years ago. The final chapter of his story — which was also the prologue — unfurled before his eyes.

There’s a couple on the living room floor, dressed in long black robes with nothing underneath. They have strange symbols painted on their hands and faces. They’ve turned the television into some kind of altar: a black piece of cloth is draped over the set, covering the screen, and there’s a dead chicken or hen or rooster with its throat cut so deeply that its head hangs at an angle. Its feathers are black.

No blood.

No knife.

Just the dead fowl.

The man and the woman are singing or chanting. They’ve clearly rehearsed the words many times, and their faces betray not a hint of emotion. There is no music, just their voices, and neither of them can hold a tune.

At the woman’s side, wrapped up in blankets, there is a small baby. The baby is silent; it does not cry. Its eyes are only half open; its mouth is twisted into an odd shape, the lips limp. The baby might be drugged.

The man nods as he chants. Tears begin to well up from his eyes and then spill down his cheeks. The woman reaches out clumsily and grabs his hand. The man shakes his head, vigorously; it is the woman’s turn to nod.

The woman lets go of the man’s hand, turns her body, and picks up the tiny baby.

They both continue to chant. The man’s voice is quiet but the woman’s is loud, as if she has something to prove.

Then, abruptly, the chant changes, one word, repeated over and over again: Loculus.

The woman holds up the baby by its throat. The blankets drop to the floor. The baby remains still, its sedated form motionless as they woman closes her eyes and starts to squeeze.

The man looks down, at the floor. Behind him, something stirs. Darkness rushes in, like a thick fog, coiling at floor level and then rising, forming a tube, before it takes on the shape of a man. A white-beaked face leans forward, eager.

The man opens his eyes. He reaches out and grabs the baby. The woman does not resist. It is over, just like that: the moment has gone. The spell is broken.

The beaked figure fades to blackness, flapping its arms and thrashing its head from side to side. Then, after a few seconds of this violent activity, it is gone.

The man and the woman stare at each other, reaching some kind of unspoken agreement. They reach out and hold hands, the baby clasped between them.

The sacrifice has failed. They could not go through with it. They could not kill the baby, even to save the other children.

Marc’s parents — his real parents, who loved him after all — have backed out of whatever deal they had made.

That is the reason for the subsequent haunting. That is why Captain Clickety tried to get to the twins. Because the life he was offered, the one he would have accepted without pain or pity, was revoked. The one he’d been told about all that time ago when he’d first encountered the village of Groven: the Witness.

So instead he went after all the others — the Pollack twins and all the rest: the ones he took and the ones that got away. The Pollack twins, the three boys he lured inside the Needle, the Gone Away Girls… but none of them was ever the right one. Because that one escaped, he was snatched away.

But now he’d come back.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

ROYLE PARKED IN the next street and made his way on foot to Abby Hansen’s house. He’d already been briefed on the two-way radio, so he knew what was going on. Erik Best — a man he’d met and spoken with on several occasions — had gone crazy with a handgun and there was a full-on armed siege taking place in the Concrete Grove.

As he approached the property, flashing his ID at uniformed officers as he made his way through the police cordon, he saw members of the Armed Response Unit getting into position. A man with a high-powered rifle was visible on the roof of the house opposite; the rest of the team was dotted about at various points close to the house, their weapons trained on the front door and windows. There’d be at least a couple of officers at the back of the house, doing the same thing. It was all locked down tight; Erik Best was going nowhere apart from down.

Detective Superintendent Sillitoe himself came walking over when he saw Royle, raising a hand in greeting. The tall, thin man looked anxious. He never had been good with television crews, and there were a lot of cameras on the scene today.

“Sir,” he said, nodding.

“Glad you could make it, Royle. We have a… well, a situation here.”

“I’ve been briefed, sir. I know what’s going on.”

Sillitoe glanced towards the house and then back again, his eyes narrow and focused. “You know this man, Best?”

“I do, sir. I’ve dealt with him on a few occasions. He’s a local gangster — did time for GBH and assault, but we could never pin anything else on him. It’s a known fact that he runs bare-knuckle boxing bouts but not from anywhere around here. We think he has links to the drug fraternity, but again there’s no hard evidence. He’s Teflon, sir. The bastard always manages to stay out of our sights.”

“Okay, anything else?”

Royle paused, tried to remain calm. “The Gone Away Girls, sir.”

Sillitoe tensed, seeming to grow in height. “What about them, Royle. Don’t start all that shit again, please. Not here, not now.” His eyes opened wider, flashed.

“No, sir, you don’t understand. The last girl taken, before it all stopped… it was Best’s daughter, Tessa Hansen.”

“And the mother’s in there with him…”

“So I believe, sir.”

“Fuck. That’s all we need, to revisit another old mess.” He paused, looked again at the house. When he turned back to Royle, his features had softened. “Can I rely on you, Royle?”

“You know you can, sir.”

Sillitoe smiled. “Good… that’s good. Let’s try to keep any mention of the Gone Away — of that case — to ourselves.” His lips curled, as if he’d tasted something unpleasant. “The press are all over this to begin with. Armed sieges, hostage situations… flavour of the fucking month, especially after that Moat business last year over in Rothbury. The bastards can’t seem to get enough of this ‘mad gunman’ shit.”

“Yes, sir. I know.” He stared at Sillitoe’s face, trying to read the man’s thoughts. But that was impossible; nobody could read Detective Superintendent Sillitoe. That was what made him so good at police force politics, why he’d risen so far and so quickly through the ranks, despite being such a piss-poor detective.

Royle was about to add something more when he heard the gunshot.

The sound was followed by a commotion: bystanders hit the deck, police officers ran around trying to look as if they had some kind of control over the situation, members of the Armed Response Unit hunched over their weapons, awaiting the order to fire at will.

Sillitoe moved quickly behind the nearest vehicle, protecting himself. Royle moved away, taking the opportunity to give his superior officer the slip. He’d been told to come here, he was meant to be on site, right in the middle of the action. He didn’t need any distractions. He just wanted to get to the heart of the matter and rip it out, still beating if necessary.

“Royle!” The voice came from an upper storey window.

He stopped walking, turned, and looked up at the front of the house. He could see a figure partially obscured by a bedroom curtain.

Looking around, he saw an officer cowering nearby with a bullhorn in his hand. He jogged over there and grabbed it, hitting the switch and causing a whine of feedback. He put the apparatus to hips lips, took a breath, and spoke:

"Best? Yes, it’s me, DS Royle. You remember me, don’t you?”

A pause… nobody on the street dared to speak.

“Yeah, I know you. I’ll speak to you… only you.” Another pause; the man was thinking things through, examining his options. “Get up here now, or I’ll kill the woman and the kid.”

Royle stopped himself from responding immediately. This didn’t make sense.

“The kid?” His voice echoed. “Let me get this straight. There’s a child up there with you, Best?”

“Yeah, a fucking kid… or so it wants us to believe. Come up now or they’re both dead. I’m not fucking around. The time for all that’s gone. This is serious. This is where it all ends, Royle.”

Royle did not wait for confirmation from his superior officer, nor did he look at anyone as he stalked across the street and pushed open the gate. He walked up to the door, waited, and listened. He heard someone coming down the stairs, heavy-footed, and moving along the hallway. He couldn’t make out details through the stippled glass panel in the door, but it didn’t look like Erik Best.

There was the rattle of a bolt in its slot. The door opened an inch; the security chain tautened, made a faintly musical noise. A woman’s battered face peered through the gap.

“Miss Hansen?”

She nodded.

“Miss Hansen… Abby, are you okay?”

The more he saw of her face the more worried he became. She was cut and bruised, with what looked to be a broken nose and a shattered cheekbone. Both of her eyes were swollen almost shut.

“He hurt me… he’s got a gun.” Her voice was dull; she struggled to make the words clear through her beaten face. “He’s halfway up the stairs… if I try to run, he said he’ll shoot me in the back.”

Royle nodded. The decision was made.

“Let me in.”

She shut the door. He heard her pawing at the security chain, trying to release it from its catch. Then the door opened again, wider this time; just enough for him to step inside. She moved to the side, and once he was through the doorway, she slammed the door and replaced the chain, slid the bolt back into place. She was shaking. The unfocused look in her eyes made it seem like she’d just woken up from a long sleep and was still only half awake, still caught up in the wild webbing of dreams.

“This way,” said a voice from further along the hall. “Come here, where I can see you. And keep your hands away from your body.”

“I’m unarmed,” said Royle, moving slowly forward. “I’m not a firearms officer, anyway. I would probably shoot myself in the foot if I started waving a gun around. How about you?”

“Don’t worry about me. I know how to use this thing.”

Royle could not see the bottom few stairs of the main flight. As he drew closer, he saw a pair of feet, then legs, and finally a torso.

“Keep coming,” said Erik Best. He held the gun out, away from his body. The tip of the barrel was angled slightly downwards, but it was pointed vaguely in Royle’s direction. “No quick moves.”

Royle was aware of Abby Hansen standing with her back to the wall. She slid along the hallway cautiously, focusing all of her attention on the man who was standing halfway up the stairs.

“Okay, start climbing. We can talk up here, on the first floor, so we’re well out of the way of your mates out there.”

Royle nodded. “That’s fine, Erik. I’m here for you… all for you. We can talk about whatever you want.” He kept his hands held out, away from his body, the palms turned towards the man with the gun. “I want to find a peaceful conclusion to this. I don’t want to see anyone get hurt — and that means you, too. Let’s see if we can get everyone here out alive, yeah?”

Best shook his head slowly, a grim smile on his face. “We’re all already dead, marra. Don’t you see? This is a hell, and we’re all trapped here, in this hell. Like demons or ghosts… we can’t ever leave again. We’re haunting this place… haunting it…”

He’s insane, thought Royle as he started to climb the stairs. He’s lost his fucking mind. He moved slowly, carefully. He didn’t reach out to grab hold of the banister, preferring instead to keep his hands up at waist level, showing that they were empty. He could hear Abby Hansen mounting the bottom step behind him. Her breathing was heavy. She whimpered quietly, but just the once and for only a second or two.

“It’s okay,” he whispered, keeping his gaze fixed dead ahead and hoping that only she could hear him. “Stay calm.”

“Shut the fuck up and get your copper arse up here.” The gun barrel twitched, pointing directly at him. “She doesn’t need to hear you. She doesn’t need to hear anything.”

“Okay, okay… hold your horses. I’m coming. Like I said, I’m here for you. We can sit and talk, you and I, and see what we can organise.”

Slowly, Best moved backwards up the stairs, taking one riser at a time. He placed his feet carefully as he went, so there was no danger of him stumbling and falling no matter how hard Royle wished for it to happen. The man might, indeed, have lost his mind, but he was aware of his surroundings and seemed intent on having his way.

When he reached the top of the stairs, Royle followed Best along the landing to an open door. Best stood to the side, flicking the gun as if he were chasing off flies. “Get in there.”

Royle nodded. “No problem.” He entered the room. At first it wasn’t clear what he was looking at, and then he realised that there was a pile of what looked like a child’s belongings in the middle of the room, as if they’d been arranged into a heap and then spread out messily. There were clothes and toys, pages from magazines, and even photographs in the pile. He realised then that these things had once belonged to Erik and Abby’s daughter. These were her things; they’d been placed here deliberately.

Then he saw the thing that was standing in the corner.

He stopped, feeling the urge to turn around and run, to just get the hell out of there and not look back, not once, not ever. Just keep on running until he was out of sight and far away from the Crawl.

The figure was small — child-sized. It was dressed in a floppy-brimmed black hat, a long black cloak, and had some kind of weird bird mask covering its face. Placed over the mask where the eyes should have been, incongruous and lending a further surreal touch to the already eerie figure, was a strange-looking pair of black goggles. The figure did not move. It just stood there, with its back to the wall, staring into the room.

Royle had overcome the urge to flee. “Hello,” he said, disappointed at the fear in his voice.

“Shut the fuck up,” said Best, entering behind him. “It doesn’t talk.”

Royle didn’t want to turn around and take his eyes off the figure. If he stopped looking, it might move; and if it moved, he was fucked. He wasn’t sure how he knew this, but it felt right. The last thing that needed to happen here was for that thing to start moving. Or crawling.

Abby Hansen walked past him on the right, moving towards the small figure. She stood near it, but not too close. She didn’t seem to know what to do — should she go to it, or stay out of reach? Her fingers flexed at her sides, her lips trembled, and she swayed on her heels for a moment, as if she were about to fall. Then, after a second or two where things looked fragile, she recovered and straightened her spine, lifting her chin in defiance.

Royle smiled at her, but Abby stared right through him. She was probably in shock. Or maybe she’d simply retreated inside herself, where it was safer.

Finally, Royle managed to look away from the figure in black. “Okay, Erik,” he said, turning reluctantly to face the gunman. “So I’m here. Now, what shall we talk about?”

Best used the gun to point at the bed. “Sit down. I don’t trust you on your feet. I don’t trust any of you fuckers.”

Royle stayed where he was. “So why did you ask me in here, Erik? I mean, if you don’t trust me, why am I here?” He gestured with his hands, shrugging slightly.

“Don’t get fucking clever. You’re only here because you tried to help when our Tessa went missing. You were the only fucker who cared. Nobody else did. They just turned their backs and walked away, probably thinking I had something to do with it.” He licked his lips. His gaze wouldn’t settle on one thing; his eyes moved around the room, looking at everything, doubting everything. “Now, sit down on the fucking bed before I put a hole in you.” Finally his gaze settled on Royle, and there was a blank spot behind those eyes that Royle wished he’d not had turned upon him.

Royle did as he was told and sat down on the small single bed. The soft mattress bowed beneath him, making him feel like a giant, or a man sitting on a toy bed. “Okay… just be cool, Erik. Tell me the problem.”

The other man laughed. “Fucking hell, man. Are you blind? This…” He gestured with the hand that wasn’t holding the gun. “This is the problem. All of it.”

“This house?” Royle was acting dumb, pretending that he was slow on the uptake. Anything that might buy him some time.

“Jesus…” Erik Best shook his head. “Not the house… not just the house. Everything else, too. This place, this estate — this fucking life.” He walked across the room and stood by the window. The curtains were closed. The beaked figure did not move as he approached, and he barely even looked at it. “I’m right at the centre of the black hole, Royle. I can’t move, can’t breathe. Nothing I do makes any sense.” He turned towards the small figure. “Look at this… this thing.”

“What is it, Erik? I can see it, too. Where did it come from?”

Best turned away from the window. He dropped the gun hand down by his side. “It came from the black hole. Right over there.” He nodded towards the pile of items at the centre of the room.

Royle wasn’t certain, but it looked like there was a hole in the carpet right at the middle of the untidy heap. The hole looked like it might even penetrate the wooden floorboards beneath.

“That thing… I think… I think it’s my daughter. Or at least a small part of her.”

That was Abby Hansen’s cue to move. She seemed to snap out of whatever fugue state she’d entered, and moved sideways, towards the figure. It stood there like a statue, tense and immobile. Even when Abby put one arm around its narrow shoulders, the thing did not move.

“Get away… you get away from it.” Best raised the gun.

“Listen, Erik. Let’s just stay calm.”

“Get the fuck… away.” His finger tightened on the trigger. It was a subtle movement, but Royle was looking at exactly the right place to see it happen. He was ignoring the man’s face. He was more interested in that hand, and the gun it grasped so tightly. Without thinking, he stood and made a single quick movement towards the gunman.

Erik Best’s finger twitched on the trigger. The gun went off: a single shot, but in the small room the sound was deafening.

Royle reached him too late. Abby was already bending over and clutching her abdomen by the time he grabbed the gun hand, twisting it to release the weapon. By this time, Best had gone limp. He let go of the gun without a struggle and sank to his knees, his head going down and his shoulders hitching in a silent sob.

That was when the figure by the window started making a noise.

It raised one small, thin arm, pointing at the wounded woman, and let out a sound like a broken motorcycle engine. The din was unearthly… that was the exact word that came to Royle’s mind, even at the time. The sound was not of this world. A long, high-pitched clicking sound, like nothing he’d ever heard before.

Other than raising its hand, the figure did not move. It just kept on clicking: a single endless ratcheting note, with not even a pause for breath.

Royle went to Abby Hansen. She was down on her knees. Blood had turned her legs red; she was clutching at the wound, trying to stem the flow. She started crawling on her knees, making her way over to the pile of items on the floor — all the things she’d kept when her daughter went missing. When Royle tried to help her, she brushed away his hands. She kept on moving, staggering on her knees, until she came to the hole in the floor.

Royle could hardly believe what he was seeing.

The hole had enlarged; the edges were burnt, as if an intense heat had seared the floorboards and the carpet. There were black leaves clinging to the lip of the hole. It was a perfect black circle — a black hole, just like Best had said. He felt his hand open and the gun dropped to the floor. He made no effort to keep hold of it. His muscles were limp, lifeless.

He sensed movement before he saw it, and by the time he’d turned around Erik Best had already picked up the gun. He was holding it with the barrel in his mouth, his eyes wide and his teeth chattering against the steel barrel. He smiled around the barrel, and then he pulled the trigger. The back of his head detonated in a confusion of red, like something from a dream. It didn’t look real; it was a special effect, one that would play out on the screen behind his eyes for the rest of his life.

Royle watched as the man crumpled to the floor, blood pouring from his open, slack mouth as the gun slipped away. Then, when he turned back to Abby Hansen, she was crouching by that hole in the floor, shivering. The beaked figure had somehow made its way across to her, and they were embracing tightly, as if one were absorbing the other. The small figure in the black cloak looked vague, insubstantial, like a rag doll that was no longer held together by the glue of its parents’ grief.

Abby Hansen smiled.

Then both figures fell into the hole and vanished.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

SHE’S BACK THERE, inside. She’s in the grove inside the Grove; the place that exists just out of sight, out of step, beneath and off to one side: the place that is sometimes known as Loculus. This time she knows where she’s going; she is no longer a tourist. This place has begun to feel more like home than her real home, back in the world that she can barely bring herself to think of as real.

She walks quickly, her bare feet whispering across the soft ground and the black leaves. She does not hurt her feet. It is as if they know exactly where to tread so that they can miss the stones and roots that might cause them harm.

She glances down at her belly, where she was shot. There’s still blood there, but the wound is already healing. Leaves cling to it, fusing the flesh, repairing the damage.

Before long, she is once again at the mouth of the cave, which stands among others just like it at the foot of the high cliffs. It all looks different this time, darker, deeper, and more menacing. She pauses at the threshold, uncertain. Why is she here? What happened to the thing that might have been her daughter or might just have been something else trying to impersonate Tessa?

She is beyond doubting any of this. She knows that it is as real as that other place — the one where Erik Best took his own life, and where that policeman is still standing, covered in Erik’s blood and wondering what to do next.

Both places are real. The only place where that reality is thin is the joint between the two worlds, where she crossed over. The first time she came here, it felt like a dream within a dream. But now it feels like she is wide awake. Before, she thought that her spirit was walking here, treading on ground that would be unable to take the weight of her body, but now she realises that her corporeal self is here, standing outside the cave.

This means, of course, that she might be in danger. Anything that happens to her here will have repercussions in the other world. If she dies here, she dies there, too. There is a connection, a bond, as if one world feeds the other. She wonders briefly what came first, which grove sired the other. Then she realises that it doesn’t matter.

She stares up the cliff face, making out small hand and footholds. What’s up there, at the top? What kind of view would she be rewarded with if she made it to the summit of those cliffs?

A sound draws her attention: something slithers inside the cave. She isn’t afraid, but she feels as if she has been noticed.

As she watches the cave mouth, a small figure emerges and takes shape. She feels her breath catch in her throat, but then as the figure is revealed she is saddened to see that it isn’t Tessa. It’s a small girl, but not the one she’d hoped for. The girl walks towards her, the hem of her dirty white shift dress swaying around her knees. She is smiling, but her mouth is black: no teeth are visible. Her lips are thin and pale. Her eyes are heavy-lidded, as if she has just woken from a deep sleep.

The girl beckons with one hand, a tired come-hither gesture.

“Who are you? Tell me your name, honey.”

The girl shakes her head. In that moment, Abby recognises her from the news reports and the footage on television. This is the first one; the original Gone Away Girl. It’s Little Connie Millstone… but a different version to the one that went away. She looks older, as if the soul of an ancient crone has been trapped inside the body of a child. Abby can tell by the eyes: they are far too deep inside their sockets, and look much too old for such a young girl. She wonders what those eyes have seen, what horrors have passed before them, playing out as awful and inappropriate as an adult film in a nursery.

The girl turns away and disappears into the entrance of the cave.

Abby does not know what to do, so she follows. The darkness closes around her like a fist, dragging her inside.

The fairy lights from before have been taken down. She cannot see the cave paintings. Everything is dark: black upon black. She feels her way, trusting that the girl will not lead her astray. She has no choice now. To turn back would be foolish. She can only ever move forward now, if she wants to survive.

Suddenly she is able to see. Up ahead, there is a familiar sight, but this time it is distressing. Subtle changes have taken place, and what was once a picture of beauty has become a sketch of terror.

The stone plinth is broken; jagged cracks mar its surface, a black oil-like substance has leaked out from the cracks. The hummingbirds are bedraggled, covered in grime. Their feathers are no longer the distinctive black and white that she can remember: now they are grey, all grey, covered in a light coating of dust or ashes. One of the birds has a broken beak. The other has lost an eye. As she moves closer, she realises that the dusty layer is mixed with fresh blood. Either the birds have been fighting or something has attacked them… but still, despite all this damage, they somehow manage to balance the frozen tear between them.

“Oh, no… what happened?”

Connie Millstone appears at her side, kneeling as if in prayer. Abby does the same, sinking down to her knees as she stares at the torn and bloodied hummingbirds.

“Something came. The pollution… the Underthing We thought it was gone — we thought it had gone away forever. But it came back.”

There is a loud rending noise and the cracks in the plinth open wider, forming great fissures. The blur of the hummingbirds’ wings stutters, making the shape of each wing visible, but then they speed up again. The birds dip in the air for an instant before returning to their usual level.

“Look… that’s it. The pollution. The Underthing. It’s trying to come back, to return to the surface.”

She shuffles forward on her knees and peers into the fissure, acutely aware of the activity of the hummingbirds’ wings above her. The fissure is deep; it seems to go on forever. All she can see is the sides of the rock, small stones and dusty gravel particles falling away. Then, for a split second, she catches sight of something else: like a river of filth, or an underground lake of sewage, something thick and brown and hideous slithers past. Then it is gone.

“The Underthing,” says the girl. “That’s where it lives, where it’s trapped. Underneath. But it wants to get back up on top.”

Strip away the weight of allegory and metaphor, rip off the layers of pretension, and those words are the purest warning she has ever heard. They mean so much; they mean so little. They mean everything and nothing simultaneously. She struggles to reach the deeper meaning of whatever it is she is being told, but it’s out of sight.

“I’m sorry,” she says, turning to the girl.

But the girl is merely an outline, a patch of dusty darkness at her side.

She reaches out and grabs hold of something that might be a hand, but it slips through her fingers. The Gone Away Girl is gone again. Perhaps she was never really here.

Abby gets to her feet and stands before the hummingbirds, witnessing their titanic, eternal struggle. That’s when she realises what is required of her: she is a witness, albeit a temporary one. But that’s all they need, these beautiful creatures; just someone to watch, to see what they are doing, to make it mean something again.

“I’m watching,” she says, crying. “I can see you.” But she isn’t the one: she isn’t the witness they were promised.

The sound of their wings is like an ancient prayer, the rigidity of their bodies is a truth that cannot be denied. They are here; they are real; they are the only thing that stands between humanity and the gaping void (the Underthing?). As long as there is someone to bear witness — not all the time, just once in a while, to remind the great consciousness of the human race that this is still here, still happening — their strength will be renewed and the fight will go on. Whatever is underneath will stay there, banished from the upper reaches. Everything will be synchronised; forces will remain in balance. Twin energies will be aligned.

Her face is hot. She lifts her hand to dab at her cheek, and her fingers come away wet. Glancing down at her fingertips, she sees red… she is bleeding. This time she raises both hands to feel her skin, and she is aware of a lot of fluid. She traces the lines of blood up to her forehead, where the skin is broken in several places. There are small wounds, lacerations; the type of tears and gouges that could possibly be caused by the beaks of tiny birds.

She glances up, above her head, and sees them circling near the ceiling. There are a lot of them, small, silent hummingbirds. Her gaze follows a trail of them across the ceiling and into the dark cave mouth behind the shattered plinth.

Then the noise starts.

It sounds like distant helicopters, but she knows exactly what it is: it is the sound of a million hummingbird wings. They fly out of the hole in the cave wall as a single mass, a solid blur of motion. Her eyes struggle to cope with the sight and she reels backwards, falling to the ground.

The hummingbirds pass directly over her head, only inches from her moist upturned face. An endless flock, they are not interested in Abby; they are heading elsewhere, summoned by a silent song, answering a call that she is unable to hear. She lies on her back and watches them, praying to a god in whom she has never believed, hoping against hope that amid this feast of miracles she might just get the one she’s always wished for: she might just get to see her daughter again.

She waits for the thunder to pass. It takes a long time. This storm has been brewing for millennia, and now that it has broken there will be no stopping what destruction shall be wrought.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

NURSE BENNETT STOOD over the bed, looking down at the policeman’s wife. There was something strange about the woman, and he couldn’t quite place what it was. He’d been nursing for fifteen years, and in all that time he’d never had a patient quite like her. The way she lay there, so quiet and calm and unconcerned, as if she knew something that the rest of them didn’t. The angle of her body, the way she tilted her head to the side, as if staring at the plain white wall… it was weird, but it was also oddly comforting.

Yes, that was it: she was a comfort. The ward had never been this quiet, not for as long as he’d worked here. The other patients seemed to take some kind of strength from her presence, too. He’d even caught a few of them casting sly glances her, as if she were something special.

As he stood there, pondering these things, the ward went dark. The lights remained off, not set to come on until later that evening, and he glanced at the window. The sky beyond was filled with squirming black clouds; they seemed alive, writhing over themselves like a nest of snakes.

The patients started to sit up and ask questions. Chatter buzzed around the room. But the patient below him — the calm, comforting policeman’s wife — did not move. The sky outside continued to darken, turning to black. There’d been no freak weather conditions mentioned on the radio, so he had no idea what was going on.

He strained his eyes to make out what was happening up there, and slowly began to realise that the shapes in the sky were not clouds. They were birds. Millions upon millions of birds had come together to form a canopy over the hospital, and over the area beyond. The streets outside were cast into darkness. No lights came on; the false night was vast and threatening. Car alarms went off, wailing in the blackness. Figures hurried indoors, trying to get to safety.

The canopy of birds blotted out all daylight. They were coming from the direction of that shit-hole estate — the Concrete Grove.

There was a sound behind him, a noise other than the rising panic of the patients and the running feet of the other hospital staff: a loud, harsh rustling, like that made by stiff plastic sheets shifting across a tiled floor.

He turned and saw that the policeman’s wife was sitting up, her knees raised and her legs open. Shadows were streaming from between her legs and scuttling across the floor, heading towards the door. For the moment, no one else could see what was happening. They were all caught up in the excitement of this unnatural nightfall.

Nurse Bennett did not know what to do. Was the woman actually giving birth to the tumours they’d detected inside her?

The woman’s eyes were closed. She didn’t seem aware of what she was doing.

Nurse Bennett took a single step forward and then stopped, entranced by what he saw. The shadows were solid; they were corporeal. When he turned his head slightly to one side, he made out small, skittering creatures, made of dust and darkness and empty spaces held together by strings of atrophied matter. When he looked directly at them, they were shadow; if he used his peripheral vision, they became much clearer…

These were not tumours. They were something else… something incredible.

“What are you?”

“The Slitten,” he said, answering his own question in an unfamiliar whisper. He had no idea where the word had come from; it just appeared in his head. But he knew, beyond all doubt, that it was the name of these things. He also knew, somehow, that they were not to be feared — they had been summoned for a purpose, and it had something to do with that sky full of birds.

The Slitten.

He knew what they were called, and that they had come to help. What he didn’t know, was where they had come from.

Then, as the woman who’d birthed them settled back against the mattress to sleep, they were gone.

TOM STAINS WAS drunk again. He was always drunk, but that was okay. Being drunk was how he handled the world; or, rather, how he liked to keep it at bay. Ever since his disabled Helen had killed herself he’d been aware of the world — of stinking humanity — reaching out to try and grab him by the throat. Helen had somehow managed to drag herself out of bed and throw herself down the stairs, snapping her neck. Some days — especially when he began to doubt his own memories of the incident — he wished that he had the guts to emulate her.

So, drunk and shambling around the first floor of his house on Grove Road, he at first thought the sight of all those birds blocking out the daylight was another one of his whisky-fuelled delusions. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and was forced to admit that this was real. None of this was inside his head. Not this time.

He reached out and tried to turn on the light, but the bedroom remained in darkness. He stumbled out onto the landing, and then into the back bedroom. The sky at the back of the house was the same: it was filled with birds, forming a screen of black against the sunlight, cutting it off, trapping him down here, in the pitiless dark.

He glanced down, at his tiny rear garden, and saw a figure standing outside the gate. But there was something wrong with the figure… It had no legs. No, that wasn’t quite right: it had one leg, a very thin one, upon which it was balanced.

He pressed his fingertips against the window glass. He rested his forehead against the cool pane. Downstairs, more figures joined the first one, hopping along on those thin, rigid appendages.

“Scarecrows,” he muttered, hardly even believing what he saw. “Fucking scarycrows.”

He watched in stunned awe as they headed off along the street, in the direction of the Needle.

He ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time as he headed down to the kitchen. On the kitchen work bench, there was a bottle of whisky, only half full. He snatched it up and took a large swig, then another… before he was done, the bottle was almost empty. He thought about poor dead Helen; the Sea Cow, that’s what he’d called her when she was alive. He missed her sometimes. Not all the time, because to think about her too often brought strange memories to the surface… memories he’d managed to block out for a long time. Something about a woman and a girl and the things they’d done together.

He’d always known this day would arrive. Deep down inside, he’d been waiting for the monsters to come. They’d been here before, many times, and they would come again. They never stopped… but now everyone else would see them, and not just him.

There was a loud noise from outside, like thunder… like an earthquake. Tom moved through the ground floor rooms, watching as his trinkets and knick-knacks rattled on the shelves. He pulled open the front door, too drunk to even think about his own safety, and looked on as the surface of the street rippled and writhed, curling around and breaking, snapping as it was torn to pieces and the ground beneath surged and swelled, as if something were approaching from below.

He imagined a monstrous sea cow smashing through and rising above him…

The first tree broke the surface and shot up out of the road, its branches clenched like a fist, and then opening, spreading, coming to life. This tree was followed by others, springing up like crazy film-set props, as if they were on springs. Geysers of water erupted from shattered pipes, soaking the fronts of buildings and flooding the gutters. Car and house and distant shop alarms bleated, creating a deafening cacophony. And the trees kept growing; they rose from the ground almost comically fast, smashing through the man-made skin of society and churning up the earth.

Tom smiled. He backed away, leaving the door wide open. He stumbled, fell, and watched in silent awe as the uppermost branches of a mighty oak tree shattered the pavement right outside his house and the gnarled trunk began to rise, rise, rise, like the long, straight arm of a god reaching up towards that darkened sky, fingers unfurling to grab at whatever it could catch.

He smiled. This was it. They were here. Nothing would ever be the same again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

HIS MIND BUCKLING under the force of the revelation, Marc knelt on the floor in the grubby room and breathed deeply, as if he were underwater. One hand rested palm-down on the floor by his feet; the other gripped his side, where a stitch had developed. He opened his eyes and stared at the peeling walls, dotted here and there with obscene graffiti, the boarded window, the floor upon which tatters of carpet still clung like stubborn scabs. Someone had painted the word Flange on a wide skirting board; six-inch-high letters, bright red against the scabbed white paintwork. The floorboards in one corner were curled up, like a row of tongues.

“I’m the baby,” he said, breathing normally again. “I was there… I was here… I’m the baby.”

This explained his reticence to really commit to the book he was writing, and the fact that he found it so easy to create excuses not to write, not to research too deeply. Harry Rose had been a distraction. That was the truth. Rather than being drawn to the man because of the information he had (which turned out to be a lot more than he’d ever hinted at), Marc had used the old man to divert his attention from the actual work of writing his account of the Northumberland Poltergeist.

His parents had not died in an accident. They’d driven off the road deliberately, to end whatever nightmare they had started when they refused to offer baby Marc as a sacrifice. That was why the memory of the crash had always seemed so unreal: he’d filled in the blanks himself, giving a context that was false. They were holding hands when his mother swerved the car off the road. They were in it together; it was a suicide pact.

He stood, shaky and exhausted. His body felt bruised, the result of a massive force rocking him to the core. He stood at the centre of the room and wondered what the hell he was supposed to do with this new-found knowledge. He had an entire history of which he’d previously been unaware; a whole new aspect of his life had opened up like a dark flower.

He stared at the walls, at the flaps of wallpaper. He recognised the pattern on a strip that hung down like a window blind: pale yellow sunflowers, with thin stems and oversized heads. A sudden flashback assaulted him: he was lying in his crib, crying. The television was blaring; his small, chubby hands were reaching for those pale flowers…

A sound distracted him: somebody was moving around downstairs. He heard crunching footsteps, a door banging open and then shut, and more footsteps slowly climbing the stairs.

Slowly, he backed towards the door. The sounds grew louder; whoever it was, they were heading for this exact spot. Fear gripped him, holding him in place. Who was this coming for him now? Who even knew that he was here, at the very heart of the story he’d been so reluctant to tell?

He turned around to face the door. A figure loomed into view. It was a man, average height, stocky build. He was wearing a black woollen balaclava over his face and carrying a wooden baseball bat. The man stood in the doorway, legs apart, and hefted the bat. One hand gripped the handle; the other opened to receive the wide end of the bat.

“I…” Marc didn’t know what to say. This whole situation had become unreadable. He’d been flung from grimy reality into loathsome fantasy and then back again, and now he was so unmoored from the world that he felt unable to react to anything. “I’m sorry,” he said, not even knowing what he meant, what he was apologising for, or to whom he was speaking.

“Erik Best says hello.” The voice was flat, heavily-accented, and held the trace of a smile. More figures crowded behind the first, having reached the landing. They each had a similar bat in their hands.

“What do you mean?” Marc walked backwards, going deeper into the room.

The first figure stepped over the threshold, the bat swinging at waist level. He whacked it into the door frame and dust clouded at knee level, moving like a light mist. “Erik Best says hello,” he said again, as if that explained everything.

And in a way, it did.

Hadn’t Erik Best already threatened him once? He certainly didn’t seem like the kind of man who would repeat himself, or who gave second chances. This was what he got for messing with the wrong woman. It was his payback for sleeping with Best’s beloved. He should have seen it coming, but the truth was he’d been so caught up in events around the estate — and in particular those at Harry Rose’s house — that he’d failed to see the signs. This was the only language these people knew; the dialect of violence, or revenge and repercussion. It was always the same: you do what you’re told or you get smashed.

“I didn’t mean it…”

The other man laughed, entertained by Marc’s pathetic excuse. Marc laughed, too, getting the joke. But his laughter was mirthless. It was heavy with despair, the laughter of a doomed man.

There were three other men, and they too had entered the room. The four of them stood there, the bringers of some abstract apocalypse, and stared at Marc. They were calm, collected; clearly they were used to such acts of aggression.

“I can give you money.”

The lead figure shook his head slowly. He raised the bat and swung it through the air, sending off a warning shot. He took another step forward. Marc took two steps back. It was like some idiot dance, a warm-up for the choreography of busted heads.

Shadows moved around the room, splashing the ceiling, staining the floors. Marc watched them as they shifted across the boards, climbed the plaster walls and made strange patterns on the remnants of old wallpaper. There was a strange humming sound in his ears. He wondered if everyone who was about to be killed heard this: a muffled sonic boom, the soul’s implosion?

Then he realised the sound was an external one. It was coming from outside his head… outside the room.

He turned to the boarded window, his gaze drawn by the busy shadows. There was something out there, on the other side of the boards. He stared at the edges of the timber. The shadows bled through the gaps, like a thick fluid. The boards began to rattle, and then to shake. In what seemed like a couple of seconds, the boards were being torn away and a chaotic display of flapping wings surged into the room, filling all the spaces, swarming around his assailants and causing them to panic.

They were hummingbirds, and there were hundreds of them. But they stayed away from Marc, choosing instead to attack the other men in the room. He watched with difficulty through the screen of madly blurring creatures, amazed at the sight of the four grown men being pushed down to their knees. Hummingbirds pecked at them, pulling away strands of clothing and then of flesh. Screams mingled with the sounds of humming, and Marc turned away, appalled by the sight of so much madness.

When he turned back, the men were still. They lay on the floor, crumpled, broken and torn. The baseball bats were harmless now, discarded in the melee. The hummingbirds were silent — they hung in the air, unmoving, as if time had stopped, reality had frozen in place. Even their wings were motionless, as if someone had taken a photograph and this was the resultant image.

Marc walked forward and raised his arm. He opened his fingers and grasped at the flat, static image. He touched one of the birds near the front of the group, stroking its hard little beak with the tip of his forefinger. It felt like a stuffed bird: lifeless, essentially unnatural. He moved along the wall of birds, enraptured by their colours — at first they’d all seemed black, but now he could see that they were many-hued, things of beauty. He could hear no further sounds, even from outside the Needle.

When he reached the other side of the room, he stopped and turned around. As if drawn to the exact space where he was looking, four or five birds darted out of the frieze and flew headfirst at the back wall of the room. Sounds rushed in to fill the void; his ears popped. From outside there came deafening sounds of explosions, as if buildings were falling, roads and pavements were being torn up.

The birds hit the wall, backed up, and then flew at it again. Upon each kamikaze impact, the plaster cracked a little more; the cracks widened and set off a chain reaction. They crazed the wall, becoming deep zigzagging fissures. The wall split, the joints in the mortar turned to powder. Chunks of plaster, and then brickwork, fell away. Instead of revealing another room behind, the wall peeled away to show him something else, something that he could hardly believe. Thick tree roots mingled with the ruined brickwork, knotted and shredded.

He walked over to the damaged wall, stepping over the now dead birds that had sacrificed their lives to open up this wonder. He peered through the cracks and the dead roots and saw an expanse of flattened grass surrounded by the broad bases of huge oak trees. He bent over and stuck his head through the largest of the cracks, then stepped through, into the centre of the grove of ancient oaks that waited beyond.

As he climbed through, the trees spun away and he followed a trail of black leaves. The trees were replaced by what looked to be the base of a cliff. The cliff face was littered with openings which led into dark caves, and inside the mouth of one of these caves there stood four young girls dressed in raggedy clothes. He knew who they were immediately. They were the Gone Away Girls, and they were waiting for him.

He approached them in silence, hearing only the crisp black leaves crackling against the soles of his shoes. The earth had a heartbeat; he could feel it vibrating against the skin of his feet. There was power here, but it was old, tired, and unfocused. Like an ageing man at the point of death, it was troubled, confused, did not know what it was supposed to do or what it had done in the long-ago past.

Up close, he could see that the girls were dressed in animal skins, but the fur resembled nothing he had ever seen before. There seemed to be scales amid the pelt, and he was sure that he caught sight of eyes blinking at him from the garments, as if these were not the pelts of slain animals but living things, protective vestments that would attack if the girls were in danger.

Then, abruptly, they were once again just four girls dressed in torn but normal clothes.

They turned and entered the cave. Marc followed them, not knowing what else to do. He had not asked to be here, but it seemed that his presence was required. The girls were his welcoming party, and they were unthreatening, simply acting as his guides.

The cave walls were covered with strange paintings, but he could barely make them out because of the lack of light. He focused ahead, trusting the girls to lead him. He listened to their footsteps and kept going in a straight line, his arms held out at his sides to ensure that he didn’t collide with the cave walls. Before long, dusty light began to glimmer in the air before him.

The ground was smooth underfoot. The air was moist but not unpleasant.

Up ahead, the cave broadened out to form a cavern. Along the far wall were the entrances to other caves, but in front of these was a broken stone plinth upon which two hummingbirds fought. But, no, that wasn’t it. The birds were not fighting; they were balancing some kind of gemstone between the tips of their beaks. Their wings were a blur; they were soundless inside the cave.

“That’s the first tear ever shed here, in Loculus.” Abby stepped out of the shadows to his right and placed a hand on his arm. Her face was battered and bloody. She smiled. He had not seen her smile before, and it made her look beautiful, despite the terrible marks upon her face. Here, in this place, she looked different than she did in the Concrete Grove. She was less shabby, more substantial.

“What happened to you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Why are we here?”

“Because we followed the Path of Black Leaves.”

One of the girls — Abby’s daughter, Tessa; he recognised her from her photograph — broke away from the pack and held her mother’s hand. Her face was a porcelain mask; it held no expression. The eyes were flat and shiny. She was like a life-size doll.

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve been talking, my daughter and me. She’s been telling me stories, lots of stories.

“Things started to happen a long time ago, and this is the outcome. Different people started to interfere with this place, tried to gain entry so they could use the power here for their own reasons. There’s pollution under the ground and it gets stronger with each negative emotion that ends up here — the pollution came from us, from humankind. There used to be balance. Now that balance is misaligned. That’s why they’re struggling…” She indicated the hummingbirds with a raised hand. “If they drop the teardrop, it’ll shatter. I don’t know what happens then, but it can’t be good. Not for any of us. But the Path of Black Leaves will grow longer and wider… other things will use it to leave Loculus and find their way back there, to our world.”

“What about Terryn Mowbray?”

She didn’t reply.

“Captain Clickety.”

She nodded. “Oh, him.”

“Yeah, him.”

Abby sighed. “As far as I can tell, he’s a… what’s the word? A tulpa?”

“Yeah, that word would fit.”

“You think about him, and he comes. It’s like opening a door for him. Last year three men spent a lot of time thinking about him. He got his claws in. He broke through. They dealt with him, I think, and what we’ve seen is the leftovers… the remains. Not much, but enough to try and cling on, to use my pain and my memories of Tessa to try and stay there, in the Concrete Grove.”

Marc turned to face her, finding it difficult to take his eyes off the birds. “So what are we supposed to do about all this?”

“The girls were brought here to watch over this cave, and what’s inside it. They came to bear witness to the struggle for balance. Because that’s all that’s ever required, for somebody to see what’s happening. Our world forgot about this place, absorbed it into our myths and our legends. The first dreams mankind ever had ended up here, strands of power. The last dreams we ever have will come here, too. This place… it’s just concentrated Creation. But you’d be surprised how easy it is for creation to become destruction, when the balance isn’t right.”

“What about the girls?”

She shook her head. “They’re tired. They were too weak for the task. They were inadequate replacements. You were promised and prepared a long time ago, to act as a permanent witness, but your parents reneged on the deal and that’s when the balance really began to tip. You were always meant to be here. You were born to be here. I’m sorry… Clickety knew that. He tried to repair the damage. If the balance tips, he fades. He is a product of the status quo.”

“So he isn’t a monster?”

She nodded. “Yes, he’s a monster. But one who knows what’s good for him.”

He thought of the life he was being asked to leave behind, and how it had always seemed hollow and insubstantial. He’d always felt that he was destined for something else, something better or more important, but he’d never been able to discover what it was he was meant to do. And now here it was: his purpose. He was nothing more than a witness.

“What happens if I say no?”

Abby smiled, but sadly. “Who knows? There are no rules here. It’s just another form of chaos.”

“What’s in those other caves?” He motioned to the cave mouths beyond the plinth and its birds.

“They lead to other places. Maybe even other worlds or other times… probably both. This place we’re in is just a way station. I have no idea what other routes might be available, but there are hundreds of them scattered throughout these caves and tunnels. All those hummingbirds originally belonged somewhere in there. Now they’re lost in Loculus, just like the rest of us.”

Without another thought, Marc nodded, stepped forward and knelt down at the foot of the plinth. It seemed natural, as if long ago — perhaps in another lifetime — he’d been trained to do exactly this. He wasn’t sure, but the two birds seemed to respond to his approach. Their wings beat harder, their beaks looked stronger, and their colours were far brighter than they had been only seconds before. The shattered stone plinth began to mend itself.

He felt the weight of a hand on his shoulder, and then another as it enclosed the first. Five hands clutched him, thanking him and saying goodbye. He did not turn around. There was no need. This was his station — he belonged here, in this little place. He always had.

For the first time in his life, Marc felt useful. He was glad.

He’d hate to have made another mistake.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

ROYLE FELT IMMENSE pressure in his lower back as he held onto the small, soft hand. When Abby Hansen had dropped into the hole, he’d bent over and reached out instinctively, trying to save her. His flailing grasping fingers had come into contact with something, so he’d tightened his grip. But the hand he held did not feel right… there was something wrong with it.

When he looked down now, braced above the opening with one foot on either side of the hole, he wasn’t sure whose hand he had hold of. He shifted his position, gripped tightly with both hands, and pulled. A small, dark shape began to rise up from the depths of the hole, covered in black leaves. The leaves formed a layer — a skin. They coated the figure, making it seem even smaller, compressed.

He tugged as hard as he could and the figure emerged, popping out like something being born. He thought of Vanessa, and the unborn child they had made together… he felt sick, wasted. His energy dipped dramatically.

He stepped away from the hole, hauling the body out and shoving it aside. It was damp, slimy. Unclean.

He looked at his hands. They were covered in those mulch-like black leaves. He wiped them on his trouser legs. The body stirred. Leaves came away, falling to the floor and making a soft, slippery sound. Royle went down onto his knees and stared at the figure. It was inchoate, not quite complete: a stunted child’s body with an oversized, beaked head. The limbs were thin and wasted; the hands were three-fingered claws. He reached out and grabbed the mask, tearing it away… there was nothing beneath: just a shapeless mush of black leaves and a lot of tiny, fragile bones, as if a flock of birds had died in that mess.

The figure began to shred, parts of it slithering away and liquefying. Royle sat down and watched as it was reduced to a thick, black slime on the carpet. The last thing it did was reach out and hold his hand.

“You didn’t make it,” he said. “You couldn’t get through. We stopped you… somehow they stopped you.”

He stood and turned away, then, as an afterthought more than a calculated act, he turned back and kicked at the remains of the mound at the centre of the room, destroying the structure that Abby Hansen had so painstakingly made in honour of her missing child. There was no longer a hole in the floor. He could see no evidence of the route by which Abby Hansen had travelled… she was gone; her point of access had closed up, like a wound scabbing over. He wondered if she would ever return, if he would ever see her again.

Erik Best’s body lay a few feet away, its ruined face turned away from him. He shook his head. “You stupid bastard…” He walked away, left the room, and went downstairs.

Outside, Royle stood in the street and surveyed the damage. It was chaos out there. Sirens were going off, emergency vehicles were entering the estate from all angles; alarms blared, creating more panic. People were running, standing in groups, or cowering in gardens and doorways. A well-known local drunk was standing in his doorway, waving an empty bottle and ranting about sea cows.

All around, huge, thick-bodied trees had burst through the earth, houses and buildings had tumbled, walls had shattered, exploded out into the street, and cars were overturned and ablaze. Water sluiced across the road, discharging from a burst water main. He spotted a few dead bodies: in the gutters, in gardens, even one slumped over the bonnet of a car.

It would take a long time — perhaps years — to figure out exactly what had happened here, but whatever had occurred, it was over. It was done. Something had tried to come through, and it had failed.

Uniformed officers were running around in a panic; they were not trained to deal with something like this. The news crew was trying to film everything and nothing. The whole place resembled a battlefield immediately after the fighting had ceased, or the site of some terrorist atrocity. He’d missed it all, but in some ways he’d witnessed more than anyone else. He just wished that he understood the things he had seen.

He glanced up at the ever-present shape of the Needle. The sky was clear; the birds had flown. A few of them had gathered around the tip of the tower block, as if they were waiting for something to happen. The outline of the building seemed to tremble for a moment, as if a detonation had occurred inside.

From the corner of his eye, he saw a quick, dark shape scurry across the road, but when he looked directly at it there was nothing there but what seemed like a dusty shadow. Nearby, a scarecrow lay in the gutter, its torso shredded, the stick that had supported it snapped in two. It was crawling slowly along the side of the road, heading towards him. Royle stood with his legs shoulder-width apart, wishing that he had a gun. Everything out here was like a medieval nightmare, an image from a biblical painting of demons and monstrosities, of impossible things.

The scarecrow was close now. He couldn’t move. He felt like kneeling down and waiting for it to take him. His legs began to shake. Tears filled his eyes.

The black shape he’d glimpsed earlier shot across the road and hit the scarecrow, rolling it on the road surface. He couldn’t make out what it was, despite the fact that it was only a few feet away from him. The creature’s form was not solid, as if it were made of thought rather than matter. He thought of dusty rooms, empty larders, and buildings where old people went to die, lining up patiently to see the Reaper…

The scarecrow was torn apart as he watched. Then, as he turned away, he caught sight of the thing that had killed it — the thing was visible only at the edge of his vision, not head-on. It resembled old, ancient, papyrus tatters invested with a form of energy. Then, all too soon, it was gone, vanished into the air like a memory. People ran and screamed. The drunken sea cow man — now sitting on his doorstep — started to laugh hysterically.

Whatever that thing was, it had saved him.

Detective Superintendent Sillitoe ran up to Royle. He was hatless, with a shocked expression on his face. “What happened here?” He looked to Royle for some form of explanation, but it was futile. Nobody knew anything.

“I don’t know,” he said, as his superior officer moved away, running towards a squad car with its roof punched in and short, sharp tree branches poking out through the rips in the bodywork, waving around like monstrous spidery limbs.

Royle turned again to stare at the Needle. It drew his gaze, calling to him. He knew that he should be heading back to the hospital, to be at Vanessa’s side, but there was something else he had to do first. There was unfinished business; the final act of this messy epic.

He started to jog in the direction of the centre of the estate, passing injured people, while others walked around in a daze. He couldn’t stop to help. There was something more important to do. Ambulance men and paramedics tended to the fallen, soothing them, bandaging their wounds, trying to impose a sense of organisation onto the scene.

He heard the noise when he reached the Roundpath, and it grew louder as he approached the hoarding that ran around the Needle. A single soft note, as if hundreds of people were humming under their breath.

The fence around the building was torn and pulled away in places, so he had no difficulty accessing the site. He stood and stared up at the tower, and in that instant he knew that it was about to fall. He could feel it in the trembling ground beneath his feet; insistent tremors that travelled up through his legs and into his belly, making his innards sing. The loud humming noise was meant as a warning.

He looked at the ground, closed his eyes, and prayed that he wasn’t too late — but too late for what? He had no idea. All he knew was that he’d been summoned here. He opened his eyes again and looked at the Needle, challenging it to show him why he’d been called. Thick tree roots were wound around its base. The walls were cracked, and leaves and branches showed through the widening fissures.

The main doors flew open. A figure staggered out, almost falling to the ground. It was Abby Hansen. Black leaves clung to her arms, her legs, and her body. More of them formed a narrow pathway ahead of her, out of the building. Her hair was wet. Behind her, four other figures — these ones much smaller, and dressed in rags — moved in a sombre line, exiting the tower and standing around her, reaching out to help her.

When he started to move towards the group, he realised who the other figures were. He recognised their clothes first — despite being torn and dirty, they were the same outfits they’d been wearing when they disappeared.

He knew these girls as well as he knew his own wife, despite the fact that he’d never met them:

Connie Millstone, aged seven.

Alice Jacobs, aged eight.

Fiona Warren, aged nine.

Tessa Hansen, aged ten.

The Gone Away Girls.

They were the same ages as when they’d vanished. This did not seem as insane as it should, and Royle simply accepted that it was true. Of all the things he’d witnessed today, this was probably the easiest to understand. They’d been gone for years, but hardly any time at all had passed since they’d gone away.

“Abby…” He grabbed her arm and helped her away from the building. “This way. We have to get out of here before it falls.”

She blinked, her battered face showing comprehension. “It’s going to fall?”

He nodded. “Don’t ask me how I know, but yes it is.”

They made it over to the fence line before it happened. Royle sat Abby down on the ground, and then he gathered the girls together. They said nothing; their faces were dirty and blank. Their eyes seemed to stare inward. He wondered if they had any idea what was going on, or if, like him, they were simply spectators to some greater event.

“You were shot… are you okay?”

She nodded, and smiled, as if enjoying a private joke. “Just a flesh wound.”

He turned to take another look at the Needle, and it began to fall.

The lower floors sheared away, as if a great explosion had shunted them to the side. The floors above fell straight downwards. He was reminded of the World Trade Centre towers back in 2001, September the 11^th. It was a date imprinted on the memory of the Western world, when terrorists had shaken the foundations of society. This tower fell in a similar manner, and its destruction was just as symbolic.

It seemed to take a matter of seconds, and when the billowing dust cloud began to clear, all that remained was the rubble. For an instant, Royle glimpsed a vision of a grove of massive oak trees, shimmering brightly, as if they were on fire. But the image lasted only a fraction of a second, and he could not be sure if he’d really seen it at all. All he was left with was a retinal burn; a visual tattoo, which soon faded to a small black spot — shaped not unlike a single leaf — in his vision. He’d stared directly into the sun, and it had not blinded him. He could still see, but the sights were much less beautiful than before. The falling of the tower had signified the end of something. Perhaps it was also the start of something else.

“What’ll happen here now?”

He looked down at Abby. She was sitting on the ground with her legs tucked up under her body. She was shaking.

“I’m not sure.” He reached down and stroked her head, ran his fingers across her battered cheek. “The people will have to move out of the estate. Or maybe they’ll stay, living like savages among those trees and wrecked buildings. Who knows? Who even cares?”

Abby nodded. The Gone Away Girls stood staring at the ruins of the Needle, as if watching a miracle. Each of them was weeping, but silently. He had a feeling they would never say anything again.

“Let’s go,” he said, reaching down to help Abby to her feet. “There’s a lot to be done. And a lot of other people to help.”

“Your wife…” She stood shakily, grabbing hold of him for support. “I think she’s okay. The baby, too. They’re both fine.”

Royle didn’t question this wisdom; he simply accepted it, just as he knew he must accept everything else that had happened over the past few weeks — and even longer, because hadn’t this been going on for centuries? If he doubted any of this for even a moment, he was afraid that he might lose his mind.

He held Abby’s hand as they left the Needle, heading towards the sound of sirens. Around them, new shoots began to grow. Saplings took root in the ruins; they rose towards the sky, growing quicker and stronger than any natural tree. By the time they had reached the way out, the entire area was knee-high in new trees. They walked away from this struggling new life. They did not look back.

The Gone Away Girls followed close behind them, a tight little bunch of lost souls that had somehow been found.