Silent Voices

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

SIMON AND BRENDAN stood outside the low-rise apartment complex in Gateshead, in view of the Baltic Flour Mill and not too far from the banks of the River Tyne. They could hear traffic in the distance, and somewhere nearby loud music was playing — in a public park or a local beer garden — and it drifted on the still air, bringing with it a sense of subdued frivolity.

“Jesus,” said Simon. “It hasn’t half changed round here.”

Brendan nodded, but he did not speak. He looked exhausted. Simon reached out and touched his arm, rubbing the sleeve of his jacket like a concerned mother. “We don’t have to do this now, mate. You can go home, be with your family.”

Brendan turned to face him. “No,” he said, smiling lightly. “It’s fine. Let’s do this. There’s nothing to be gained from my going back. I told you, the kids are fine. Harry’s home and Jane’s coping. I’d only make things more stressful if I was hanging around at the house.”

Simon squeezed Brendan’s arm. His friend had been through a lot the previous night — Harry throwing up, and what could only have been a small bird erupting from his throat. Then the boy going into some kind of convulsive fit. The ambulance. The hospital. That was a lot to deal with, for anyone… especially a neurotic night owl with serious attachment issues.

Simon’s new mobile phone was yet to turn up from the distributor, although his new credit and debit cards had arrived by courier that morning, at the break of dawn. So when he’d got out of bed Simon had called the Coles from the payphone on the corner (which was miraculously still working) to find out how the kid was doing, and Jane had told him that Harry had finally been sent home to rest about an hour ago, feeling restless but more or less comfortable. They’d taken samples of his blood, done some tests, and little Harry had sat up in the hospital bed smiling and chatting and asking for food. He didn’t seem to realise what was going on, and had no memory of what had happened back at home the night before.

The doctors had taken plenty of time to convince themselves that Harry was in good health, apart from a sore throat and a minor headache, and then told the family that he could be taken home. He was prescribed infant aspirin for his aches and pains, a week off school to recuperate, and plenty of pampering from his parents.

“Come on, then,” he said, turning to face the apartment block. “Let’s get up there and see if he’s at home.”

The two men walked along the path at the side of the residents’ car park, looking at the expensive vehicles lined up in their private spaces: Jeeps and Land Rovers, sports models and coupés. There was a lot of money in those white-painted parking spaces.

“Looks like Marty’s landed on his feet.” Brendan seemed calmer now, more focused, if exhausted. “I always knew he would, eventually.”

“He’s only flat-sitting. It isn’t his. None of this belongs to him.” Simon felt a pang of envy, or perhaps it was more like bitterness, swelling in his stomach. He didn’t want anybody thinking that one of his old gang members had been more successful than him. He’d spent a long time, and given up a lot of personal involvement, to get where he was today, and he needed everyone to know that he’d earned it and that he was the top man. He didn’t like feeling this way, but he did feel it. Simon guarded his success closely, like a private stash of wealth; he hated feeling inferior to anyone, especially the people he’d left behind.

They approached the main entrance and Simon examined the neatly hand-written name cards above the buzzers. He wasn’t sure why he was doing this, because he already knew that Marty was staying in flat seven, the penthouse. But he was nosey; he liked to know things, even if they weren’t important. Just the knowing itself represented some kind of control, and it made him feel good to gather details towards himself like a child collecting shells on a lonely beach. It was not so much that knowledge was power, but that it gave him an edge over other people when it came time to push.

He glanced at Brendan, who was looking around furtively, like a criminal keeping an eye out for trouble. He smiled. Then, turning away, he pressed the buzzer for flat number seven.

There was no audible sound from where they were standing when he buzzed, so the two men just stood on the step for a while, waiting for something to happen. When nothing did, Simon reached out and pressed the small metal button again, and then leant forward and peered through the thickened glass panel, trying to make out any kind of movement in the entryway. He saw closed doors on the ground floor level, and a concrete staircase leading up to the floors above. There was nobody there; the place seemed deserted. Potted plants stood at intervals around the ground floor, like sentinels guarding the doors of each flat. He guessed that everyone who lived there was probably out at work — all the office workers, the bankers and solicitors, who could afford these high-spec dwellings no doubt put in long hours to meet the mortgage payments. There was no evidence of any children — no bikes or buggies or mislaid toys. These places were designed for young, upwardly-mobile people: professional couples and post-graduate flat-sharers. They were empty, even when everyone was at home. He could see how easily Marty Rivers might fit in with a set-up like this, making no mark, casting no shadow; moving through the rooms and corridors like a ghost.

“Nobody home,” he said, redundantly.

“Well, that’s a bit fucking anticlimactic.” Brendan sounded angry. He turned around and walked a few steps away from the entrance, kicking at the concrete flagstones. “I left my sick child at home for this?”

“Hey, it’s fine. It’ll be okay. Let’s go for a drink somewhere and come back later. In fact, I’ll tell you what… let’s leave a note.” He took out a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and started to look for a pen.

“Here,” said Brendan, handing him a blue biro with a chewed end and no lid.

Simon flattened the paper against the glass of the door and scribbled out a quick note: We came to see you. We’ll be back. Then he folded the paper in half and in half again, before writing Marty’s name on the sheet and sliding the note under the door.

“Think it’ll do any good?” Brendan’s eyes were wide. He looked afraid. He must be more tired than Simon could even imagine.

Simon shrugged. “Fuck knows, but we have to try. What else can we do?”

They turned back to the apartment complex and stared up at the top floor. The windows were tinted; no interior light could be seen behind the dark glass. The sun, high above them, was more a promise of warmth that failed to deliver. Simon wondered if they were being watched. It certainly felt that way; as if Marty were up there, hiding, and examining their every move. Without even thinking about what he was doing, Simon raised his right hand, turned it so that the palm was directed towards the window, and opened the fingers. He made a slow fist, one finger at a time: the secret salute of the Three Amigos.

Come and see, he mouthed silently, his lips forming words that he held deep inside. Come and help us.

MARTY WATCHED THEM leave from the living room, standing before the large window in his old jeans and a torn T-shirt. He had not bathed this morning, and his mouth tasted stale. He idly rubbed the side of his stomach with the palm of his hand, feeling the lump there. It was like a growth, a tumour, and occasionally it moved — a slight twitching motion, like a dog makes while it is sleeping.

It was strange seeing his old friends again, especially together like that. They’d both changed quite a bit, but he would have recognised them anywhere. There was something about the way they moved, some trace of the children they’d been. Simon’s swagger, Brendan’s reticence… the boys had become men, and yet something vital had been left behind.

And there was the way that Simon had saluted him, just the way they used to when they were kids.

He knew why they were here. He’d picked up Simon’s messages on his voicemail. At the sound of his old friend’s voice, whatever was hiding within him — and he knew what it was; he just had trouble naming it now, because he suspected it could hear his thoughts — had turned right around inside him, hurting him. Doc had claimed that the wound was clean, that there was nothing inside, but Marty didn’t believe that. He could feel it, curling around his abdomen: a small, squat invader, using his body as a home. Part of him knew that none of this could possibly be real, but another part of him — the part that had been stunted as a child, not allowed to develop properly — knew that it was real, and he was being possessed, or haunted, or both, by something from a childhood nursery rhyme. The infant Marty Rivers’ deepest fears were manifesting inside the adult version; he was a cocoon, and soon that fear would hatch out, the egg within the egg, the horror coiled up within a nest of horrors. Soon it would return to the outside world, and Marty had no idea what might happen afterwards.

He turned away from the window and grabbed his drink. Whisky for breakfast again: this was becoming a habit. He took a sip and went through into the bedroom, where he stripped off his T-shirt and stood before the mirror. His body was smooth, the muscles visible beneath his skin. At first glance, it looked like he had a bit of a belly, like the unfit farts who hung around on the old estate. Then, upon further investigation, it was clear that the bulge in his abdomen was irregular; it wasn’t formed by layers of fat. There was something… unnatural, weird and disturbing about it.

He laid a hand on the bulge and felt it shiver. It was like being pregnant, he supposed, and the thought was almost amusing.

Almost.

He recalled a newspaper report from a few years ago about a man who’d gone through breast implant surgery after a drunken bet. There was full-spread story in one of the red-top newspapers, with photos showing the man proudly displaying his new breasts in a low-cut shirt, the top buttons undone to show off his cleavage. At the time the images had repelled Marty; they had made him afraid in a way that he didn’t understand, and this had quickly turned to disgust. Right now, standing before the mirror and examining his own altered form, he realised that it was the notion of invasion, of something foreign being present inside a person’s body that had caused him such grief. That was why he’d never liked women with fake breasts; the thought of something underneath their skin, nestling there, had always made him feel slightly afraid.

The shape slithered around inside him, coiling around his innards. It wasn’t painful. The sensation was even mildly pleasant. But the feelings it provoked were deeply disturbing, at levels he’d not even been aware of before. When he closed his eyes, he saw three boys bound by leaves and twigs in a secluded grove, and shadows moving, patrolling the boundaries like jailors.

“What do you want?” he said, speaking to the mirror. His silent invader tightened its grip and his heart began to pound harder. He thought of Simon and Brendan out there in the car park; he saw once again Simon’s splayed fingers making a fist as he waved up at the window, mouthing words that Marty had been unable to lip-read.

He knew what they wanted. They wanted his help. They wanted him to join forces and help fight something. Just like he’d been fighting his whole life, but alone, standing apart from the crowd. Now it was time to forget about being the lone wolf and reach out, take hold of someone else’s hand. Maybe he would feel another hand gripping his own, and whoever it belonged to would lead him out of the darkness in which he had always been lost.

Marty put on his jacket and left the room, then the flat. It was time to get things done.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

THEY WERE SITTING at a table in the window, looking down at the river, drinking slowly, not speaking much; just waiting. Hoping for something to happen, waiting for the momentum to kick in and move them.

The bar — The Mill on the River — was new, with shiny tables and chairs and up-market clientele stopping off for a few drinks or a spot of lunch after viewing the paintings in the Baltic galleries. The bar (it was a bar, not a pub; to people like Simon and Brendan, there was a crucial difference) sat in the shadow of the old Art Deco style building, and benefited from its new status as one of the North’s top art venues.

Brendan wasn’t comfortable in places like this. He felt more at home in dingy drinking dens on impoverished estates, sharing space with drunken old men, youngsters already on their way down the slippery slope of drink-dependency, and broken-down single mothers looking for a brief window out of the hole they’d made for themselves. People in nice suits bothered him. He felt uneasy around them, as if he were an interloper and they knew it.

He sat opposite Simon sipping his pint — an expensive round; almost a tenner for two beers — and staring over his friend’s shoulder. The river was the same one he’d known all his life, but from this angle it looked different. The colour was lighter, the slight waves less threatening, the current moving at a slower pace that might not tug you under if you fell in. The river he knew and loved — and sometimes hated — would pull you down and kill you within seconds.

“Just relax,” said Simon. His face looked somehow loose on his skull, as if the last few days had tired him beyond anything he’d ever expected. Brendan knew the feeling. It wasn’t just Harry’s episode, the trip to the hospital and the night without sleep; there was a lot more going on than that. Like the river, his life had developed a weird current, and he was being dragged along by forces he would not have dreamed of months before. Even his own body was rebelling, taking on a life of its own. The skin of his back was trying to tear away from his frame, seeking a freedom that during darker moments he suspected might benefit him.

When he’d returned from the hospital in the early hours of the morning, he’d made sure his family were asleep and then gone into the bathroom. Stripping off his clothes, he’d been presented with a hideous sight: the flesh from the nape of his neck down to the base of his spine, just above his backside, was infected again. The skin had torn and split; viscous yellow fluid was slathered all over him. He was polluted; his body could no longer accept what was being done, the badness that he had held inside him for so long. His system was rejecting the filth; or was the filth simply coming out to play?

“I need to go to the bathroom.” He slid his pint glass across the table and staggered across the room, following the signs to the gents. As he pushed through the door he bumped into a man coming the other way, and snarled. The man — who was talking loudly into a mobile phone — stumbled aside, letting Brendan pass, and there was such a look of pity in his eyes that Brendan wanted to smash the guy’s face in.

He walked along a narrow hallway, bouncing off the walls, and came to the toilets. He pushed open the door to the gents and leaned against it, breathing heavily. His back felt soft, yielding more than it should against the wooden door, but there was no pain.

“Oh, fuck…” He looked around the small room. There was nobody else in there. He kicked open the four cubicle doors, but they were also empty. Then he grabbed a tall litter bin from the corner and pushed it over onto its side on the floor at the base of the door. Dirty paper towels spilled from the bin. It was a flimsy barricade, but at least it would warn him if someone was coming. He would have time to duck inside a cubicle and out of the way.

Brendan approached the wall-length mirror set above the row of stainless steel sinks. The sinks were pristine. In fact, the entire room was spotless — no piss on the floor tiles, no shit stains on the back of the cubicle doors, no graffiti scrawled on the walls.

He stared at himself in the mirror. His eyes were sunken, as if his skull was swallowing them, and his cheeks were dark, hollow. His hair had never looked so thin; he could see patches of pink scalp beneath the greasy filaments. He ran the cold tap and ducked his head to the sink, scooped cold water onto his brow. It did no good; he could not cool down. Something was boiling inside him, and it wasn’t anger or resentment, not any more. It was pollution. He was polluted by whatever had happened to the three of them, tainted by the influence of that weekend.

He leaned forward, his hands gripping the sides of the sink, and stared into his own dead eyes. Red-rimmed, yellow at the edges, as shallow as glass. He looked wasted, defeated; the fight was already done, and they had lost.

His back crawled.

“Leave me alone…”

He thought of goat eyes and hummingbird wings.

As if in answer to his plea, a clicking sound started up behind him, inside one of the cubicles. It was soft at first, like someone snapping their fingers to low music, but as he turned to face the sound it intensified, growing stronger and faster.

Brendan walked slowly across the room, his feet whispering on the floor tiles. When he reached the open cubicle door he halted, listening. The sound was emanating from the toilet bowl. He took another step forward, so that he was standing over the bowl, as if preparing to unzip his pants and take a leak. The clicking sound continued. Brendan went down on his knees, grasping the sides of the porcelain bowl, and stared down into the clean, still water. Only his reflection stared back up at him, but it looked thin, ghostly: the face of a man who was haunting himself.

He pulled back from the image, a gag reflex causing his own throat to echo the sounds coming from the bowl. He fell backwards, onto his arse, and pushed with his feet against the bottom of the bowl. Sliding backwards across the tiles, he closed his eyes and wished that all of this would just stop, that everything would go away and leave him alone.

The clicking sound ceased.

Slowly, Brendan got to his feet and returned to his spot before the mirror. Scrawled across the glass in what looked like grease — perhaps oil and sweat wiped off human skin — was a word he’d never encountered before:

Loculus.

Brendan peered at the strange word, unsure of what it meant. Was it a name, a place, a person? What the fuck did it mean?

The word faded, as if drawn in mist. He reached out and rubbed the mirror clean, and saw a fleeting, jerky movement behind him. He spun around, but of course there was nothing there. He was spooked, seeing things. He could no longer trust even his own senses. Sight, sound, smell, touch… liars, all of them. He doubted now that he had even seen the word written on the glass.

He took off his jacket and laid it on the next sink along, draping the collar over the taps so that it wouldn’t fall onto the floor. Then, without looking down, he began to unbutton his shirt. He did it slowly, methodically, not wanting to rush. Still there was no pain; no feeling at all. His entire back was numb, as if the nerves had been stripped away, the meat cleaved off the bone.

He placed his shirt on top of his jacket.

Even facing forward, looking at himself in the mirror, he could see the red blotches as they crept around his sides beneath his arms, caressing his small love handles. He turned to the left, looking at his right side, and the first of the boils came into view. Whatever had entered him — possessed him? — that night, when the acorn had disgorged its occupant, had done this to him. It had crawled inside him, letting out the twenty-year-old pollution but also bringing its own toxins, mingling them, stirring them up.

He turned the rest of the way around, craning his neck so that he could keep an eye on the damage in the mirror. Last night he had noticed the suggestion of something within the mass of ruptured tissue, something with eyes. Today that formation was clearer, the picture taking shape.

A rudimentary face was forming out of the chaos across his back, the marks and striations, the ruined flesh. A face that was at once familiar: features that somehow resembled his own.

The face sat between his shoulder blades, its eyelids level with the centre of his back. Its nose stuck out of the skin, the nostrils perfectly formed, and he could even make out the bone structure he’d stared at every morning in the mirror, the cheeks he’d spent years shaving every other day, the lips with which he had kissed his wife and his children countless times.

Brendan tried not to think about his dead twin often, but right now he was unable to think of anything else.

He’d heard the story many times as a child, and even researched the facts when he was older. He had not thought about it in any great depth since his own children were born, but now the memories surged forward from the darkness at the back of his brain.

He recalled the doctor’s description by rote; it was like a fairy tale, an old story told to ensure his good behaviour. An old story about how, when he was in the womb, still an egg, more or less, he had been one of a set of twins. His egg had absorbed the other egg. The process was called Vanishing Twin Syndrome. It was a quaint term, and he supposed it was named that way to lessen the blow, but it added to the fairytale quality of the account, making it into a story rather than a statement of fact.

Brendan, in his own pragmatic way, preferred to call it a case of in utero cannibalism.

He recalled what he had read in books and online. During the first trimester of pregnancy, a foetus would spontaneously abort and the foetal tissue would be absorbed, by the other twin, the placenta, or the mother. It was more common than people might think. The latest figures estimated that Vanishing Twin Syndrome occurred in 21-30% of all multiple pregnancies.

A common thing, then: one twin consuming the other.

At least it had not happened to Jane. They had been blessed with their own twins, and because of no genetic history of multiple births in her family, they supposed that his genes were responsible for the happy result. He was a twin. And his twin’s face had now appeared on his back, like Jesus in a bowl of cornflakes or Elvis on a cheeseburger bun.

No sweat.

Nothing wrong with that.

He stared at the face in the mirror. When it opened its goat-like eyes, he was not even shocked or surprised. It seemed so natural, so perfectly natural, that the face on his back would open its eyes and smile. There were no teeth in its mouth — not yet, anyway — so the smile was rather crude, unformed, but it was friendly enough in its way.

The bathroom floor tilted sideways and Brendan set his feet apart to ride out the movement. Then, when the room settled down and stillness was restored, he said, “What do you want from me?”

The eyes in his back closed; the face sunk into the pus-lathered spots and pustules. Brendan felt dampness on his cheeks. He reached up and brushed away the tears. How strange, he thought. How strange it is to mourn someone who has never really lived.

The bathroom door opened an inch or two before hitting the bin. “Hey,” said a voice. “What’s going on? I need to use the bog.”

“Just a minute,” said Brendan, rushing over to lean against the door, to prevent it from opening any further and allowing an outsider to intrude upon this family business. “There’s a bit of a mess in here… just cleaning it up. Could you use the ladies instead?”

The man grunted, huffed and puffed, and then went away.

Brendan went to the cubicle and wiped at his shoulders with paper tissues. Then he layered them over his back, like a second skin, before he put back on his shirt and his jacket and moved the bin away from the door.

He took one last look in the mirror before leaving. The smile he presented looked odd, disjointed. It made him look as if he’d lost his mind.

“Loculus,” he said to his retreating reflection, wondering again what it meant, and if he was even pronouncing it correctly.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

BRENDAN LOOKED ILL when he sat back down at the table. His hands shook as he gripped his glass, and he slopped beer down the front of his shirt.

This time Simon did not ask if he was okay; he was beginning to feel like a mother hen, clucking around the favourite chick. He felt bad for thinking it, but Brendan was still putting up walls, keeping him out, and if that was the way he wanted to operate, there was little to be done about it for now. He could only push so hard before breaking something, and that had never been his aim.

Simon finished his beer and began to stand. “Same again?” he said, pushing the chair back from the table.

“I’ll get them.” The voice came from slightly behind him and off to his right.

Across the table, Brendan’s eyes widened.

Simon turned slowly. He knew exactly who would be standing there, but still it came as a shock to see Marty Rivers scowling at him, his broad shoulders blocking out a substantial amount of daylight from the window.

“Jesus,” said Simon, brushing against the table and making the glasses wobble. The moment stretched, becoming elastic.

“No. It’s just me. Marty. I believe you two characters have been looking for me.”

“You were there, weren’t you? Inside the flat when we came round.”

Marty nodded.

“Why didn’t you come out?”

Marty shrugged. His shoulders were huge. His entire frame was massive: wide chest, squared-off waist, thick arms. He looked exactly like what he was: a fighter. “I like to come to people on my terms. Even old friends. Now… what can I get you?”

Simon told him the round and as the enormous man walked across to the bar, he glanced at Brendan. “You’re fucking quiet,” he said.

Brendan nodded. “Aye, sorry. I’m distracted. Just let me get my breath back — yeah?”

Marty returned with the drinks, setting them down on the table. He pulled up a chair and sat alongside Simon, so that the two of them were facing Brendan across the table. Somebody chose that moment to turn on a CD player behind the bar. Low music stalked them through the tables and chairs — a female vocalist singing a bluesy tune.

“Well, well, well. This is nice.” Marty had a pint of lager and a whisky chaser. He sipped the lager, his eyes unmoving, seemingly unblinking. His face was unreadable. “All of us here like this, having a friendly drink.”

“It’s good to see you,” said Brendan. It was a feeble opening gambit, but it was better than saying nothing. “I mean, after all this time… I was never quite sure if you were dead or alive, or if you were even still based in the northeast.”

Marty swallowed. “Yeah, this is a regular fucking reunion, isn’t it? Just like in the movies. Like The Big Chill, only with added psychological damage.”

Simon smiled. He couldn’t help it. Marty’s comment wasn’t exactly funny, not really, but in that instant it seemed it. “So you’re a film buff, then?”

Marty winked over the rim of his pint glass. “I love films, me. I’m a regular cinephile. Odds are, if I haven’t seen the film I’ll have at least read the book.”

Simon was taken aback by the distance between the three of them. There were years separating the three men, yes, and lifestyle choices too, but there was also some uncommon kind of magic that had kept them apart — and right now, as they sat and drank in a riverside bar, that magic was weakening. He was aware of walls coming down, of barriers tumbling, and for the first time in longer than he could calculate, he felt at home in his own skin.

“So you got my messages?”

Marty smiled. “Yes, I did. I suppose we can dispense with the social niceties and get right to it.”

Simon nodded. “So you know why I’m here, and why we need you?”

“I can make an educated guess.” Marty took a long pull from his beer and then a small sip of whisky.

“Go on, then,” said Simon. “Be my guest.”

“So much for the tearful reunion… Okay.” Marty put down his glass. “You’ve got it into your head that you can change the way you feel, the way you’ve always felt, if we all get together and talk about the past. If we can come to some kind of conclusion regarding what went on back then, you hope that it’ll free you and allow you to have a better future.” He paused, licked his lips. “I’m guessing there’s a woman involved. Maybe someone you think you should love but you can’t… and you blame the past for this. You think that if you can sever all ties with what may or may not have happened to the three of us, it’ll let you feel about this woman the way you believe you should.” He stopped, leaned back in his chair, rubbing at his stomach. “So, am I right or am I right?”

“Very insightful,” said Simon. “But you’re only half right. I do believe that the three of us need to confront our shared past, but I think we need to do it more literally.”

Brendan shuffled on his chair. He picked up his drink and held it, not moving it anywhere near his mouth.

Simon rubbed his chin, feeling the stubble growth. “I think we need to go in there together — the Needle. We need to make like it’s twenty years ago and march right the fuck in there, then shout and scream and force whatever the fuck held us in there to make an appearance.”

Marty sat forward again, his arms flexing and pulling his shirt tight. “And then what? Kick the shit out of it?”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Simon. “At first I thought we were going to have to pull down the place, brick by brick, so I bought it from the council. Took me ages to convince them, and I paid well over the odds. Now I realise that won’t be necessary. Simply by coming back here, I seem to have triggered something. Whatever’s been hiding here, making its nest under the streets of the Grove, it’s waking up… it’s waking from a long sleep. Can’t you feel it?”

Marty did not reply.

“You’ve been having dreams, haven’t you?”

Marty nodded, but still he did not speak.

“Weird dreams that feel just like reality, but fucked-up, messed around. Apocalyptic visions, monsters from the past chasing you, things keeping pace with you in the dark?”

“Yes,” said Brendan, joining in at last. He was gripping his glass too tight; his knuckles were white. “Yes, that’s it. All of us… the three of us… we’ve been dreaming about the same things, the same place. Haven’t we?”

“Yes,” said Marty.

“Yes,” said Simon.

“Another drink?” Brendan slammed down his glass.

Marty laughed softly.

Simon shook his head. “Is that all you guys do around here, drink? I’ve not drunk so fucking much in my life since I’ve come back.”

“You’re out of practice,” said Marty. “And I’ll have the same again, thanks.” He glanced at Brendan, smiled, and let out another soft chuckle.

“It really is good to see you,” said Brendan. “Both of you.” When Simon looked over, he saw how pale Brendan’s face had become, and he felt such a great wave of pity that it pressed him down into his chair, pinning him there.

Before he could say anything, Brendan stood and went to the bar, fishing nervously inside his jeans pocket for his wallet.

“Is he okay?” Marty leaned in close. He smelled of whisky and expensive aftershave. And beneath that, a deep, musky odour that made Simon think of violence: of punches thrown and threats made, of kicked heads and split skin and spilled blood.

“I’m not sure. His kid’s ill. Last night, something strange happened. He went into some odd kind of shock, like a trance or something. Threw up and something… well, something really weird came out. A bird.”

Marty closed his eyes. “A hummingbird,” he said.

“How did you know? How the hell did you know about that?” Simon’s hand made a fist on the tabletop; his nails scratched against the damp wood.

“I don’t know. I… I just knew. When you said it, an image came into my head. Like a dream I once had but couldn’t remember until now. The hummingbirds are important — we saw them back then, too. Can you feel it?” His eyes were wide, the pupils dilated. “It’s like doors are opening inside me. Connections are being made, loose ends tying themselves together in neat little knots. Something’s happening…”

Simon shook his head. “I wish I could say the same. It’s what I wanted, why I’m here. But I don’t… I don’t feel any of that. My brain feels like when you push your knuckles into your eyes to fight sleep: that same kind of bunched-up pressure, when the darkness behind your eyelids starts to spark. That’s all. I get nothing else.”

Brendan had returned with the drinks. He set them down on the table, beer spilling over the rims. “I feel it,” he said. “Just like Marty said. Cogs are turning; they’re moving together, starting up some kind of motion. It’s slow — very, very slow — but it’s happening. What happened to Harry is only part of it. We can stop it, if we try. We can put an end to this shit.”

Simon felt empty. Why was he the only one who could not feel the energies massing, the world reconfiguring and taking on a new shape around them? It wasn’t fair; it was not right. He felt cheated, as if he were the victim of a con or a grift. He, Simon, should be the one to feel it first, the man to set off the reaction. After all, it was he who had come back here, in search of the truth, so it was only fitting that he was the one who acted as a catalyst for whatever would take place when the Three Amigos banded together for a fight.

The music on the stereo had changed to soft rock, a power ballad. The volume was still low, but one of the barmaids was singing along quietly as she worked. Simon watched her as she glided the length of the bar, picking up glasses, washing them, rubbing them dry, and mouthing the words of the song.

“Listen,” he said. “Why don’t we try something? How about this: each of us talks about what we can remember from that time, when we were held in the Needle? I know it isn’t much, but maybe if we piece our memories together we might start to see a picture forming. It might help me to feel everything you’re feeling.”

Brendan looked nervous. He was biting his lower lip. “Do you think it’s worth it? I mean, will it actually achieve anything?”

Marty leaned forward again, his big arms pressing against the table. “Is this, like, our Rashomon moment?” He smiled, shook his head. “Actually, I think it’s a good idea. If nothing else, it might prompt something, press a button in one of our heads and free up other memories, images, feelings… whatever.”

“Exactly,” said Simon. “Are you in, Brendan?”

Brendan stared at the two of them, and then finally he nodded. “Okay.” He took a drink. “So who goes first?”

There was a slight pause, a silence within the greater silence that had surrounded each of them for two decades, and then Marty spoke: “I went back there, you know. To that grove of trees. After I had my bike accident. You know about that?”

The other two nodded.

“Well,” continued Marty. “I was in a coma for a while — not long, and it wasn’t too deep. But while I was unconscious I went back there, and I stood enclosed within that grove of old oaks. I remember…” — he closed his eyes — “I remember it was night, and the stars looked miles away, too high to be much more than pinpricks. I could hear that same clicking sound — Captain Clickety’s voice — but it was too far away to scare me. In fact, now that I think about it, the clicking sound was moving away, leaving me behind, and for a moment I felt abandoned. Then the trees and the bushes began to rustle. I felt that something was stalking me, or at least watching me from the undergrowth. I think it wanted me to follow it.”

The barmaid was still singing. The bar had emptied out; there were not many people left drinking, other than the three men at the table in the window. Sunlight lanced through the glass, making a dagger shape on the table.

“It was weird,” said Marty, “but I think I was looking for that girl — the one who spoke to us when we were tied up with branches in the middle of the grove of trees. I think… I think she saved us.”

“Hailey,” said Brendan in a whisper.

“Yeah, Hailey. The hummingbird girl. That was it. I could never quite remember her name. I was looking for her. I’m not sure why, but I needed to see her, perhaps to tell her something. Maybe to thank her. Other than that, all I could remember about actually being there the first time was that it was dark, I was scared, and that fucking bird-faced cunt was tormenting us. I think he probably tortured us — abused us, or something.”

Brendan was nodding. “Yeah, yeah… that’s what I remember most: the torture.” He looked paler than ever, and his neck was scrawny, like that of a chicken. “It fucked me up, that torture. I don’t remember any specifics, but it left me with…” He glanced at the others, his eyes wet, on the verge of tears.

“Go on,” said Simon. “We won’t judge you. Not us.”

Brendan nodded. “Okay. Here goes. It left me with a kind of kink; a fetish, I suppose you’d call it. I read a lot of bondage magazines, watch the videos. I like to watch it happen to other people, to see them tied up and… and abused. Nothing bad, not real violence. Consensual stuff, light spanking, and that. I just like to watch.” The colour came back to his cheeks; he was blushing. “Jesus, it left me liking bondage…”

Marty turned to Simon. “What about you? What are your memories?”

Simon’s head dropped. He stared at a damp patch on the tabletop. “Not much. Not much at all. Just the grove of trees… and that’s about it. I remember everything before that, when we made that stupid den, and thinking we were heroes that night, tracking down some kind of beast. But afterward, when we went in there… there’s nothing. Nothing but the trees. The fucking trees.”

A silence elbowed its way between them at the table. None of them spoke for a moment or two, as if they were each afraid to shatter the quiet that had fallen across them. Background sounds swelled: the music, the chatter of the handful of people left in the bar, the barmaid’s soft, lilting voice as she continued to sing.

Then, finally, Marty spoke.

“Let me ask you something,” he said, clasping his hands together on the table in front of him. “Does this — any of this — feel weird to you, or does it feel… well, normal? Does it feel natural?”

“You mean us?” Simon glanced at the other two men, one at a time. “Meeting here again, after all this time?”

Marty nodded.

“Not weird to me,” said Brendan. “Not any more. I thought it did, at first, when it was just me and Simon. But now it’s just like you say — it feels natural, as if we never parted.”

“Yeah,” said Simon. “Yes, that’s exactly how it feels. It feels like–”

Marty butted in before he could finish: “It feels like we left each other yesterday, as children, and then met up again today as adults. It feels like no fucking time has passed at all.”

The quiet fell once again around their shoulders, covering their heads, their mouths. They all stared at each other, eyes flicking from face to face, seeing beyond the masks of age. For all intents and purposes, the men sitting around the table were once again little boys. They were young again. But this time they were not afraid.

“You know,” continued Marty, “I’ve always lived my life on the edge of glory. Never quite got there, just prowled around on the wrong side of the ropes, trying to fight my way in. Now I finally realise that’ll never happen. I’m not going to make it. But maybe with you guys I can still make a difference, even if it’s just to us. To the rest of our lives.”

The barmaid’s singing built to a small crescendo. The song was a sad one, and she knew the words by heart.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“WE HAVE TO go back,” said Simon, breaking the spell. “The three of us, all together… We have to go back in there and kick-start the whole thing, make it happen again. But this time we need to fight it, and beat it. This time, we stop it dead in its tracks.”

The other two Amigos said nothing, but the mutual consent was evident in their faces, the posture of their bodies, the way they each sat forward in their chairs, as if eager to meet something head-on.

“We have to go there now, before we change our minds. We can’t wait, not any longer.”

He could see in their eyes that they agreed, despite remaining silent. Their features were old, worn, and tired, but those eyes — they were young boys, peering out from behind the broken-down faces of men.

CHAPTER THIRTY

JANE WAS WORRIED. Brendan had called her half an hour ago and filled her in on the latest news.

They’d met up with Marty and they were going inside the Needle; all three of them, together again, to see what memories they could stir up. Jane was put in mind of three boys poking a wasp’s nest with sticks, and the wasps going crazy, their stingers dripping with poison. It was a stupid image, really — a ridiculous comparison — but nonetheless, she felt that her husband and his old friends were about to disturb things that might just be best left to rest in peace.

She moved around the house like a Prozac phantom, her mind in a haze, her eyes roaming across every surface, her gaze unable to settle in one place. She felt simultaneously energised and exhausted. It was a strange sensation, like running through treacle.

Harry was fine. The boy was sleeping soundly, oblivious to the concern he’d caused.

But she couldn’t stop checking on him; she’d been up there three times in the past hour and was, even now, turning to climb the stairs again. She grabbed the handrail and began to ascend, her mind floating ahead of her. He’s okay, she thought, not knowing if she meant Brendan or their son. We’re all okay.

At the top of the stairs she turned and walked along the landing. The bathroom door was open. She could see the mirror through the gap; it was greyed-out, steamy with condensation. Had she taken a bath earlier? She must have done, but could not remember anything about it. Perhaps she’d bathed the twins — or maybe just Isobel, while Harry rested.

“Jesus,” she whispered. “I’m losing the plot.”

Written in the condensation was a nonsense word: Loculus. What was that, the name of a cartoon character or a TV show? Maybe Harry had been up and about…

Jane stopped outside the twins’ room and waited. She didn’t know what it was she was waiting for, but the pause felt right. It seemed like the thing to do. She pressed the palms of both of her hands against the door, and then leaned in close, pushing the side of her face against the wood. She listened, but could hear nothing. Of course she couldn’t. Harry was asleep. Isobel was at school, and then later she was going to a hastily arranged sleepover at a friend’s house on Far Grove Way.

The twins used to share a room when they were very young. She’d tried to separate them when they got older, and it had caused an uproar, with stamping feet and infant tantrums. She’d relented, but eventually they’d have to be separated again, and she knew that it would cause more trouble. They hated being apart, even when they were asleep. All the things you hear about twins had proved to be true.

Not for the first time she wondered about the origin of the twins; how Brendan had almost been a twin, so the genetic makeup was there, in his DNA, that someone on his side of the family could produce a multiple birth. But wasn’t it meant to skip a generation? She supposed it had, in a way, because Brendan’s twin had died in utero, not even given the chance to form into a proper foetus. It had been just the size of a thumbnail, probably even smaller. No eyes, no nose, no features of any kind. A floating being, without even a soul…

But Jane didn’t believe in the soul. She was an atheist. The lure of religion had not drawn her to its flame, not in the way that it had her mother. Jane’s mum had seen God as a way out of an abusive marriage; Jane had seen God as a convenient crutch for the weak to lean on. Where had God been when her father had beaten her, trying so hard not to touch her in the same way that he’d touched her sister? Where was the Holy Ghost when she’d lain awake at night, listening to his footsteps as he roamed the house, drinking and muttering and talking himself out of raping his own daughter? Some might say that it was God who had kept him away from her, but Jane preferred to think that it was the threat of going back to prison; he’d served three years for sexual assault when he was in his early twenties, and the experience had scarred him enough that he could not ever face another visit.

She pushed open the bedroom door and stepped inside. The curtains were closed, but dim light penetrated the cheap material. The room looked as if it were filled with dust; the air shuddered as she moved through the space. Harry was a motionless mound in his red plastic Lightning McQueen bed with the Ben 10 quilt pulled over his head. His toys were dotted around his side of the room, on shelves and cupboard tops, and scattered across the floor. Isobel’s side was much tidier; she had inherited her mother’s eye for neatness and formality.

Harry didn’t seem to be moving at all. She was worried that he’d stopped breathing. She knew that she was being silly, that the doctors had given him a clean bill of health, but still… when you were a parent, it paid to be just a little bit paranoid.

Slowly she crossed the room and stood at the side of the bed. She reached down and pulled back the quilt, revealing the sweaty top of Harry’s head. His hair was soaking. She tugged the quilt down past the back of his knees (he was sleeping on his belly, as always). Still Harry did not move.

“Hey, kidda. You okay?”

He did not even stir.

Jane’s heart felt as if it were gradually climbing her chest, inch by inch, making its way towards her throat. She swallowed; her throat ached. She heard a strange humming sound, but it was only inside her head.

“Harry?” Her voice was croaky.

She reached down and nudged his shoulder, just a little, barely hard enough to move his little body. Then she did it again — harder this time, applying more pressure, easily enough to wake him.

Harry was still.

“Harry… baby… wake up for Mummy.”

She dropped down onto her knees at the side of the bed. Her hands ran over his back, feeling beneath his armpits to see if he had a temperature. His skin was cold; too cold. Not icy, not quite, but cold enough to be of concern. She rolled him over, onto his back.

“Harry!”

His face was pale. His lips were a light shade of blue. His eyelids did not flutter; the muscles in his face were loose, relaxed. She shook him, hard, trying to wake him. “Harry! Time to get up!” Her voice had become shrill, the tone rising as the panic set in. She fought hard to keep herself under control, to keep calm, but she recalled the hummingbird that had erupted from his throat, and the convulsions on the bedroom floor. Nobody seemed to want to talk about the hummingbird, at the hospital. They ignored it in the hope that it would go away, much like the bird itself had flown out of the room. The convulsions, though, fascinated them. They’d loved the fucking convulsions: they were normal, regular symptoms that could be studied and explained away. They were nothing at all like the insane image of a tiny American bird being expelled from a little boy’s throat.

She picked up her son and ran for the door, cradling his head in the same way she’d done when he was a baby. She hurried downstairs — not too fast, just in case she fell and broke both of their necks — and made her way to the phone. She called an ambulance first, quietly amazed at how calmly she was able to handle the conversation.

She hung up the phone and pressed her fingers against Harry’s neck. There was a pulse; it was strong, regular. He wasn’t dead. That was good. It was something she could hang on to, a rope to cling to in the darkness, which was rising slowly from the floor like a thick mist to consume her.

Then she called Brendan, to tell him what was happening — even though she didn’t have a fucking clue what was happening. She needed him here, with her, not on some stupid wild goose chase with a couple of blokes who had never really been his friends, not since childhood, and perhaps not even then, because they’d all been too young and far too selfish to know what friendship really meant.

She punched his number into the phone and listened to the ringtone, holding her boy against her breathless chest and wondering if she still had the strength to speak.

It was only when she got the recorded message, saying that his phone could not be reached, that she began to cry.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

AS THEY APPROACHED the Needle, Marty couldn’t help but think of a scene from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western about three criminals in search of Civil War treasure. The familiar theme tune filled his head; voices chanted, the warbling score sent a thrill — somewhere between delight and dread — through the channels of his body.

The Three Amigos were back in town, and this time they wouldn’t go down without a fight.

“What’s so funny?” Brendan stared at him, his brow creased and his eyebrows slanted.

“Nothing,” said Marty. “Just a daft thought, that’s all.”

What the hell am I doing here? he thought. How did they get me to agree to this? Two strangers in a bar, reminding me of old times I’d rather forget.

He stared up at the tower block, feeling a strange sense of black-tinted nostalgia. The last time they’d all been here together, something monstrous had occurred. None of them could recall the details, but the act had spread a rancid shadow across the rest of their lives. It seemed melodramatic to think in those terms, but it was true. No other language could do the thought justice: there was nothing subtle about what had happened to them here, and he only wished that he could remember what it had been.

Or did he?

That was the big question, wasn’t it? Did he really want to know what had gone on inside those tall concrete walls? Was he so eager to find out what had been done to them, when the sturdy upright panels had been so readily shunted aside to reveal a dark grove of trees and whatever waited beyond them, its intentions darker still?

Even now, standing before the building, he was unable to answer his own questions.

The sides of the tower looked black in the odd afternoon light, as if they were covered in oil. The blackness had a metallic sheen, and it shimmered. The illusion did not last; it was gone in moments, but it was long enough for Marty to realise whatever they had come to confront knew they were here. His stomach lurched; the thing within him shifted slowly, deliberately, chafing up against his internal organs and rattling like a prisoner at the bars of his ribcage. He was convinced that he felt a tiny hand-foot clutching his liver, and his chest took another knock from the wrong side… the inside.

He clutched at his side, gritting his teeth against the pain.

Whatever Doc said, he was convinced that he was carrying around inside him some kind of cartoon demon, a hand-drawn phantom from his childhood, a monster that had leapt from the pages of a book he should never have been allowed to read.

“So,” said Simon. “Are we going to do this? Now, in broad daylight?”

Brendan nodded, quiet again.

“If this was a horror film, we’d wait till after dark before coming snooping around in a derelict tower block.”

Brendan giggled, but it didn’t sound quite right, like a pressure valve, a release of pent-up tension.

“Fuck it,” said Marty, tensing his body, trying to ignore the tenant inside his gut. “What have we got to lose?”

“Everything,” said Brendan. Now he was deadly serious; there was no hint of humour in his voice.

“Nothing,” said Simon, moving forward and fumbling with his keys as he approached the gate in the hoardings. “Nothing at all.” He waited a moment, looking up at the sky. Then he glanced back down at the ground, as if establishing his position in the universe. “This isn’t exactly going as I’d planned,” he said. “Not at all, if I’m honest.”

Marty tried not to sigh. He was growing impatient, but he didn’t want to let the others see. “How do you mean?”

Brendan placed his hands on the gate, as if trying to divine something of the atmosphere on the other side simply by touching it.

“Well,” said Simon, “I thought we’d have a few drinks, catch up on each other’s lives, and then slowly work our way up to this point.”

“Why waste time?” said Marty. “Now that we’re back together, it doesn’t feel like any time has passed. We agree on this, don’t we?”

Simon nodded. Brendan said nothing; just kept his silent vigil by the gate.

Marty rubbed his left cheek with his right hand. He felt the stubble rasping against his fingers. “It’s as if our lives got stuck in a groove when we were ten, and nothing really moved on. Yes, you have your wealth and businesses, and Brendan has his family, but despite these things, we were frozen inside. Our hearts stopped beating; the blood was stilled in our veins. I know I’m not exactly explaining this very well, but…”

“Yeah.” Simon closed his eyes. “Frozen… that’s a good way of putting it. We moved on, lived our lives, but everything inside us was frozen in place. Speaking for myself, it’s held me back in every relationship I ever had, made it so that I can barely relate to anyone in my life.”

“So why the fuck do we even need to mess about, to dance around this moment? Let’s just do it. We’re here now, anyway, so we’re all agreed. This is it; the time’s come to defrost.”

Even as he spoke, Marty felt his insides stirring as whatever monster he now carried within him responded to his words. He gritted his teeth, trying not to scream, and waited it out. Soon the movement died down, and eventually stopped. He thought this must be what it was like to be pregnant: to feel the existence of another inside the fragile envelope of your body.

“So we’re all agreed, then? We’re doing this now. Right now.” Brendan had turned around to face them. He looked ill. His eyes were bright and feverish.

Simon stepped forward, brandishing the keys. He unlocked the gate with a steady hand and stepped aside to let the others through. When they were all on the other side of the barrier, he locked the gate behind him. Marty felt that there was something final about the action. He was unable to shake the feeling that all of them might not be coming back out, and those who did make it would be changed in more ways than he could imagine.

The last time they’d all been here together, time itself had behaved strangely: they thought they’d been inside the Needle for only a short time, but when finally they emerged from its shadow an entire weekend had passed. He wished he’d taken the time to tell someone where he was going today, but then he remembered that he had no one to tell. His friends from the fight game were merely acquaintances, and the only other significant person in his life was Melanie, but he’d already cut his ties with her. He could never tell his grandmother; she would worry too much, even about something she did not understand.

There was nobody. He was truly alone. It was a sad indictment of his life that the only two people who cared where he was right now were here with him, and he had not spoken to either of them in twenty years before this day.

“So this is what it all comes down to,” said Brendan, suddenly, breaking into Marty’s thoughts as if he were attempting to echo them and add his own spin. “These last few days of tracking Marty down. It all comes down to this: three strangers standing outside an old, empty building.”

“No,” said Simon. “Not the last few days, the last twenty years. This is it. This is what we’ve been waiting for, but didn’t even realise. This is where we face down our fears.”

“You’re right,” said Marty. “Both of you. All we are is three strangers who were once, for a brief moment in another lifetime, friends. It’s taken us two decades to get back here, and we’ve had our own little adventures along the way. I’ve spent my time fighting. You, Simon, have spent yours in another kind of battle — but still fighting yourself, I’d guess, just the same as me. And Brendan. What about you?” He nodded towards Brendan, who was standing stiffly, as if awaiting some kind of verdict. “In many ways you were the best of us. You at least managed to have some kind of real life, and you’ve brought children into the world. You’re the part of us that worked; the part that matters. Simon and me, we represent all the other stuff: the shit that went bad.”

There was nothing else to say, nothing to add. The three of them stood there, renewing old bonds, waiting for some kind of energy to throb through their veins and pull them closer together.

Marty felt stronger than he ever had before in his life. But he also felt a weakness within him, a fracture that had always been there and that might yet prove to be his undoing. His hidden passenger — the fairytale nightmare hitching a ride in his belly — was reaching out, seeking that fissure, with the aim of making it wider and letting out whatever darkness it found there.

“Let’s go,” said Simon, striding towards the main doors of the tower block and brandishing his keys like a weapon. “Let’s get this thing done.”

The door opened onto blackness. Not a dim area or a room without light, but utter, perfect darkness. When they stepped inside, Marty felt like he was walking into water; it flowed over and around and into him, filling his lungs and making his eyes sting. Fathoms deep, he stood there blinking and trying to get his bearings. He heard the doors close behind them, and the breathing of his companions. Then, struggling against the tide of darkness, he shuffled his feet along the floor and tried to move forward, deeper into the building that now felt like a wide open space.

Groping blindly at his side, he felt a small, cold hand grip his own.

Whose hand is this? he thought, as it squeezed his fingers, the grip tight and unwilling to let go.

“Keep hold of each other,” said Simon. “Somebody grab my hand. I’m moving it around, by my side. Try to grab it.”

“Don’t I have hold of you?” Marty felt panic welling up inside him; he wanted to run, but there was nowhere to go. Every direction was just another pathway deeper into this pitch blackness.

“No, that’s me,” said Brendan, close to his ear. “You have my hand.” The grip slackened; the fingers twitched.

Thank God, thought Marty, feeling slightly more relaxed.

“Okay, then. Do you have my hand, too?” Simon’s voice sounded slightly farther away, as if he’d moved along a passage of some sort.

“No,” said Brendan.

Voices: this was all they had in the dark.

“Me neither.” Marty sounded hoarse; his throat was dry.

“Fucking hell… then whose fucking hand am I holding?” Simon’s voice sounded weak, as if he were struggling to contain his terror.

Then, in answer, there was a soft clicking noise in the darkness, and a short burst of childish laughter.

“It’s gone,” said Simon. “It’s fucking gone… my hand… it had hold of my hand… and its fingers were hot.” Footsteps grated on the concrete floor, everyone’s breathing was heavy, laboured, as if they were climbing an incline.

“Let’s just… move forward.” Simon again, sounding breathless.

“But which way is forward?” said Marty.

“This way.” Brendan was taking charge. “Just follow my voice, Simon. I have your hand, Marty. Come with me. I think I can see light up ahead. I know the layout of this place. I think I have my bearings.”

The clicking sound was still audible, but only just. Marty couldn’t tell if it was behind them, up ahead, or off to the left or the right. Space had taken on alarming new qualities; the dimensions of this room were meaningless, a strange geometry had taken over. He could be inside a tiny room or lost in a vast, endless void. He wasn’t sure; it all felt the same, limited and limitless.

This is how it feels to be lost, he thought. Truly lost. Cut off even from yourself. This must be how it feels all the time… that thing. The Underthing.

He wasn’t quite sure where the word had sprung from, but with it came a suggestion of pity. He felt emotionally wrong-footed, shoved off centre. Was it even possible to feel sorry for a monster?

Brendan tugged on his hand and Marty allowed himself to be pulled slowly in one direction, trusting that it was the right way to go. The air was thick and heavy, like damp towels laid across his face, and that clicking sound kept waxing and waning in and out of the range of audibility, as if it kept crossing a threshold of some kind and then rushing back, just to remind them that it was still there, keeping track of them. He smelled burnt rubber and Parma violet candies: aromas from childhood, which produced within him a longing for things lost or left behind. The sweet, harsh taste of the sweets — like perfumed soap — was on his tongue, making his mouth water.

“This way,” said Brendan, tugging harder on his hand. “We’re almost there.”

Almost where? The statement felt bigger than had been intended, as if it encompassed something beyond words: the time they’d spent wandering in their own darkness since the last time they’d been here together, the roads they had taken, the wrong turnings they’d made, the people they’d left behind.

Almost there…

They were almost somewhere, that was true enough. But was it somewhere they wanted to be? Whatever the answer to that question, Marty knew that it was probably where they needed to be, if any of them was to stand a chance of moving on from here and salvaging their lives.

He became aware of a light source up ahead, glimmering softly, like an underwater lamp. The light was greenish, swamp-like, and it did not look comforting. It was, however, more promising than this massive darkness through which they were currently trawling, like deep-sea divers cut off from their rope tethers.

They pushed on, and as the light became closer — that’s how it felt; like the light was drawing near to them, rather than the other way round — he felt Simon’s hand flailing at his own before grappling with his fingers and gripping him tightly.

“It’s okay, mate,” he said, not feeling okay at all. “I’ve got you.” Yes, he had. Simon and Brendan had him… but who the hell had Brendan? Was he also holding somebody’s hand? Someone who was not one of them? Was he being dragged towards the green light, trusting in some spectre to lead them to safety?

The three men stumbled into the green light, as if they’d entered a doorway and emerged from the sea onto dry land. Marty expected to be dripping wet. He even ran a hand across his shaved head, as if he were drying his scalp.

“Where are we?” Simon voiced the question for the three of them, much as he’d been the self-appointed mouthpiece of the gang in his youth.

Around them, all they could see were trees. A thick, dense screen of leaves and interlocking branches, through which was filtered that odd green light. Marty glanced around him; the patch of concrete they were standing on was surrounded on all sides by mirrors, reflecting trees that were not there: ghost trees, a phantom forest, a wilderness of the imagination.

“This can’t be real.” Brendan sounded as if he were trying to convince himself. “It’s not… it’s a dream.”

“I can’t speak for you two,” said Marty, “but I’m wide awake.”

As Marty watched, a shape flitted through the trees. Or, more precisely, it moved quickly through the open space beyond the trees. He could not make out what it was, but the shape was small and agile. When he saw it again, he became convinced that it was standing upright, on two legs. Yet it did not seem entirely human.

Almost there…

“Jesus.” He was afraid, yes, but beneath the fear was a sort of relief: they’d come a long way for this, and if they had encountered something normal, something natural, it would have been anticlimactic. To confront the weird, the magical, made sense. This was what they’d all expected, after their nightmares had gradually worn away at their sense of reality over the past few days.

“Where are we?” This time it was Brendan, and he sounded like a child, a little boy lost in the woods.

The clicking sound had stopped as soon as they’d entered the green light, and it had not resumed. Perhaps this was a place of safety, somewhere they could regroup and think about what they should do next. The light shimmered, as if the branches shifted in a breeze, and despite the feeling of being shut in, and the mirrored screens, Marty felt certain that they were near a portal that would allow them to enter another place, a place that was outside.

But how can that be? he thought. How can we be outside and inside at the same time?

The light flickered through the gaps in the greenery. The shape — the figure, because that’s surely what it was — moved at the periphery of his vision, more slowly this time, as if it wanted to be seen.

“What is that?” Simon moved a couple of paces to his left and raised his hand. The green light dappled his skin. “There’s somebody there.”

Brendan moved, too: he turned and faced the two of them. “It’s a girl,” he said, his face reflecting green. “It’s the girl. It’s Hailey.”

The space in which they stood seemed to surge and swell, as if the revelation had triggered some kind of response. The area grew larger, its boundaries pushed away to allow them more room to manoeuvre. The darkness was forced back where it could not reach them.

The girl’s face manifested in the leaves, becoming clearer as Marty stared. It was as if her features were forming from the vegetation, her eyes and nose, her small, curved mouth, her hair, all coming together organically from the life around her. She was smiling. Her eyes were green, like tiny round leaves.

“Hello again,” said Simon. His hand — still raised — hovered in the air like a bird: a pale, pink hummingbird.

The girl’s smile grew wider.

“It’s been a long time.” Simon sounded relaxed. It seemed that he was taking all this in his stride, simply accepting the weirdness in a way that Marty could only envy. He clutched at his side. His passenger was moving again, straining at the envelope of his skin.

“Hello, boys,” said the girl. Her voice held the traces of a faint buzzing sound. Again, Marty thought about the sound of hummingbird wings — a light rasping quality which was not at all unpleasant. He’d definitely heard that voice before; the same words had come from her mouth twenty years ago, when she’d appeared at their side, holding back the darkness just as she was doing now, but by less sophisticated means.

“What are we supposed to do?” Marty said.

“I’m afraid you’re stuck there.” She smiled again.

“Stuck where? Where exactly are we?” Brendan said.

“Where you are isn’t where I am. I’m here on one side, and you’re on the other. But the place you’re standing is in between. It’s not one place or another. It’s no place, really.” She moved backwards, and only then did Marty realise that the soft buzzing sound was not in her voice: it came from her wings. The girl — Hailey — was hovering in place on oversized hummingbird wings, but they were the same colour and texture as the trees behind her.

“How can we get where you are? We have business over there, you see.” Again Simon’s voice was calm; he must have detached himself from the moment in order to deal with the situation.

“You need a doorway. The last time, you were the doorway — all three of you. Your hurt and your pain, the fact that you all yearned for something more than what you had, something better, allowed you to set foot here.” She was still smiling. It was beautiful. “But that doesn’t work this time. It needs something more.”

“And where is ‘here’?”

She shook her head. “Oh, where I am has many names. I suppose the best way to explain is to tell you a little story.” She moved closer towards them, away from the screen of trees — which, Marty now realised, was thin, only two-dimensional. “Are you all listening?”

Marty nodded. His friends did not speak, so he assumed they’d done the same. They were all hypnotised by this beautiful girl, and her wondrous smile, and her amazing wings…

“Listen,” she said. Then she told them her tale:

“When the first man dreamed, this place was born. It has no name, yet mankind has called it many things. We who dwell here call it Loculus — ‘little place’. There are no other places, not really. There is only here.

“Loculus. The little place.

“This place is a container for dreams, a burial niche for them when they have nowhere else to go. Whenever you have a dream, or an idea, and nothing comes of it, that energy comes here. All energy is neutral in Loculus, and for a long time a sense of balance was achieved. Then human dreams turned sour; as Man evolved, became stronger, his dreams turned grander, and more foolish, and more easily spoiled. A lot of them went sour, like a vat of milk left out in the sun.”

Marty felt a small, empty part of him fill up with this knowledge. He knew that the girl’s story was true.

“Who, or what, is the Underthing?” His mouth was still dry, but he made himself heard. He had to know. “Is it Captain Clickety?”

The girl’s smile was sadder now; it contained a capacity for misery.

“All energy is neutral in Loculus, and for a long time balance was achieved.” Her smile faltered, fell away. “Then human dreams turned bad; as Man evolved, became stronger, his dreams turned sour. Pollution entered this place; all this became tainted.” She hovered backwards, raising her arms. “That’s what the Underthing represents. He is the result of that pollution.

“Loculus is Heaven to some and Hell to others; freedom to one, a prison cell to another. It is nothing and it is everything.

“The Underthing is, in many ways, a prisoner of paradise. He wants to escape to the hell of the world in which you men live — a world I used to know. Loculus is held together by balance, two halves operating as a whole. The Underthing collects twins, clutching them to him in the hope that he can upset the balance — separate the two halves, split the two worlds and sneak in through the gaps. Not many twins are born in the Grove. In here, in Loculus, if there is the possibility of a set being conceived, he smells it through the fabric of the place, and he is drawn to it.”

Twins.

Marty glanced at Brendan, who had clearly come to his own conclusions.

“He wanted me all along… because of the twins. He knew I could have twins. He smelled them on me when I was ten years old…” Brendan was crying. Tears streaked his long, pale face.

Hailey spoke again, through the trees: “Captain Clickety is an avatar. The Underthing cannot leave this place, so he sends out tendrils. Once there was a man who tried to enter Loculus… a plague doctor, a man who hid his lusts behind the mask of medicine. The Underthing uses him occasionally, to walk abroad out there, in the Concrete Grove. Like a tentacle reaching for something shiny, Captain Clickety goes out looking for ways to upset the balance.”

“How do we get over there?” said Simon. “How do we get into this ‘Loculus’? You mentioned that before, when we were kids, we were doorways. What about now?”

She shook her head. “I’m afraid that time is gone. This time I have sent you a new doorway. I can’t do anything more. Last time I made myself known to the Underthing, and he’s been aware of my presence ever since. I have no special power. I’m just a mediator — all I can do is show you the way to go.”

At that moment something moved to Marty’s right. He spun around, adopting a defensive stance — guard up, covering his face, feet pointing forward, knees bent — and saw a small, thin man with a white mask over his face walk out of the tree-screen.

“This,” said Hailey, “is Banjo. He is your doorway. It’s why he’s here, what has kept him alive. He has this one job to do before he can be free of his nagging body and escape the demands of the world.”

Banjo stood there, in his stained clothes, his white mask — which Marty now saw was made of bandages — shockingly bright under the strange, diffuse green light.

“Go ahead, Banjo.” Hailey’s voice had adopted a gentle, motherly tone. “You know what to do.”

Banjo reached up and took hold of a loose flap of bandage, and then he proceeded to unwind the wrappings, turning the bandages round and round his head and gathering them in his fist. He kept on going, revealing yet more layers of white, until finally he uncovered what was hidden beneath.

The man’s face was badly scarred. The scars were old, shiny, and reflected the green light like plastic. His eyes were open, and the lids were thin and tattered, like paper. He had no lips, just nubs across the top and bottom of his mouth opening. He looked like he was grinning: he was the man who grinned forever, but who never quite got the joke.

His raised arm moved around his face with mechanical regularity, removing the remaining bandages. Marty expected the movement to stop when his ruined face was fully exposed, but it continued after that.

In fact, when Banjo reached the end of the gauze dressings, he kept on going, unwrapping strips of his damaged skin in the same long, loose coiling motion. It was like peeling an orange: the flesh came away easily, like rind, and fell to the ground. Next was the bone, which was stripped away in the same manner. And beneath that, inside the man’s skull, was a cluster of leaves. The dried leaves fell, falling to earth in a slow, spinning drift, and as Marty and the other men watched, something strange happened… Banjo was no longer there, and in his place there appeared an opening in the trees.

The screen had vanished; this was here, real.

Real trees; a real wood, and on the other side, a small, open space: a peaceful grove, within which they had once been bound and had pain inflicted upon their ten-year-old bodies.

All at once, and without hesitation, the Three Amigos stepped back into the ancient oak grove. There was no longer any doubt; each man wanted to be here, to settle old scores and put his ghosts to rest.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

JANE SAT BY Harry’s bedside, crying into her fists. She had been unable to contact Brendan. She felt helpless, a useless part in a machine that had gone spinning out of control.

The doctors — the same ones who’d sent him home — didn’t have a clue what was wrong with Harry. His vital signs were all strong; the tests they’d run had come back negative. All the apparatus of modern medicine seemed to agree on the same result: Harry was fine, he was fit and healthy and should not be lying in a hospital bed in what was, for all intents and purposes, a coma.

“I need you,” she said, not sure if she meant her son or her absent husband. “Please come back.”

The heart monitor at the side of her son’s bed beeped rhythmically and steadily.

Jane closed her eyes and wished: she wished that Simon-fucking-Ridley had not come back into their lives; she wished that Brendan had never been friends with those other two boys; she wished that she could do something to save her son, her family, her very existence.

The machine continued to beep.

Harry did not move. His face was serene above the bed sheets. His hair was neatly combed into a side parting — she’d done it earlier, just to occupy some time and get rid of the nervous energy rushing through her body.

The hospital ward was busy. The nurses had pulled the curtains around on their rail to give her and Harry some privacy, but this was still a public ward. The family had no private health care; they had to accept whatever they were given. She could hear the hushed voices of other visitors, the soft-soled nurses’ shoes as they brushed across the tiled floor, the frightening sounds of other medical machinery. Somebody was speaking on the phone at the nurses’ station. They laughed, and then remembered where they were and began to whisper.

Jane reached out and took Harry’s small hand in her own, above the covers. There was no response from his body; his muscles did not even twitch. She felt empty, as if he’d turned his back on her, ignoring her show of affection. She knew this wasn’t true, that she was being silly, but it did not help. Her son didn’t even know she was here, at his side, crying for him.

“I need you to come back,” she said, this time speaking to them both — Harry and Brendan. Isobel was still at a friends’ house gearing up for the sleepover, ignorant of the hell Jane was going through. How did you tell a ten-year-old that her twin brother might die, and nobody could do a thing about it because they had no idea what was happening to him?

She closed her eyes, and for a moment — a second, at most — she thought that she heard Harry making a strange clicking sound, as if he were pressing his tongue against the side of his mouth the way he did whenever he saw a dog on the street or in a neighbours’ garden.

She opened her eyes, but of course Harry was just the same: he had not made a sound.

Jane let go of his hand and stood. She took out her mobile phone and checked it for messages. There were none. She went to the nurses’ station and told them that she was stepping outside to make a call, to see if she could contact her husband. The nurses smiled and nodded, and their eyes were filled with pity. Poor soul, they were probably thinking. He’s probably out at the pub, or in the betting shop.

Jane went outside. When she made the call, and there was no answer, she felt like smashing the phone. She leant back against the wall and wished again: but this time she wished her husband dead… and instantly regretted the thought, tried to take it back.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

IT WAS A seamless transition from standing in that small, cramped, green-lit place to being here, beyond the screen of oak trees, just inside the grove. Simon accepted the passage with an unfamiliar calmness. It felt like some kind of Zen moment: his mind and body acted as one, unified against the strangeness that was showing more of itself to him at every twist and turn of this journey. He’d gone beyond fear. He wanted to embrace horror — the horror he’d always felt should belong to him.

Hailey was nowhere to be seen. Now that Banjo, their doorway, had helped them enter the place she’d called Loculus, she had fled the scene, leaving them to their own devices. She did not seem to have any power here. He wondered if she’d exhausted her energies that first time, when she’d helped them escape.

He glanced at the two boys he’d known back then, who had become men he barely knew at all, and wondered what it was they were meant to do — why they were here. They were all present to face their fears, he knew that. But at a deeper level, unknown forces were warring. The three had become pieces in a game that none of them could understand.

He recalled his most recent dream, when the Angel of the North had been bowed and broken, and a weeping woman had cradled the body of her children — her twin babies. It all made sense now, in a grim kind of way. That dream, he realised, was a prophecy, a glimpse of how things might be if they failed here.

Twins.

Two parts of a whole.

Yin and Yang: opposing forces.

Comedy and tragedy. Darkness and light.

This place, he thought, must exist in a state of turmoil: the balance shifting, constantly moving back and forth between opposing points. The Underthing — whatever it was — had sniffed out that Brendan was capable of producing twins and tried to claim him early, to tip the balance in its favour. That was why they’d been brought here twenty years ago; that was why they’d been examined by uncaring hands. It had not been sexual abuse, but a sort of medical examination, meant to find out which one was the future twin-maker. Then, before things had reached their terrible conclusion, Hailey had stepped in and helped them to get away.

He remembered, now; he recalled more than he ever had before.

Standing here, in the grove where they’d been tormented, he had a mental flash: Hailey standing between them and some huge, shapeless shadow, waving her arms, flapping her weird wings, and shouting, screaming, distracting it to give them a chance to get away. He could not remember who had managed to struggle free from the leafy bonds first, but after that, they’d acted together to break out and run free.

They had acted together. As a single unit… three separate parts, joining together to form a whole.

That was important to remember.

And that was all. He could recall nothing more. He probably never would. But at least, for now, he had his horror to hold — the sordid excuse for a life that he’d led could be traced back to an actual event, rather than the scattered fragments of shattered memory.

“Look.” Marty was pointing with one hand while he gripped his side with the other. He seemed to be in pain. His face was pale, his mouth twisted into something that came as close to a snarl as Simon had ever seen on a human being.

“It’s come back. It still wants us…” Simon watched as a great shadow roiled in the space beyond the trees, moving away from them like a mobile stain across the land. “Let’s go and give it what it wants.”

Simon led the way out of the grove of ancient oaks and into an open area. The sun hung miles above them, as still as a picture, and the hills rolled away to other patches of woodland, most of them burned and blasted. To the west, across a vale of green and grey, he could see the ruins of some kind of city. Cradled between two hills, in a shallow valley, the blackened buildings waited like a ghost of shelter. “What the hell is this place?”

It was all from his dream: a possible future, where everything was ruined.

Brendan turned in a slow circle, surveying their surroundings. “I don’t know, but we’ve been here before. This land — it knows us. It can sense that we’re here. Can’t you feel it?”

“Yes,” said Marty, still clutching his side. “It feels like we never really left.”

Simon nodded. The truth of his friend’s words dug deep, piercing his heart; and in a way, they never had left this place, not really. All they’d done was peek outside the boundaries of a prison and pretend that their lives were part of another world, a place where people killed each other for money, fucked each other for company, and bobbed and weaved like fighters inside a ring, never stopping, not even pausing for breath before they reached the grave.

Ahead of them, at the base of the slope on top of which they stood, the earth began to heave. Above them, the sky turned dark, as if a huge shadow was passing above them.

Simon looked up, and what he saw there scared him more than anything else he’d seen since returning to the Grove. The sky was filled with hummingbirds. There were millions of them, just hanging there, hovering in the air about a mile above the three men, waiting for something to happen. They stretched out like a patterned sheet, covering the sky for mile upon mile — so far, in fact, that he could barely see the blue edges.

This had happened twenty years ago, too. He was certain.

“What do they want?” Brendan’s voice was tiny; he sounded like a child.

“I think they want to watch us. Or maybe watch over us.”

There were no sounds other than those caused by the men.

The air was still.

The birds were silent.

Even that incessant churning of the earth was soundless, like a film clip with the volume set to mute. They all turned to watch the chaos of soil, shifting and turning as if a huge invisible shovel were digging there. Something erupted from the muddy surface, its segmented back breaking through the soft crust and rolling like the body of a withered serpent. Its hide was dark and wet, yet covered with a fine mesh, like old teabags. There were bright yellow boils along the ridge of its spine, and as it lurched upwards and forwards, thrusting itself out of the hole in the earth, Simon thought that he saw what might have been a face amid the mass of waste that had been compressed to form its long, thick neck. Then he realised that it was all neck. Like a snake, or an old-fashioned image of a sea monster, it arched its body and slammed back into the earth, sending showers of mulch flying.

The creature did not move any closer. It kept its distance, toying with them from afar, coy as a lover. Simon had seen this thing before. He knew what it was called, if not what it was.

He had seen it in his dream.

“The Underthing,” he said. “That’s it. That’s the Underthing. This time it’s showing itself.”

He glanced up, at the hummingbird sky, and saw that every tiny beak, every black eye, was turned in their direction. Whatever was happening here, it was larger than their experience. This meeting signalled a stage in the evolution of Loculus, and he was too dim, or too inconsequential, to be given insight into what form it might take.

“This isn’t how I had it planned…” He turned to the others, his eyes moist, his mouth open. “It’s not what I expected.”

A loud clicking sound broke the silence, splitting the air and causing the birds above them to shiver. It was the call of Captain Clickety, the damned and damning song of their childhood nightmares. If the vision of waste and corruption before them was the Underthing, then the avatar, the tentacle they’d named Clickety, was now to make an appearance in the endgame that was unfolding around them.

“He’s coming now. The Plague Doctor. Captain Clickety. He’s here.” Hailey stood beside them, her voice a whisper.

Simon wasn’t sure where she’d come from, but he felt glad that she was here, if only for moral support. Her wings were folded down, plastered to her back like a weird cloak. Her hair was as black as a raven’s wing; her leafy eyes were solemn. “The Underthing won’t come near you… he’s afraid. He can’t touch you, because if he does, he’ll fall apart. So much spiritual pollution can only hold itself together, in one piece, if it isn’t subject to human contact. It’s fragile, like an eggshell; too much pressure and it will break. That’s why it always sends in an avatar to do its dirty work.”

Pressure… the thought filled Simon’s head, as if the space there had been waiting to enclose that one word.

Pressure…

Pushing…

Wasn’t that the one thing he was best at — pushing, applying pressure? He’d done it all his life, to get what he wanted, and now he was faced with a real test of his talent. If he could push this thing, coerce it into doing his bidding, he might be able to save them all. The past would be shut out; the darkness would lift; the hummingbirds would move on and the sky would clear, letting back in the sun.

It was time to push.

BRENDAN COULD FEEL his unnamed brother on his back, like an unwanted passenger. The face that had haunted him from the inside without him even knowing, the familiar features he had never even laid eyes on until yesterday, was speaking to him silently. He could feel the lips moving between his shoulder blades, the frown forming on its brow, the diseased cheeks puffing in and out as they sucked at the air of this place.

He reached behind him and tried to slap at the face through his clothing, but it did no good. He grasped at his back, attempting to still those lips, to stop that unforgiving toothless mouth from moving.

But the face — the terrible face formed of ruined, besmirched flesh — mocked him; it taunted him with one word, repeated over and over again:

Loculus.

He could feel the word forming on the lips of his back, tearing from his own rancid flesh, and almost hear it spoken aloud inside his mind. His brother, his never-lived, never-really-died twin, was chanting the word like a prayer.

“No,” he whispered, “Stop it.” He grabbed a handful of the material of his jacket and pulled; he felt the face laughing. He reached behind and battered at the top of his spine, hurting himself. He beat at the edge of the face, hitting, slapping, and punching.

Then he began to scratch — he had not been able to scratch there, on his back, for years, and the pain felt good. Even as the skin split beneath his clothes, even as the blood seeped from the wounds…

THE CLICKING SOUND was deafening.

It filled the air like helium in a balloon, forcing it close to bursting point. Simon could feel it worming its way beneath his skin, entering his bloodstream, forcing aside his bones and vital organs to aid its passage.

The music was inside him, and it was hideous.

He looked at his friends and saw that they were experiencing the same discomfort. Brendan was scratching at his back, pulling at his clothing. He took off his jacket and threw it onto the floor, and then began to tear at his shirt, flaying it from his body.

MARTY’S SIDE WAS on fire. He clutched at the wound, feeling the stitches fray and the dressing come loose. Humpty — that awful, terrible creature from his childhood’s darkest nightmares — was moving around, picking at the wound from the inside, and trying to get out. This was where it wanted to be; it could smell the earth beneath Marty’s feet and feel the breeze of this place on its ugly, chubby cheeks.

He could feel its deformed hand-feet scrabbling, tearing away at his flesh. His side felt warm; blood was being spilled. He looked down and saw his abdomen blowing up like a balloon, doubling, tripling in size…

He went down onto his knees, crippled by the pain. He pressed the palm of his hand into his beltline, trying to push the thing back inside. Was it trying to exit through his navel?

Then, wriggling, the thing began to shift around, turning itself like a breech birth. Its head was close to the opening; he could feel the lips of the wound begin to pucker and open, like a mouth preparing for a long, deep, loving kiss. His body was preparing to vomit out the interloper.

Humpty-fucking-Dumpty was coming out to play. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men wouldn’t be able to put Marty together again…

SIMON WAS ALONE, now; he had no back-up. Marty was writhing on the ground, clutching at his abdomen — which was swelling as Simon watched, as if the unholy clicking sound was filling it, bloating the man’s stomach like a pregnancy. His swollen belly undulated, bursting the buttons on his shirt, and Simon saw that it was taking on the shape of a giant egg: a tight, pale oval.

“What’s happening?”

“Look,” said Hailey, pointing towards the trees at the bottom of the slope.

About a mile away, like some kind of border, was a stand of undamaged oak trees, not unlike the ones from which they’d emerged. As he watched, a figure stepped forward from the tree line, using a short cane to walk. Even at this distance, he could make out the dark floppy hat, the dark clothes and the white beaked mask.

“Captain Clickety,” he said, the sound of the entity’s voice invading his mind. Like the frantic beating of castanets, it played out a surreal soundtrack, ushering the figure into view. Clickety moved without moving; he walked in place, as if exercising on a treadmill, and yet still he loomed closer, covering the distance in jinks and jerks.

Simon looked back at his friends. Brendan was hugging himself, but violently, as if he were trying to squeeze himself to death. If anything could be heard over the sound of clicking, then it would have been Brendan’s screams. His mouth was open wide, his teeth bared, and he was wailing like a penitent monk, flagellating himself before a statue of the Saviour.

Marty was rolling on the ground, wrestling with what looked like a large, pink, gelatinous egg. He was beating at it with his hands, gnawing at it with his teeth. The thing was rudimentary, only partially formed, still attached to his stomach by strands and threads of bloody flesh.

“What can I do?” Simon turned to Hailey, but she was no longer there. She had deserted him just when he needed her most.

Her voice came to him, between clicks, and he heard her say: “Do what you must. Do what you do best. Just push.”

Then it came to him: the way he could do this, how he could defeat whatever it was that had set itself against them.

Just push…

He had always pushed people, towards what he wanted them to do or away from himself. It was his skill, his only real talent.

He turned and looked at his friends, locked in their personal battles, and started to piece things together. He was the go-between here; he always had been. It was his role in life: to help others make things happen.

Just push…

He was the pusher. So he did what came naturally: he pushed.

“Get up,” he said slowly and calmly. “Get the fuck up and join me.” He stepped over to Brendan, who was still clawing at his own shoulders, tearing away the rags of his shirt. “Get up. Now. Leave the fucking spots alone and climb onto your feet. Help me now, or so help me, when I get back there, to where we live, I’ll take Jane away from you…”

Just push…

“I’ll take her to bed, and then I’ll take her away from everything she’s ever known. I’ll show her all the things she’s been missing, the life she should’ve had. I’ll take her and I’ll keep her and you’ll never see her again.”

It was working. Brendan staggered to his feet, his face contorted in pain and rage and bitterness.

“Stand with me… or you’ll never get to hold your wife again.” Simon raised his left hand, the palm facing outward. He splayed his fingers, and then slowly drew them into a fist, one finger at a time folding in towards the palm, little one first and the thumb last: the long-ago salute of the Three Amigos.

Brendan grabbed Simon’s arm, but rather than a gesture of violence it was one of love; a bond, once broken, was being remade. Brendan realised what Simon was doing. They both looked down, at the old scar on Brendan’s right forearm, and Simon remembered the time when they had built the den. A good time, a happy time, just before the darkness arrived.

Brendan smiled and nodded; he understood what was required.

“And you,” he said, turning to Marty. “You fucking pussy. Call yourself a fighter? Call yourself a man? Look at you, rolling around in the dirt wrestling with yourself. Get the fuck up or get the fuck out. You’re nothing; you’re useless. Your father was right about you. You’ll never be a real man.” Tears clouded Simon’s vision, but he kept up the assault. “Get up and be a man or just lie there like a little boy.” It hurt him to say these things, but he hoped that Marty, too, would get what he was doing. “Just lie there, like you did when Sally died!”

Marty screamed: a roar of rage. He gritted his teeth, stood and faced Simon.

“Be a man.” Simon squared up to his friend. This was it: do or die. “Okay, soldier?” His voice was an echo from a time before darkness; from the days when monsters were just things they read about in books or saw in films on TV.

Marty nodded.

Then, back together again — truly together, for the first time — the Three Amigos turned as one to face their enemy. Simon moved his hands away from his body and opened his fingers. The other two men took his outstretched hands, one each, and they held on as if they were afraid to let go.

Simon smiled.

Then he pushed again.

Three separate parts joined together to create a whole. He could feel the energy thrumming in his hands, spreading up along his arms to pool inside his chest, forming a hard little shell around his heart.

Captain Clickety stood before them, a nightmare in black. He stood with his weight on his left foot, supporting himself with the cane. His black hat was tipped at a rakish angle and his white beak pointed straight forward, like a stubby accusing finger. In his free hand — the one without the cane — he was holding out a photograph: a portrait of a young boy. It only took Simon a second to recognise the face.

The photograph was of Harry. It was old, tattered, taken a few years ago, but it was definitely Brendan and Jane’s boy.

He felt Brendan sway at his side, as if he were about to pass out. Simon clenched his fingers around Brendan’s palm, pushing his brotherhood, his love, towards his friend.

“Push with me,” he said.

Captain Clickety nodded.

“You can’t have him.”

Captain Clickety nodded again.

Behind him, down the slope, the Underthing was writhing in a paroxysm of fury or excitement — it could have been either: anger at being faced down, or delight that the game was almost over and the twin was within its grasp. Everything hung on the cusp in this moment.

“No,” said Simon. “I’m not afraid of you. Not anymore. I’ll fight you. We’ll fight you.”

His friends were effectively hobbled by their own fears. Brendan was silent and swaying; Marty was repeatedly whispering the words “Humpty Dumpty” under his breath. It would have been a comical sight, under other circumstances, but now, in this situation, it was simply horrific.

Simon could smell burning shit and vomit and Parma violets. He gagged, the stench reaching the back of his throat.

Captain Clickety flipped the photograph over, showing him the reverse side.

There was another image forming on the white paper, a shot of Harry in a hospital bed, his face slack, the features blurred yet still recognisable. Jane sat at his side, holding one of his hands on the clean, white bedclothes. On her face was a look of anguish, so intense it almost burned through the page.

Suddenly Simon knew what he must do. He realised why he was here, what his role was meant to be. He’d spent twenty years envying the others their horror, and wondering why it was that he retained no horror of his own. Now he knew why that was; the knowledge came to him in a flash, like a migraine.

This was the horror he’d always been looking for, the terror that he’d spent his life tracking down without even knowing it. The dreams of the Angel; the prophecies of apocalypse. The Angel, he now realised, was meant to be him.

He was the Angel of the North…

And what was it that angels did? What was their great purpose?

Angels, like the hummingbirds hovering above him, were messengers. They had sacrificed their humanity to serve at the shoulder of their god.

Sacrifice.

This was his purpose; it was the reason he was here, the mission he’d come back to accomplish.

Sacrifice.

He smiled. “Take me instead. Leave the boy and take me.”

Pushing… pushing hard… pushing for something he did not quite understand…

Hummingbirds began to fall from the sky.

At first they plummeted one by one, and then in clumps, like debris from a volcanic eruption. They fell around him, missing him by inches, but not one of them came into contact with him.

Captain Clickety was crippled beneath the deluge, his arms raised uselessly to protect his head. The clicking sound was by now cataclysmic; it was the sound of tectonic plates shifting in this strange, symbolic dream-world, of great stones grating together on the ocean bed.

Here was Simon’s horror. This was his terrible prize.

Captain Clickety’s lenses and mask were knocked off his face, and beneath these was another, smaller mask exactly like the first.

He straightened, stretching to his full height, reached up and removed this mask, too. There was yet another one underneath. He was a being made entirely of masks; a walking lie, a deception. One mask after another was torn from his face, and the hummingbirds continued to fall.

This, Simon realised, was the birds’ own sacrifice, their way of confirming his thoughts, telling him that he had been right.

“Take me,” he whispered, opening his hands and letting go of his friends — perhaps relinquishing his grip on those childhood friendships forever. The two men fell to the ground at his sides, kneeling like tired suitors before a prospective bride.

Gradually, the rain of birds ceased. The sky cleared. The surviving hummingbirds flew off in groups, letting back in the daylight.

Captain Clickety shuffled forward. He was broken, spent; a thing past its use-by date. His arms and legs hung from their sockets like a marionette’s. The Underthing was no longer raging in the ground behind him. It had returned to whatever sewers or underground conduits served as its home, fleeing in the face of defeat, not wanting to watch as its plans were torn down.

Captain Clickety sniffed, like a dog, inhaling Simon’s scent. His hat had come off and his head was bald and white, an extension of the beaked mask. He kept sniffing and sniffing, and then, finally, he stopped and slowly nodded.

Yes.

The sacrifice had been accepted. Perhaps this had been required from the start; there was a chance that Brendan had never been the one, that it had always been Simon, and only now was the truth being told.

Simon reached out and took the final mask from the face of his nemesis, his childhood fear. He crumpled it easily in his fist. This stagnant puppet of deception, this last bedraggled lie, wore nothing but a paper face. Beneath the final mask was nothing but a broken mirror. Simon stared into his shattered reflection, wondering what all of this could possibly mean. He studied his empty eyes, his sunken cheeks, his dry lips.

He barely even recognised himself.

Captain Clickety fell into a heap of greasy sticks and rags on the ground. The avatar was no more; he had been torn apart by the simple act of sacrifice, a show of friendship that monsters like him would never, ever understand. To love was human, not divine; to hate was simply monstrous.

The Three Amigos would live to ride another day, and everything that came after this would be different, cast in a new and uncertain light. Rather than a band of three, each would set off into his own sunset as his own man, liberated, freed at last from the terrible bondage of a shared past.

“What happened?” Brendan rose from his knees, topless, his shirt cast aside, his skin scratched and torn by his own fingernails. “Has it gone?”

“I’m not sure,” said Simon. “I’m not sure about anything.”

Marty staggered upright, to complete the group. He was bleeding from a gash in his side, stitches pulled free and dangling like threads. “Did you see it?” His face was ashen. He was crying openly, unconcerned by his show of what he usually saw as weakness. “Did you see Humpty-fucking-Dumpty?”

Simon shook his head. “I don’t know what I saw… or what I’m seeing now.” He looked up, at the brightening sky. A few straggling hummingbirds flew in circles above them, watching over these final few moments. “But I want to go home.”

They turned around and walked towards the grove of oak trees, no longer afraid of what they would find at its centre: just the shadows of forgotten youth, frayed lengths of rope, and husks of memories that even now were losing their power over them.

For a moment, he thought he saw a ghostly outline of three small boys, holding hands as they stood in a row before the trees. Their outlines shimmered and they were gone; he had seen nothing, after all.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“WHAT THE FUCK happened in there?”

They were standing on the Roundpath, outside the Needle. Simon had locked the gates and was returning the keys to his pocket.

“What the fuck happened?” Marty was clutching the remains of Brendan’s shirt to his side. The blood was still flowing, but slowly.

“Would you do me a favour?” Brendan, still topless, turned around and presented his back to the group. “Tell me what you see there, on my back?” He still sounded afraid, but it was fear of a different kind.

Simon stared at his friend’s back. It was scratched and bloody, but nothing more. “Just a few scratches.”

“You sure? I mean really sure? I’ve suffered horrendous back acne my whole life. If what you’re telling me is correct, I’m cured.”

Simon walked over and touched Brendan’s back. His skin was hot and damp, but apart from a few old acne scars, it was clear of any kind of blemish other than the ones caused by the man’s own hands. “I promise,” he said. “The only marks on your back are either very old or the scratches you gave yourself.”

Marty hobbled over. “I still don’t understand any of this. What did you do in there? Did you defeat the… the monster? Is it dead?”

Simon shook his head. “No. I don’t think so. I think we just sent it away for a little while. How do you kill something that was never alive in the first place? It won’t bother us again, though. It’s done with us. We have nothing else that it can take.”

“It… it sniffed you. Hailey said that it could smell twins. Are you a twin?”

Again, Simon shook his head. “There are no twins in our family. I was an only child. Whatever the hell it smelled on me, it wasn’t that… maybe it just caught a whiff of my spirit, and decided that the fight was no longer one it could win? Who knows? I don’t have a fucking clue.”

The sky was dark. Night had fallen. He wasn’t sure how long they’d been inside the tower, but it felt like days had passed in the outside world. He remembered that time had no meaning in there; in the place Hailey had called Loculus — the little place, where dreams went to die.

“Let’s go home. Back to Brendan’s place, check on Jane and the kids. I have a feeling they’ll have their own story to tell, and it’ll make as much sense as ours.”

Brendan’s head snapped up. “What do you mean? You think they’re in trouble?”

“Not any more,” said Simon. “While we were fighting our demons, they had to contend with one of their own. But I’m certain they’re all okay, now. We won, didn’t we?”

The three men went silent for a moment.

“Did we? Did we win, I mean?” Marty looked like he might collapse at any minute.

“Let’s get you both seen to, eh? Then we can either talk about this until dawn and try to figure out what we just did, or fucking forget about the whole thing and move on with our lives. It’s your call. I’m too tired to even think about it.”

They moved off, away from the Needle, with Simon in the lead, Marty in the middle, and Brendan bringing up the rear, dragging his mobile phone from his pocket and checking the messages. He stopped in his tracks, the phone held against his ear.

“Oh, shit…” He listened to every message before allowing them to move off again.

“It’s Harry. He’s been ill again. But… well, according to the last message, he’s okay now. Jane’s still at the hospital, but she says he’s fine. They just want to keep him in a couple of days to keep an eye on him.”

Simon smiled. “He’s fine. The boy’s fine.”

Marty said nothing.

Brendan called Jane’s mobile and asked a lot of questions as he walked, promising her that he’d go right to the hospital once he’d cleaned himself up. He seemed a lot happier when he hung up, although he was crying. He even smiled.

“Yes, he is fine. He’s eating fucking ice cream and flirting with the nurses.”

Simon laughed, and turned back round, to look where he was going. He saw the figure only briefly, as it darted out from a ginnel that led to Back Grove Crescent.

Just before he felt a sharp punching sensation in his stomach, and fell to the ground, he recognised the baseball cap with the Scooby Doo badge on the front. The hat fell from the kid’s head as he ran back into the ginnel, palming the bloodied knife.

Simon smiled. What else could he do?

He realised now that they’d never really escaped when they were children. Time had no meaning in Loculus; twenty years in the real world might be a few days in the little place. Captain Clickety, and by extension the Underthing, had simply let them leave. Because it knew — it had always known — that they’d come back.

Take me, he thought. Take me back home, to a time when the world was smaller, the days were brighter, before the monsters were real and the damage was done…

Simon died with that ironic smile still on his lips. He tried to speak. To tell Marty something, perhaps even to explain the joke, as the other man cradled him in his arms. But he didn’t have the strength. He closed his eyes and accepted the onrushing darkness. Somewhere within it — from deep inside all of that vast black night — he heard a faint clicking sound, as if something approved of his passing.

The sacrifice had been accepted.

And still he did not know the reason why, or the full extent of what he had offered to save his friends.