Silent Voices

CHAPTER NINE

MARTY POURED HIMSELF a drink and waited for the phone to stop ringing. He glanced over, at the telephone table, and smiled. He knew who it was. It was her — Melanie. She wouldn’t leave him alone.

He sipped his cold beer and crossed the room, stood by the phone. He reached out and laid a hand on the tabletop, only inches from the black plastic device. He wasn’t going to pick it up, but this felt like teasing, so he allowed his hand to creep across the desk and tickle the edge of the phone.

The ringing finally stopped.

His recorded message kicked in: “It’s me. I’m not here, or I can’t be bothered to answer. Leave me a message.” Then there was a short, high-pitched bleep.

“Hi, Marty. It’s me. Again. I’ve tried you on your mobile and didn’t get an answer, so thought you might be at home. Am I going to see you tonight? I mean, if I’m not, you could at least do me the favour of telling me. I’m sitting here wondering why the fuck I persist with you. I get nothing back, so why should I keep giving you all this attention?”

Marty took another mouthful of beer. He didn’t feel a thing as he listened to Melanie’s whining voice. He supposed that he ought to feel at least something — lust, irritation, interest, resignation. But, no; he was empty. The girl inspired no emotion. She was just another warm, keen body on a cold night, a name and number in his mobile phone contact list. Nothing more than that.

When she ended the call he reached out and pressed the button to delete the message. She was history, this girl — he never wanted to see her again. Even the promise of her trim body, and the things she liked to do when she’d had a few too many Bacardi Breezers, held little appeal.

There would always be another one just like her. Women like Melanie were drawn to men like him; they couldn’t help themselves. It was a kind of self-abuse, the desperate way they clung to the kind of bloke who lifted heavy weights, took drugs, and battled in back alleys when the pubs were closed. Melanie and her ilk were addicted to Hard Men — they were like groupies following a famous rock band around the world, all too willing to lower their morals and spread their legs in return for the slightest crumb of attention, even if that attention was ultimately negative. He had never been able to understand the mentality, but had exploited it his entire life. He’d taken hundreds of these women to bed, and not one of them had ever touched him inside, where it mattered. None of them had inspired within him anything more than a blunt craving for sex.

Marty was not an evil man. He’d done many bad things, yes, but he told himself that he was not inherently a bad person. He was intelligent — unlike a lot of his peers — and he was self-aware enough to realise the error of his ways, but none of this insight had ever stopped him from doing what he did best.

It was too late for Marty to change; the world had moved on around him, but he’d been stuck here in one place for twenty years. His chances were all used up. There was nothing left for him but how things were now, how they’d always been, and how they would remain until the day he died.

“Sorry, Melanie,” he whispered. “But you’re not going to be the one to save me.” He smiled; he drank; he turned away from the phone.

Marty walked over to the window and looked out at the Baltic Flour Mill and the river beyond. Gateshead had changed a lot since his youth, when he’d cross the river to buy drugs, fight in amateur boxing bouts in local working men’s clubs, and crack skulls on a Saturday night in the rough pubs along Low Fell before heading off into Newcastle to catch a late club and score with some orange-tanned slapper from Walker or Byker, or perhaps a single mother from Fenham or Benwell.

Yes, things had changed a lot around here.

Redevelopment money had turned the old flour mill into a magnet for the region’s artists, and people from all across the country came to visit the gallery and spend their money in the pubs and restaurants along the Quayside on both sides of the Tyne. All that cash, it meant good times for a lot of people — especially the criminal fraternity. And Marty had always been well enough connected to skim a lot off the top. His old friend Francis Boater had introduced him to a few people, and they’d vouched for him to others higher up the food chain, until Marty had become part of their world.

He’d fought for them, these people. He had entertained them by knocking men unconscious in social club boxing rings, and then, when he was unable to get a license because of his injuries, in abandoned warehouses after midnight. It made his wallet fat and his body hard; he was a born fighter, and there was always someone ready to exploit that in a man, and money to be made off the back of it.

He turned away from the window, the sound of skidding rubber tyres ringing in his ears. The soft thump of impact, the sound of breaking glass, a girl’s screams… it had happened a long time ago, but the accident had changed his life. The girl — Sally — had died from her injuries, and he had been damaged enough that the British Boxing Board of Control had revoked his boxing licence on medical grounds.

His fists, however, did not recognise the board’s authority. So he’d carried on fighting. It was all he knew, what he was. If he peeled back his skin, there’d be steel beneath. He was solid all the way through, and no man had ever put him down.

He stared at himself in the mirror above the fireplace. He was not wearing his shirt — he’d been ironing a clean one when the telephone rang. He looked at the muscles in his shoulders, the toughened pectorals, and the solid slab of his upper abdominals. He had avoided the crappy fashion tattoos that blighted the flesh of most of his peers. He didn’t have a six-pack; didn’t need one, in his game. Six-packs and absurdly defined guns were for gym bunnies. Fighters simply needed to be ironclad.

The old scars along the inside of his biceps were clearly visible in the lamplight. The ones on his wrists he saw every time he took off his watch. Faded burn marks, from the tips of lighted cigarettes. When he was younger, he had become fascinated with body conditioning. If he toughened his body to accept and absorb pain, then no one would ever hurt him. Not his father, not the men he fought for money, not the bastards he battled for fun.

Nobody.

“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…” He whispered the old nursery rhyme, staring at his lips as they formed the words; “…couldn’t put Humpty together again.” It was his mantra, the way he summoned strength from the dismal depths of his rage. Memories bristled behind his eyes, threatening to spill out into the mirror. Fear pushed the glass, like a hand pressing against it from the other side.

He turned away from the mirror and went to the ironing board, forcing away his dark thoughts and the snippets of bitter recollections. He finished ironing his shirt, watching the muted television. There was some kind of talent show on, but he wasn’t really interested. He just watched the bright, eager faces as they scrolled across the screen, mouths open, he supposed, in song, but they looked to Marty more like silent screams.

He switched off the iron and left it to cool, and then put on his shirt. Feeling calmer now, more in control, he enjoyed the feel of the warm material on his skin. He turned off the television and went over to the iPod docking station. He put on his favourite playlist and hit ‘shuffle’. It was the one with all the old blues singers: Aretha, Billie, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. Most of the people he mixed with liked drum ’n’ bass, techno, or stomping euro dance anthems, but not him. Marty liked the blues, especially when they were sung by a strong female voice. He knew the blues well.

Billie Holiday sang about Strange Fruit and Marty Rivers closed his eyes. He thought about those black bodies swinging from the trees, and then, as if a channel had been opened, his head filled with second-hand images of death: fleshless Jewish prisoners, liberated and staggering out through the sagging gates of Nazi death camps; the hacked-up victims of machete-wielding Rwandan death squads; a young Russian soldier beheaded by laughing Chechen rebels; nineteen-year-old British squaddies blown apart by Taliban devices in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan. Bullets strafed the space inside his skull, and he accepted them, knowing that he had spent his entire life dodging the same shots. He lived below the line of gunfire, always ducking and moving, bobbing and weaving, trying to remain in one piece.

The Holiday song came to an end and was replaced by Janis Joplin. Her broken heart flooded the speakers.

Marty left the room and went into the master bedroom. He wasn’t quite ready to treat this place as his own. He’d only been living here for a couple of months, and was due to move out when the owner returned from New York in another couple of months’ time. He was house-sitting; none of this stuff was his. Even the iPod was borrowed, and he’d downloaded the music on his landlord’s computer. Marty owned nothing, and in turn nothing owned him.

He went over to the bed and went down on his knees. The carpet was thick and soft; the bed linen was expensive. He reached beneath the bed and pulled out his suitcase, then stood and placed the case on the bed, opened it and stared at what was inside. The acorn had appeared a few weeks ago. He’d woken up still wearing his clothes, feeling hung-over and strung out way past his limit. He remembered that it had still been dark, probably the early hours of a Sunday morning. He put his hand in his jacket pocket to check if he had any money left, more out of habit than anything else, and his fingers had closed around a small, hard object.

The acorn. The acorn with his initials scratched into its surface.

He had no idea where it had come from; anyone could have slipped it into his pocket. He’d been all over the night before: working on a pub door in Jesmond, then to a house party in the Concrete Grove, and finally he’d staggered back here with some woman whose name he didn’t even know. Glancing over at the other side of the bed, her memory was still there. The skin of Melanie’s’ bare shoulder glowed in the darkness. Her arms were thin and pale.

But now Melanie was gone and the acorn remained. It was a fair trade, he thought.

He didn’t know what the acorn represented, or why his initials had been scratched into the flesh, but something inside him told him that it meant more than he was ready to confront. It had something to do with what had happened to him and his friends twenty years ago — of course it did. Marty wasn’t stupid. He’d taken the tests; could even join MENSA if he wanted. But Marty had never been much of a joiner.

The acorn was from one of those trees, the oaks that had appeared inside the Needle… at least that’s how it happened in his dreams, the ones he’d suffered back then and the ones that were still with him now, clinging to the inside of his skull like dirt. The trees that shouldn’t have been there, but were there anyway, surrounding them like sentinels. Marty, and Brendan, and Simon: the Three Amigos.

He smiled. He had not thought of that name in years.

Was that what the acorn was meant to tell him? That the Three Amigos would ride again?

He closed the lid of the suitcase and slid it back under the bed, then straightened and glanced out of the bedroom window. The blinds were open; the river gleamed like a road of razorblades beyond the pane. A bird, tiny and fragile, hovered on the other side of the glass. Marty went over to the window and stared at it. It was a hummingbird.

There had been hummingbirds then, too: twenty years ago, darting above them, in the trees. Impossible creatures, they were not meant to be here in the cold, desolate north-east of England.

The hummingbird flew directly at the glass, colliding with the transparent surface. Then the bird backed up and tried again. Like an oversized bluebottle fly, it made several clumsy attempts to fly through the window, but each time its tiny body simply slammed into the glass, too light and insubstantial to break through.

Marty watched in slow-dawning horror. He didn’t understand why he was so afraid, but the sight of the hummingbird slamming into the glass made him feel sick with anxiety. It was a sight that should not be real; an image from a dream that had invaded the waking world.

After a short while, the hummingbird gave up the fight. Its wings blurred as it flew slowly backwards, away from the window, an illusion of stillness hiding frantic activity. The bird kept moving that way, facing him, looking him in the eye, until it was swallowed by blackness. To Marty, it seemed like it had simply vanished into the enveloping night air.

He ran from the room, into the bathroom, bent over the toilet and threw up. Again and again, until there was nothing left in his stomach, and then he kept on retching and dry-heaving, until finally he slumped sideways onto the cool, tiled floor. His stomach ached; the pain was cyclic, wave upon small wave of cramps.

Marty realised that his fist was closed around something. He forced it open, as if the fingers belonged to someone else and were reluctant to budge. There, at the centre of his palm, was the acorn. He had not put it back in the suitcase. For some reason that was beyond him for the moment, he’d kept it with him, unwilling — or perhaps unable — to put it away.

He closed his eyes, closed his fist, and waited for the cramps to pass.

Once the pain had subsided, he was thirsty. He set down the acorn beside the sink and filled one glass after another with cold water straight from the tap, using it to wash out his mouth and his insides. Soon he felt a lot better. He was thankful for that. Tonight’s work needed a clear head and a fit body. If he was to beat his opponent, he needed to remain focused, and his reactions would have to be perfect.

He stared at himself in the mirror. His long, lean face was mean; the skinhead haircut accentuated the look. His grandmother always said that he looked like the kind of man she should be afraid of, and then she’d throw her frail arms around him and beg for reassurance that he was okay, that he was living a decent life.

He lied to her every single time. He couldn’t bear to tell her the truth — he was unable to admit to her that he was a bastard, just like his father. That he hurt people for fun and for money. He fought to find catharsis. Each punch he threw, and every kick that made contact with a stomach or a thigh or the side of a head, made him feel better about himself. These acts of violence allowed him to forget his own failings, if only for the length of time it took for his opponent to recover and retaliate.

He smiled in the mirror, but his face felt rigid.

He head-butted the mirror, hard, and cracked the glass without shattering it. When he pulled back his head, there was a tiny cut along the front of his brow, just beneath the hairline. A speck of blood glistened under the harsh bathroom light. He lifted a hand and used his finger to smear the blood across his forehead. Marty was unbreakable: even sharp glass did him no lasting damage. He gritted his teeth and raged silently at his own reflection, and at the face of his father crouched behind those tensed features.

Glancing down at the acorn, he began to feel dizzy, drunk on his own anger.

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall…”

He tasted the promise of battle on his tongue, like an electrical charge.

Tonight, he would make another man pay for his own sins, and for his father’s sins before him. This night, just like many other nights, Marty Rivers would draw someone else’s blood in his quest to understand what it meant to be a man.

“…Humpty fucking Dumpty had a great fall.”

CHAPTER TEN

BANJO WAS LOST in the Needle. It happened to him all the time, especially lately. He would start wandering, going slowly from room to room, floor to floor, and eventually find himself standing in an area he did not recognise: a small, cramped hallway, or a large room with only one door and no windows. It was strange, like a prolonged dream. Sometimes he would sit down and wait to see if the interior would change again, this time with him watching. It never did, though; it never altered in front of his eyes, only when he wasn’t looking.

He remembered the fire. The burning gym and the horrible men who’d died in the flames. He had no idea how he had managed to get there from the hospital, or why most of the skin of his face had been removed. When he slept, he dreamed of creatures emerging from the broken screens of old televisions, and voices in his head that told him to hurt himself.

His mind had been empty for so very long. Then, gradually, it began to fill with thoughts and images; vague recollections of a life that may or may not have been his. Drugs and parties and a nagging hunger. A few women, a few men: a lot of empty relationships. Then there was a room, a chair to which he’d been bound. And a bullish man who had been kind to him, and then led him into great harm…

There was not much else until he woke up in hospital, and then another blank spot which ended in him being in a room filled with flames. Following this there was the Needle.

And then, of course, there was the girl. The girl and the chores she’d asked him to carry out — the deliveries he’d made to three men on her behalf.

The pretty, pretty girl, with her pretty, pretty wings. She’d told him her name once, but he couldn’t remember it right now. He forgot a lot of information this way, as if his thoughts were leaking out through holes in his head, like water from a colander.

He walked along a short hallway with an exposed concrete floor, his arms held out at his sides and his fingers scratching the walls. It was dark in here; the windows were covered with security shutters.

There was an open door at the end of the hallway, and he could not fight the urge to enter whatever room lay beyond. He knew that it might lead him into trouble, and that he would probably regret following the impulse, but he was too weak to turn around and walk away.

Something moved behind him. It sounded like a mouse or a rat scurrying across the floor. He pretended that he had not heard the sound, preferring instead to focus on the doorway up ahead. Now that he was closer, he saw that there was soft green light spilling from the rectangular frame. The door was open. He smelled burning.

Burning.

But no, it was not the same as before: this fire would not hurt him.

He studied the open doorway. On the other side, positioned along the far wall, was a row of televisions. Their screens had been removed and fires had been set in the guts of the appliances. The flames were bright green. A small pyre burned inside the shell of every set.

Unable to turn away, Banjo stepped into the room. He closed the door behind him, yet he had no reason to block his escape route. He was puzzled by his own actions; his hand seemed to move of its own accord.

Banjo moved to the centre of the room. The walls were bare: no paper, no plaster, and no paint. Just squares of bare concrete. Shadows clustered at the corners of the room, at floor and ceiling level. The fires shed little illumination, despite the healthy green flames. The weak, swampy light spilled across the floor for a foot or two, and then diminished, expired, as if eaten up by those shadows. The flames did not destroy, they simply burned. They burned perpetually.

Banjo sat down in the middle of the floor. The concrete was cold, even through the seat of his jeans. He reached out his hands, opened them, and tried to gain warmth from the flames. He felt nothing. Banjo moved closer, shuffling forward on his backside, but still he felt no heat. The fires were cold.

Something shifted up above him, at the apex of wall and ceiling, and when he looked up he saw a long vine or a creeper curling back like a tongue withdrawing into its mouth.

The ceiling was growing a thin layer of vegetation. He felt so close to that other place — the one the girl had told him about — that he could almost breathe its air. The cold green fires crackled and popped; the air moved with a draught; the vines moved like snakes across the ceiling.

Banjo felt as if he was standing on the border, just about to take a step across but somehow barred from doing so. It was over there; he could see the rim of a new horizon. But he was not allowed into those territories.

A shape drew itself together from the shadows and the vegetation, forming a long, narrow ovoid. It made no sound as it slowly detached itself from the ceiling, hanging down on trailing vines, to drop onto the floor to his right. The shape was upright; it resolved into a figure.

The girl.

“Hello, Banjo,” she said, stepping out of the shadows. She was wearing the skin of an animal and her long black hair was knotted with leaves and twigs. Her bare legs were thin, the bones of her knees as prominent as her elbows. Her face was pale, narrow. She looked hungry.

Banjo smiled. She meant him no harm, this child of that other place.

“Thank you for your help.” She took a few steps towards him and then stopped. She opened one hand and a tiny hummingbird flew out of her fist, circled his head, did a lap of the room, and then flew into the shadows from which she had emerged. “It’s almost set now. Not long to go. All the pieces are in place, and we just need to wait for them to move closer together.” She smiled. Her teeth were stained dark from the leaves and berries she ate in order to survive.

Banjo nodded. He tilted his head, eager as a hound for his mistress’s affection.

“You remember me, don’t you?”

He nodded again, excited this time. Keen to impress.

“That’s right. It’s me. It’s Hailey.” She covered the next few paces in an instant, and suddenly she stood right before him, reaching down to stroke the side of his bandaged face. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s okay… I won’t hurt you. Not me.”

He realised that he was crying.

“Remember? I’m your friend. We help each other. We help each other hide from him — the other one. You remember him, too, don’t you? The bad one.”

Banjo pulled back, as if from the chill green fires in the television screens. He heard himself whining like a whipped cur.

“That’s right. The other one: the Underthing. It’s because of him you’re the way you are, with your face all torn apart and your mind in pieces. The Underthing did this to you. The television things were his. The Slitten were mine, but they’ve gone now. All used up. We all make our own monsters over here, in the grove and the little place beyond the grove. Some of them are forever; some of them are temporary, not meant to last beyond the moment when they are needed.”

He had no idea what she meant, but her words soothed him. They made him feel whole and happy and loved. He pushed his bandaged cheek into the palm of her hand, wishing that he could fly away, like the hummingbird.

“Here, let me help.” She crouched down in front of him, her white features hovering like a vision in the gloom. Her eyes were dark, nearly all pupil, and her cheekbones were as sharp as blades. “Let me take a look.” She smelled of fresh air and wild flowers and herbs — honeysuckle, jasmine and rosemary. Her sweat was nectar. “The doorway must be clean, unsullied.”

Banjo smiled; he opened himself up to her, yielding to her touch.

The girl began to remove the wrappings from his face. She did so slowly, carefully, smiling all the while. Her hands moved slowly and easily, and he felt no pain. The bandages came apart, peeled away, and fell from his damaged face like shedding skin.

“Oh, you poor, poor baby,” she said, and then she leaned forward and kissed his scarred cheek, keeping her lips there, cooling his maimed flesh.

Banjo was dribbling like a baby. She was his mother, this strange, sombre girl, and she loved him.

“It’s looking better,” she whispered. “Your face. It looks much better than before. Some of the power of the grove has touched you. I’m not sure how, or why, but it’s helped a little.” She removed her hands from his face. “Would you like to see?”

Banjo shrugged. He tilted his head again. Then, trusting the girl, as he always did, he slowly nodded his uncovered head.

The girl stood and walked across the room, then bent down to pick something up. The fires glinted on the reflective surface in her hand, and as she walked back towards him Banjo watched the play of the flames in the glass.

“Let’s see… come on, don’t be shy. Take a good look at yourself. Look at the doorway.”

The girl raised the shard — not a mirror exactly, but a piece of broken glass that served just as well. She pressed it closer to Banjo’s ruined face, and at first he twisted out of the way, trying not to see. But then, as she stroked his head with her free hand, he relented and waited for the looking-glass to show him what he had become.

The fires shimmered in the cloying, shut-in air. The girl said nothing. Banjo held his breath.

Then he stared into the glass.

The flesh had not grown back; his face still looked… exposed. It was raw and naked, like something denuded which should always have remained unseen. The bones were covered by a thin layer of tissue, but it was like paper. It wrinkled and threatened to tear apart when he tried to smile. And yet… madly, he did look better than he’d hoped. The girl had not lied about that. He could still see parts of his jaw through the holes in his sunken cheeks where flesh should have hidden them, but the ragged edges of his wounds were smoothing over, becoming less repellent. His eyelids looked odd, without any flesh to the sides of and beneath the eyes, but at least they made him look halfway human.

He opened his lipless mouth, licked his front teeth — upper and lower rows — and then bared them like a wolf.

“See,” said the girl. “I told you so. You know you can always trust me. I’ll never lie to you, Banjo. We need to be honest with each other, if we stand any chance at all of stopping the Underthing. We need a bond based on trust.”

Banjo stared at the monster in the mirror, and thought that he wasn’t so monstrous after all. Certainly not compared to the one the girl was talking about. Because, compared to the Underthing, he was nothing like a monster… nothing at all.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SIMON WAS STANDING in the middle of the motorway looking up at the hill upon which he knew the Angel of the North should be standing. Light drizzle coated his skin like sweat, the sky yawned above him like some passageway into a cosmic room, and the sculpture was noticeable only by its absence.

The grass on the hill was long and unkempt, as if nobody had been here for years. A line of scrubbed dirt ran around the base of the rise, with trails springing off on either side of the hill — front and back. The path that led up to the sculpture was cracked and broken; huge portions of tarmac had been scoured away to reveal the uneven base course beneath. Ashen clouds lowered across the scene, unbroken by Gormley’s great northern masterwork. The scene was apocalyptic. The world had somehow ended, or was just about to.

Simon turned around and glanced along the road. It was empty. No traffic moved along its length, but far off, in the distance, dark clouds gathered like harbingers of chaos. He stared into the heaving black mass, but could make out nothing solid. There seemed to be protean shapes moving within the black folds — figures that kept shifting between people and animals — but he could not be sure. Perhaps it was just air currents causing the illusion of form and substance.

He turned back towards the hill, and right at its top there was now a small figure. The figure stood motionless, with its arms outstretched in the same pose as the Angel. He watched for a few minutes, but still the figure did not move.

“Who are you?” He knew that whoever it was would not hear the question. He was too far away, the light breeze was blowing in the wrong direction, and the air was thick and turgid. “Tell me who you are.”

The figure remained motionless. The sky darkened, turning the figure into a silhouette, or a black template carved out of the world, showing only darkness beyond.

Simon began walking towards the figure on the hill. He had no idea why he felt compelled to approach it, but something was calling him. His body responded to an impulse that was too subtle to explain, like the currents of the sea or the phases of the moon. He stepped onto the shattered footpath and dodged the worst of the damage. The stones were blackened, as if they’d been burned. He struggled to keep his footing; the path seemed to tilt and sway, but not in any way that his eye could discern.

He looked up, away from his shoes, and this time the figure had moved. It was standing in the same position, with arms outstretched like aeroplane wings, but it was now facing him. There was another difference, too: the figure was wearing a mask, with a long beak for a nose, and had about doubled in size. Simon knew that he should be running, to get away from the figure, but his legs refused to obey the command sent from his brain.

So instead he climbed the shattered footpath, up the hill, towards the beaked figure that stood so still and so silent in the darkness. He knew who it was; he had seen the figure before, in waking life as well as in dreams. It was Captain Clickety, the one who had taken their boyhood, the creature the three boys had followed to the Needle from Beacon Green twenty years ago. He was here; he had come back. But why had he returned, and for whom was he waiting up on the hill?

Simon felt only minimal danger. He suspected that Clickety had not come for him, but the one he wanted was linked to him. Was it one of the others — Brendan or Marty — and if so, why one of them and not him? There was a sudden pang of resentment then, of shameful envy, and he struggled to explain it. Like a knife in his gut, the feeling sliced him neatly and painlessly.

If there was horror to be had, why could he not be the one to experience it? After all this time, since running away and trying to build a life for himself, there was still a gap at his core, and that gap was the absence of horror. He knew that now; finally he could admit it, if only to himself.

The figure did not grow nearer as he approached it. “Come back,” he whispered, tasting the night: it was cold and coppery, like blood but with an underlying bitterness.

When he reached the summit of the hill the figure was gone. Its mask lay on the ground at his feet, staring upwards: an invitation. Simon bent over and picked up the mask. It felt smooth, soft, like silk, and there was little weight to it. He lifted it towards his face, turned it around, and stared into the back of the mask. Looking through the eyes of Captain Clickety, he surveyed the land. Vast acres of the earth lay scorched before him, trees had been felled and hacked into pieces, and the earth itself was churned and broken. This was the monster’s dream: it was how he saw the world in which Simon and his friends lived. Incapable of seeing beauty, it substituted a veneer of destruction.

Simon threw the mask away. He could not wear it, and he certainly did not want to view the landscape through its eyeholes for much longer. He could not bear the dreams of the damned. Because he knew that the thing which called itself Clickety was indeed damned — and that damnation had touched them all, twenty years ago. It touched them still, reaching across the years and travelling the blighted inner landscapes they held deep inside them. Damnation was a road he had built within himself, a route he did not want to take.

He became aware of a vibration, as if the ground beneath his feet were beginning to tremble. Slowly, he got down on the ground and placed his ear to the earth. Yes… there it was… a slow, rhythmic rumble, like vast machinery working somewhere deep beneath the planet’s crust. He recalled the Morlock machines from The Time Machine — a story he’d loved as a boy. Was he hearing them now, the shambling Morlocks and their infernal machines?

No, that was fiction. He could not retreat into stories, not any more. He needed to confront reality, no matter what the cost.

The vibrations grew stronger and Simon stood, afraid of what they might represent. Was something tunnelling through the earth, heading for the surface right under his feet, on the spot where the Angel of the North had once stood — and should still be standing, casting its protective wingspan across the region?

He backed away, moving across the top of the rise, and then lost his footing. He tumbled down, turning and spinning and coming to rest on the footpath at the base of the earthen platform. This, too, had been torn up, perhaps by some kind of construction equipment, or perhaps by the hateful hands of a giant.

He began to move, running away from the now-barren site of the Angel. He ran across the long grass, careful not to lose his footing again, and made for the main road. Still there were no cars in sight; the road was empty for miles… except for those churning black clouds, which had now begun to coalesce, to pull together and form a single vast shape on the horizon.

Simon stared in mute horror — or was it just an echo of horror, a faint tremor of the feelings he had experienced so long ago?

The Angel of the North stormed out from those dark clouds, taking huge footsteps to cover the ground between them. Simon stood and he stared and he watched as its massive steel feet rose and plunged, making great dents in the road, cracking the blacktop, zigzags snaking from the impacts.

It was coming. The Angel was coming, and it was going to kill him, to stomp him, to flatten him into the road surface. Simon had never been so certain of anything in his life.

He turned and ran, heading away from the gigantic effigy, moving south, wishing that he could reach London at a sprint, without pausing for breath. He should never have returned here, to this godforsaken place. It was no longer his home; he was not welcome within its borders.

Glancing over his shoulder, and exposed by the light of the moon, he saw that the Angel had drawn closer. With each terrible step it took, the distance shrank by yards. Those steps were immense, and his were tiny, puny: he could never outrun this nightmare image. However fast he moved, and wherever he went, it would always be gaining on him, covering the ground faster than he ever could.

He was haunted by the north, and by the ghosts he had tried to leave behind.

The sculpture — always artfully rusted — looked as if it had been left unattended for generations, and the material had decayed. The steelwork had turned black in places, and there were human body parts wedged between the lattices of its framework. The spaces between the layers of metal were filled with raw meat; blood dripped down its flanks, its legs, and formed streaks on the dark road surface. Its mighty wings beat the air rigidly, pivoting at the shoulders. It would never fly, this thing, but it might just about manage to hover, or float, at least a few inches off the ground.

The dark Angel was close now. It must be only minutes before it was upon him, bearing down like a mountain, a living, sentient part of the landscape he had tried so hard to abandon…

HE WOKE WITH a scream lodged in his chest. The muscles were working, but no sound would come out. He felt like he was choking… his throat was stuffed with chunks of rancid flesh, like the offal decorating the oxidised exoskeleton of the Angel.

He sat up in bed, his hands clutching the sheets, and tried to breathe. After a short while, he realised that he was not dying; his airwaves had opened up again, and he sucked in air and attempted to shake off the nightmare.

That’s all it was: a nightmare. The worst he had ever experienced.

His head throbbed, and he imagined his brain small and shrivelled, like a walnut, from the alcohol he’d consumed with Brendan. There was no clear memory of going to bed, just a hazy recollection of falling backwards onto the mattress and succumbing to blackness. Back in London, he didn’t generally drink the kind of volume he’d knocked back today. It was a different kind of drinking he did back there, less deliberate and much more social. Even when he drank alone, he stuck to wine or spirits, so he wasn’t used to the peculiar, heavy drunkenness brought on by quaffing so many pints of ale.

His phone was on the bedside cabinet. The display showed several unopened text messages. They would all be from Natasha. He knew this without even looking. He had no idea why he was ignoring her, but for some reason he wanted to keep his distance. Was it the idea that she might be polluted by whatever was happening in the Grove, and he wanted to keep her pure and untouched? It sounded plausible, but he had never before placed her on any kind of pedestal. That was one of the reasons she’d liked him so much to begin with: all of her other boyfriends had been in awe of her beauty, treating her like some kind of untouchable princess. Simon treated her like every other woman he’d been involved with — he kept her at arm’s length, not allowing her into his life far enough for her to have an impact when she eventually left him. Because she would leave him, they always did. He made sure of that.

He got up and crossed to the window, reaching out to pull the curtains slightly apart. He looked out at the street and it was empty; he glanced behind him and the glowing digits on his travel alarm told him that it was after 2 AM, not quite late in the day-to-day life of the estate. But it was nice to see the place at ease for a change, with no gangs of youths or suspiciously parked cars to add to the threat.

Turning back to look out of the window, he saw a small shape darting through the air across the street. It was either a tiny bird or a large insect, and it moved at great speed, whipping out of sight before he could identify exactly what it was. Or perhaps it was simply a shadow, a shade: another slight fold in the fabric of the Concrete Grove…

Simon returned to the bed and sat down. The bare room closed in on him, its walls looming too close and the ceiling lowering by fractions. He closed his eyes, and behind the lids he once again saw the massive, implacable approach of the Angel… chunks of raw meat sliding around at its core, dark blood sheeting across its torso. The Angel threw back its head and roared, but silently. No sound came; its rage was muted.

What had that been about missing the horror, or the lack of horror causing a fault line in his life? Why the hell had he thought that, even in a dream? Real horror was not something he ever wanted to experience again.

He turned at the waist and opened the top drawer in the bedside cabinet — the only furniture in the room, other than the bed and a cheap flat-pack wardrobe. Rummaging around inside, passing over his watch and his wallet and some paperwork, his fingers closed around the acorn. It felt larger, but that could have been a trick of his imagination. He did not retrieve the acorn to find out; he just left his hand in the drawer, fisted around the object.

“Bring me your horror,” he said, the theatrical language making him feel slightly absurd. “Bring it on, Clickety, you fucking bastard. I’ll swallow it all and then come back for more.”

But he was lying. He knew he was lying. Sitting there alone, in a small, spartan room in the town where he’d left his childhood, the lies piled up against the walls, like diseased corpses awaiting a decent burial.

CHAPTER TWELVE

IT WAS 2:30 AM and Marty was ready to be let off the leash.

The crowd in the Barn would be small but select, with men in tailored suits or designer sportswear and women in expensive dresses. There was a lot of alcohol floating around, and most of the people in there were either drunk or well on their way. Bodies pressed close, couples fondled each other, and strangers flirted like it was the end of the world and all they wanted was to go out with a bang.

These people loved a bit of sexual tension to go along with their violence.

Marty was sitting in the back of an old Rover, wrapping his hands in protective tape: criss-cross, wrist, palm and knuckle. Even though these bouts were advertised as bare-knuckle fighting, he never fought without some kind of protection. He’d seen too many men break their knuckles, shatter the bones in their fingers, or smash their wrists in so-called ‘pride fights’. Marty wasn’t like them; he was clever. Yes, he was an idiot who fought for money, but he was a clever idiot who made sure he chose bouts where there was at least some kind of rule book.

He smiled, staring at his fists. He flexed the fingers. The wrappings were perfect: nice and tight. Some men had hands like glass, but Marty’s were like steel rods covered in a thick layer of rubber.

“You okay back there, Rivers?” The man in the front passenger seat did not turn around. He just sat and stared through the windscreen. His big bald head sat on a neck as thick as a horse’s thigh, and the expensive leather jacket he wore glistened like a beetle’s back.

“Fine,” said Marty. “Just take me to the fucker, and I’ll put him down. Then we can all go home and count our money.”

The man laughed. “Aye, you’re a funny bastard. Has anyone ever told you that?” At last he turned around, and his small, squinty eyes looked as hard as stones beneath his curiously light eyebrows. His face was wrinkled, but it was difficult to tell how old he was. Even Erik Best’s closest associates didn’t know his true age; it was a well-kept secret, and the fact that he never told anyone betrayed the man’s huge capacity for narcissism.

“Yeah,” said Marty. “They tell me all the time. I’m a regular fucking stand-up comedian, me.”

Best turned back to face the windscreen and the Barn beyond, the smile stuck to his face. Marty did not trust this man an inch. Erik Best was an ex-boxer, and a thoroughly old-school monster, who always played with a game face. Nobody knew what he was thinking; not one person could see beyond the façade. And that was the way Best liked it. No one got past his defences; not even women.

“This Polish boy — this Aleksi — he’s a big lad. You sure you can handle him? I have a lot of money riding on you, and my friends have even more, so the last thing we want is for you to go down on your arse, marra.”

Marty grinned. His cheekbones felt solid and unbreakable, like teak. “I’ve seen the tapes. I can handle this kid. He might be big, but he does the same thing every time. He feints with his left just before swinging that big right haymaker. He’s strong, but he’s clumsy and obvious. No proper training. I can take him.”

The bald head nodded once. “Just make sure you fucking do, or you and me will have a little problem. And I doubt either of us wants that, eh, marra?”

Marty waited a beat, just to show that he wasn’t scared (although he should be; Best was a bad bastard from way back, when hard men were genuinely hard). Then, quietly, he said, “No sweat, Erik. I’ll even string it out a bit, just so your friends get their money’s worth.”

Best’s laughter filled the car. It sounded genuine, but Marty knew that you could never be sure with a man like Erik Best.

The silent driver guided the car off the motorway and along the minor roads. They were several miles out of the city, where the countryside began to encroach and cancel out the manmade structures. Not too far away, the Scottish borders demarcated the ancient boundaries between the old tribes of the Britons and the Picts: it was a place of ruined castles and ley lines; of ancient stone cairns, secret underground waterways and the spirits of the marauding dead. The land was steeped in a history that Marty had only ever learned about in school. The real stories — the petty wars and the personal politics and the blood that had drenched the earth — were something of which he knew very little. But still it scared him. He feared these open spaces, seeing glimpses of an ancient world that he could never truly know. Strip away the urban glamour, the cars and the suits and the money, and all you had left was the bare earth… and the old bloodstains that would never truly fade.

The farmhouse loomed on the horizon. It was an old structure, all ancient timber beams and locally quarried stone, and as far as he knew nobody had lived here for decades. Erik Best ran a lot of his entertainments out of this place: dog fights, sex and drug parties, and of course the bare knuckle bouts upon which he’d built his reputation.

As they drew closer to the old building, Marty saw people milling about on the grass outside the Barn, located several yards away from the main building. The lights were on in the house, but the doors were open and the majority of the select guests had already begun to gather at the place of combat.

“They’re all ready for you, me lad. Let’s not let them down, eh?”

Marty said nothing. He checked the wrappings on his hands and did a few neck-stretching exercises. He was limber this evening, but there was always room for a little more flexibility. The key to this kind of gig, he knew from experience, was a combination of stamina and flexibility. With those two elements in place, you could easily outdo brute strength. If you knew what you were doing.

And Marty knew what he was doing.

They parked the car slightly away from the other vehicles — mostly four-wheel drive yummy-mummy school-run models, but with a couple of Mercs and Beamers parked alongside them. The driver stayed where he was, and Best climbed out, going round to the rear to open the door for his star attraction.

Marty nodded and got out of the car. “Thanks,” he said, scanning the area. He’d been here before, a handful of times, so he already knew the layout. The last time he’d been at the farm, it had been for one of Best’s infamous parties, but the time before that was for a bout in the Barn against a wiry gypsy blessed more with aggression than with ring sense.

“You ready, marra?” Best stood before him; the top of his head came up to Marty’s chest. He was small, but he was deadly. Sometimes people forgot this fact, and they always came off the worse for it.

“Fuck, yes.” Marty clapped his hands together and started to jump up and down on the spot, short, sharp movements meant to get his circulation going, to get his buzz on. The air was warm; the sky was strangely bright for this time of the night. He unzipped his tracksuit top, turned around, and threw it into the car. He was pumped; the muscles in his arms and shoulders felt tight, in a good way. He was primed.

Best walked over towards the infamous Barn and Marty followed. He threw some quick air punches, snapping them back just for show. He rolled his head on his neck and shrugged his shoulders. He made his face neutral; he wanted to give nothing beneath the surface away, he had to protect what was inside, behind the mask he always wore.

Humpty Dumpty, he thought. Humpty fucking Dumpty…

Fear surged through his body, starting in his belly and spreading out along his limbs. He bit down on the terror, swallowing it back down, consuming it and taking raw power from it. This was what he had cultivated, when he would condition his body as a teenager. All those small cuts, the burning cigarettes, and all the times he had held his forearm to the flame of the gas cooker in the kitchen. It was all done to summon this fear: the fear of Humpty Dumpty and the beatings his father had dished out in the name of discipline.

“Humpty Dumpty,” he whispered, tasting the words, the regurgitated fear, the horror that had dogged him for twenty years and taken on the form of a nursery rhyme because that was the only way he could think of to deal with the cold, dark feelings that gnawed away at his insides.

He remembered the trees up along the edge of Beacon Green, and the small, fat thing that sat in the branches of his memory, gibbering and giggling and spitting as he watched it swinging its legs and slapping its egg-like torso. The thing that was never too far from his dreams, the creature that could simply not have existed… but it had; the monster was fact, not fiction.

Humpty Dumpty was real. He had seen it, twenty years ago, hours before he and his friends had followed the figure they’d christened Captain Clickety into the Needle and lost a slice of their summer, their lives, their fucking childhood.

Best spoke to a lot of people as they made their way to the Barn, but Marty ignored them all. The designer suits and the dresses, the leering, sweaty faces and the wet mouths that bayed for blood. They were worse than animals, these people; all they wanted was to see someone get hurt, anyone. It didn’t even matter who got trashed, or how much money was lost in the process. As long as they got a glimpse of bloodshed, and heard the sound of bones cracking, they were happy. They would go home and they’d fuck each other senseless, thinking of the blood-stained combatants they’d seen, pretending that they were tough enough to get inside the ring and trade fists with a brutal stranger. Telling each other that they understood what it meant to be a man.

Marty knew that he was a stand-in, nothing but a rich couple’s role-play: they barely even saw him as a real person, just an extension of the video games they played and the action films they watched as they snorted cocaine off the lid of a DVD case. He hated these people; he wanted to break them all into little pieces and piss on the remains. But instead, he’d be their show pony and take their money, and go back to the flat to patch up his injuries ready for the next time.

He knew his place, and they knew theirs. This was how the world worked: there were those who paid and those who played, and then there were those — like Erik Best — who facilitated the action. In many ways, this last role was the worst of all, because there was little honour in manipulating the pieces on the board. At least the actual players got their hands dirty, whether it was from the ink of printed money or the blood of the defeated.

Marty had once been present when Best had accepted a delivery of business cards. Small, neat font, good quality ivory card; they must have cost a lot of money.

The words stamped on the front had said: Erik Best — Facilitator.

Erik Best knew his place, too.

They entered the Barn, walking in through the open double doors. Everyone crowded in alongside them or behind them, being careful not to jostle in case they prompted some early violence. Marty smiled.

There must have been thirty or forty people present, but the noise was kept to a level that would not be heard from the road. Marty wasn’t sure about the logistics of these bouts or how Best managed to organise them and keep the authorities away, but they were usually low-key affairs with the details and guest list kept secret until the last possible minute. It took a lot of money to buy your way in, and once you were there it still didn’t mean you were guaranteed a return visit. Everything was at the whim of the organiser. Best kept a tight rein on things, and he enjoyed keeping people guessing. Nobody would ever take him for granted.

A crude ring had been set up at the centre of the barn, enclosing an area of approximately six metres square — near enough to regulation boxing ring size to suggest that somebody had at least taken the preparations seriously. There was straw scattered on the floor, long stakes had been driven into the ground at each corner, and sagging lengths of old climbing rope lashed it all together. Marty remembered this set-up from last time: it was surprisingly sturdy, and the stakes had held even when he’d thrown his last opponent against one of them, almost snapping his spine. There were lighting rigs strung across the ceiling, but the halogen bulbs were not quite powerful enough to dispel all the shadows. The interior of the Barn had a dusty atmosphere, as was fitting.

“Can you smell it?” Best turned to face him, raising his strange blond eyebrows. “Can you smell all that fucking middle-class cash?” His smile was wolfish, and his skin was moist with sweat. He looked… Marty struggled for the right word, and then settled on hungry. Erik Best looked ravenous.

Across the other side of the Barn, surrounded by four or five men dressed in gaudy sports casuals, there stood a tall, broad-shouldered man with cropped white hair and ugly tribal tattoos across his upper chest and shoulders. He was staring at Marty. His face was long and pale and his eyes were narrow; the muscles in his jaw were so tense that it looked like they might burst through the skin at any moment, like parasites escaping their host.

“That’s him,” said Best, nodding in the direction of the other fighter.

“I know,” said Marty. “Not very pretty, is he?”

“He looks tough.” Best glanced at Marty, as if judging his response.

“It’s the ones who don’t look tough you have to worry about. You know that. Blokes like this one, they’re all image, all gym-bought muscles, cheap tattoos and a whole lot of front. Just look at you: a short-arse with a pot belly, and yet you’re the most fearsome bastard I ever met.” He smiled, letting Best know that he was at least half-joking. Nobody else could get away with talking to Erik Best like this. Marty knew that he was afforded certain privileges because he made the man a lot of money…

Best laughed softly, shook his head. “You’re a cunt, Rivers. But that’s why I like you.” He slapped Marty on the right bicep — hard, with enough force to let him know that he was being favoured.

“Humpty Dumpy,” said Marty, looking back at his opponent. The other man was having his shoulders massaged by a short, fat man in a comically dated Kappa tracksuit. His curly black hair was soaking wet, as if he’d been caught out in the rain.

“One of these days,” said Best, moving away, “you’re going to have to tell me what the fuck that means, marra.”

Marty did not smile. He couldn’t. He was entering the zone, the place where all bets were off and no prisoners were taken. He smelled phantom blood in the air and his head was filled with the distant sounds of battle: cries and screams and gunfire, women wailing in a litany of loss as their menfolk were slain in the streets. Towers falling. Planes crashing. Cities burning. He felt connected to an ancient source of warfare, a rich seam of death and destruction that raged constantly beneath the surface of the world. This, he knew, was the real face of humanity. Some people — those like him and the man across the Barn — were either born or created to fight. The difference was fractional; whether by design or birthright, they were warriors. The only thing that mattered now was who would walk away as the victor and who would remain there in the makeshift ring, face to the floor, bleeding into the dirt and the hay and suffering the ignobility of defeat.

“Okay, everyone, we all know why we’re here.” Best’s raised voice silenced the gathered onlookers. He was that kind of man, one with a high level of natural charisma. Glasses and bottles clinked, somebody coughed, whispers hung in the air, but his voice rose above it all. “Give us a few minutes to have a chat with the fighters, and then we’ll start the bout. Keep drinking, keep betting, and don’t give me any fucking reason to not invite you back here.” He grinned, but his eyes shone with barely repressed fury.

Marty followed Best across the room, towards the spot where the Polish kid was standing with his cronies. They were silent; all eyes were upon him as he stepped across the dim space. The Polish kid started to shadow box, but his gaze remained fixed on Marty. His technique wasn’t bad, but Marty’s was a lot better.

Marty nodded his head once and bared his teeth in a feral grin. The kid stopped his performance, realising that it was not having the desired effect.

“Okay,” said Best once they had all gathered together. “You all know the rules, and as I’ve said before, if anyone tries anything funny, they’re fucked. I have men who will pile in at a given signal and crack your skulls if you even look like you’re messing about. I want a clean fight… but not too clean. Got that?”

Marty nodded.

“Yes,” said the fat, curly-haired man in the Kappa, his English clipped but perfectly clear. “We know rules. We play by rules. It is the same everywhere. My man will win this, whatever rules may be.”

The Polish fighter smiled. Marty noticed for the first time that his front two teeth were missing from the upper row. He probably wore dentures, and had taken them out for the fight. Rather than make him look tougher, it showed a potential weakness.

“Right then, retreat to your corners and get ready. Let’s get this thing going and make some money.” Best watched as the men walked around the ring and took up their positions at their allocated corners. The Polish fighter climbed in through the ropes, followed by the fat man, clearly his trainer and corner man. The others just stood there and practised looking shifty, like extras in a cheesy gangster flick.

“Where’s Jock?” Marty scanned the barn, looking for Best’s usual corner man.

“He’s here… somewhere. Probably drinking my fucking whisky.”

A small, lean man in a flat cap appeared at ringside, raising a hand in welcome.

Marty walked to his side of the ring and shook the man’s hand. “Jock. How’s it going?”

“Nae bad,” said the wiry Scotsman. “You feeling fit?”

Marty nodded. “Fit as a butcher’s dog.”

“Good.” Jock lifted the middle rope and stepped aside to allow Marty to climb through the gap. “You should take this kid easy. He’s big, but he’s slow as fuck and he telegraphs them big punches about half an hour afore they arrive.”

Marty started moving, keeping his feet light. He’d been training for this bout for about a month, with early morning runs, sparring sessions at a friend’s gym in Byker, and some work with heavy weights. He was lucky in that he was naturally athletic, and his early boxing training had taught him his ring craft. Most of his opponents in these bouts were either Irish gypsies with no style and plenty of energy, or men like this one — immigrants who were fighting to feed their families, because they had no other saleable skills to offer this flattened economy.

Everybody feared the gypsies, but Marty was more cautious of the fighters who had more at stake than a campsite reputation. A man who fights for his children, for his wife, is a man who will not go down easily, and even when he does go down the odds are that he won’t stay there for long unless he is put out cold.

A fight like this one was like a fight against himself: battling his own inner demons, but each with a different face and a different style than the last. Some of them were experienced martial artists; a few of them might even be champions of some obscure brand of cage fighting back in their own country. But they were all tough as steel, hard as iron nails. They never quit until they had no choice.

He looked at the small, exclusive crowd on the other side of the ropes, scanning their faces for anything other than a shallower version of the kind of hunger he’d seen breaking though Erik Best’s features. But all he saw were shining eyes, open mouths, and a never-ending demand to be entertained.

Marty would entertain them. Hell, yes. He’d show them something they’d never forget.

He’d show them Humpty fucking Dumpty.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

IT WAS NIGHT in the Concrete Grove. Clouds scudded overhead, clustering around the pyramidal tip of the Needle. Shapes moved within those clouds — birds or shadows, or perhaps something else, something more sinister. The sounds of the estate combined to create a song of sorrow: barking dogs, a distant car or house or shop alarm, an occasional raised voice, the tinny beat of somebody’s stereo left to play dance music into the wee hours…

Brendan looked up from the book he was reading, feeling as if he were being watched. He experienced the sensation whenever he was alone, had grown up with it hounding his days and blighting his nights. He never felt safe, even when he was by himself — especially when he was by himself. It was as if something had stalked him across the years, keeping an eye on him, watching his progress. Whatever it was, this thing, it had been drawing closer, narrowing the distance between them as the years played out into decades.

Something was keeping a close eye on Brendan, and he knew in his heart that it had begun on the night that he and the other two Amigos had been trapped in the building outside the cabin in which he now sat.

He was reading a Stephen King novel and trying to pretend that fictional terrors were more frightening than real life, but he also knew that this was a lie. Real life was worse, always so much worse, than fiction… and hadn’t his life become a fiction, like something from the books he liked to read?

How many times had he gone over the same page in the book he was holding? It felt like time had slowed down and he’d been there for hours, reading and re-reading the same passage. But still the story made little sense, and the intricacies of the plot eluded him.

He stood up and went to the door, opened it and looked out at the night. Darkness lay like a shroud across the landscape. He blinked, his eyes burning for a moment, and then he glanced left, then right, before stepping out of the security cabin. The Needle loomed above him, watching him, just like whatever he and his friends had disturbed had always watched him, and in the same way that he often examined himself, in the mirror. Filled with doubt and mistrust; not quite believing the image that he saw reflected there in the glass.

The acne on his back had calmed down earlier, but now it was beginning to itch. He resisted the urge to scratch at it, and clenched his hands into fists.

No, he thought. Don’t touch it.

The thought of the telephone call he’d received from his boss only a couple of hours earlier filled him with a rage that felt like something sexual, a slow-building sensation demanding some kind of release. Brendan was nobody’s gofer, but right now, wrapped up in the arms of an endless night — a night that had lasted for two decades — he felt like he was bound to his old friends like a horse strapped into an ill-fitting harness.

This time Simon had gone too far; his actions were offensive. Brendan knew that he was probably overreacting, and that Jane would talk him down in the morning, but when it came to Simon Ridley, and the way that bastard had left them all here to rot, he often found it difficult to rein in his emotions.

The skin on his back and shoulders itched madly. He tightened his fists and dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands. One pain to take away another, like for like, tit for tat: it was like old magic, and the spell never failed.

Grinding his fingernails into the soft flesh, he forgot about his acne, and imagined his fingers digging right down into the skin and gristle and tearing through his hands, emerging from the other side dripping in blood.

Sighing, he looked up, at the second, third, fourth floors, and saw a shadow flit across one of the intact windows. Was it Banjo, the junkie, making a night-time patrol of his own, or was it something much worse? He remembered a man with a stick and a beaked mask, a figure who made a sound like maracas but in slow motion. They had called him a name, Captain Clickety, but he knew now that the simple act of naming your demon does not banish it back under the bed or to the rear of the wardrobe… sometimes a demon will like its given name, and it will reach out to embrace those that named it.

Sometimes the monsters were real.

He turned around and went back inside the cabin. Glancing at the novel, he was unable to pick it back up and finish the chapter. Not now; not tonight.

Not when it was night in the Concrete Grove, and the memories were so close to the surface that they threatened to break through and hurt him.

Once again, the skin of his back and shoulders started to itch. This time, he knew, it would be even more difficult to resist scratching at the wounds. Maybe they’d open up and bleed anew, causing new pain to layer over the old.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“SHAKE HANDS,” SAID the ref, pushing Marty and the Polish kid together at the centre of the ring. Marty stuck out his wrapped hand and the other man grabbed it, squeezed hard, and shook it once.

“Zaraz cię zabiję,” said the Polish kid — Aleksi. His name was Aleksi. Marty needed to remember that, if only to register who it was he had beaten.

The two men parted company, backing away towards their corners. The next time they came together, it would be all business.

There were as many variations of the rules in these bouts as there were fighters. This time, as was often the case with one of Erik Best’s fights, it was old school: fists only, no feet, no chokeholds, no head butting; no biting or gouging or elbows. The ref — a big man himself, another ex-boxer — was there to ensure that nobody stepped across the line and the fight was, insomuch as any illegal bout could ever be, a fair one.

Unlike boxing, there were no rounds to speak of. This was a fight to the finish. The man who remained standing at the end was the winner and would receive the entire purse. The loser would depart empty-handed and no doubt suffering from worse injuries than wounded pride. Such was the way of these things, and Marty was as experienced as anyone else he knew on the small, secretive bare-knuckle circuit. He’d learned the hard way, after the accident that ended his boxing career. At the time, he’d felt that he had no other option than to fight. He was a born fighter, so he simply continued along that same path.

People were shouting and screaming. Men and women jostled for position, trying to get a good view. The Barn was now a place of gladiatorial combat. The air was thick and heavy with the expectation of violence, and the audience moved as one amorphous mass, heavy and swaying, their sweat mingling and rising in a thin, steaming cloud. Couples grabbed at each other beneath the poor lights, in some savage act of foreplay. Others stood and watched, generating an altogether different kind of energy.

Marty ignored it all and moved slowly forward, raising his guard. Aleksi kept his own guard low, just as he had done in the videos Erik had supplied for Marty’s research. It was apparent that the kid relied on brute strength, but that was no match for speed, guile and ring craft. The two men circled each other like great beasts, each summing up the other, inspecting his opponent for weak points. The roar of the crowd was reduced to a whisper; Marty focused on the other fighter to such an extent that everything else faded away. His vision narrowed to a tunnel and he began to smell the other man’s musk. Soon he would taste him, like a tang in the air. His senses would be so attuned to the task, and to his foe, that his body would have recognised him in a dark room filled with a hundred strangers.

“No chodź staruchu,” said the kid, his Polish wasted on Marty. “Dalej, dawaj.”

Marty waited, waited, waited… smiled, bobbed his head and weaved a little, throwing wide a few light jabs just to rile the other fighter. He said nothing, he never did. He was a silent enforcer, a man who let his fists speak with a language of their own.

The lights flickered overhead, but Marty was only dimly aware of the change in illumination. He did not take his eyes off Aleksi. To do so would break the spell.

The lights flickered again, and that was when the kid decided to strike. He moved in surprisingly fast, going low with a decent shot to the body. Marty turned to the side and bent at the waist, not enough to dodge the blow completely but more than enough to absorb its immediate power. He responded with a short left hook, which caught the kid on the side of the head. The kid staggered, his feet shuffled backwards, and Marty slammed a good straight right into the centre of his forehead. He felt the dull jolt of the impact through his fist and along his forearm.

The small crowd made even more noise at this point, but Marty barely registered their jeering. He went in fast, double-jabbing all the way, and pushed the kid back onto the ropes. He lost his footing for a second, his left leg buckling slightly in his stance, and it was enough for Aleksi to mount a spirited retaliation. Marty retreated, blocking a barrage of mostly wild blows, and tried to work out exactly how far he was from the ropes on his side of the ring. He couldn’t risk grappling with this one; he was outweighed by at least two stone, and had less reach. He had to keep on the move, ducking and dodging and wearing the other guy out with combination shots.

They stood toe-to-toe for a moment, trading blows. Marty used his defence, and was pleased to see cuts opening up on the other man’s face: a long gash across his brow over the left eye, a nick in his cheek beneath his right. Blood washed down his face, thinned by the adrenalin in his system.

Marty took too long admiring the damage. He felt a glancing blow to the temple and reeled; he was rocked immediately by another quick punch to the cheekbone, this time from the big right hand. Then, just as he was beginning to think he’d misjudged or underestimated the kid, he saw what he’d been expecting from the beginning. The Polish kid dropped his right shoulder an inch or so and feigned with a left, preparing to unleash his main shot: the big looping right. Marty struck before the kid had time to consider his next move: a straight right, catching Aleksi on the chin; he followed with a double-left jab, and then finished the combination by throwing all he had into a sweet right uppercut that he dragged right up from the floor.

Marty felt the bones in his hand compress as the blow made contact; it was a good one. The kid toppled to his right, his hands going down, the arms limp, and staggered backwards towards the ropes.

It was time to finish him. Most fights lasted only seconds, very few more than a couple of minutes. In the movies, they went on for a long time, but in real life they were scrappy affairs, consisting of brief bursts of energy and longueurs of heavy breathing and grappling. But there would be no close contact fighting tonight. That was not in the script.

Marty moved in for the kill.

Left, right, left, left, right… boxing all the way, not brawling, and using his training and experience to subdue the other man. The kid was flagging; he didn’t know what to do. His big weapon had failed him, and he had no craft to fall back on. Blood was smeared across his face; the light in his eyes went out.

And then it happened.

Just as the kid slumped back onto the ropes, a strange transformation occurred. It did not last long, just a flash, like an echo of a memory, but suddenly the Polish fighter was no longer in the ring. Leaning against the ropes was a huge, oval torso with stubby little legs that ended in hands instead of feet. The face was made up of large, heavy-lidded eyes, two holes for a nose, and a lipless mouth that was more like a thin crack in the flesh-coloured shell.

This was no longer the Polish street fighter.

It was Marty’s old friend Humpty Dumpty.

He threw one punch after another, laying into the image, trying to make it go away, to crack the shell. His vision blurred and then flickered, and the egg-shaped monstrosity changed back into a big loose-lipped Polish kid with blood on his face. But it was too late for Marty to do anything but continue his assault. He kept punching, his fists aching, his fingers crunching, and could do nothing but wait until his terrible rage was spent. Anger drove him on, fuelling his body and inuring it to the pain in his hands. He was once again the child whose father had beaten him for no other reason than to toughen him up, who grew into a teenager who burned and lacerated his own body so that nobody would ever cause him pain or beat him in a stand-up fight.

Just as Marty thought he might black out and enter the darkness where a bastardised kid’s rhyme lay in wait, sung through a crack in the world, he became aware of many hands upon him, an arm wrapping around his throat, and people pulling him off the other fighter. Realising what was happening, he went limp, his arms hanging loose at his sides, and allowed himself to be dragged away without further protest.

His opponent lay on the ground, his young face a mask of red. He was not moving. He did not even seem to be breathing.

What have I done? thought Marty. Who did I become?

At last, the audience had fallen silent. This was too much, too harsh for them to process. They came here expecting violence, and they had faced absolute savagery. Marty realised that he was screaming, but the sound was nothing that could be described as words. It was just a long, wailing lament, a cry of rage at the things that had pushed him to this point and driven him to fight with a demon from the pages of a children’s book.

“Get off me,” he cried, shutting off that other noise — the one that made him sound as if he’d lost his mind. “Get the fuck off!”

Who the hell was I trying to hurt? Not him — not the kid.

As the figures released him and backed away to give him room, he got to his knees and stared at them all. The ref was shaking his head, Erik Best was smiling, and a few of Best’s heavies were trying to stop the Polish corner crew from climbing into the ring. Marty held up his hands and stared at them. The white wrappings were coated with blood.

Nobody can hurt Marty, he thought, recalling the years of self-damage, of extreme body conditioning, and the insane physical tests he had put himself through before the age of thirty. Nobody hurts Marty… not even Marty.

Best stepped forward and bent down, trying to be heard above the clamour. “That was some fucking show, marra,” he said, grabbing Marty’s shoulder. “But I think we need to get you out of here before it all kicks off.” He squeezed Marty’s arm, earnestly.

Marty nodded. With Best’s help, he stood, feeling shaky and ill. The egg-shaped creature was no longer in the ring, and when he glanced beyond the ropes, at the people being herded away from ringside, he caught no sight of it anywhere in the vicinity.

“Quickly. This way.” Best guided him to the edge of the ring and lifted the top rope. Marty stumbled through, falling onto his knees as he hit the dirt on the other side. He looked up, staring at one of the ceiling lights. The bright spot held his gaze; it pierced his skull, burning into his brain, and once again he saw the terrible stunted image of a grinning Humpty Dumpty. He closed his eyes and twisted his head to the side, trying to rid himself of the horror.

Some kind of fracas was occurring off to his left. Marty could not hear clearly, just a dull roar, as if his ears had popped under pressure. He opened his eyes to see, and was just in time to catch the fat Polish man in the Kappa tracksuit forcing his way through the crowd. Marty blinked. His ears felt as if they were stuffed with cotton wool. He wasn’t sure what was happening, but he realised that things were not right. Then, just before someone grabbed him by the back of the neck and dragged him away, the Polish man hit Marty hard in the side. The impact was dull, yet it burned briefly. Marty moved in slow motion, glancing down at his left side. There was a shock of red there: a stain. The stain was moving, blooming like a flower. Spreading across his left side…

That was when he realised that he had not been punched. He’d been stabbed.

Sound rushed back into his ears and he pressed his bandaged hand to the wound. The tips of his first two fingers slipped easily between the edges of the cut, and they went in deep. The blood was warm. He felt no pain.

“Jesus,” he said. He looked back up, towards the hanging light fixture near the ceiling, but saw only the incandescence of the bulb. Then he looked back at his hand. His fingers were red and slick. There was a white halo around them, from staring too long at the light.

“Get him over here,” said someone he’d never seen before. “Now!”

Erik Best was charging around the Barn like a bull, clearing out the rest of the crowd and directing his men to grab hold of the Polish contingent. The fat man was lying unconscious on the ground at the foot of a broad timber post. Someone had wrestled one of the other corner men onto his back and was slipping in a couple of punches to his kidney area. Two other men in suits had pinned the last Polish man to the wall, where they were taking turns to hit him in the gut.

Marty was being walked quickly by three men towards the opposite corner of the Barn. Doc, an old guy in a shabby grey suit, was laying out medical equipment on a plastic bench beside a low wooden table. He was smoking a cigarette and his hands were shaking. Carefully, he placed a scalpel, syringes, scissors and various dressings onto the flat top of the bench.

Marty was forced to lie down on the table, strong hands pushing down on his chest. He still could feel no pain — the rush of adrenalin was probably masking it, but he knew the numbness wouldn’t last for long. Soon his left side would be in flames.

He opened his mouth. His lips were dry. “Is it deep?”

The doctor looked up from where he was inspecting the wound. “Yes, but it isn’t fatal.”

Erik Best appeared at the side of the table. “Can you fix him up, Doc?” His face was shiny with sweat.

Marty was drifting in and out of a dream. None of this was really happening; it was like a play or a movie. He’d fallen asleep in front of the television.

“Not a problem,” said Doc, peeling off a pair of rubber gloves stained with blood and putting on a clean pair fresh from the sterile packet. “The wound’s located far enough forward that it’s missed his kidneys. Luckily, because it’s on the left side where it might have happened, it doesn’t seem to have hit the liver. Higher up, though, and it would have got his spleen.” Doc grinned around his cigarette. “I should really make a larger incision to explore the wound, but I’m happy enough with my diagnosis that it won’t be necessary. This is basically your textbook loin wound. I’ll use lignocaine to anesthetise locally, clean it out, and then I’ll chuck in some ethilon sutures to stitch him back up.” He smiled again, a man happy with his work.

“Quit the shop talk,” said Best, glancing around to look over his shoulder. “Just fucking patch him up, marra.”

The Barn had grown quiet now, as most of the onlookers had been moved outside. They would be inside the house by now, quaffing Best’s champagne and talking about how close they’d been to real violence, true bloodshed. There would be a lot of fucking going on afterwards, and Marty hoped they felt satisfied with his performance.

Marty watched in silence as Doc jabbed him with a needle, then, after what seemed like hours, the man began to apply the sutures. He was still smoking his cigarette — or had he lit up another? — and the entire process had taken on a surreal air.

So this is what it feels like? he thought. He’d often wondered, and had even known a couple of people who had been wounded by blades in the past. It’s not so bad. I’ve gone through worse.

“You did good,” said Erik Best, leaning down close to speak. “You gave them what they wanted. You entertained those fuckers.” Marty felt a soft, hot gust of breath against his cheek. He smelled Erik Best’s halitosis. “And that’s what it’s all about — entertainment.”

Best was grinning.

Marty nodded. He felt high, as if he were on heroin.

“And don’t worry about those Polish fucks. We’ve taken them away, and they won’t be coming back.”

Marty nodded again. “Humpty Dumpty,” he whispered.

“What?” Best’s face loomed large in his vision, like yet another monstrous image from his butchered past. But, thank God, it was not oversized and egg-shaped; thank fuck it did not belong to a monster.