The Concrete Grove

CHAPTER TEN

IT WAS EARLY morning and Tom was running again.

He had no idea why he was here, skirting the edge of the Grove, but he knew that he had come to some kind of decision. He ran at a steady pace — jogging really — and tried to give himself time to think about what he was doing. Last night had been a tipping point, where he had been forced to confront a truth he had hidden for years. He did not like the man he was becoming — betrayal was not something that came easy to him — but this constant mask-wearing was taking its toll and he was rotting away inside.

Tom had not loved Helen for so long now that he could not even remember when his feelings towards her had changed. Even before she had been injured by That Man, his emotions had confused him. They had grown apart steadily, without any major problems causing clean fractures in their relationship, and the result of this gradually increasing distance was that when she went into hospital he was almost relieved to be alone.

His shame at these feelings had forced him to bury the truth, to smother it under layers of forced emotion: duty, empathy, a sense of needing to do the right thing by his wife. Her injuries — her lower-body paralysis and resultant emotional neediness — had served to distract him, and also given him a reason to carry on pretending that he still loved her. Even though she had transformed into the likeness of an aquatic mammal before his eyes.

He thought of this now, as he padded along the pavement. On the surface, he had no idea where he was heading. But underneath, where his real emotions lay, he knew that he was running towards Lana Fraser, and the promise of salvation he had glimpsed so briefly behind her dark eyes.

Last night, as he’d sat in his car watching her flat, wishing that he could spot her silhouette at the window, he had crossed some kind of invisible border. He felt that he had travelled far, and under false pretences, to reach this place, and now that he had arrived he could no longer wear the lies in which he wrapped himself like a second skin. He had shed that skin and beneath its rotting layer had been a brand new being, a man who accepted his own needs and the fact that they had not been met for such a long time.

Before he knew it he was running along Grove Drive, past the tract of waste ground where derelict factories stood like the repositories of nightmares. Small fires burnt across the bare earth, smouldering and sending up black plumes into the pale blue sky. Someone was incinerating old tyres. A thin man walked between his private pyres, prodding them with a long stick. Tom paused by the fence, staring through the railings, and watched the figure as he traipsed back and forth, tending the sputtering flames.

The black smoke broke apart and rose in tendrils, like skinny arms reaching towards a liar’s heaven. Tom felt strange, as if he were being given a glimpse of another world. The figure was too thin to be human, and the long stick was actually an extension of his arm. He moved slowly and dragged his left leg behind him.

Tom’s eyes began to water, but it was not from the thick, acrid smoke. The land beyond the fence was grey; there was no vegetation growing through the flattened soil. In the distance, beyond one of the fires, a small dog sniffed at a heap of rags on the ground. Tom was certain that it was the dog he had seen before — the one with the human face. He had even dreamed about the same creature many years ago, when he was a small boy.

His father had been a distant man, cold and abusive in the way that he withheld his affection. Tom’s mother was also emotionally cold, as if she were afraid to show how she really felt. At night, when he found it difficult to sleep, Tom would imagine a dog with a boy’s face wandering around the house, raking in the kitchen bin, sniffing at the cupboards, and padding softly upstairs to investigate the top floor of the house. The dog would never enter his room: it just sat there, outside his bedroom door, either guarding him or waiting for him to come out so that it could attack.

It was worse on the nights when his parents had sex.

Tom could hear them through the thin walls: his father’s repeated obscenities, his mother’s tears; and terrible animal sounds, culminating in a series of muted thuds as his father repeatedly punched either the headboard or his mother’s body as he climaxed inside her. Then silence, which was slowly filled by yet more of his mother’s weeping. After a short while she would go out onto the landing, walk to the bathroom, and lock herself inside. Tom always fell asleep before she left the bathroom, so he never knew how long she remained in there, or what she did behind the locked door. He had always imagined that she must be tending to her bruised body.

Those nights, above all else, were the worst. They were the times when Tom was faced with the reality of his parent’s flaws, and no matter how hard he tried he could not block out the sounds. On mornings following these events, his mother would move slowly around the kitchen, wincing in pain with each step she took. She never said a word; she took it all in silence.

Tom stopped dreaming of the dog when he was eleven years old. It appeared in his dreams only once more after that, on the night his mother died. It was as if her death had finally exorcised some kind of crude ghost, a shoddy spirit that only ever came to him because he craved his mother’s love.

He had forgotten about the dog until he saw the vision yesterday evening in the Grove. He knew it was not real — it couldn’t possibly exist in the waking world. But what scared him more than seeing it was the thought that something had reached inside him and pulled out that childhood dream, putting flesh on its bones.

The man tending the fires looked normal again: just a thin figure with a pointed stick. Tom smiled, feeling sad and empty as he pulled back from old memories. Then he resumed running, heading towards Lana’s Fraser’s flat and the precious new memory of her face, her eyes, and her ambiguous smile.

Turning right onto Grove Road, he saw a car parked at the kerb. The vehicle was a Vauxhall Nova, the paintwork scratched, the wings battered from a collision, and the rear bumper hanging askew. Two boys in baseball caps sat in the car. The windows were rolled down. Another boy — this one younger, barely in his teens — was leaning against the side of the car and poking his head through the open driver’s side window. Tom slowed his pace to a walk. He was breathing heavily but still felt as if he had a few miles left to go. He watched the boys as they talked, and then caught sight of a small brown-paper package changing hands. The boy on the pavement straightened up, slammed his palm against the roof of the car, and then turned away, setting off in the direction of the Needle, whose pyramid-shaped roof and upper storeys could be seen from almost everywhere on the estate.

The car’s engine revved loudly. The rear wheels spun on the road surface, and then the car shot off, taking the right turn into Grove End at such great speed that the rear end skidded across the carriageway.

Tom knew that drugs were big business on the estate. He would have to be a fool not to recognise that he had just witnessed yet another deal, but rather than frighten him it filled him with an intense feeling of sadness. These kids, they were wasting their lives before they’d even begun. If they were dealing in that stuff now, what would they be doing in five, ten years’ time? Gun crime was a recent problem and it was only going to get worse. Things here still weren’t as bad as they were in the States, but surely that kind of gang-driven chaos wasn’t too far away… a decade, maybe even less?

Tom was glad that he and Helen had never been able to have children. Then, feeling guilty once more, he thought about Hailey, Lana Fraser’s girl. What kind of future did she have to look forward to, trapped on this godforsaken estate? Nobody seemed to care — not the local council, the central government, or the media. The latter were more than happy to demonise the people on estates like this, but they refused to examine the real problems at the root of this kind of behaviour. These sink estates were forgotten zones, dead spots in the nation’s psyche. The public would rather envisage them as the playgrounds of devils than the places where those who had lost everything ended up.

Facts were always difficult to consume; fiction made for a much less complex diet. Tom had learned, and accepted, a long time ago that most people were content to be spoon-fed a simpler gruel. It was easier to keep down, and to forget you had even eaten.

Tom stood on the pavement outside the Grove Court flats, undecided whether he should ring the buzzer or continue running. Part of him wanted to escape, to get away from the emotional holocaust he sensed might be the result of any further association with Lana and her daughter. Yet another part of him — this one stirring, as if roused from a lengthy sleep — reached out towards her, needing her by his side.

“Tom?” Her voice came from behind him. For a moment he was too stunned even to move. “It is Tom, isn’t it? From yesterday?”

He didn’t realise that he was holding his breath until he remembered to let it out. His chest deflated; his throat ached. He turned around.

She was standing on the pavement a few yards away, clutching a blue plastic carrier bag in her left hand. She was wearing a faded denim jacket, buttoned half way up with the neck left open, and her legs were bare beneath a red knee-length skirt. On her feet she wore a pair of battered running shoes. Her hair was loose, messy, and it framed her face like the fur of a hood. Her eyes were lowered, as if she were unable to meet his gaze.

“Hi,” he said, feeling small and weak and needy. “Sorry.”

“For what?” She smiled, tilting her head to one side. She showed him her small white teeth: they were perfect, like lovely ivory sculptures of teeth rather than the real thing. “Why are you sorry?”

“For being here, I guess. I’m not some kind of stalker. Honest. I was… well, would you believe I was just passing?” It sounded pathetic. He felt ashamed.

She laughed, then, her eyes widening, those flawless teeth flashing in the morning light. And all at once he knew that it was okay, that everything was fine. She didn’t think he was pestering her; she enjoyed the attention. “Come on up,” she said. “I was going to make coffee.” She held up the carrier bag, indicating that she had been shopping for provisions.

Tom followed her in silence. He did not want to speak, not yet, even to accept her invitation, in case she changed her mind.

Upstairs he stood at the window as she unpacked her shopping in the kitchen. He stared out at the view: the circular array of streets clustered around the Needle, and the imposing sight of the crippled concrete tower itself. The windows on the lower floors were covered with wooden boards and metal shutters, but those higher up the building, where nobody could gain access, were mostly unsecured. Some of the frames still held panes of glass, others had only shards, like curved and pointed teeth, where kids had shattered them with stones.

The glass of the pyramidal roof was in bad shape. It was unbroken, but birds had desecrated the panes with their droppings to mix with the other general filth. It looked to Tom like there was a swarm of flies gathered around the pointed tip of the skylight, but surely flies would be invisible to the naked eye at such a distance? They were too small to be sparrows or pigeons, and he didn’t know of any birds that were capable of hovering in such a manner. They were almost motionless: just a faint blurring of their wings against the sky.

There was a lot of graffiti on the walls at the lowest levels, where kids had sprayed obscenities and depictions of sexual acts. A few names had been added in a cruder style, almost as an afterthought. Further up, on the south wall, the word ‘Clickity’ had been daubed in dull red paint. Isolated in such a way, it was incongruous, entirely random, yet Tom felt that it must hold meaning to someone. He recalled something he’d often seen on the side of a footbridge over the A1 motorway when he used to travel south regularly for work: Cigarette Burns. He’d often wondered what that meant — was it the name of a band, a record label, or something more sinister? He hadn’t thought about the piece of graffito in years…

“How do you take it?”

“Sorry?” He turned stiffly.

“Your coffee. How do you take it?” Lana was leaning across the kitchen counter. She arched her black eyebrows. Her cheeks were pale, almost white at the edges, but small circles of red had appeared at their centres.

“White. One sugar.”

She nodded and slid back into the kitchen.

“What happened here? Where’s all your stuff — the furniture. Where did it go?”

She appeared from the kitchen holding a mug in each hand. The coffee steamed, sending out bitter ghosts. “I owe money to someone and couldn’t pay this month’s instalment. So they sent somebody round to take our stuff instead.” Her smile was rueful, yet behind her eyes he could see what he could only describe as restrained terror. Lana was scared, and trying hard not to show it.

“Who is he, this man? A loan shark?”

She nodded. “His name is Monty Bright.”

“I don’t know the name. Then again, why would I? I don’t know anyone round here.” He took a mug from her hand and sipped the hot coffee.

“I got myself in a bit of trouble. Hailey and me, we needed things. She needed things. She’s a teenage girl, how could I deny her?” She drank from her mug, lowering her head but not taking her eyes from him. “I was stupid.”

“I’m not going to judge you, Lana. I know nothing about your situation. I do know that you don’t belong here. I’ll be honest; I did some research on the internet. If that offends you, I’ll leave and you never have to see me again.”

Her dark eyes flashed with anger for a second, but then she smiled. Putting down her cup on the windowsill, she walked towards him, stopping only inches away. “That’s fine. I gave up my right to privacy when the newspapers started sniffing around Timothy. That’s my husband, the one who killed those people.”

“You don’t need to explain anything.” Tom licked his lips. “I’ll take you at face value if you do the same for me.”

Lana turned away, picked up her cup, and stood with her back against the wall. She lifted one leg, placing the sole of her foot against the wall, and blew on her coffee. “Hot,” she said, unnecessarily. Then she took another sip.

“Do you owe this man — this Monty Bright — a lot of money? I mean, if it’s a small sum I might be able to help.” He was testing her, pressing her buttons, seeing how far she would go. Trying to figure out exactly what she wanted from him.

“I don’t want your money, Tom. I want your friendship.”

“I suppose that’s something we both need,” said Tom. “My wife… she’s lost to me. She’s a paraplegic. I’ve tried my best, but there’s nothing there. Just a shell of what we used to have. All I am is her carer; she doesn’t need a lover these days, just somebody to keep her clean and feed her medicine.” He smiled, but it was as bitter as the coffee.

“My turn.” Lana did not move from her spot on the carpet. “I borrowed three grand from Bright. Now, with his fucking criminal rate of interest, I owe him twenty grand. It’s like a game to him: he enjoys having people in his debt. I think it’s his drug, the way he gets his kicks. Fuck knows, he doesn’t need the cash. He’s loaded.” She shook her head. Fingers of black hair came free and plucked at her cheeks.

“What is this,” said Tom, “Quid proquo? Tit for tat?”

Lana laughed, throwing back her head. Rogue sunlight caught in her hair and was held there, amid the thick black tresses. “We’re a couple of fuck-ups, aren’t we? Real class acts.”

They had moved together across the room without Tom realising. One minute there was space between them, the next they were almost touching. Holding his mug in one hand, he raised the other to waist level. Lana did the same, opening her fingers and reaching for him. Their hands met, the fingers entwining, forming a knot that he felt might never be broken.

“Is this what we want?” His voice cracked. “I mean, do we really need more problems than we both already have?”

Lana sighed. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

But the decision was taken from them; it had already been made. When they kissed, it came as a surprise. Tom knew it was happening, but it shocked him just the same, like a tiny electrical charge. Her tongue was warm and smooth. He licked her perfect teeth; she snapped her jaws together, pretending to bite.

They did not move apart for a long time, and when finally they did, the damage was already done.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

HAILEY WENT TO her room early that evening. She was tired, washed-out. Her stomach felt oddly empty, as if she hadn’t eaten for days, and her throat was parched. No matter how much water she drank — and she had consumed at least a litre of the stuff since returning home from school — she still felt thirsty.

She lay low down on her bed with her arms by her side. Her bare feet hung over the edge of the mattress. There was a breeze coming in through the open window and it felt good against her body. She was naked. She didn’t know why she had not put on her pyjamas, but it had something to do with a vague yearning to feel the air on her skin, allowing it to breathe.

Tomorrow was Saturday. Apparently Tom was coming to take them out for the day, to Hadrian’s Wall. Her mum had seen him earlier today, and they had discussed the outing. She said that Tom wanted them all to be together. In fact he had insisted that Hailey come along.

Hailey knew that Tom was married, and that his wife was ill. Her mother had let it slip, and then tried to lie her way out of the situation.

Tom wanted to fuck her mum. It was obvious. The way he looked at her, with hungry eyes and his lips slightly parted. He’d looked at Hailey the same way, when she had first met him. He probably wanted to fuck her, too.

She wondered about his wife: whether he still slept with her, or if her condition denied him a sex life. Maybe he was sick of masturbating, and saw her mother as a viable receptacle for his desires.

Hailey smiled. These thoughts — illicit, virtually obscene — were new to her. Never before had she considered such things. She’d kissed a couple of boys, one at a school party who had been all hands, and the other on her way home from school just for the hell of it, but still she failed to see the appeal of tasting the spit and enduring the clumsy touch of a classmate. Some of the girls in her class talked about giving blow jobs and hand jobs, and one or two of them claimed to have gone all the way with their boyfriends. Hailey suspected that most of them were lying, just to give the impression that they were grown up, women of the world instead of blinkered little girls from the estates.

She smiled, reached down and stroked her flat belly. It pulsed softly. She liked the sensation: it was erotic, how she imagined the touch of a grown man’s hand in the same place might feel — a man rather than a silly schoolboy. Somewhere deep inside of her a door had opened, and the woman she would soon be was peeking out, taking stock, getting things in order before she stepped across the threshold.

It started to rain. She turned to face the window, the gap where the curtains had not been fully closed. Street lights. Rain. Shimmering on the glass. The sight was like a promise of beauty, but one from which she was separated, as if by physical barrier.

She closed her eyes and fell into sleep as if it were a hole in the ground. One second she was awake, the next she was dreaming.

SHE IS STANDING before the Needle, still naked. The ground is wet beneath her bare feet but the rain has stopped. Lights move beyond the unbarred upper storey windows of the tower block; unstable figures move within the spots of illumination, waving their hands like stage magicians.

She walks towards the building, feeling the cold air as it caresses her skin. Her legs feel long, lithe, and her nipples stiffen because of the chill. She enters the building through the front door, but is not aware of doing so. She simply takes another step and she is inside, standing in the foyer. The concrete floor has cracked open in several places, and thick, gnarly roots poke through the gaps. Large patches of wall inside the foyer are covered in thick swathes of bark; it feels like she is standing inside a hollowed-out tree.

The sound of humming is everywhere. She looks up and around, at the branches forming a lattice across the shattered concrete ceiling and the rough bark that covers the walls. Hummingbirds have made strange conical nests. She moves towards one of the walls, reaches out and touches the bark. It is hard, rough. One of the nests is within reach, so she runs her fingers over it. The nest is made of human hair and what look like finger bones — she can make out the gristly knuckle joints. A tiny blue hummingbird flies out of the hole at the narrow end of the cone, and then it hovers before her face. Its wings move faster than she can see; there is just a blue-grey blur, a glorious vision of rapid movement. The hummingbird’s eyes are black. Its beak is ruby red.

“Hello,” says Hailey, moving her hand, trying to catch the bird on her palm. “I won’t hurt you.”

The bird flies backwards, gliding like a smaller dream within the larger dream she inhabits. It opens its red beak and unfurls a long, thin tongue or proboscis. Like a soft, hollow tube, the tongue unrolls, growing longer and longer, until eventually it reaches the floor, its end scraping in the dust. More hummingbirds join the first, flying from other nests, some of which are located high overhead. The walls no longer contain any trace of concrete; they are all dark brown, an armoured layer of bark. The floor has turned to vegetation. The roots crawl and writhe, like snakes, around Hailey’s feet. Weird insects burrow beneath this mulch, their bodies displacing the earth and making small heaving tracks across the ground.

“Where am I?” It seems like such a huge question. The answer must be equally as large, perhaps so big that the universe cannot contain it.

The birds form a circle around her, like the flipside of a Disney cartoon, where the magic animals arrive to help the princess. But these birds, she knows deep inside, are not here to offer her aid. They are trying to warn her, or perhaps to scare her away. They are the harbingers of something else — something large and old and terrible. Like the small fishes that feed on a shark’s back, these things co-exist alongside the monstrous, and by doing so have become like tiny monsters themselves. Their beauty is not joyous; it is terrifying. It is the beauty of decay and degradation, the empty grandeur of destruction.

Hailey does not know where this knowledge comes from. It is just sitting in her head, waiting to be accessed.

“You’re old, aren’t you? So very old.” Her voice echoes within the tree-chamber. When she glances away from the birds, once again inspecting her surroundings, she sees that she is now standing at the centre of a small grove of tall oak trees. She knows they are oaks because she recognises them from school, when she and her classmates did a nature project and had to draw the leaves of different species of tree — oak, maple, pine, willow. The oak tree was her favourite: there is something mysterious and majestic about the oak. It is one of the bones of England.

The trees lean in towards her, as if attempting to pass on some secret knowledge. They grow as she watches, dwarfing her, becoming the likeness of what they used to be, thousands of years ago, when this land belonged to nature and contained some kind of indigenous power. But man came along and dug up the land, shattered and fragmented whatever power was buried here, and poisoned it.

“Is this home? Is it where we belong?” She isn’t sure if she means her family or everyone else, perhaps she is referring to all of humanity. “Is it where we started? Where we’ll end up?”

The trees shudder, as if her words have made an impact. Then, slowly, they draw back, moving away. Leaves fall like solidified tears upon the ground. They turn dark as they tumble, crisping as if they are being dried out in an oven. The fat roots slither across them, folding over the fallen debris, crushing it and turning it to compost. Great slabs of concrete erupt through the mat of knotted roots and branches, noisily reclaiming the space, raping it and making it unfit for anything but human habitation. The only animal corrupt enough to live here is man.

Suddenly Hailey understands everything. Then, just as quickly, she realises that she understands nothing. She begins to cry but doesn’t know who — or what — the tears are for. The trees diminish, shrinking, shedding their leaves, going to ground. The hummingbirds take frenzied flight above her head, performing wild, graceless loop-the-loops and almost crashing into each other in their haste. The sound of their wings is that of a million little heartbeats; their vibrant colours are like paint splashes in the air.

Far off, somewhere deep within this ravaged primeval forest, a beast cries out in the throes of either hunger or despair.

CHAPTER TWELVE

LANA USED TO look forward to the weekends. She remembered a time when everything in her world was stable, and she worked part-time at a solicitor’s office in Newcastle. She was the best legal secretary in the firm, commanding a higher salary and better benefits than her peers, and the senior partners thought a lot of her.

Then Timothy had gone spectacularly off the rails. He had invested all their money in a long-distance haulage business that was actually part of an elaborate front for human trafficking, and the world she had so carefully created began to fall apart. It took less than a year for her loving husband to turn from a responsible family man, a respectable investor (or so she’d thought, before he threw in with gangsters) and property developer, into a murderer and a suicide.

It had taken such a short time to fall a great distance. But was the distance really so great? In all honesty, was the difference between family man and vengeful, paranoiac killer so huge? Sometimes, when she remembered him caressing her, whispering his desperate plans for their future into her ear, she thought there was hardly any difference at all.

Weekends these days were much the same as the rest of the week, apart from the fact that Hailey did not have to go to school. Hailey usually stayed in bed until just before noon, watching her DVDs and reading her books and magazines. But now she could no longer do that — her television was gone, the DVDs were useless without a player, and only the books remained.

Today they were both up and ready before nine o'clock. Lana was dressed in jeans and hiking boots, with a good fleecy jacket she’d bought years ago, in more affluent times. Hailey was wearing a pair of battered charity-shop Nikes, her best skinny jeans, and a man’s padded coat that looked so big on her frame Lana suspected she’d either stolen it or been given it by a mystery boyfriend.

Tom had said that he would pick them up at ten, and even though Hailey showed no interest at all in the planned day trip Lana felt as excited as a schoolgirl preparing for a first date. She knew that she was using this as a distraction from her troubles, that Tom’s unexpected arrival on the scene had offered her a smokescreen behind which to hide everything else. But she didn’t care; she was happy — albeit a muted sort of happiness — and she would allow nothing to spoil that feeling. Even if it was just for a day.

Self-delusion, she thought, is often just another coping mechanism.

She heard a car horn blaring outside, and when she rushed over to the window she saw Tom’s car parked in the bus lay-by across the street. She waved but he didn’t see her. He was staring straight ahead at a figure that had just stumbled through a narrow ginnel along Grove Lane and was making its way slowly and awkwardly across the road in front of the block of flats in which she lived.

“What is it, Mum? Who’s that?”

Lana stared at the figure. “I’m not sure, honey. But he looks drunk.”

“Or stoned,” said Hailey.

“Yeah. Maybe.”

Lana felt a formless fear moving at her core. This was the kind of thing she hated most: social terrors in the early morning, or the middle of the day. At night she could almost accept this kind of behaviour, or at least convince herself that she could deal with the threat by locking it out. But during the hours of daylight, when the world was meant to be bright and without shadows, the sight of a junkie staggering about in the road was akin to a personal insult.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get down there before that idiot causes a commotion. Tom’s waiting. We don’t want him to have any hassle.” What she really meant was that she didn’t want him changing his mind and driving away.

Their footsteps sounded hollow as they hurried down the stairwell, and they both moved with a sense of urgency, as if something were pursuing them. Lana felt fingers of terror brush along her spine, and was prompted to look back over her shoulder. Dusty shadows quivered down the stairs. She looked away, feeling absurd that she should be so afraid.

Lana burst through the doors, tightening her grip on the cooler bag she’d slung over one shoulder. The other hand clasped her handbag, and she wished it contained something she could use as a weapon. Mace. A pair of nail scissors.

The man was now standing in front of Tom’s car, weaving on the spot like a listing galleon. His hands were raised and grasping, as if he were trying to grab handfuls of fresh air.

“I know him,” said Hailey, slowing down as they crossed the road and approached the mini roundabout. “It’s that junkie — what’s his name again?”

Lana reached out and grabbed her daughter’s hand, dragging her towards the car. Tom had seen them. He opened the driver’s door and set one foot outside. “Everything okay?” His voice was quiet; the slight breeze took it and lifted it above the rooftops, carrying it away like a scrap of litter.

Lana nodded. “Hurry, now.”

“Banjo!” Hailey stopped dead in her tracks. Her hand slipped from Lana’s grip.

“What are you saying?” Lana spun on her heels, keeping one eye on the unsteady fool who was still standing directly in front of Tom’s car, staring into the windscreen but clearly seeing nothing outside the theatre of his own head.

“That’s his name: Banjo. He always hangs around here. Went missing a few days ago — I remember somebody was asking around for him, wanting to know if anyone had seen him. He’s just a harmless druggie dude.”

“Come on. Let’s just go.” Lana tugged the girl across the road, to the car. Tom was now fully out of the vehicle. He was torn between watching the junkie and greeting the two women.

“Who the hell’s this?” He half smiled, half grimaced.

“Just some local druggie,” said Lana. “Let’s get in the car.”

Tom nodded. “Nice to see you, too.” The smile grew, making his face look younger, cleaner, nicer.

Lana shook her head. “Sorry. This place. It spoils everything.”

Tom opened the rear door and then walked around the back of the car to open the passenger door. He stood, balanced in a moment where he was not quite sure who would sit where.

“Fuck!”

Lana turned towards the front of the car, the direction in which the expletive had come from. Banjo was now weaving so violently that he looked like he might fall down at any minute. His feet remained fixed on the ground but he was now bending forward at the waist, as if performing a weird little dance. He was thin, snake-hipped, and able to manage a wide range of movement. It looked strange, like the beginning of some drug-fuelled urban dance recital. His fingers moved like pincers. He had long, dirty nails. They looked sharp as knives.

“Fuck!” He screamed the word this time, white foam flecking his lips. “Gerroff me!” His face was pale, bloodless, and his lips had peeled back from his teeth to give him a feral expression. “Fnugh!” Speech was deserting him; his throat was convulsing too violently to produce language. Lana watched in fascination as his Adam’s apple bobbed like a ping-pong ball caught in a python’s gut.

“Oh, shit. Get in the car.” She glanced at Hailey, who by now had moved around to the other side of the vehicle. She was closer to Banjo than any of them. “Get in, Hailey. Get in now.”

“Wait a second, Mum. We should call an ambulance, or something.”

Banjo leapt, pushing himself forward like a giant cat attacking its prey. His lower body slammed into the bodywork, and he rolled along the car’s left wing. This gave Hailey enough time to back-pedal, and Tom moved his body between her and the gibbering junkie. He stood firm, hands clenched into tight fists.

“Hailey!” Lana ran to her daughter, pulling her away from the car. She fumbled inside her purse for her mobile phone and thumbed the emergency number.

“Just stay back,” said Tom. “Keep the fuck away.” He took a single step backwards, stumbling slightly.

Banjo was wailing now, like a baby demanding food. His mouth was lathered in foam; his eyes were weeping blood. His hands were still raised in front of his face, and he turned his palms inward, twisting his thin fingers into hooks. Then, still moaning wordlessly, he began to claw at his cheeks with those long, guitar-picking fingernails.

“Oh my God. Do something. Shit, do something!” Hailey’s voice had risen to such a high pitch that it sounded like she was singing.

Lana screamed into the phone: “Grove Court! There’s a man killing himself, send help, now!” The operator tried to calm her with words she could barely even hear, and she just yelled her request over and over again in the hope that it would be answered. “Send someone now!”

Everything seemed to freeze apart from Banjo, and what he was doing. The others just stood there and stared, incapable of anything but watching the horror as it happened.

Banjo’s fingernails had gone in deep. Lana saw flashes of white tooth or skull amid the red, and the man’s cheeks already hung from his face in fine tatters, like thin slices of Parma ham. He had stopped crying and worked now in silence, raking the loosened flesh away from muscle, the thick muscle away from bone.

The man slumped to his knees, his hands still working furiously at his ruined face, as if controlled by an external force. His fingers pushed through into his oral cavity; Lana could see them wriggling in there when he opened his mouth in a gurgling scream. He tore away the flesh, hooking his bottom lip between finger and thumb and tugging it like a fattened maggot from a feast of rotten fruit. By the time the sirens were audible, wailing across the estate like a bunch of harpies, he had taken off half of his face.

Lana didn’t think it was possible to cause this much damage to your own body without losing consciousness, but somehow the fucked-up drug-head had managed it.

When the ambulance pulled up at the kerb and ejected two paramedics from its rear doors, Banjo was slumped against the side of the car and still pulling away the flesh directly under his chin. Blood decorated his shirt like a bad dye job. His legs twitched against the tarmac, his shoes slapped the kerb. His features were obscured by the dangling raw-meat mask he now wore. He had stopped screaming and worked in a strange, almost formal silence.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THEIR TRIP WAS delayed, but they were determined to continue with their plans. The ambulance crew took away the injured and sedated man, strapping him to a gurney, and they were told to wait until the police arrived. There was not much to say when the officers questioned them, just a précised version of the facts, and they were asked to call in at the local station as soon as it was convenient to give a formal statement.

Nobody seemed to care that much about Banjo; the emergency personnel went about their business in a calm, detached manner. He was just another junkie who’d lost his mind, overdosing on cheap smack, and turned his emotions inward to cut himself.

The area was full of people just like him, and the police seemed unimpressed even by the manner in which Banjo had done himself harm. They’d seen it all before. It was part of the job, another aspect of their day-to-day existence: self-harming junkies, street drugs, and common-or-garden madness. Just one aspect in a grim parade of extremity, the same as every other event they were trained to deal with.

“Are you sure you still want to do this?” Tom glanced into the rear-view mirror as he drove out of the estate. He knew what he wanted to hear, but didn’t want to prompt a reply she was reluctant to give.

Lana sat with her arms around Hailey’s shoulders, but the girl remained oddly unmoved by the experience. “What do you think, honey? Shall we still go, or would you prefer to go home?”

Hailey shook her head. “We’ll go. What have we got to go back for? There’ll be blood on the road and questions and gossip from the neighbours. I’d rather stick to our plans.”

“Only if you’re sure, baby.” Lana stroked her daughter’s hair. Her eyes remained locked on Tom’s in the mirror. Her lips formed a tight line across the bottom of her face, as if underlining the event.

“He was just a drugged-up loser, Mum. Who cares?”

Lana’s hand stopped moving on Hailey’s scalp. “Okay, honey.” She stared at Tom.

Tom nodded. “So we continue, then: to Hadrian’s Wall. It might do us all a bit of good, actually, just to get away from all that madness back there.”

“Can we have music on? Please?” Hailey was sitting up straight. She’d folded her arms across her chest and moved away from her mother, pressing her body against the inside of the door. She seemed to have forgotten about the horror they had witnessed.

“Yeah. Sure we can.” Tom reached out and turned on the radio. He noted that his hands were shaking, even as he turned the dial. The radio was tuned to a local station; they were playing a pop tune he vaguely recognised from a television commercial. He wasn’t sure what kind of product the ad was selling, but he knew most of the words to the song’s hideously catchy chorus.

“That’s good. Thanks.” Hailey smiled as she looked out of the side window. Her eyes looked empty, bereft of anything but the reflection of daylight.

He drove west, towards Hexham, taking the A69 — a road which followed the route of Hadrian’s Wall. Green fields were pocked with strange pools of light and shadow. Small tumbledown stone walls barricaded dirty sheep and kept them from the roadside. The occasional fell walker waved as they drove by, raising red-cagouled arms to indicate some kind of bond they did not share. Tom drove in silence until they reached the signs for a place called Greenhead, where he turned off the main road and followed the signs for the Hadrian’s Wall Path.

Tom parked the car on a patch of gravel. The sky was turning dark, clouds were bloated and shuffling. A few other people — pensioners, on a day out — were milling around, putting on or taking off their walking boots, sorting out rucksacks and packed lunches.

“I brought a picnic,” said Lana. She was buttoning her coat against the chill.

Tom nodded. “That’s nice. I’m sorry, the weather’s turning bad, and that thing back at the estate… It seems like something doesn’t want us to have a good time today.”

Hailey was walking away, towards a low fence. She sat down on the top bar and stared back along the road.

Lana moved towards Tom, placing her hand on his arm. “I want us to have a good time,” she said. “What happened earlier doesn’t matter. It’s what we did yesterday that really counts.”

Tom placed his hand over hers. She was warm, and her long, thin fingers moved against his, rubbing his thumb. “I want us to enjoy this, too,” he said. “All of it.” The sky churned above them. A large bird — black, and with a huge wing span — flew over their heads, cawing loudly. It was like an omen, but Tom refused to let its message inside his head.

“Come on, let’s go for that walk.” She squeezed his hand, and he felt brittle, like calcified bone. If he stopped for even a moment to think about all of this, he might snap into a million pieces, his skeleton shattering and the broken bones spilling across the hills and dales.

They walked together to the spot where Hailey was sitting, her legs tucked up under her bottom and her hands pressed flat against the wooden fence. “Come on, we’re going to work up an appetite.” Lana brushed her fingers across Hailey’s cheek, and the girl flinched away before getting to her feet and following them across the flat, wet grass.

They crossed the fence using a wooden stile, and headed up a long, gradual rise. The gravel path soon became a hard-packed dirt trail, and the bushes and trees thinned out the higher they climbed. Scrawny lone trees stood like sentinels, surrounded only by flat stretches of grass. Old rock falls had created shallow caves, and the roots of old trees clasped the stone walls of these strange natural constructions.

Soon they reached the tip of the hill, and went through a gate to follow part of a bridle path. As they turned to follow the tip of the rise, the partial remnants of the great Roman wall came into view.

The uneven stone spine of the wall stretched away from them, dipping into small valleys and then rising to rocky peaks. The route was no longer steep, but it did undulate dramatically, so that the wall itself resembled the sculpture of some great stone serpent. Tom recalled with passing fondness the legend of the Lambton Worm, and the old folk song they used to sing at school when he was a small boy:

But the worm got fat an’ grewed an’ grewed,

An’ grewed an aaful size;

He’d greet big teeth, a greet big gob,

An greet big goggly eyes

This particular worm, the one whose back they were following across the ancient landscape, hoping that it might lead them to a glimpse of something better than they already had, was made of stone. But no, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t the wall that would lead them to better things, it was their own ambition, and the strength of any plans they made.

“We learned about this at school, in Mr. Benson’s class.” Hailey had drawn level with them. Her eyes were still blank, dreamy, but she seemed a little more focused than before.

“What did you learn?” Tom thought that a mellow discussion about the history of the place might divert her mind from darker thoughts, and even help him to stop thinking about his increasingly uncertain future.

“Well, Emperor Hadrian built the wall. I think it was in AD 122, at least that’s when he started. It took — I think it was six years to build.”

“Well remembered,” said Tom. Lana gripped his hand. “Anything else?”

“It was built as a fortification to keep out trouble from Scotland.” She chewed on her lower lip between sentences, as if lost in thought. “But it was also meant as a symbol of Roman power, according to Mr. Benson. He reckons it was like the Romans flexing their muscles. Telling everyone else not under Roman rule to keep back, or they’d get a good kicking.”

Tom laughed. “Well, yes, that’s a fair point. The Romans certainly knew how to give folk a good kicking.”

“Something else, as well: we read this article from a science magazine, and apparently back in the Sixties someone dug up a portion of the wall and found human bones. Baby bones. Newborn children were buried alive under the foundations as a sacrifice, to protect the wall.”

“Jesus, Hailey… do we really need to talk about that?” Lana shook her head. “What the hell gets into your head, girl? Sometimes, I just don’t think I know you at all.”

Hailey’s voice turned petulant, the tone low and uneven. “It was in the magazine. I didn’t make it up.”

“Okay, that’s actually very interesting.” Tom turned to face them, walking backwards across the stony ground and trying to avert the threatened row. “The Romans were a pretty nasty bunch, and they had very demanding gods.” Something caught his eye. A small, almost dainty movement far behind them, somewhere back along the route they had taken. It looked like a scrap of white sheet, or perhaps a piece of paper, flapping in the wind. Tom stared back along the trail, but nothing else moved. Even the hikers they’d seen in the car park were absent.

“What is it?” Lana looked in the same direction, and then at Tom. “Are you okay?”

Tom nodded. “Yes, fine. I just thought… I dunno. Something just spooked me.”

“Yeah,” said Lana. “Probably all this talk of dead babies. So I think that’s enough of that.” She glared at Hailey, who continued walking at a slow pace, watching the ground at her feet.

They followed the relatively straight line of the wall, clambering over small rocky outcroppings and plodding up and down the sudden dips and rises. In places the grass was so worn that it looked bald, as if transparent ice were forming and hardening the ground. The air was chilly — but not cold enough to support the idea of snow — and the slight breeze was stirring, becoming stronger.

Tom kept glancing over his shoulder, trying to catch sight of whatever he had spotted moments before. Each time he turned his head, something twitched at the edge of his vision. But by the time he had focused on the location, there was no longer anything to be seen. It was as if something were teasing him, drawing his attention before ducking back out of sight. The thought unnerved him, and he remembered the weird visions he’d been having lately: the dog with a boy’s face, a figure that may or may not be a visual echo of his dead father’s abuse.

“How about we stop for a bite to eat?” Lana pressed her body against him. It was warm, firm, and reminded him of reality rather than stupid dreams and visions.

“That would be good. Hailey — what do you think?”

“Whatever.” The girl stopped and sat down on a large, damp rock that was sticking out of the ground like a giant’s tooth. She picked up a twig and started stripping the bark, rolling it off between her fingers like the rind of some strange fruit.

Lana put the cooler bag on the ground and sat on a nearby cluster of stones. Slowly she began to take items out of the bag: a small checked blanket, bags of sandwiches, a thermos flask filled with what Tom assumed must be coffee. She lined up these things neatly, as if it were important that everything was just right.

“Can I help?” Tom made a move to sit down beside her, but she glanced up and shook her head.

“It’s fine,” said Lana. “Be done in a minute. The grass is still a bit wet, but it’ll be okay if we stay on these rocks.”

The sky was now grey as slate, and the dense clouds resembled a layer of dull, dirty plaster across the ceiling of the world. Tom stared upwards, trying to make out the sun behind the billowing mayhem. He saw glints, tiny fragments of brightness, but they were swallowed instantly. “Hope it doesn’t piss it down,” he said. And when nobody answered, he trudged over the grass towards a low section of the wall.

The stone was old, chipped, and light grey in colour. It poked up above the grass like a giant fossilised spine. He approached the ruin, glancing along it in the direction they’d been heading. Then, as his hand pressed against the cold stone, he looked the other way, trying to pick out the route they had come along.

Something shifted in the grey air, partly obscured by the dimness and the distance. It was a mere flicker, like the sudden twitch of a fish’s tail twisting and vanishing into deep, debris-filled waters. The motion filled him with a heavy sense of dread, and he wished that he had not seen it.

Tom kept looking at the same spot, but the movement failed to reoccur, and nothing solid appeared out of the dull, heavy air.

He felt a weight pressing down on him, as if the air above him were turning to stone, like the wall, like the attitudes of the people on that damned estate. His shoulders began to ache from the imaginary burden, and if felt as if he were being pushed down into another world — one that existed either directly beneath or alongside this one. He ran the palm of his hand across his forehead and it came away damp. The sweat was cold, like the perspiration from someone suffering a fever. His vision burred; the churning air far ahead of him shimmered with the promise of more movement.

“Who’s there?” he whispered the words, afraid to speak them louder.

Then, fading into existence like a slow-dissolve image on a cinema screen, something took shape a few hundred yards down the track. It hovered in the air, twisting and bucking, filled with an energy that was both frightening and invigorating. It seemed to Tom that he was watching many hands, chopping, punching, and picking at the substance of the air, as if trying to use those small, condensed acts of violence to break through the barriers of reality.

“Who?” Again, it was a whisper. He didn’t want Lana to hear.

The hands darted like birds; they opened like wings and then folded shut again, forming solid fists that pummelled the air. Tom heard their impact in his mind, but he knew that the sound was not audible in the real world. Only in that place he had felt shifting beneath and around him, that one that was still trying to open up and pull him in.

He was trapped here, mute and helpless before those rampaging fists — the fists that were now moving closer to him, seeking him out, drawn to his anxiety.

It was like a pocket or envelope of air had closed around those barely visible fists, and they were trying to fight their way out. They were large, bony and monstrous: bigger than life, yet so much less than living. He saw now that there were scores of them, packed in tight like creatures caught up in gossamer netting.

Tom stood his ground. He was too terrified to move, to run. His feet had been swallowed by the earth, becoming part of the footing of the ancient wall at his side. The fists raged; they bristled with energy. If they touched him even once, Tom knew that he would be destroyed. His body would explode on impact.

Then they were gone. The pocket of air seemed to pop like a balloon, and nothing threatening was inside. The sky rose back to its natural position, and his legs were released from the ground’s hungry grip.

“Mum said the food’s ready.” Hailey stood at his side, one hand resting on his forearm. Her face was so pale that he thought he could see through it to the skull beneath. Something twitched inside the confines of her cranium, causing the bone to bulge outward: nothing but a vision that was leftover from his brush with that imaginary realm. He blinked and it was gone.

Tom was under no illusion that her presence had sent the chaotic hallucination on its way, and he could have fallen to his knees in thanks. Instead he followed her back to the cluster of rocks, where Lana sat smiling on the red and black blanket, an array of food set out before her on an improvised table of stone. The sheer banality of the sight helped him to put some distance between this moment and what he had seen — or what he thought he had seen.

“This stuff isn’t going to eat itself,” she said. Then a look of concern crossed her face. “Are you okay? You look… well, you look shocked. Or scared.”

Tom knelt down on the blanket, reached for a sandwich. “Sorry. I was just thinking — thinking about my late father.”

And then he was frightened all over again, because it was true: he had been thinking about his dead father, but without even realising he was doing so. Those fists — those images of violence — had been all that was left of the man, a representation of his will. His ghost, his phantom, was nothing more than a snatch of unfocused aggression, a flock of fists fighting against something unseen.

After they’d eaten — sandwiches with cheap fillings, freezer-shop-bought vol-au-vonts, mini sausage rolls, flattened cheese spheres wrapped in red plastic jackets — Hailey walked across the grass and then started to stroll along the side of the rampart. She bent over to pick up a stone, threw it, and then ran her hand along the weather-worn surface of the wall.

“She was a twin, you know.” Lana smiled, but her eyes were flat. “Her brother was stillborn. Thirty-seven seconds after I had Hailey, I delivered a little corpse.”

Tom didn’t know what to say, so he remained silent. He stared at Lana’s face, at the way her hair fell across her cheek and she kept pushing it out of the way; an unconscious gesture, but somehow sad and beautiful.

“I haven’t told anyone that,” she said, glancing at him, and then down at the ground. “I don’t even know why I’m telling you.” She shook her head. “Hailey doesn’t even know she almost had a brother.” She smiled again, and this time it was better, stronger, almost real.

“What’s wrong?” Tom waited for her to answer; there was no rush, they had all day. “What’s really bothering you?”

“I’m worried about her,” said Lana, turning to stare at her daughter’s back.

Tom moved round on the blanket so that he was sitting right next to her on the rock. He could feel the heat of her body, even through their fleecy jackets. A flash of sunlight lit the sky above them, and then dimmed but did not vanish. “Why? Is she still having those fainting spells?”

Lana shook her head. She lifted a hand and pushed the hair from out of her eyes. “No, she seems to have stopped those. But there’s something else, something wrong.”

Tom placed his hand on her knee.

She glanced at him and smiled, but the expression didn’t last. “I think she might be pregnant.”

“Ah… okay. Has she said anything?” He squeezed her knee, but this time she failed to respond.

“No, it’s nothing she’s actually said. But sometimes when I look at her, when she’s wearing thin clothing, her belly seems swollen. Then, the next time I look, it’s flat. I’m not sure what’s going on, but it isn’t right. It could be a tumour, or something. It might not be natural at all. I think I should take her to see a doctor, but if I tried I know she’d fight me.”

The landscape was silent; not even the birds sang. Not a living soul was visible. The sky trembled.

“This all sounds a bit strange,” said Tom, unsure of what she wanted him to say. “Her belly — you say it looks like she’s pregnant one day, and then the next it looks normal?”

“No,” said Lana. “Not normal. On those other days she looks too thin. Skinny. Like she’s starving to death. Her skin’s all dry, her breath smells, and she’s passing blood when she goes to the toilet. She says she’s never even been with a boy. I don’t know what to do. I couldn’t handle it if she was seriously ill.”

Tom remained silent. He wanted to help, to offer support, but this was something in which he had little experience. He’d never been a father; his marriage had not produced a child.

“I’m sorry.” She hitched closer again, so that her thigh brushed against his leg. “I shouldn’t be burdening you with this. All my troubles, my fucking woes.” She tried to laugh but it didn’t quite work: the sound was shrill, pitched almost at breaking point. “It’s just that everything seems to be turning bad, and I have nobody else to talk to.”

Tom held her hand. It was warm, despite the chill. “Listen, I’m here for you. I don’t know what it is, but we have a connection here. I’m married, you have your own responsibilities, yet we’re drawn together. Or am I reading this all the wrong way, and you just need someone to lean on? I can be that, too… if that’s all you want.”

She shook her head. The movement was vigorous, as if she were trying to convince more than just Tom of her motives. “No, that’s not all I want. I need someone to hold me in the night, to make love to me and make me remember that I’m a woman and not just a single mother, a statistic struggling to cope. I need… I need. That’s all.”

Her hand ran along his thigh, moving into his lap to cup him there. She squeezed, softly at first and then harder, and Tom felt like he was about to burst apart at the seams.

“I think I need you, Tom.” Her eyes were wet, but she did not cry. Her neck blushed red; her cheeks took on a little of that colour.

“We’ll work something out. I promise. Because I think I need you, too.”

They both looked over at Hailey at the same time, as if she had called out to them.

The girl was standing motionless, turned slightly away from them but with the side of her face still visible, about a hundred metres along the wall. Her hand was outstretched, the palm held flat, and a tiny red and gold bird was perched at its centre. Hailey’s lips were moving, as if she were talking to the creature. Then, as they both watched in silence, the brightly-hued bird rose and hovered inches above Hailey’s hand before skimming off across the top of the wall, where it disappeared into the shuddering dimness beyond.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

LATER, AS HE drove away from the Grove, Tom thought about what a strange day this had been. Nothing had seemed to go right on the surface of things — the junkie trying to rip off his own face, the tense mood once the three of them had finally reached Hadrian’s Wall, the revelations regarding Hailey’s problems, and that odd, insightful moment with what had looked for all the world like a hummingbird — but underneath all this, he felt that it had all been so perfect he wanted to wrap up his memories of the day and lock them away inside a little box.

He had wanted nothing more than to stay for a while at Lana’s place, but Hailey’s mood had soured once they got out of the car and he thought it best to leave them, to give mother and daughter some time together. It was getting late anyway: they’d remained at the site longer than expected, leaving reluctantly only when the sun began to set. And he had promised Eileen Danby — the neighbour who was keeping an eye on Helen for the day — that he wouldn’t be back too late. He had already broken that promise, just like all the others he had broken simply by spending the day with Lana.

He drove slowly through Far Grove, trying to prolong his time away from home, but deep down inside he knew that wherever he went and however long he stayed away, he would always have to return to his wife. It was his duty, his penance. His entire life had been lived in the shadow thrown by an obstacle he could never quite define, and now he was facing the punishment for so many lost years and wasted chances. There wasn’t even anyone to blame, not really. Because That Man had not been a monster, just another human being making mistakes like everyone else.

He turned into their street and parked the car on the drive. Then he sat behind the wheel for a while, filled with a dark regret. He stared at his hands on the steering wheel. They looked old, wrinkled. He imagined that in a few years’ time liver spots would appear, marking the onslaught of death.

The radio was playing a song by Otis Redding, and despite the hi-tempo beat the tune filled Tom with a sense of regret. Why could he not have met Lana, or someone like her, when he was still young enough and sharp enough and free enough to take advantage of the opportunity? Why had it happened now, when he was already resigned to spending the remainder of his years looking after a wife he hated?

Hate. It was such a strong world… but in rare honest moments, like this one, he knew it to be true.

“They call me Mr. Pitiful,” he said, smiling, looking for humour in a situation where there was none. His eyes, when he looked at his face in the rear-view mirror, were dull and flat and lifeless, like pennies thrown in a pond to rust, corroded by dreams so heavy that they could not be lifted from the bottom.

He got out of the car and walked slowly along the drive. The lights were on downstairs — Eileen, the neighbour, must still be in there, watching over Helen as she lay sweating in her bed. He paused outside the front door, wishing that he could turn back, run away, and head off into some movie-scene sunset. Then he opened the door and walked inside.

“Tom?” Eileen Danby appeared in the kitchen doorway. She was holding a mug and her face was drawn, tired.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” said Tom, taking off his coat. “I hit some bad traffic.”

“It’s okay.” Eileen smiled, and when she did so her tired, heavy face lost at least a decade. He recalled that many years ago, before her husband had left her, she was an attractive woman. “No, it’s not that. I don’t mind. It’s Helen… she’s had a bit of a bad time.”

Tom glanced towards Helen’s room. The door had been left ajar. The handle looked like a weapon, but before he could puzzle over this thought and where it had come from, Eileen was speaking again. “She got a little paranoid.” She tightened her grip on the mug, wrapping her fingers around a faded comedy decal of Bugs Bunny dressed as a French Maid. “She seems to think that you’ve been doing something wrong, or visiting a place you shouldn’t.”

Tom’s stomach seemed to drop into his knees.

“I couldn’t really be sure what she meant. Her voice, her words. It was all just gibberish.” She smiled sadly.

Tom looked down at the floor, at his walking boots. Dried mud was spattered on the toughened toe caps. “I’ve been with a client. We went for a walk near where he lives, had lunch in a nice rural pub. There’s nothing else.” He felt like crying. He always felt like crying.

“I know that, Tom — God knows, you’ve been loyal to her, caring for her when a lot of men might have walked away. You’re a good man, a saint. I know how tough it must be for you.”

He felt like grabbing her by the shoulders and screaming into her startled face: I’m not a good man, I’m a bastard. I’ve been thinking about nothing else but fucking another woman all day!

He nodded. “Thank you, Eileen. I really appreciate that.”

She took a few steps closer and reached out, one hand still clutching the mug and the other grabbing his hand, groping it before finding purchase. “A very good man.” Her fingers were hot and clammy.

Tom could not raise his head; he was unable to look up, into her eyes. He knew that Eileen Danby had been attracted to him for years, and that attraction had grown since Helen’s injuries. She’d made a blatant pass one New Year’s Eve, about seven years ago. Her husband had left her the Christmas before, and she was feeling lonely and neglected. They’d been sitting on the steps at the back of her house, listening to the revellers inside — this was back when Helen was still willing to get around in her wheelchair, so even she was present at the party.

Eileen had placed her hand on his knee, moved it almost casually up his leg. Then, without uttering a word, she’d undone his zip and masturbated him. Right there on the doorstep, smelling of beer and cigarettes and staring away, across the garden, as if the act was separate from her, a part of something else she was thinking of.

And Tom had let her do it, enjoying being complicit in such a blatant act of sexuality.

“I’m not a good man,” he whispered. “Never was.”

Afterwards, when he was breathing hard and spots of light were scattered across his vision, Eileen had wiped her hand on a paper tissue she’d produced from the breast pocket of her blouse. She kissed him on the cheek, stood up and went back inside the house, all without speaking, without acknowledging in any way what she had done. Tom had sat there for another ten or fifteen minutes, drinking his beer and wondering what the hell had just happened.

They had not spoken of the event since, pretending that it had never happened. Those scant few moments on the back doorstep were like a shared wet dream, something that might vanish if they confronted its memory.

“You know where I am if you ever want to talk.” She pulled her hand away, placing it behind her back, as if to hide the evidence of her touch. She always said the same thing, and not once had he taken her up on the offer. But he knew it was there: he still felt the pressure of her grip on his penis, even all these years later, as if she had never really let go.

“I know, Eileen, and it’s really appreciated.” At last he raised his eyes from the floor, glancing at her. She had stepped back, and her face seemed unable to fix on a single expression. “Thanks.”

Eileen smiled, nodded, and then frowned. “She’s sleeping now. She slept most of the day, to be honest.” She put down her mug on the table near the stairs and grabbed her coat from the hook on the wall. “I’ll leave you to it. Tell her I’ll pop in on Tuesday, as usual, to see if she wants any shopping.”

Tom remained where he was as Eileen let herself out — she’d had a key for years now, and came and went as she pleased whenever Tom asked her to help out while he was away on business. She never overstepped the mark of their unspoken agreement, and had not once given him reason to think that she might have an ulterior motive for doing what she did. Eileen had been a good friend to Helen, despite that one slip at the New Year’s Eve party. She had also been invaluable to Tom whenever he needed support. She’d never again strayed beyond these personal boundaries, but the unspoken offer was out there, whether he wanted it or not.

“See you, Eileen.” The door slammed shut on his words.

He walked across the hallway and pushed open the door to Helen’s room. Every time he did this, stepped into her darkened room, he thought of that film, The Exorcist. The one with the possessed girl in an upstairs bedroom, strapped to a bed in the dark. The way the visiting priests’ breath misted in the icy air; the oppressive pressure of the silence in the room, apart from the ragged sound of her breathing.

“Helen? You awake, Helen?”

He could hear her breathing, just like the demonic teenager in that film. It was low, heavy, asthmatic, and punctuated by soft little snores.

“I’m home. Sorry it took longer than I thought, but the guy wanted a full report on how I’m planning to save him money on last year’s taxes.” He hated lying like this, but the demands of his accountancy work were a gilt-edged excuse. Helen knew he had to visit clients, to keep them sweet and reassure them about their money and investments, so she rarely questioned his motives when he left the house for a day, and she always enjoyed Eileen Danby’s company.

“No.” Her voice was thick; he could tell immediately that she was still asleep.

“It’s okay, pet. I’m here. I’m home. There’s no need to fret.” He approached the bed and sat down on the edge of the mattress. There was a jug of water by the bed, half full, and a crumb-covered plate containing half a slice of buttered toast and a folded chocolate biscuit wrapper. “No need to worry, now.”

The television at the foot of the bed was switched on, but there was no picture, just a silent screen filled with surging static.

The top of Helen’s head, along with part of her face, was visible above the covers. He could see the sweat glistening on her forehead like crushed ice. Her eyes were closed but her eyelids twitched, holding back a dream. The bedclothes covered her mouth, but he could see by the movement of the muscles in her jaw that she was grinding her teeth and mumbling in her sleep — something she often did when she was uneasy, when she was feeling disturbed or anxious.

He reached out and stroked her forehead. The skin was warm and wet; each furrow or crease was filled with greasy moisture. Tom held back a wave of nausea, feeling guilty for the way he disliked to touch his wife.

“What did you do?” Her voice was louder this time. The covers shifted down a few inches, exposing her open lips. Her teeth were large and discoloured. “What did you do with her?”

“Hush now, it’s okay. There’s nothing wrong. I’m home…” He was running out of things to say, and knew that she probably couldn’t hear him anyway.

“Bastard!”

She did that too, sometimes: swore at him, abused him as she slept. Once he had fallen asleep beside her, curled up on the bed, and woken to find her hands around his neck, tightening, trying to choke him. It had been the last time he’d ever allowed himself to doze in her room. After that he made a point of heading upstairs as soon as he felt tired. Something else she had spoiled; another thing for him to feel guilty about, but on her behalf: a sense of guilt by proxy.

Give me all of it, he thought, bitterly. A man can never have enough guilt.

Tom turned and looked again at the television. The static danced before his eyes, threatening to take on forms, to twist into the shapes of dancing figures. He stared at the monochrome blur, narrowing his eyes. Could he see fists in that chaos of interference? Where they swinging, as if throwing punches on the other side of the screen?

Helen moaned: a soft, wordless noise.

A face seemed to loom forward from the screen, breaking away from the mass of dots. Its eyes were closed but its mouth was open, widening as Tom watched. Other, smaller faces poured out of it, dancing around the original features. He was tired, seeing things.

“Tom?” The picture broke apart at the sound of Helen’s voice, as though afraid to be witnessed by anyone but him.

“Yes… yes, it’s me.”

“Where’s Eileen?” She blinked into the darkness, the wash of TV light softening her features, making it look as if there were no bones beneath the skin, or like the bones there had melted.

“She went home. It’s late.”

“What time is it? I… I must’ve fallen asleep again. I’ve been very tired today. Exhausted, but I’m not sure why.” Her hands fidgeted on top of the bedclothes, exploring like pale stick insects. Her eyes were wide and wet and slightly imbecilic.

“It’s almost nine o’clock. I’m really sorry for staying out this long.”

Helen shivered. “No. It’s fine. You need to work, to bring in the money. I know that.” She looked like a plastic doll, rigid and unblinking.

“Just lie back down and go to sleep. I’ll clean up and have an early night myself. It’s been a long day. Tiring. I need to catch up on a lot of work tomorrow, so will probably be up and about early.”

One of her flailing hands settled on top of both of his. Her fat fingers enveloped them, spreading out across his knuckles like a jellyfish. “Okay, Tom. I love you.” Her voice was filled with a desperation that he found offensive, even frightening. She said it because she wanted him to say it back — she needed to hear him say the words, to reassure her, to put her mind at rest. He hated it when she got like this, and he despised himself for begrudging her the slight demonstration of affection.

More guilt for him to carry, and it always prompted him to give her what she needed.

“I love you, too,” he said, through tight lips. The words sounded like someone else was in the room, speaking for him.

She squeezed his hands and then relaxed her grip. He pulled his hands away, just about resisting the urge to wipe them on his shirt, as if she had left a residue, a taint that he could not bear to feel against his skin.

“I had a strange dream,” she said as she nestled her head back against the pillows. Her eyes were open. Even in the darkness he could see the pulse in the side of her neck jerking like a jumping bean.

“Don’t worry about that now. Just tell me in the morning, when we’re both less tired.”

“But I might forget.” Her eyelids were flickering shut. The pulse in her neck was slowing, its movement becoming less frantic. “What if I forget it, Tom?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said, adjusting his position on the bed so that he could get up without disturbing her. “It’s nothing, just a dream. And dreams can’t hurt you.”

“The TV people told me.”

Tom felt his limbs stiffen. His eyes widened in the dark and his shoulders tensed.

“They said that you were with someone — another woman.”

He stared at her face, her slack cheeks and her closed eyes. Her small, hard nose. Her slit of a mouth and the multiple chins beneath.

“I don’t mind. I know you have needs. You’re a man, still a young man, really, and you can’t deny your desires.”

She was asleep now: he could see that she was. He knew her well enough, and had spent so many years by her side, that he could not fail to recognise when she was no longer awake. Yet her speech was crisp and erudite. She was speaking lucidly, unhurriedly. Her words were as clear as the sound of falling water.

“But they said she’s dangerous. The TV people. They told me that she’ll hurt you. Something’s going to happen, and everyone will suffer. We’ll all pay a price, a debt that’s owed. We’ll all get hurt because of her.”

She’s sleeping, he thought. Talking in her sleep. She does this all the time — don’t get freaked out. She knows nothing.

But he was freaked out. In fact, he was terrified. How could she know that he had been with a woman, and one whose very presence made him weak and senseless with desire? It wasn’t real, couldn’t be. This was some kind of fluke, a random circumstance. There was no way on earth that Helen could know, and there certainly were not any people inside the television to divulge the information.

He looked over at the screen, needing to keep an eye on it, to watch it more closely. The static was going crazy. It was like a swarm of monochrome bees trapped in a jar, bouncing off the glass walls, confused and trying to get out, get free, back out into the open.

“She’ll break everything. Cause damage. They told me this, the TV people. They had skinned faces and long, bent-back legs. There were tiny birds with bright wings hovering around them and landing on them, sitting in their open palms.”

The television screen bulged. Just once, like an air bubble. Then it went dark. Reflected for a moment in that jet black surface, Tom saw something that could not possibly be his father’s face, no matter how much it resembled the man’s features.

“She’ll open doors that should stay closed.” Helen’s voice was drifting now, growing weaker, quieter. “She’s going to let them out, and… she doesn’t know… it.”

Then she went quiet, apart from her ragged breathing, and the faint sound of her little snores.

Tom prepared to get up and leave the room. The face in the television screen — the one that he refused to acknowledge looked like his dead father — was no longer visible. He shifted his weight on the mattress, causing it to creak and rock slightly beneath him.

I’m seeing things, he thought. That’s all.

Helen sat bolt upright, her eyes open wide. They were all white: no pupil. Just big white marbles stuck into the pale dough of her face. Her mouth dropped open, her tongue lolling like a fat dead worm. “Kill me.” She said. “You deserve better.” Her eyes were normal now; the pupils were dilated but at least they’d gone back where they were meant to be. Her face had regained some of its firmness, and looked less like the face of a corpse. “I know you want to, Tom.” She slipped back onto the pillows, her eyes closing. “I know it’s what you want.”

Tom stood and backed away from the bed, terrified that he might disturb her and the whole performance would start up all over again. He moved towards the door, keeping one eye on Helen and the other on the dead television screen.

“Maybe I want it, too.”

He could not be certain that she said the words, but he heard them anyway, inside his head. The stale air in the room buzzed with energy, like the air before a storm. Helen’s statement — whether real or imagined — was stuck in his head, refusing to budge. The words hung there like dead animals nailed to a wall: a reminder of something bad, the first bloody act in a chain of events that could not be prevented from running its course.

He backed out of the room and tried to shut the door. He could not remove his fingers from the handle; they were glued there by fear. Perhaps if he remained where he was, with his hand on the door, then nothing Helen had predicted would happen? Perhaps he could stop the world, simply by standing there, unmoving.

Or perhaps the world would simply keep on turning without him, unaffected by his ridiculous protest, and the damage his wife had spoken of would still destroy them all. One by one, like diseased trees falling in a dying forest, or plastic targets put down by gunshots.

Maybe nothing he did would ever matter, not any more. Not now.

Because what if his life was already over — if in fact it had ended ten years ago, right after the accident — and since then he’d just been playing catch-up?

He shut and then re-opened the door — just an inch or two, the way Helen liked it. When he leaned in close and peeked through the gap he saw a large, grey hairless mass on the bed. Fins twitched above the covers like the legs of a dog dreaming of the run. At last the sea cow was sleeping…

…then it was her again: it was Helen, asleep on the bed, her nightdress in disarray. His wife: the person who depended on him so completely. The woman he was meant to love.

As he moved away from the door, Tom had the terrible feeling that he was leaving behind one kind of darkness only to enter another.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

HAILEY IS DREAMING again, but this time it’s different. She is not naked, for a start, and her surroundings are not at all familiar. She is standing barefoot in a dense wood, wearing sheets of flesh still warm and bloody from whatever animal they have been sliced from. She looks down at her body beneath the pelts, and sees that there are designs painted upon her swollen stomach in blood.

Signs and sigils; numbers and letters in a language she does not recognise.

A spell, a hex: some kind of protective charm?

She rubs at her skin with her fingers, trying to remove the blood, but it has already dried and marked her like indelible ink. She cannot remove the writing; it has made of her a book, a bible: a living chart filled with vague rules and instructions.

“Hello. Is anyone here?” Her voice lifts into the air, hits the canopy of trees, and then falls back towards her. The words fade, become silence.

Silence.

It strikes her all at once that she can hear nothing, not even the sound of her own breathing. Her voice was the only thing able to penetrate that wall of silence, and even her words could not survive for long once they left her mouth.

She feels as if she is standing in the middle of a movie scene with the volume set to mute. Her ears ring with pressure, but she cannot even hear an internal sound. There’s just a dull soundless throbbing, a gentle ache that is not entirely unpleasant.

She takes a few tentative steps forward and her feet make no noise on the leaf-coated ground. She feels her bare feet sinking into the mulch, the cold mud seeping up between her toes.

The pelts hang heavy around her, like a royal cloak. Their warm and clammy underside presses against her sin.

The air touches the exposed parts of her flesh, making her tingle where the blood-words have been written.

Her grotesquely distended stomach hangs like a sack of offal. Whatever she carries inside her is still, unmoving. She fears that it might be dead. The bloated flesh sways as she moves, its weight trying to drag her down towards the earth.

As she walks through the woods she begins to make out strange shapes high up in the trees. Weird stick-figures made of twine and twigs, tied and knotted and placed like decorations. They hang suspended from the branches, their tinder-stick limbs twitching in a breeze she is unable to feel: rudimentary bodies twirling, spinning, like children’s mobiles.

“Can anybody hear me?” The sound of her voice is shocking, but it makes no impact on this space, just bounces off invisible walls and falls to the ground, defeated. It feels as though there is a sheet of glass between her body and what she sees — and she is trapped, unable to break through and get inside.

The breeze ruffles the grass and fallen leaves but still she cannot feel it against her skin.

Something large and cumbersome moves through the undergrowth directly up ahead, turning a large, shaggy head to glance in her direction. Its haunches are wide and muscled; the flanks have been skinned: pink meat shows where strips of the creature’s hide have been cut away. It stops, turns, and looks at her. The face she sees is hairless and vaguely human in aspect. It blinks heavy eyelids, licks its lips with a fattened tongue.

As she watches it opens its mouth to speak, but she cannot hear what is being said. Its teeth are huge, yellow and glistening. These are the jaws of a monster.

The writing on her body begins to liquefy and run, the blood dribbling in narrow streams across her body. The pelts shift as if they are alive, tightening around her shoulders, and she begins to feel even more trapped.

The creature smiles; it is a sad, almost mournful expression. Then the beast walks away on all fours, like a great brown bear. Its humanoid face, in profile, looks fat and unwell, as if labouring beneath the weight of ills and agues.

Where the creature stood only a moment before, a thin, naked body now hangs. Upside down, arms dangling limp and lifeless, the body has been tied with lengths of hemp at the ankles and suspended like slaughtered game from the trees above. The body turns slowly, smoothly, and as she draws near she begins to recognise its shape, the tone of its skin, the colour of its hair.

“Mum?”

Her mother’s corpse spins slowly to face her. The torso has been cleaved, the rib cage forced apart like the white-barred doors of a cage. The stomach contents have been removed and the cavity stuffed with dry oak leaves. She is close enough now that she can reach out, take hold of a clump of that makeshift stuffing and pull it out. The leaves are attached, like a rope of handkerchiefs being drawn from the secret depths of a magician’s sleeve.

She does not weep. She is calm, existing at a place beyond grief. This is a normal thing, a natural event. Her mother has died and been taken into the bosom of nature, and then reinvented as a part of this enchanted place.

Acorns pour from the savage wound, dislodged by the motion of leaves as she tugs them aside. More acorns than could possibly fit inside her mother fall from her belly, released from where they have been stored in her womb: countless mutant babies waiting to be born into a world of wonder.

She looks at her mother’s face and the eyelids flicker open. Her eyes are acorns, too; highly polished, and smoothed down as if by a steady, nimble hand wrapped in emery cloth. Her mother’s mouth hinges open and vomits a stream of filth: dead bugs, the gnawed bones of small mammals, and hundreds of tiny wood-dwelling isopods that move in a single wave across her pale face, forming a crisp brown mask.

She drops to her knees and throws her arms around her mother’s neck, basking in that fountain of grime. Her mother’s skin feels rough as bark, and cold as all the lies she has ever told.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

FRANCIS BOATER WAS used to waiting. He had been waiting for something good to happen for his entire life, and still the much-anticipated event was yet to arrive. Whatever it was — and Boater didn’t really know what that thing might be or where it would come from — he was still waiting.

“Is she gonna be long?” He stared at the skinny barman, flexing his massive chest in a way that he knew intimidated people. Boater used his bulk like other people used words: he hid behind it, communicated with the mass of gone-to-seed muscle that had turned to heavy fat. He couldn’t remember a time when he had been anything but big — but at least when he was younger, in his early twenties, his physique had been hard and knotted, like a stocking filled with conkers. Now that he was in his forties, he looked like an ageing mountain — or, as he thought on bad days, a stockpile of lard.

“I’ll just go and check.” The barman — what was his name again? Terry? Trevor? Some soft-shite student-type name, anyway — put down the glass he’d been cleaning and hurried through into the back room, where he vanished up a narrow flight of wooden stairs.

“Fucking bitch,” said Boater, necking almost his full pint of lager. He knew about bitches: knew them well, in fact. His mother had been the biggest bitch of all, and she had created what she lovingly referred to as her Own Little Monster when she fucked with his mind during childhood. He remembered coming home often to find her rutting on the sofa with strangers; sometimes she’d even told him to stand and watch, staring at him as her latest beau thrust into her, his eyes closed and his wet mouth pressed against her neck. On these occasions, her smile was like a razor: sharp and dangerous.

Even with intelligence as limited as his, Boater knew that the woman had deliberately twisted him, turning him into what he was today: an enforcer, a man who enjoyed hitting people more than he did simply touching them; a violent sociopath more comfortable in a fight than a lovers’ embrace. Yes, even he was aware enough to realise these facts. He’d read enough true-life crime books, and seen too many documentaries on men of violence not to know the limits of his own broken mind.

He glanced around the bar, willing someone to give him a wrong glance, or speak out of turn about him to their drinking partners — a word passed behind a raised palm, a glance held too long or not long enough. But there were no takers; everyone knew who he was, and even if they didn’t, his musk was strong enough to scare them. He was a fighter, a warrior, a barely caged tiger. He was Monty Bright’s top man, and his reputation went before him like a sword thrust into the darkness.

“She’ll be just a couple of minutes.”

Boater turned back to the bar, glaring at the stupid little bastard who’d come back with the message. Boater hated the bloke’s thin forearms, his pale skin unsullied by prison tattoos, and the keen brightness in his eyes. “Another pint. Now.”

The man scurried the length of the bar to use the pump farthest from Boater. This made him smile. Other people’s fear always did.

He drank his next pint more slowly, and felt the alcohol dull his rage. No doubt it would flare up later, after a few more beers, some cheap shots, and whatever drugs he could score during the course of the evening. But for now he felt calm and easy. He was out on a promise, and the girl he was waiting for was just about worth the delay.

A few minutes later she came sashaying out from the doorway behind the bar, wearing a skirt so short that it looked more like a belt, a little leather jacket over the top of a low-cut vest top, six-inch heels, and an orange tan from a bottle.

“You look great,” he said, leaning towards her and almost swallowing her in his bulk.

“Ta. You look fucking massive, but that’s just how I like them.” Her smile was plastic, a warped Botox grin, and her eyes were as flat and lifeless as those of a sex doll.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here. I hate this shite-hole.” He grabbed her tiny hand, swamping it in his warm flesh, and dragged her towards the door.

“Hey, my dad loves running this place. It’s his private little hidey hole from the world. Just him and the hardcore drunks.” She began to laugh, almost manically, and Boater was confused about the reason why. What was funny about the words she’d said? He just didn’t get it, but he rarely got anything these days. Sometimes he felt that the work he did, the life he had led, made him different from everyone else. Another kind of human; one not entirely in step with the others he saw around him. A man apart; a breed not fit for the company of others.

“Where are you taking me, then?”

They emerged from the grotty little pub under the Tyne Bridge. Boater glanced up, at the steel and concrete underside, and for a fleeting moment he realised that the sight represented the prison bars of his life. Then, shaking off such idiocy, he thought about how he was going to shag this bitch until she screamed. Maybe leave her blackened and bruised; her own private tattoo, to remember him by. Where was he taking her? Right up the arse, that’s where.

“Well?” her voice was starting to get on his nerves; it sounded small and tinny, like a faulty tape recording.

“I thought we’d have a little dodge along the Quayside for an hour, and then go back to Far Grove for a few beers and a smoke with my mates. I can score some good gear there — something that’ll keep us going all night.”

She laughed again. The sound grated on his nerve endings. “I like it when you keep going all night, Fran.”

It was starting to rain; the charcoal sky looked like someone had slashed it repeatedly with a knife, showing the flat blackness beneath. The clouds were low and heavy, lumbering like pregnant beasts, and the air was turning cold. Boater ducked into a pub doorway, losing his grip on the girl’s hand for a moment, and made his way through the hot, sweaty crowd to the bar.

They had two drinks, and during the time it took them to finish he realised that he was already bored of this girl. He didn’t even know her name; she was pointless, just another way of wasting time as he waited for that good thing to appear — the event that he knew, deep inside, would never happen, not even if he lived for a million years. Where had he even met her, anyway, this plastic sex toy? He reached inside his memory and plucked out an image: she owed Monty Bright some money, and had taken the option of servicing him once a week to bring down her payments. Growing tired of her, Monty had given Boater permission to take her on, and it had all clicked into place.

It happened all the time, this trading of bodies. Monty got sick of them fast, and he passed them on to his men. This time it was Boater’s turn, but each moment he spent in the girl’s company was another inch towards the thought of killing her — one more step along the road to oblivion.

He was glad when his mobile phone rang. It pulled him up out of the swamp of his thoughts, made him realise where he was and who he was with — another empty vessel, a cast-off he was about to use as a receptacle for his dead dreams and his dull desire.

He pulled the mobile out of his inside pocket, where it was vibrating against his ribs, and flipped open the lid with his thumb. “Monty. What can I do?” he always answered the same way whenever his boss called; it was a ritual, a habit that he enjoyed. It placed him inside an ordered moment, like a well-oiled hinge in time and space, and made him feel important. ‘Doing things’ was what he was good at.

“Where are you?” Monty’s voice was calm, unhurried — that was good, at least. There could be no trouble if he wasn’t on edge.

“In some shitty pub down at Newcastle Quayside.” The sound of the revellers inside the building swelled, threatening to steal Monty’s response, but he pressed the mobile handset tight against his ear.

“Get your fat arse back here. I’ve had a phone call. We’re going to have some fun.”

He could imagine Monty’s face and over-gelled hair shining in the low light, and the way he would be leaning back in his chair, perhaps even fondling his crotch as he spoke, anticipating the night’s pleasures.

“I can be there in about half an hour. Who is it?” The crowd surged, dragging him sideways. He lost sight of the girl as a host of people spilled between them, moving in a clot towards the back of the narrow space.

“You know — that bitch from the other day. The Fraser woman. The one with the daughter. She’s decided to take us up on our offer. She wants to negotiate a deal, payment in kind.” His laughter spewed through the phone handset. It was a terrible sound, like the gurgling of a backed-up drain.

“Okay, I’ll just dump this slag and be right with you.” Her face came into view, over the shoulder of a thin black man in a sparkly shirt that made Boater want to reach out and slap him. She looked afraid, as if she knew what they had in mind for Lana Fraser. “In fact, I’ll probably be there even quicker than that.” He smiled, but somewhere inside he was aware of something tugging as it threatened to break: a small hand, tightening around his guts. The smile felt wrong, as if it had been manufactured. It didn’t quite fit his bloated face. “Just let me deal with this situation, and I’m gone.”

Static crawled along the connection, reaching for him. More small hands, but these ones made up of sound. Then, just as quickly, the static cleared. “Okay,” said Monty. “Don’t be late or we’ll get this show on the road without you.”

The line went dead but the words hung there, like objects suspended in the darkness of space.

Boater put away his mobile and finished his pint. Then he looked at the girl, wishing for a moment that he knew what to say, how to act like other people. He jerked his head, indicating that she should follow him, and then he set off for the main entrance, barging people out of his path.

“G’night, Boater,” said the tall, lean doorman who was lounging against the wall to his right. Boater couldn’t remember his name, but he might have sparred with him years ago.

Boater turned around, glared at him. A dull, uninspired rage moved through him, coiling like snakes. “What was that, fella?”

The man’s eyes flickered — whatever confrontation was brewing, he had already lost. That was all it took: a faltering glance, a tiny show of weakness. “Nothing… just saying goodnight, like.”

Boater squared up to him, straightening his back so that he reared to his full height and with his chest pushed outwards, narrowing the space between them. “No. What did you say, exactly? What were the exact words you just said to me?” He clenched his hands into fists; they were like steel, the joints between fingers sealed shut, welded with sweat.

“I… I just said ‘G’night, Boater’.” The man took a step back, his spine hitting the wall. That was another show of weakness, his second within the space of a minute; an unforgivable act of defeat that could not go unpunished.

“I’m Mr. Boater.”

The doorman nodded, looking to his friends for assistance. He raised his hands, but they were open; he held out his palms, surrendering before the fight had even begun.

Boater didn’t even need to look over his shoulder to know that the other two doormen would not intervene. He was a known face; his violence was both feared and emulated all across the region. Nobody fucked with Francis Boater, not unless they wanted their face remade into a sculpture of flesh and bone and their family beaten like dogs. He didn’t know where to stop; violence was his fuel, his food. He lived to hurt, to cause pain. It had always been his way. That’s why Monty Bright had brought him in, trained him up, and trusted him with his life.

“That’s Mr. Boater, you piece of shit.” His hand moved so fast that he barely registered the motion. He was so keyed-up, so attuned to the moment, that he didn’t even feel the impact of the blows, just knew in his heart that they had landed true. He saw a splash of red, a blur of pink, and a flurry of spastic movement… then the man went down, hitting the floor like a felled tree.

It was over in seconds. Barely anyone had seen it happen, and those who did failed to understand what they had glimpsed: the raw, brute power of the blows, the finality of the knockout, and the strange compression of time and energy which resulted in Boater walking away the victor. He was always the victor; nobody he had ever met could even come close to besting him.

He left the building, trusting that the girl would follow. They always did. It never failed him, the allure of violence. Not with this type; not with a girl like this one, who always mistook savagery for heroism and confused a beating with a show of passion. He hated her; hated them all. These bitches, these bastards: these fucking empty shells tottering around with nothing on their minds but badly dyed hair.

“Where are we going, Fran?”

He was facing the thick black tongue of the River Tyne, watching people caper like cartoon characters on the other side, waiting in line to enter The Tuxedo Princess, the decommissioned car ferry that now served as a grotty floating nightclub. He refused to turn around, to look at her, but she insisted. Her hand clutched his arm, pulling at him, trying to get his attention.

He focused on the boat and the fact that it was soon to be sent to Greece, where it would probably be scrapped. He’d once worked the door there, pushing around scrawny students and estate kids, flexing his muscles to make the men shake and the women giggle. The end of an era; another local landmark stripped down, floated away, soon to be forgotten. He often felt like his world, his private northeast, was being slowly demolished, bit by bit, memory by memory. Soon there’d be nothing left of the life he’d once known.

Finally, with regret, he allowed himself to be turned.

“Where to now, then?” Her eyes glittered like the stars above them; the skin of her neck was flushed a deep shade of red; her cheeks trembled. She was aroused, she wanted him.

“Fuck off, pet. I have to go somewhere.” He breathed deeply, trying to get his rage under control. Even a random act of violence had failed to clear his system, to give him that fix of blood and thunder he seemed to need more and more often these days.

“Take me with you. I’m game. Whatever you want: you, your friends. We can all have a party.” She was so eager to be abused, so keen to submit to even a hint of cruelty. What was wrong with these people? What was wrong with him?

He imagined breaking her spine with his passion. He thought about cutting off her lips with a pair of scissors. He felt sick; he was dead inside.

That coiling sensation from deep within him had returned, but this time he could not ignore it. There was something going on, a feeling that he couldn’t even explain. He felt like crying. That was why he’d given the doorman a slap: because his emotions were running away from him, breaking free, and he needed to at least try to get them back under control. He was not a man who could allow himself to experience normal human emotions. Empathy, understanding, pity, mercy, redemption… these were not for him, not for his kind. He had been flensed of such concerns, a layer of epidermis surgically removed by a blade so keen that its edge was invisible.

The girl seemed to hover before him; her feet were raised several inches off the ground. Her bottle-blonde hair shone like a promise of something better and her eyes glittered again, this time even brighter than the stars. She reached out, reached inside, and Boater felt her small hand grip his ribs, pull them apart, and expose his heart. He heard it beating, beating, and the sound was so close that it was terrifying.

Then, as a crowd of revellers spilled out of another pub and onto the pavement, yelling and screaming and chanting football songs, the moment ended. The cage of his ribs sealed shut and his heart was locked away, where it belonged, deep inside the prison cell of his body. The vision, for what it was worth, had ended.

“Fuck off,” he said, turning away and stumbling along the stained footpath like a drunk at night’s end. His cheeks were wet; he was crying, but silently and trying to pretend that he wasn’t. For a moment, someone else had taken him over — someone real, someone normal — and he hated the feelings that weakling interloper was forcing him to endure. He had been invaded by normality, and it felt… wrong, unnatural.

The Fraser woman — that bitch, just like his mother was a bitch — was really going to get something special tonight. If he had felt sorry for her before, there was no more room for sympathy now. Someone had to pay for the way he felt, and she was going to find herself impaled on the sharp end of his confusion just to settle that debt. He promised himself that it would be an experience she would never forget — even if she walked away with her body intact, her mind would be crippled by the memory.

Boater hailed a cab, flopped down onto the back seat, and told the driver to take him to the Concrete Grove, where the edge of a familiar abyss awaited his arrival.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

LANA STOOD IN front of the mirror and stared at her reflection. She was wearing her little black dress, black high-heels and way too much makeup. Bright red lipstick made her lips look swollen; the smoky liner around her eyes gave the impression of light bruising. Ordinarily, she would never go out like this, but she knew what men like Monty Bright admired in a woman: overt sexuality; the image of a whore.

“Whore.” Spoken out loud, the word lacked genuine impact. It only hurt when she thought it, when she kept it inside where it could slice her up like a razor.

She turned away from her tarted-up image in the mirror and walked towards Hailey’s room. She pushed open the door and stepped inside. The curtains were open; street light leaked through the pane, streaking her daughter’s bed covers.

She walked across the room, stepping over Hailey’s discarded clothes, and stood at the side of the bed. Staring down, her heart felt heavy and her mind began to clear. What she was about to do, she did for Hailey. She would go to any extreme to put things right, to clear the debt and start all over again. If she had found a way to turn back time, she would have done it without pause for thought, and to hell with any sacrifice time might demand.

She remembered when Hailey was born. The memory still ached inside her. Three in the morning: New Year’s Day. She’d just missed out on being one of the first New Year babies, and her sibling had missed out on everything by being born dead. Lana’s labour had been long and hard. Her waters had broken fifty-two hours before the delivery, but she had not been dilated enough for the midwife to induce her. The hospital was understaffed and too many pregnant women had been admitted… the whole thing had been horrible, a nightmare.

She recalled a scene a minute or so after midnight, with Timothy standing by the bed, repeatedly lifting and letting drop one of the cheap nylon bed sheets. Worry and lack of sleep had made him fuzzy and weird — he barely even knew where he was or what he was doing. Fireworks were going off outside to welcome in the New Year, but Lana’s gaze was drawn to her husband’s busy hands, and the sheet as it fell repeatedly onto the bed. Static electricity shimmered in the air; it was their private firework display, a show put on just for them and their as-yet unborn children — the living and the dead.

“For you, honey,” she whispered now, in another life.

Hailey stirred in her sleep, one arm coming up out of the creased mass of sheets to cover her face. The bedclothes slipped down to her waist, exposing her midriff. The skin there looked thin, like paper. Lana could almost see her insides through the semi-translucent layer: bunched intestines, and other organs that didn’t look quite normal.

When Hailey was born she was floppy and unresponsive, a condition caused by something toxic in Lana’s liquors — the fact that her waters had broken so early had led to some kind of infection. The baby’s skin was grey; she was barely breathing. They took her away and put her in the Special Care Unit, up on the top floor of the hospital, while Lana continued with her labour. Timothy followed them out of the delivery room; he was clutching one of the tiny woollen hats they’d told him to bring along for the newborn babies. A small, silent Indian doctor drifted in to stitch up Lana after she’d pushed out Hailey’s brother, repairing the wounds caused by the delivery of the twins. He worked in silence; he didn’t look up from his task once, not even when Lana began to cry. A nurse with short hair and a small tattoo on her neck had carried away a bedpan containing the waste.

“For you…” She leant over her teenage daughter’s bed and touched Hailey’s stomach. The flesh there was warm, almost moist. She spread out her fingers, forming a fan of the digits. Something fluttered inside Hailey, like a caged bird, and then went still. Her belly remained flat; it did not bulge or distend in the way it had before, when Hailey had lifted her blouse to show Lana the great secret of her anatomy.

I imagined it all, thought Lana. The stress, the sheer pressure of our situation… It caused me to hallucinate. What I thought I saw… it was impossible.

Even as she thought this, she was not entirely sure that she truly believed the theory.

Impossible…

Tucking Hailey back into bed, she straightened up and left the room. Everything seemed heavy: her skin, her bones, even the weight of her thoughts. The world was moving slower than it ever had before, as if the nature of gravity had altered.

Her plan was simple, but it was also repellent. She would go to Monty Bright, allow him to do whatever he wanted with her, and then walk away, back to her life. She had been through so much, experienced such horrors because of Timothy and the things he had done, that she believed she could detach herself from the moment and just let it happen.

It might hurt; it would probably haunt her for the rest of her life. But at least the debt would be cleared, and she and Hailey could move forward, make plans to leave this horrible place.

She was willing to do anything to guarantee Hailey’s future. Even this: allowing a crude and vicious man — and possibly his friends — to use her body as a plaything. If she thought of it in mechanical ways — she had had a coil fitted a few years ago, so would not become pregnant; she would demand that they all use condoms in case of disease; she would refuse to kiss anyone on the mouth — then she could pretend that it was a job of work. She had grown accustomed to stifling her emotions, and this would simply be one more situation to lock up inside, throwing away the key.

She could think of worse things… like death, or mutilation. Rape — no matter if she went there willingly or not — was better than being maimed or crippled or killed. These men, she knew, were easily capable of all three acts. Penetration she could probably handle and come to terms with, even if it meant losing something of her soul; but losing a physical part of herself would be a lot tougher to accept.

But then again, she knew that physical scars healed. Blood stopped flowing; cuts and lacerations sealed themselves shut. Emotional scars, though, never went away: they just faded.

Could she do this? Could she really go through with it?

She glanced over her shoulder, at Hailey’s bedroom door. She remembered how that fat bastard, Monty Bright’s enforcer, had caressed her daughter’s photograph, licking it with his obscene tongue.

Then she asked herself the only other question that mattered under the circumstances: did she really have a choice?

She grabbed her leather jacket and handbag and walked briskly to the door, refusing to look back over her shoulder. She paused at the mirror hanging on the wall by the door, looking again at her doll-like image. She took a packet of baby wipes from her purse and washed off the lipstick, the rouge, the eye make-up.

“No,” she whispered. “Not for you.” That bastard didn’t deserve to see her at her best. She would go to him unadorned, making her sacrifices without the use of war paint.

She kicked off her stripper heels and put on a pair of flat-soled pumps. She would make no concession to eroticism. Let the bastard take her in her most ordinary state, looking like she was on her way to the shops.

Lana opened the door and walked out onto the landing, barged through the fire door, and then stepped briskly down the stairs.

She was on autopilot; her body felt empty, as if she had relinquished all control. She didn’t want to do this, but she could see no other way out of her predicament. She did not want those bastards coming anywhere near her daughter. If they touched Hailey, she would kill them all. It was that simple.

The air outside was cold and sharp. Lana tugged her bomber jacket tighter around her body, feeling more vulnerable than ever before in her life. She wished that she’d changed into a pair of jeans. Her bare legs were already feeling the chill. Her body didn’t feel as if it belonged to her, and her mind was locked up inside, unable to control what was happening. She knew that she had imprisoned herself in this situation, and the only way out of the jail cell was by doing something terrible… but sometimes, she thought, terrible things can release you.

But hadn’t Timothy thought the same? His actions, when he had been pushed into a corner, were surely the seeds of the terrible thing she was contemplating doing right now. Horror begat horror; bad deeds created even more badness. It was a simple rule of the universe, and one that could never be ignored or forgotten.

Her trapped mind was racing, but it was powerless to intervene. Only the body could perform a meaningful action. The physical Lana was in control now: the flesh-and-blood woman that encased the spiritual being, the shell around the hidden self.

She crossed the road outside the flats, glancing down to inspect the blood stains from that mad junkie, Banjo. The blood had dried to a dark hue; a series of splatter patterns on the roadside and against the kerb. The local news had reported the event earlier, and according to the newsreader Banjo — his real name was Bernard Clarkson — was currently in the LGI, strapped to a bed in an overcrowded ward. They said his mind was wiped. That was the word they’d used: wiped. Like a tape recording or a computer’s hard drive. There was nothing left of the person he’d been; the man had vacated his shell, leaving behind nothing but meat.

Lana began to make her way along the long curve of Grove Road. It was the first of the concentric circles that spread out around the Needle. She hated these streets, even more than the outer edges of the estate. They were cold, unwelcoming, and there was always some kind of trouble brewing. Yet here she was taking a roundabout route to her destination — ‘going round the houses’, as they said in this part of the world. She supposed that she was simply putting off her inevitable arrival at Bright’s gym.

She passed a few boarded up houses — security shutters at the doors and windows, graffiti crawling across the brickwork. These abandoned dwellings were flanked by homes in which people still lived. Television light flared behind the windows. Shadows passed by on the other side of grey net curtains and slatted window blinds. Lana felt a deep sense of loss, a strange kind of grief for something that she had not yet given away. She had no idea where this feeling had come from, but it hurt. The pain was like a blade drawn across her chest.

For you, Hailey.

Once again she thought about the tiny baby her daughter had been. It seemed like yesterday. Intense. Immediate. Such a small infant, and she’d been kept in an incubator for two days. When, finally, Hailey was allowed to take her daughter home from the hospital, both she and Timothy had no idea what they were meant to do. They’d stood over her Moses basket, holding hands and crying together, filled with relief that they’d had at least one child to bring back with them. Watching their baby sleep; looking to the future.

Or so they had thought.

Because the future had not turned out so lovely. Instead it had become a bad dream, a series of absurd events that had ended in murder and Timothy’s suicide.

Walking now along harsh streets, perhaps even watched by hungry eyes, hidden eyes, Lana realised that those events had been the beginning of her downfall. Like a trigger, Timothy’s decision not to talk to her about his problems, to get hold of a gun and try to solve them in the most insane way imaginable, had been the moment when her world had started to crumble. Their daughter — their beautiful, bright, lovely girl — had suddenly been cast out into a darkness through which she was still stumbling, looking for an exit.

Lana reached the corner of Grove Street West, where there was a patch of ground upon which a corner shop had once stood, and next to that the Unicorn pub — perhaps the roughest drinking den in the area. She paused for a moment, glancing at the pub lights and its bright yellow windows that spilled illumination onto the cracked pavement. She could hear music, laughter, raised voices. Somebody was singing a football song, while other voices cut in with another crude ditty.

She turned onto Grove Street West, leaving the light behind. Darkness shifted around her, massaging and grasping her like a huge, soft fist. She fought the urge to turn around, run back to the Unicorn, and drink herself free of this debt to darkness. But if she did, her problems would still be there when the hangover cleared. None of this was going away; it was here forever, unless she made a move to rectify the situation.

Bright’s Gym was a hundred yards along the street, pushed back from the pavement and with its back to a small gathering of willowy trees which bordered the no-man’s-land of Beacon Green. Many years ago, when the area was less poverty stricken, she’d heard that a warehouse depot with its own siding and station had stood on the Green. The old railway line still ran along the eastern edge of Grove Rise, at the bottom of the Embankment, but the old timber sleepers had long since been reclaimed and all that survived were some half-buried metal cleats and a rough trail where people walked their dogs by day but were afraid to visit after dark.

The gym was a small, squat two-storey building that stood alone on this part of the street, opposite a row of derelict houses. Its windows were always covered by metal grilles, with faded, out-of-date posters advertising historical bodybuilding competitions stuck to the glass behind. Nobody could see inside from the street; and nobody inside was able to see out through those windows. The gym wasn’t exactly open to the general public, but the regular clientele consisted of local hard men, amateur boxers and paunchy nightclub security staff. These meatheads would go there to pump some serious iron and ingest whatever steroids Bright could supply them with. It was the loan shark’s base; he operated every bit of business he dealt with from the shabby premises.

It was his castle, his secure hideaway from the world. The centre of the spider’s web.

The police never bothered with Monty Bright. He had the whole area sewn up, and Lana suspected that the local constabulary were of the opinion that they’d rather deal with the shark they knew than the devil they didn’t. It all went to prove her beliefs that everyone and everything was either corrupt or in the process of being corrupted. Timothy’s actions had formed the basis of this theory, and her experiences here, in the Grove, had merely helped it evolve into a working hypothesis.

She approached the front door and waited, still unsure whether she could go through with her plan. She heard the infant Hailey crying inside her head; her mind was filled with images of Timothy’s victims and that of his pale corpse on the mortuary table when she’d been called in to identify his body. A portion of his skull, just above the right eye, was missing. She had glimpsed a blue-grey swell of brain matter through the hole.

“For you,” she said, not knowing who she meant: Hailey, Timothy’s ghost, or herself.

She lifted her hand, made a fist, and knocked hard on the door. It was opened before she even had time to lower her hand.

“Hello, Lana.”

It was the fat man from the other day — the one who’d pinned her against the wall and attempted to invade her with his knee.

She swallowed but her mouth was dry. “I’m here to see Monty… Mr. Bright.”

The large man smiled. Oddly, it was a gentle smile, as if beneath the layers of fat and muscle this man might just have a heart after all, hidden within the folds of his cruelty. “I know why you’re here, Lana. And, please, call me Francis.” His lips were wide and wet. His cheeks were ruddy.

“Okay, Francis. Can I please see Monty? He’s expecting me.”

The door opened wider, and Francis stepped back into a long, narrow hallway. There were old boxing posters stuck to the walls, promoting fights between combatants whose names Hailey didn’t recognise. Dust hung in the air like a light mist; small motes danced before the fat man’s retreating form, making him take on a ghostly aspect, as if he were barely there at all.

“This way,” he said, turning slowly in the cramped space. His thighs brushed against the wall, unsettling yet more dust, and he moved ponderously, like a whale cruising through the deeps. “He’s been waiting for you. We all have.”

Following him through the murk, Lana felt the first strands of real fear brushing against her cheek. Like cobwebs, the fear stuck to her skin, drawing her in. They came to a large open space, and to her right Lana could see a dimly lit arena. A boxing ring was positioned at the centre of the room, and along the walls were hung heavy sand-filled punch bags, battered leather speedballs and all kinds of metal bars and brackets meant for performing strength exercises. She’d been in gyms before — in fact, she had once attended exercise classes regularly, back in her old life — but she had never seen such primitive equipment as this. A lot of it looked medieval: crude and cruel and meant for inflicting pain upon the human body, rather than working out the muscles for the sake of physical fitness.

A small man in a white vest and baggy shorts was dancing in the shadows. She had failed to see him at first because of the weak light and the fact that he was positioned in the corner furthest from where she stood. The man’s hands were covered in protective wrappings and he was shadow boxing. Each move, every combination, was carried out a lot slower than it would have been in the ring: it was stylised, almost like a silent mummer’s play, a weird performance dense with ritual. She watched for a while, entranced, and was only able to move away when the fat man touched her arm and whispered her name.

“We can go up now,” he said. “That’s Dennis. He comes here every night. Never gets in the ring, just shadow boxes for hours. We leave him in peace. He pays his dues so we let him do his thing.”

The man kept moving; he was never still. His feet shuffled across the smooth floor, shushing like the delicate touch of a drum brush against a hi-hat cymbal. His face was stern, almost grim, and his eyes were focused on a single point on the wall. Whatever he was fighting, he would never be able to beat it. The man’s private bout would last forever, or at least until the moment when he shadow-boxed into his grave.

“Shall we go now?” Francis increased the pressure on her arm. His fingers were wide, his grip insistent. It was not a question.

“Yes,” she said, looking at his face, concentrating on his small, piggy eyes. “Yes, I’m ready now. Let’s go and see Monty Bright.”

The silent boxer didn’t even acknowledge their presence as they passed from his view. She doubted he even realised they’d been there. The thought filled her with a deep sadness that made her flesh tingle.

Her thoughts and feelings were corrosive. She felt like she was on the verge of losing her mind, and she welcomed that madness, wishing that it would hurry up and take her away from all this. Hoping that it would help her to get through whatever happened next.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

TOM WAS STANDING on the landing outside his room. He could not remember how he had arrived here, or even when he had woken and climbed out of bed. The last thing he could picture was the bedroom ceiling as he closed his eyes to try and sleep.

He felt like a little boy, dressed in his pyjamas and wandering after midnight through the family home. His fears were those created by a broken childhood; his desperation not to be seen was born of the fact that his father was home and he had been drinking.

He was unable to sleep; his mind was racing with unfocused thoughts that he wished he could suppress. Lana Fraser, Hailey with her strange biology, and a debt that must, at some point, be repaid. He was gripped by a sense of urgent panic, as if he knew that somewhere someone important to him was in trouble, but he couldn’t do a thing to help them. Events were racing to some sort of conclusion, but he had no idea how to stop them or even what those events might be.

He padded across the landing to the bathroom and stared at his face in the mirror. His jowls sagged; his eyes were small and narrow, like piss holes in the snow. His skin had taken on a slight yellow hue, as if it were jaundiced. He could not recall ever looking so worn out. He was exhausted yet he could not sleep.

The book he’d been reading earlier was on the shelf by the basin. He must have left it there before going to bed. Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment. He was attempting to wade through the classics he had not looked at since school, when a strict English teacher and his dry methods had rendered them cold and turgid and lifeless.

The title of the book had taken on a resonance that made him feel uncomfortable. Thoughts of Lana and her loan shark floated in his brain, bobbing on the surface while darker, more complex thoughts ran in the deeper currents of his subconscious mind.

He thought about the sea cow downstairs, lost in her paraplegic dreams. Then he thought again of Lana: her dark-sparkling eyes, her hair, her smooth, pale skin.

“I love her,” he said to his reflection. The reflection smiled, completely unsurprised, but Tom didn’t feel his own face take on the same shape. It was like another person was looking at him, placing him and his emotions under scrutiny.

“I love her,” said his reflection, belatedly; but he didn’t feel his lips move in harmony with those in the mirror and the voice sounded deeper than normal. He was two people now, or one person split down the middle. His life had been cleaved, as if someone had taken a large axe and brought it down at a point right between his eyes, separating the two opposing sides of his brain.

Was he awake or dreaming? He didn’t feel as if he were asleep; the world was solid around him and his senses were alert. No, this was not a dream. He was caught in a space between sleeping and waking, an interstice in which the rules of both of these states battled for supremacy. The imagery of dreams was bleeding into his waking world, and it felt like a drug trip: intense yet hazy, a blend of fact and fiction, a whole new world of contradictory sensations and images. For a moment he smelled wet grass; then the odour became that of rotten meat.

He’d read somewhere that people with brain tumours often experienced phantom smells.

But no, he wasn’t ill. Perhaps the explanation was as simple as insanity. Maybe he was losing his mind.

In an attempt to wake himself up, he brushed his teeth. Whenever he looked down, at the sink, he had the impression that his reflection was staring at the top of his head. But when he looked up again to check, his reflection seemed to move with him. He felt twitchy and paranoid; he needed to relax.

He put away his toothbrush and moved over to the bath, where he put in the plug and turned on the hot tap. Soon the room began to fill with steam. He stripped off his T-shirt and pyjama bottoms and sat naked on the edge of the tub, staring at the plumes of water vapour as they rose and gathered in the air. He began to see shapes forming: clenched fists, compressed faces with knotted features. Rudimentary heads shifting in the patterns made by the steam.

He twisted the hot tap off and turned on the cold, adding some bath oil. Testing the water first with his hand, he then turned off the cold tap and climbed into the tub. Despite the addition of cold water, the bathwater was too hot. It burned his skin, turning his legs red, then his belly. He sucked in his breath sharply as he lowered his upper body into the water. This was a small yet pleasurable pain; a brief and biting agony that soon faded as his body became accustomed to the temperature of the water.

As he lay there he pictured Lana, naked. Her soft curves were cupped by shadow, and the visible parts of her skin were almost luminescent. She stroked herself with her fingertips, running a hand across her breasts, down towards her stomach, and then to the dark patch below. A large shadow loomed behind her, stretching like a black sheet around her body…

Tom reached down and began to fondle himself. His hands were clumsy; there was little response to his self-attention. He tried to masturbate but couldn’t quite sustain enough focus. That shadow — a vast billowing presence behind the imaginary Lana — was too distracting. He knew what the shadow was, what it meant. It was the shape of her debt, a crude representation of what she owed to that man Monty Bright.

Angry and frustrated, he got out of the bath and stood, dripping wet, before the mirror. His reflection was smiling again, but this time he felt the expression mirrored on his face. The smile was bitter, cynical: there was not a trace of humour evident, just a cruel trace of thwarted desire.

He grabbed a towel and dried himself off, feeling as if he were tending to someone else — a man who was sick and not completely sane. His last ten years spent as a carer — a person whose sole aim in life was to appease the needs of another — had changed him in many ways, and some of them only ever peeked above the surface during times of great stress or anxiety. Sometimes he viewed the world as a place filled with those needs, and he felt as if he’d been cast adrift in a landscape of pain and disability.

He put on his night clothes and went back out on to the landing. The house was quiet; he couldn’t even hear the ticking of a clock, or the sound of traffic passing by on the street outside. He glanced at his watch. It was almost 2 AM. Even the night people had quietened down.

He walked to the top of the stairs and peered down into the dimness. It looked like the darkness was a sea. He imagined creatures swimming down there, in the shadows, perhaps even his wife had floated out of her bed to ride the night-time currents, her mouth gaping and her hands grasping.

Tom descended, gripping the handrail tightly. He realised that he was tense, perhaps even afraid. His strange experience in the bathroom had wrong-footed him, making him feel as if he and Helen were not alone in the house. He felt as if a stranger was moving through the rooms below, silently examining their belongings, picking up and inspecting the minutiae of their lives and judging them as worthless.

When he reached the bottom of the stairs he saw the stone wall in the hallway. He knew immediately that it was a portion of Hadrian’s Wall — perhaps even the same section where he’d picnicked with Lana and Hailey. It had emerged from the front wall of the house, near the front door, and looped around the door to return through the same wall on the opposite side, forming a barricade to prevent him leaving.

I am dreaming after all. So there’s nothing to fear.

But that was a lie. Everything was a source of fear: terror hid in every corner, and was displayed on every shelf and surface.

He stared at the crude segment of the wall. It was a surreal image: the arrival of something ancient in his home, the stone dirty and with patches of fungus spotted along its length. He wasn’t afraid of the wall. His feelings towards it were more complex. He experienced a rush of strangeness, a thrill of exhilaration at the sight of the old stone. Then, at a deeper level, he felt honoured that such a vision should present itself to him, a normal man, a struggling husband and potential adulterer. What had he done to deserve this? Why had he been singled out for such a reward?

Then, as he watched, the section of wall slithered, moving like a great, dry serpent. The old folk rhyme returned to him, and he recited it once again in his head:

But the worm got fat an’ grewed an’ grewed,

An’ grewed an aaful size;

He’d greet big teeth, a greet big gob,

An greet big goggly eyes

But there were no eyes on this worm. It did not even possess a face. It was a long, shifting portion of the ruined Roman wall, and its presence here was simply an indication of a deeper mystery.

The wall moved continually now; a moving barrier, blocking his way to the door. He knew it was meant to keep him inside, to hold him hostage. There was a grinding sound, stone upon stone, and he remembered Hailey’s comment about baby bones being buried beneath the foundations.

“Dreaming,” he said, feeling more awake than he had in days. If this was a dream, then it was a lucid one, and rather than succumb to the logic of the dream he would be required to act, to move freely through the dream and not simply become part of its story.

The door to Helen’s room was wide open. Darkness bulged from the doorway, pressing through the frame like oil. He watched it for a while, wondering if he should feel more afraid — his fear was slight now, like a vague notion of how people were supposed to react when confronted with the unknowable.

Without thinking about what he was doing, he began to walk towards Helen’s room. It felt right; part of the dream. He was meant to see inside that room.

As he drew closer to the open door he began to make out sounds: a soft, smothered grunting noise, like a pig snuffling at a trough; creaking bed springs; a gentle slap-slapping of flesh on flesh.

It sounded like someone was having sex in there.

That Man, he thought, wildly. Is it his ghost, returned to finish what he and Helen started? To finally consummate the relationship that was cut short by his death and Helen’s paralysis?

He stood before the door but could not see inside. The darkness was solid. Slowly, he reached out and pressed the tip of his index finger against it. The darkness bulged inward, like a balloon. Yes, that was it: a huge black balloon. But he was stuck inside the balloon and Helen was on the outside, in the real world.

Still he was not afraid enough to turn away, and even if he could, there was nowhere to go. The wall was still blocking his exit. He could either continue on, into the room, or return upstairs to confront his rogue reflection.

He stepped inside the room, his face pressing against the surface of the balloon, stretching the material, forcing it past its elastic limit… and then, with an audible popping sound, he was through and standing on the other side of the darkness.

The sounds were louder now, unfiltered as they were through that cloying blackness. Helen’s lamp was on, so there was enough light to see what was happening on the bed.

The bed.

Helen’s bed.

The same gathering of fists he’d seen at Hadrian’s Wall was inside the room, hovering above and around Helen’s bed. The fists were huge — each one the size of Tom’s head — and they formed a loose netting around something that was twitching and bucking at their centre. The fingers moved liked birds’ wings, flapping slowly; their motion was odd and slightly nauseating. Then, simultaneously, they all tightened once again into hard fists.

It was a flock of hands, all gathered above the thing in the bed. A flock? Was that even the right expression? What was the collective noun for fists, anyway? A pummel? A flight?

No, a flock: that sounded best.

He was using his frantic, panicked thoughts to delay his reaction to the sight on the bed. He could barely understand it, let alone absorb what he was actually looking at.

There was a sea cow on the mattress, a floppy grey manatee. It was huge, flabby, and grotesque. The fact of its existence was bad enough, but the juxtaposition of this fat, struggling mammal lying on its belly on Helen’s normal, everyday bed made the image seem even more nightmarish… and Tom knew that he was responsible for this representation of his wife’s inability to move, her utter acceptance of defeat. He always thought of her as a sea cow, and here it was, the metaphor made flesh.

But it got worse. Much worse.

Within the enclosure of floating, disembodied fists was a barely formed figure, a large, bulky rendering of a man. The man was naked, and he had his hands on the sea cow’s bulk. He was thrusting himself into the manatee, ravaging it from behind. His hands moved away from the thing’s plump body, and he began to strike it — slow, hard blows to the sides. Stinging body-shots, just like Tom’s father had done to his mother all those years ago, during the dimly remembered episodes of marital rape.

The beast writhed and jerked, but it slowly dawned upon Tom that these movements were not an expression of struggle. The animal was participating in the grim, abusive events: its frantic movements were actually spasms of pleasure. The man and the manatee were making love.

He was witnessing an act of mutual desire, a violent, blasphemous coupling of man and beast.

The ghost-fists shimmered with motion, rising from the bed. The inchoate figure at their core moved with them, carried by their awkward flight. The manatee tried to flip itself over onto its back, but its weight and the fact that it was out of water, stranded in an unnatural element, made the task all the more difficult. Finally, struggling for air, it gave up the fight and just lay there, sprawling and spent on the bed. But during that brief attempt to turn, Tom had seen its face: Helen’s face, on the body of a slobbering beast.

“Let it come,” said a voice that sounded familiar. “You’re almost there, but not quite. It’s reaching for you.” The hands parted, creating a shell-like hollow in the air, and Tom’s father stepped out from the fisted enclosure. “It’s reaching out for all of you.”

His father’s image was degraded, like damp tissue paper: his edges were soft and flaking away as he stood there; his pallor was ghastly. His mouth didn’t move as he spoke, and as Tom glanced down, taking in the full sight of this shoddy spectre, he saw that the man’s form was unfinished. There were no genitals; his sex act with the phantom manatee must have been nothing more than what, as a schoolboy, Tom and his friends had called a ‘dry hump’.

He tore his gaze from the ghost and looked over at the bed. Helen was herself again, and she was sleeping. Her skin looked slightly grey in colour. The folds of her bare skin glistened with sweat. The horror he had seen, the sight of the insane coupling, was just another phantom: a ghost of a memory mixed with the detritus of his insomniac mind.

“She used to like it, you know. Your mother.”

Tom looked back at his dead father. His face was crumpled, a bloodless mass of deconstructed tissue.

“She enjoyed the pain and humiliation. And then, afterwards, she would go into the bathroom and cut herself.” The figure wobbled slightly, threatening to topple forward, and then righted itself. Flecks of it fell away from the central mass; a slow fall of ghastly snowflakes. “She hated herself for what she saw as unhealthy desires. But I just loved all that dirty sex.” There was laughter, but it seemed to come from all around the room, emerging from every corner. Parts of the apparition’s face slipped away, falling to the ground but vanishing before they reached the carpet.

“Ectoplasm,” said Tom’s father. “The shit of the spirit world.”

Tom backed away; a single step.

His father took an equal step forward. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

“Then, why?” Tom was surprised at the sound of his own voice. It was stronger than he had expected. “Why are you here? In my dream.”

“It’s not a dream. Not really.” The figure’s shape was becoming less solid. Whatever kind of matter had formed the likeness of his father, that stuff was now losing its adhesive qualities. “This is the space between dreaming and waking. It’s where the old place exists — the oak grove and whatever lies beyond. There’s a doorway here, and it’s starting to open — just a crack, mind. But it is opening.” The voice had become faint.

“I don’t understand.”

His father shook his head. More of it came away, his features sliding off like crumbling meringue from a rotting cake. “There is nothing to understand. You’re there and I’m here. The other place, the one that’s reaching out to you and your new friends, is somewhere else. It’s simple, really. True Creation is always simple. It’s destruction that’s the tricky part.” Again, the smile; the rumpled, degrading smile. “Because nothing can ever be fully destroyed. There’s always traces, detritus, left behind.”

Then, before Tom had the chance to say anything more, the vision was gone. Small flecks of something white remained on the carpet, like crumbs from a midnight feast. Tom walked over, bent down, and tried to pick them up. They dissolved in his hand.

“The shit of the spirit world,” he said, quietly. That sounded just about right. It described his father perfectly: the man had only ever been shit, a composite person made of several kinds of human waste. Something better off flushed down the pan.

Tom stood and walked over to the bed. Helen was sleeping soundly. He adjusted the duvet, tucking her in. Part of him wanted to lean down and kiss her, but another part of him wanted to walk away and never come back. Again, he felt like a man split down the middle.

“Sorry,” he said, not really knowing what he was apologising for. Then he left the room and closed the door behind him. The snake-like segment of stone wall was no longer there. The darkness had lifted. Everything was normal again, if that word even meant anything now. He suspected that normal was no longer an option; the world had turned, his perception had shifted. That other place, the one he’d been sensing lately, and that his dead father’s bespoke phantom had spoken of, had noticed him, and nothing could ever be remotely normal again.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

IT WAS TIME. It was coming. She could feel it.

Her belly was swollen, the skin there pulled so taut that it seemed as thin as tissue paper. When she peered down at those areas of her stomach that were visible between her clutching fingers, she could see rapid movement beneath — a frantic motion in her belly, like scrabbling hands. There was no pain; she was beyond that now. All she felt was a strange hunger, a terrible emptiness despite the thing –

Or things; what if there was more than one? Like twins?

– that was rapidly filling her stomach.

Hailey was lying on her bed, staring up at the bedroom ceiling. Her eyes stung. The back of her neck was burning. But still she felt these sensations as an outsider, an observer. Everything that was happening right now was taking place inside her — the external didn’t matter. Her existence had wound tightly around whatever was stirring at her core.

“Come on,” she whispered, almost cooing the words. “Come on out and see me.” She stroked the mound of her belly, feeling the hot, damp skin shift. “Come out, now.”

The hands responded by fluttering again. She knew there were no hands in there — not really — but that was how she had now begun to think of the movements within her body: quick-clutching hands, scrabbling around her internal organs.

The radio was on and voices were debating car crime in Newcastle. It was a late-night phone-in show, one that had won national awards because of its cutting edge approach. The radio was not Hailey’s — all of her stuff had been taken by the men who had come to intimidate her mum while she was out at school. She had found the radio in the bottom drawer in the kitchen. It was an old model, like something out of a film: black plastic and with a single tape deck built-in. Hailey only knew what a tape deck was because she’d seen them in magazines, in features on retro fashion and accessories. Like everyone her age, she listened to downloaded or pirated music on her MP3 Player.

At least she had done, before those bastards had taken her stuff.

The pressure on her stomach increased. Whatever was inside was straining to get out.

Hailey knew from physics lessons at school that there were forces constantly being exerted upon the world, the solar system, even the entire universe; pushing and pulling, acting and counteracting: a delicate balance of forces, both cosmic and prosaic. There were forces everywhere, shaping the very nature of reality with their endless activity.

But what if there were also forces that were not generated in this world, forces from somewhere else? A place beneath the world she knew. Somewhere with its own physical laws, which acted against our laws rather than alongside them? A place that was always looking for a way in, a breach in the walls between worlds…

And what if the thing (or things) inside her was a part of all that? A spore or a seed from that other place, something she’d picked up somehow, getting it under her skin. What if that seed were growing? And what if she, Hailey, was to be its way into the world?

The thought, however odd, didn’t trouble her as much as she expected it to.

She knew that she should be afraid, but she felt as calm as a prayer. Her mind was clear. All she was able to focus on was the movement inside her body, and she was unable to think of it in any terms other than the contents of an egg. A huge egg, its shell pure and white, and with the suggestion of something moving inside.

“I’m an egg,” she said, talking to the empty room, the white walls, the cheap-papered ceiling. “I am an egg, and this thing is growing inside me.”

She listened to her voice but the words didn’t seem like they belonged to her. Not for the first time, she felt like someone else was speaking for her, shaping her lips.

She pressed her hands against her belly once again. This time the movements inside became more frantic, responding to the heat transmitted through her palms.

“It’s coming,” she said, and this time the voice was hers. It could not possibly have belonged to anyone else. She recognised the longing, the desperation that hid behind the words — the same emotions that she detected whenever she said her father’s name, late at night, as she stared at herself in the mirror.

She wanted this. She really did. She desired it more than anything — apart from having her dad back, her old life returned to her. But this was the next best thing. It was the best that she could hope for.

New life. Of a sort. Hunger. Need. Maybe even a saviour.

Perhaps what happened here tonight would save her and her mum.

The movement inside her stopped. Silence filled the room. Then she heard a low humming sound. But the room was empty, she was all alone. None of the electrical appliances were on in the other room — the vacuum cleaner had been taken by those men, the washing machine too. Nothing was switched on that would make a noise even remotely like this one.

Even the radio had gone silent. Not even static came from its little mono speaker.

But the humming… it remained, filling her ears. Its volume was constant. Low, regular, and constant.

Hailey sat up on the bed and turned to face the window. The weight of her stomach was a pleasant ache. The curtains were open and the sky outside was dark. She often liked to look at the moon, the stars, and imagine that she was up there, high up in the night sky and flying. Drifting away from all this fuss and bullshit.

There was a large flock of tiny birds hovering outside her window. She could see them outlined against the deep black sky, their wings blurring, sharp beaks glinting in the bleed-off from sodium street lights. Hummingbirds, hundreds of them, perhaps even thousands. The same kind she’d seen in the Needle a few days ago. They hung there, on the other side of the glass, watching her.

Hailey swung her legs off the side of the bed and got shakily to her feet. Her legs ached, but again there was no real pain, just the vague sensation of aching, like muscle memory. She padded across the carpet and went to the window. The birds didn’t move. A dense cloud of freeze-frame motion, an unmoving flurry of beating wings. She wondered if anyone else could see them, or if this was some kind of vision meant only for her. Hailey’s perception of the world was changing by the minute, and where, before, such a thought would have struck her as crazy, it now seemed perfectly reasonable.

She was carrying a wonder inside her, so why shouldn’t there be more wonders on show just outside her window?

“Hello there…” She raised her hand and placed her fingertips against the window. The hummingbirds remained as they were, suspended in the air with their wings blurring, as if locked in place like tiny working machine parts in the mechanism of eternity.

“Yes,” she said, struck by the sudden insight. “That’s what you are: cogs in the machine. Just like me. Like all of us.”

Then understanding slipped away and once again her mind was empty, a container for whatever sights the night might throw at her.

She dragged her fingers soundlessly down the pane of glass, leaving faint marks to chart their progress. The marks faded quickly; the attendant hummingbirds began to float slowly backwards, moving away.

“Come back,” she whispered, tears falling down her face. “Don’t leave me.”

But the birds didn’t respond. They drew back, and then shot up into the darkness as one, a blurred arrow ascending to the heavens. Then, in seconds, they were lost to her, gone into the blackness beyond the thin veil of clouds.

Hailey had never felt so alone, even when her dad had died.

She dragged her gaze from the sky and looked across the Grove, feeling abandoned, melancholy.

The top floors of the Needle poked up above the uneven line formed by the rooftops, its peak piercing the thin, low clouds. To Hailey it now resembled the huge fossilised trunk of an ancient tree, its branches grey and withered and its leaves having fallen to earth long ago, before she was even born: a petrified tree, with its topmost branches scraping the sky. A weird organic structure that had its roots buried in that other place.

For the first time in her life she realised how shallow her understanding of things had always been, and that everything has an inner life, an alternative identity. All she had been aware of until now was the surface, but recent events had shown her that the most important things are those which lie beneath.

Her legs felt cold.

She glanced down, at her naked body, and saw that her inner thighs were glistening. A reservoir of cool liquid had burst from inside her, washing her clean, preparing her for the act of passage yet to come.

Hailey knew exactly what was required of her, as if some trace memory, a stored neurological imprint, had suddenly revealed itself. She squatted down on her haunches, knees forced apart with her bent elbows, hands clasped tightly together as if she were deep in prayer. Then she waited to deliver something strange into the world.

…AND THIS TIME, in the dream, she is standing inside a ring of tall oak trees, looking up to watch the sunlight as it filters through the brown-tinged leaves. She squints, momentarily blinded by the light, and then clouds pass overhead and she can open her eyes again.

The creature she saw last time, near the swinging corpse of her mother, has moved on. The corpse has been taken down. She is alone. Her skin is warm, and when she looks down she sees blood smeared on the inside of her naked thighs. Deep red clots cling to the sides of her knees; red patterns decorate her shins and feet.

The sun moves west to east, travelling too-fast across the flat sky, and she is momentarily plunged into shadow. The trees creak, their ancient trunks shifting to accommodate the new position of the light source. Their branches are striving to be touched by the sun’s bright fingers.

She feels empty. She is bereft. Something has gone away, leaving her behind. Whatever she was carrying inside her has moved on. She takes a tentative step forward, and then another, gradually moving from the centre of the small grove of oak trees to its outskirts. She reaches out a hand and caresses the old, wrinkled bark as she passes one of the trees, and it moves beneath her hand, twisting like a living body. Her fingertips find a crack in the bark and slip inside, feeling the warm sap beneath. Under the toughened hide of the tree she touches something smooth and unmarred, not unlike newly formed human skin.

She stops and stares at her fingers. They are sunk up to the first joint into the tree trunk. She gently peels away a piece of bark, being careful not to cause too much damage to the delicate structure. The tree moves again, but this time as if it is responding to her touch. There is something almost erotic about the way the trunk slowly spins, turning eagerly to meet her wanton attention.

The underside of the bark is tacky; it sticks to her fingers as she fondles the material. She pulls the chunk of bark away and lets it drop to the ground, where it comes softly to rest on the grass and the fallen leaves next to her bloody feet. Leaning in close, she examines the patch that she has uncovered. It is human skin: soft and pink and covered in a red-tinged, viscous liquid, like the wet flesh of a newborn baby.

As she watches, the skin begins to rise and fall. She rests her fingers on the area and can feel a pulse, which beats much slower than her own.

“Alive?” The question is one that barely needs voicing. It is obvious to her now that the tree — or the thing she has found beneath the layer of bark, whatever it is — lives. It is breathing; it has a pulse and probably a heartbeat; there is blood, not sap, running through its mysterious system.

She presses against the patch of skin with her fingertips and watches as it pushes inward, making a slight indentation. The tree shifts; a small twitching motion. The leaves above her shudder. The sound they make is like tracing paper being crumpled up in a fist.

“Where is it?” The bark surrounding the area she has uncovered starts to peel away. The trunk begins to strip naked, revealing under its dry covering a vaguely human shape. There is the suggestion of legs, wide thighs, and the smooth curves of hips. Large breasts without nipples. The subtle v-shape of a crudely carved pudendum. It resembles a primitive wooden sculpture, but soft to the touch, and slightly elastic.

There is no head; the body is massive, and visible only to the shoulders. Whatever sits above is covered by the canopy of leaves.

Without thinking, she presses her hand further, deeper into the midriff of the unveiled body. The moist skin yields, and then splits. Her hand enters easily into the hole, that same viscous fluid aiding its passage. She slides both hands inside up to the wrist, gently spreading the edges of the wound, and grasps what she finds waiting within the cavity she has made.

The thing is rigid, motionless. She pulls it out, stepping back to allow it some space.

It is a small, rough puppet: no face, no fingers on the end of its stumpy hands. Just a rough-hewn caricature: a rude representation of a human child. She holds it close, hugging it against her naked chest. Her nipples harden, responding to the puppet’s silent hunger.

The puppet does not move. It is nothing more than an empty shell, a half-finished simulacra taken from inside a larger organism, like a splinter of prosthetic bone removed from torn flesh. There is something missing, a vital element. It is hungry but it is unable to feed. She presses its smooth, formless head against her breast, willing for it to partake of her food. Watery milk dribbles from the ends of her nipples, splashing onto this soulless, lifeless hunk of wood.

She doesn’t know what else to do.

Nobody has ever prepared her for this.

“Help me.” Her voice is tiny, lost in the primeval wood. “Help us. We need you. There’s no-one else. I beg you, just help us out of this mess.” Tears streak down her face, dripping delicately onto the top of the puppet’s inchoate head. Then, in reaction to her fathomless need, the puppet’s head slowly begins to move. It turns, pivoting on the broad neck, and the thing looks up at her. The puppet has no eyes but she can feel its gaze.

“Please. Help us. Help me and my mum… we need… we need…”

The trees writhe, their leaves speaking a language she cannot understand. A large flock of small birds flies overhead, darkening the sky and casting a flowing shadow on the ground at her feet.

“We need help.”

The puppet begins to shake, its stunted arms and blocky legs wriggling as it struggles in her grasp.

“We need you.”

The puppet, she realises, is laughing.

CHAPTER TWENTY

BOATER FELT UNCOMFORTABLE as he led the woman up the stairs to Monty’s office. He could sense her close behind him as he climbed the stairs, and hear the sound of her breathing in the enclosed space. She wasn’t wearing much perfume, but he could detect the trace of a light floral scent on her skin. She was scared — of course she was; they always were. They knew what they were here for, and what was going to happen to them, but still they were afraid. Monty enjoyed that fear; it was part of the thrill. Boater used to like it, too, but recently things had changed.

He reached the top of the stairs and turned around to face Lana. She was beautiful, even with her face scrubbed clean of make-up. The rage he’d felt towards her down by the Quayside, when he’d been confused and wrong-footed by his own churning emotions, had gone now. It had been replaced with a sense of longing.

“Just wait here for a minute. I’ll tell him you’re here.”

“Thank you,” she said, leaning her shoulder against the wall. She had not yet reached the top of the stairs, and stood two steps down from the short landing. The shadows clung to her, roaming over her body like eager hands. Boater thought that she didn’t look quite real: an erotic phantom.

“Just a minute… ” He spun around in the tight space and knocked on the office door. The light bulb in the ceiling flickered.

“Yeah. Come in.” Monty’s voice was muffled, but he sounded distracted.

He’s probably scribbling in his little book, thought Boater as he pushed open the door and stepped inside.

The table lamps were set low down, near the floor, giving the room a dusky atmosphere. The main lights were off and the window blinds were closed. Monty sat at his desk with his feet tucked up underneath him on the big chair. He was wearing his reading glasses, something that humanised him in a way that Boater found contradictory. Surely monsters didn’t wear reading glasses…

“She’s here. The Fraser woman. She’s here, just like you said.”

Monty didn’t look up from his book. He held it open on his thighs, studying it like it was a school text. He nodded, distracted and not really listening. “Did you know, Francis, that when the Romans were here in Northumberland they found something strange in the land this estate is built on?”

Boater had no idea what to say or even if a response was expected. Monty had been doing this more and more lately: talking to himself by telling Boater and the rest of the men things, passing on obscure information. It was like he was involved in a lengthy conversation with himself, and all Boater and the others were expected to do was listen.

Monty continued: “Pagan tribes would worship an old grove of oak trees, dancing and fucking and draining their blood into the soil. The Romans murdered this tribe, and then they burned down the oaks and dug up the charred earth, at least that’s what the books say, the ones I borrowed from the library. The ones no fucker else bothers to read. Nobody seems to know what kind of power the Romans found, but I like to think that Hadrian built his fucking wall to keep it inside rather than keeping the Jocks out.” He laughed, and it was a terrible sound: dull and flat and empty of feeling. “It seems to me that old Hadrian didn’t like what they found here. Nobody ever spoke of it again, except to say that the ground was cursed. That it was a Bad Place.”

Finally he glanced up from the book, as if realising that he was no longer alone. He closed the cover, running his fingers along the creased spine.

Boater read the book’s familiar title: Extreme Boot Camp Workout by Alex ‘Brawler’ Mahler. It was nothing but an exercise manual, a battered old workout book written by some ex-army type. Monty had picked up the book in a second-hand book shop, but he handled the thing like a holy relic — sometimes he even called it his ‘Bible’. He was constantly making incomprehensible notes in the margins, or sticking cut-out snippets of newspaper articles to the pages with a little glue-stick. He’d even sketched things in there, filling the margins and the white spaces between blocks of text with doodles that meant nothing to Boater but obviously held some kind of meaning for him.

Nobody else was allowed to touch the book, and Monty even kept it locked in his safe on the rare occasions when he wasn’t carrying it with him. But Boater had glimpsed the contents of the open pages on his boss’s desk several times, and the things he’d seen there — scrawled, glued and scribbled — were distressing. As far as he could tell, Monty had noted down, among other things, brief snatches of foreign languages, random words and phrases and odd bits of poetry. He had sketched partial maps and diagrams and scribbled monsters on the pages. The book now resembled the decor in the rooms inside a madman’s head, and Boater had actually become afraid of it, or more precisely what it might represent.

A book… he was scared of a fucking book. How stupid was that?

“We could learn a lot from the Romans,” said Monty, placing the book on his desk and unfolding his short legs so that he could set his feet on the floor. “Sorry to bore you with this, Francis, but it’s interesting. Hard bastards, they were, the Romans. Bummers and pederasts to a man, but they were fucking ferocious fighters when they had to be.”

Boater shuffled his feet on the carpet. He had no idea what was expected of him, he never did when Monty started acting this way. “Yeah, boss. I’m sure.”

Monty spread out his hands on the neat, uncluttered desk and slowly shook his head. He closed his eyes and opened them again. “You’re a simple man, aren’t you? A few beers with the lads, a bit of frisk in the car park when the pubs chuck out, and a quick shag with whatever slapper you manage to drag back home with you at the end of the night. Simple pleasures.” He paused, waited for an answer.

“Maybe.” Boater felt his anger rising. He didn’t like to be spoken down to like this, not even by Monty, the most powerful man he knew. It sent him crazy, burning him up inside. It made him want to lash out in every direction. He glared at his boss, approaching an imaginary line, one he knew he would be a fool to cross.

“I’m not trying to insult you, Francis. Never that. You’re a good man. A top man. You’re my top man. But sometimes even you must think about the nature of existence. How and why we’re here, on this fucked-up planet. There has to be more than fucking and fighting and drinking. Doesn’t there? I think about this stuff a lot. Ever since I was a kid I knew this place — the Grove — was special. Things happen here, things that aren’t meant to happen. Stuff that doesn’t happen anywhere else.”

Not unless you’ve had enough drugs, anyway, thought Boater, trying not to smile. The rage was gone; it had passed quickly, like a brief spell of bad weather.

Boater had heard a lot of this before. It was Monty’s pet subject: the theory that the Concrete Grove was a place where forces converged, and ghosts and monsters could be seen. Sometimes he would go on for hours, his monologue deteriorating the longer he talked and becoming more and more like a sort of personal code. It was worse when he was drunk or high; those times he sometimes came across like a religious maniac, thumping the table and shouting and yelling about all kinds of weird shit.

“I know you boys think that this is all just bullshit. But it’s not. There’s a lot of documented facts available, if you know where to look, who to ask, what holes to dig around in. Recorded UFO sightings and ghostly apparitions. Stories about poltergeists and shape-shifters. It’s all around this area, throughout history — the Lambton Worm, the Laidly Worm, the Hexham Heads, the Cauld Lad, the fucking Beast of Benton… so many myths and folktales. Did you ever think that these stories might all be part of a single, greater myth?”

He scratched his cheek, leaving red marks on the orangey, clean-shaven flesh.

“That’s what I think. There are others, too, who think the same way. I’m not the only one.” He picked up his faded copy of Extreme Boot Camp Workout and held it near the side of his face, as if listening to the paper. He gripped the spine, the pressure of his fingers flaring out the edges of the pages. “I bought this in a second-hand book shop in Morpeth. This was way back in, oh, about 1980. I’d been on a dirty weekend with some married tart — she liked to go walking up there, in the countryside. She liked it outdoors.”

The ghost of a smile crossed Monty’s face, but rather than settling Boater’s nerves it made them jangle. He’d seen that exact same smile before, usually when Monty had been reminiscing about violence.

“Yeah… good times.” The smile slipped, fell. “I already suspected that this place was special, that there was something weird going on. I’d spoken to a few people, and even seen one or two things myself that I couldn’t really explain. Then, it was as if this book was meant to fall into my hands. I picked it up and flicked through the pages, and on page twenty-nine I found a hand-written notation. Do you want to know what it said? I’ve read that phrase so many times now that I see the words whenever I close my eyes.”

Boater didn’t want to hear. He really didn’t. But he found himself nodding, betraying some inner compulsion for self-torment. Even though he’d heard the phrase repeated a hundred times.

“The note said: ‘The Concrete Grove is a doorway to Creation’.”

The pause that followed felt vast and dramatic, and filled with so many different meanings that it made Boater’s head ache.

“That’s Creation, with a capital C. It was my first clue, my first pointer. After that it was just a matter of sifting through old books, listening to pensioners tell me their fucking crazy stories, the stories nobody else would ever take seriously. If a scientist wrote a book and made a list of all the ghostly sightings and unusual activity that’s gone on here, he’d see that it was well above the national average. It’s a melting pot of the supernatural, mate. A fucking melting pot.” He shook the book, making the pages flutter. “And I’ve made my own notes, in here, for years now. Lots of notes, and a lot of other weird shit I can’t even understand: signs and symbols from history books and parchment papers kept in old church crypts.”

Boater smiled. He didn’t know what else to do.

“I know, you all just think I’m a madman, using this as an excuse for some of my more extreme behaviour. Maybe you were right, at first. It was an appealing justification. But now, you unbelieving cunts, I know it’s all real.” He smiled, and his mouth seemed to open too wide, like that of a shark. His teeth were small and pointed. “It’s all real.”

“Monty…” Boater tried to bring his boss back down to solid reality. It was always the same when he did a lot of drugs, and those new steroids he’d got in from China were messing with him in a way that was particularly intense. “Lana Fraser. She’s waiting outside.” He really wished that he had not come here tonight. He could have been back at his flat instead, shagging that girl. The one whose name he couldn’t even remember. But he didn’t need a name to lay down with her; names weren’t important, not when all you wanted was a dirty fuck.

He wished he was there instead of here; he wished that he was balls-deep inside that girl, erasing all thoughts of Monty Bright and his twitchy madness, his unnerving talk of ancient powers and festering forces.

“Oh, yeah. Lana Fraser.” Monty stood, his crumpled suit looking cheap and vulgar in the dim light. “Bring the whore in here and we’ll start the fun.” He walked over to the wall and opened the safe, and then placed his beloved book on a shelf. He touched the book’s tatty cover once, with the very tips of his fingers, before shutting it away and locking the safe door. He placed the key in his trouser pocket and then turned back to face the room.

He walked right up to Boater, standing mere inches from him. Boater always noted the fact that Monty had a peculiar odour — he smelled of old paper and dust, as if the essence of that book was rubbing off on him.

The top of Monty’s head came up level with Boater’s chest. He was a small man, and his body was wrecked from years of drug abuse and punishing gym routines. But he was fast, and he was remorseless. Boater had once seen his boss bite off a man’s nose and spit it back into the victim’s open mouth. He had witnessed Monty laughing as he cut off a woman’s hand for refusing to pay a debt, either in cash or in kind. He had seen this man commit so many foul crimes, so much brutality. Rape and murder and mayhem. And in the past, Boater had liked it. He had enjoyed it. Maybe he had even needed it.

But not now. Not today, or for any time afterwards. Something had happened; a window had opened inside him, allowing in the light and a gentle breeze. When he closed his eyes he could see a grove of trees with acres of dense woodland beyond, and his nostrils were filled with the smell of damp foliage…

Something had altered. A transformation had begun. None of this felt right any more. He no longer enjoyed the vileness and vulgarity of his life. He didn’t want to hurt people, not ever again. He wanted to see that beauty, to hear the sound of the wind in the trees and lie on the soft earth beneath their branches — perhaps even sinking into the loam, becoming part of it, a part of nature.

“Bring the bitch in,” said Monty. “I’m ready for her now.”

He was not smiling.

Boater went to the door and opened it. He wanted to scream at the woman on the landing, tell her to run and never stop, to keep on going until she and her daughter were far away from here. “He’ll see you now,” he said instead. His back was sweating; his legs felt weak. This wasn’t right.

Lana Fraser walked into the room, trying to summon from somewhere deep within her an ounce of dignity. Her beauty was enough to make both men take a step back, giving her some space. Her face was her power, but all power, Boater knew, fell down in the presence of greater strength.

“At last you’ve come to see me.” Monty grinned. His orange skin creased around his mouth, forming multiple parentheses. His hair, slicked back with too much hair product, glistened like a beetle’s back. “I’m so glad you could… come.” The emphasis on the last word was not lost on any of them.

Boater wanted to leave, but he knew that he couldn’t. He was stuck here, right until the end. There was no turning back, not yet. But perhaps he could try to make amends later, after the fact.

“You mentioned on the phone that I could clear my debt.” Her voice was impressively strong. She didn’t falter. The words were spoken clearly, and without much inflection. It sounded like she was reading aloud from a written statement.

“Did I, now?” Monty walked across the room to a door located opposite the one she’d come in. He reached out and opened it, revealing a staircase beyond. “You’d better come down the back stairs, then, and meet my other associate. I’m sure we’ll all be fascinated to hear what you have to offer.” He stepped to one side, the mockery of a gentleman, and bowed slightly. “We work as a group here. We all like to join in. The last girl left with a face like a plasterer’s radio.” He was attempting to push her buttons, looking for her breaking point. Boater had seen it all before, and no matter how strong they seemed at the beginning, they all broke down at some point.

Lana Fraser walked purposefully towards the open door. She did not take her eyes from Monty’s face. She took in every inch of him — from his off-coloured solarium tan to his whitened teeth and his deceptively weak looking chin. Then she went through the door and stepped down into darkness.

Monty turned towards Boater, smiled, and winked. Then he followed her into the stairwell.

Boater waited for as long as he was able — thirty seconds, perhaps even as long as a minute — and then he, too, went through the doorway and started down into Monty’s hidden basement rooms. For a moment he felt that Monty himself was swallowing him whole, and sucking them all deep inside his mad, black heart.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THIS IS IT, thought Lana as she waited at the bottom of the steep, rickety staircase. No turning back, now. She stood in the gloomy little passageway and listened to the sound of footsteps on the wooden treads behind her. Light spilled from a few wall-mounted bulbs, but it wasn’t nearly enough to illuminate all the dark corners. Monty Bright and his man Boater were descending after her through the building, entering the belly of the beast… that thought almost made her smile, but then, when she thought about it, the image simply made her more afraid.

The belly of the beast, she thought. Monty Bright’s belly. He’s the beast. Or, if he was not the beast himself, then he was certainly in the service of a beast; a terrible creature ruled by laws of debt and lust and desire: an entity she suddenly and confusingly thought of as Moloch, the false god from the bible.

I will set my face against that man, and against his family, and will cut him off, and all that go astray after him…

Now where the hell had she dredged that quotation up from? She hadn’t studied religious texts since high school, in Religious Studies. Her mind was going into overdrive, throwing up insane thoughts and ideas and snippets of things she had learned a long time ago. Words and phrases that were meaningless in the context of what was happening right now.

It’s fear. That’s what’s doing it. Oh, God, I’m so afraid.

Was she really that clichéd, turning to God in her moment of terror? Why not turn to The Beatles? They’d be just as much use in a crisis.

“There’s a good girl.” Bright had finally reached the bottom of the stairs. He was standing behind her, with his body pressed up against hers. She felt sick; revulsion made her feel as if her skin were trying to turn inside out. She wished that she could peel herself like a piece of fruit and discard the tainted exterior that Bright had already pawed and tainted with his filth. “It’s good to see you being so nice and obedient, and waiting for me down here in the dark.” He laughed softly, but it sounded more like an expression of hunger than one of mirth.

Bright stroked his trailing hand across her backside as he pushed past her, moving towards a scarred wooden door on the right. It was almost identical to the other doors they’d passed. But this one was different in one major way: this was the one behind which she would find the face of her demon — the slobbering face of Moloch, the great and terrible beast.

She stared at the wall, at the peeling plaster, trying not to look at that closed door. She tried to empty her mind. All the sorrow and regret; the debt and the promises of violence. The only thing she allowed herself to see, in the darkness behind her eyes, was Hailey’s face: her beautiful child for whom she was putting herself through this nightmare.

Noises echoed down the stairwell, strange creaks and moans and popping sounds. The wooden stairs had many dark, dusty old landings, broken and jutting timber balconies that led nowhere, like viewing galleries. But they had only ever been heading to the bottom: right to the very base of Bright’s black pyramid. She’d heard the rumours about these basement rooms and corridors, but never had she expected to see them for herself. Nor had she expected those stories to be true — not really; not in a million years.

Standing there, in a shabby underground passageway with a panting man’s hand on her arse, she thought about the road that had led her to this point. Timothy’s mental breakdown had been the first step, but since then she’d had chances to alter the route she had taken. Surely there had been choices to make along the way — if she believed in anything, it was that. There was always, always a choice, and she had made the wrong ones far too often. Even now, in this squalid place, she was making yet another bad decision. But this time, unlike those other times, she really did have no other option. This was it, the pit, the private hell at the end of the road: a hell that consisted of this dark corridor, two grinning men, and a door to a room where she would have everything taken from her.

“Shall we?” Bright’s voice was soft, smooth, as if he were attempting to seduce her.

She set her jaw, tensed her body, and then forced her muscles to relax. “Let’s go,” she whispered. “Let’s get it over with.”

Bright nodded once, and then opened the door.

Lana was aware of the big man, Boater, using up all the space behind her, giving her no room to escape, should she even try. She took a step and turned right, into the room.

Inside there was not much to see. A single bulb hung from the ceiling, its paper shade too dirty to make out any kind of design or decoration. The walls were bare stone, with damp stains spread across them like dark, blotchy shadows. There was a double bed pushed up against the side wall, adorned with thin blankets and a solitary shapeless pillow. The floor was stone, like the walls, and there was a crude shower stall in one corner, like something from a book of pictures of a concentration camp she’d once seen. A man stood by the shower. She recognised him from before, when they’d visited her flat to give her Bright’s last warning. He’d been wearing dark clothes, then — threatening clothes. This time he was wearing nothing but black trousers and a vest.

More than the man himself, though, she recognised the single black leather glove he wore.

Terry, she thought. His name’s Terry. It was such a common name for a devil.

He’d been wearing two gloves the last time she’d seen him. This time he only wore the one; his other hand was bare… his prosthetic hand. It looked like some kind of out-dated contraption, with thin metal levers visible at the wrist and wide leather straps holding it in place on his forearm. He raised his arm as she stood there, standing just a foot over the threshold, and clenched his plastic fingers. Then, as she began to lose all sense of reality, he undid the leather straps and removed the false hand to reveal a shiny pink nub of flesh.

“Just wait ’till you see what he can do with that stump,” said Bright, standing right beside her. She turned and looked into his shiny face. His eyes seemed to have doubled in size and there was white spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth.

Terry, waving his stump around in the air, began to laugh. It was a quiet sound, almost polite: a gentle chuckle that was completely out of place given the situation.

She looked down, at his bare feet. He was wriggling his toes on the stone floor. For some reason the sight was more sickening than that of the naked stump, and Lana felt a wave of bile rising at the back of her throat.

She took another couple of steps, trying to impose herself in the weird isolated space that was the room, to exert some measure of control. She heard the door shut behind her. Then there was the sound of a key rattling in the lock, and then a series of blunt clicks as the only way in or out of that room was sealed, perhaps locking a part of Lana inside there forever.

“So, Lana Fraser,” said Bright, slipping off his jacket. “At last you deign to come and visit us, to offer us some kind of payment on your debt.” His body, beneath the jacket, was clad in a tight grey shirt. His arms were huge, the biceps oversized. He could barely even bend his arms to remove the outer garment without having to angle his body to aid its movement. He was deformed; a man made monstrous by the abuse of muscle-building chemicals and heavy weights. Like most small-time criminals, he had an obsession with physical strength, but his had become so acute, so outlandish, that it had altered his exterior to reflect, more or less, how he saw himself in his mind’s eye.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m here to pay it off. I want to bring this to an end, finalise the deal. Just like you said on the phone.”

Terry, still standing by the primitive shower stall, laughed again. He flexed his gloved hand; the leather creaked loudly in the silence that followed his abrupt laughter. He stared at her face, her eyes, and never broke eye contact even as he stripped off his vest. His torso was well-muscled, but not as barrel-like as his boss’s broad trunk. Blue-black prison tattoos — at least that’s what Lana assumed the crude, thick-lined renderings to be — decorated his upper arms. An odd-looking dragon draped its badly-drawn tail around his shoulder.

“Is that what I said?” Bright walked around and stood directly in front of her, cutting off her view of Terry as he began to loosen his trousers. Bright was pulling his shirttails out of his waistband. Then he began to undo the shirt buttons from the bottom up. “Yes, I suppose I did say that, didn’t I?”

“I know the score,” said Lana, trying to find strength from somewhere, anywhere. “I know what’s expected of me, and I’ll do it all. I’ll do you all, if it keeps you away from me in future, and away from my daughter.” She clenched her fists and refused to look away as he slipped off his shirt and folded it neatly before placing it on the floor, near the end of the stark double bed.

Beneath the shirt he was wearing what looked like a wetsuit. It clung to his oddly-shaped form like a second skin, accentuating the ugly, disproportionate muscle build-up around his upper body. Lana was so surprised by Bright’s ridiculous get-up that for a moment she forgot to be afraid, and a tiny smile flickered across her lips. She cut the smile short before it got out of control, wishing that she could have prevented it altogether. The last thing she wanted to do was antagonise these men: there was too much aggression in the room already; unless she was careful, there was the risk that they would lose all control and cause her some real physical damage.

They could fuck her, by all means — she was just about prepared for that — but please God, don’t let them break her.

“Monty, I have some things to do… I’ll just go back upstairs while you sort things out down here.”

Sort things out, was that how they thought of it? What they called gang-rape? Lana felt her back stiffen as Boater brushed up lightly against her.

“Don’t be silly, Francis. We’re all taking part. We’re going to have some fun.” Bright smiled at her. “Aren’t we, Lana?”

She didn’t have it in her to reply, but she somehow managed to keep staring at him, pressing her gaze into his soft face. There was something going on here — something below the surface, a situation that was nothing to do with her but in which she seemed to have a pivotal role.

“But, Monty–”

“But nothing, Francis!” Bright’s eyes swivelled away from her and glared over her shoulder, at his mammoth henchman. “But nothing. We all stay here, and each of us takes our fill. We owe it to this kind lady, who has put herself to a lot of trouble to be here. Never, Francis, ever look a gift horse in the mouth.” He smiled but it looked all wrong, as if his face were splitting in two. “And don’t ever let a free fuck go to waste.”

Lana felt her legs start to shake, but she fought to control the movement. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of witnessing her fear. She was strong; her mind and body were one. This bastard wouldn’t break her, not ever. She vowed to remain intact to the very end, even if she ended up dead. This fucker would not see a single tear roll down her face, or hear a scream pass from her lips. She was stone. She was already dead.

“Are we ready?” Bright rubbed his hands together. His wetsuit absorbed the meagre light, glistening like the flesh of some hideous black lizard. “Are we all ready?”

“Fuck, yeah,” said Terry, moving forward, away from the shower stall. He was standing in his white wife-beater vest and underpants. She could see clearly that he was ready for action.

“Yeah,” said Boater, still standing behind her. There was something about the giant that Lana couldn’t fathom. It was obvious that he was having some kind of crisis of faith; she’d picked up on the fact that he was struggling with his own emotions. He’d almost turned against his boss. She felt it in the air: a sense of suppressed rebellion. Why couldn’t he have gone all the way and brought the fight out into the open, giving her some slight hope that this might not happen — that these men might not use her as a sex doll in this grimy basement room?

Terry’s pink nub of a wrist shone weakly in the dim light. Monty Bright grinned like a lunatic. And behind her, remaining out of sight for now, a silent giant took stock of his situation far too slowly to offer Lana any form of hope.

Bright took something from his trouser pocket: a thin black scarf. “Here.” He said. “Put this on.” He opened his fingers and let the scarf unfurl, holding one end between his thumb and the palm of his hand. It was not a scarf, it was a blindfold: a black silk blindfold.

Lana reached out and took the blindfold from his hand. His skin felt cold and clammy, but that might just have been her imagination, conjuring little tricks to transform a bad man into a demon.

“Put it on, now.” The playfulness had gone from his demeanour, leaving behind a blank, empty shell waiting to be filled by whatever he could take from her.

There was a pause. The room seemed to exist out of time for a moment, as if they’d all moved sideways into another state of being.

When Bright slapped her, without warning, it took her a second or two to register the pain. She heard the sound — quick, high and sharp — and had time to wonder what it was before her cheek started to burn. It was too late to even raise her hand and feel the spot where he had hit her. The pause between the violent act and her realisation of it was too great for her to react without feeling stupid. “Oh,” she said instead. It was an ineffectual remark; she wished she’d just kept her mouth shut. “Oh,” she said again, thinking, Shut the fuck up!

Bright nodded. The walls closed in, squeezing her sense of spatial awareness until it lost all meaning. She realised why Bright had slapped her. The bastard had done it to sharpen her senses, to plunge her into the moment like someone jumping into a cold lake. To make sure she was fully aware when things got under way.

He wanted to ensure that she was trapped firmly in the present and not retreating into some inner chamber where she might distance herself from the outrage. The fucker knew exactly what he was doing. He had done this too many times before to make silly mistakes and allow his victim — his debtor — even a scant emotional reprieve. Maybe his men were just along for the ride, but like most serial rapists, Bright was interested in mental rather than physical penetration.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” said Bright, softly, almost lovingly — as if he were savouring the taste of his catchphrase on his tongue.

Lana covered her eyes and waited for the suffering to start.

AFTERWARDS, WHEN IT was all over and done with, she stood in the shower stall and let the cold water chill her battered body. Hot water would have been too much of a kindness, and men like these were not known for their acts of generosity.

Lana ached everywhere, inside and out. The stink of semen clung to her. She had vomited so much in the shower that her belly felt mercifully empty. She had not taken the blindfold off. She didn’t want to see them again until she was clean. She faced the wall and let the sound of the water deafen her, but still she heard the door as it opened and closed, and the footsteps approaching across the hard floor.

“Hurry up. We have things to do.”

It was Terry’s voice. She would never forget that voice, even if she lived to be an old woman. He had whispered such terrible things in her ear as they’d used her body, entering every orifice. Such terrible, terrible things. He’d spoken of Hailey, and how she looked. He’d talked about her daughter’s young body, and what he would like to do with it. The words he’d used had been ones she’d heard before, many times, but in the situation she was in they became something new: another language, and one that expressed only depravity.

These were surely not men; they were animals. Beasts. They had no souls, no morals. They were demonic.

But, no. They were just men: Bad Men.

She fumbled for the taps and turned off the flow of water. Then, wincing as her limbs burned with pain, she took off the blindfold. Then she turned to face the one-handed man who had defiled her. He was fully clothed and his prosthetic was fixed back in place. He was once again wearing both of his black leather gloves.

“Put your fucking clothes on.” The contempt in his voice was almost as hurtful as what they’d done to her. Almost, but not quite. Not at all, if she was honest. That was just another lie to tell herself, a flimsy barrier to wedge between her and the memory of what had been done here in this shabby little basement room she would always think of whenever she heard the word ‘hell’.

The door opened again just as she was putting on her blouse. She watched Bright walk in as she buttoned it to the neck and smoothed out the collars.

“So, are we done?” Her voice was hoarse. Her throat felt like it had been filled with cement. “Are we square?” She shuffled forward. Each tiny step made her thighs blaze, her crotch burn, her torn anus clench, and set off a series of dull explosions deep inside her lower abdomen.

I’ll need to get checked out, she thought. For STDs. AIDS.

This grim note of reality, even more than the acts she’d been made to perform and submit to, threatened to tear her apart. The aftermath — the thought of the countless small, intimate and desperately embarrassing tasks she would need to undertake before declaring herself clean and safe — were like daggers in her belly.

“Well?” She was amazed that she still possessed enough strength to raise her voice. She certainly wouldn’t be able to raise her hands to defend herself if one of the men chose to slap her again. Such physicality was beyond her right now, at least until she started to bruise.

“For now,” said Bright.

Terry laughed softly, but when Bright glanced at him he fell silent, and then lowered his head and left the room. He shut the door quietly behind him, as if that one look had caused him to fear even the slightest sound.

The games were over.

Bright was once again wearing his suit, but was not wearing any shoes. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a fat cigar — probably Cuban, thought Lana, madly, focusing on absurd details rather than the larger canvas of the picture taking shape before her. He lit the cigar and took a long drag. Smoke trailed from his lips; Lana thought it moved too slowly to be real.

“What do you mean?” Her hands dropped to her sides. She felt boneless, as if the men had filleted her on the bed. “You promised.” But she knew that any promises made by such a man were subject to the whims of his fancy. She’d been a fool to let herself believe that this would make any difference to her situation, but what else did she have to cling to other than foolish belief?

“I promised you nothing,” said Bright, looking at the cigar in his hand. The tip glowed bright red, like a single devilish eye. “Consider this visit a down payment. The way I figure it, you’ll have your debt cleared in, say, six to eight months. Even quicker if you bring the girl along next time. Nice and tight and pretty, isn’t she? I’ve seen her through the school gates, playing with her little friends. I think my friends would like to play with her very much.”

Lana knew that she should rush him, maybe go for the throat, the eyes: attack the soft parts, just like a cornered rat. But it was futile. He was too strong, and had always possessed the upper hand. Right from the start, he’d played her along, upping the odds until she came to him and offered him exactly what he wanted and could have taken at any point, if that had been his choice.

But Monty Bright did not want to take; it was the very act of offering that turned him on, made him shine.

Where’s your compassion?” she said, failing to penetrate his armour. “Where’s your basic human decency?” She hated the desperation she heard in her weakened voice, but it was all she had left to offer, the only thing she could dredge up from inside her poor, defiled wreck of a body.

Bright walked towards her. He was shorter than she remembered; he barely came up to her shoulder now that she’d put her pumps back on. His skin looked soft, malleable, and his eyes protruded like boiled eggs from a face as flat and round as a polished plate. Bright’s shoulders were hunched; his posture was awkward, as if the years of self-abuse disguised as exercise had mutated his basic geometry. He slowly raised his hands and began to slip off his shirt. He still wore the wetsuit underneath, as he had done during her ordeal, and she stared in horror as he slid his fingers under the neck of the garment and began to peel the material downwards, as if he were calmly removing a layer of skin. He extracted his arms from the rubbery suit and rolled it down towards his waist.

“For that, dear Lana, I’d have to be human.”

The blindfold and the wetsuit had prevented her from seeing anything before, and most of the time her arms had been pinned down or back behind her, but his naked torso was a mass of lumps and abrasions. More and more of this was revealed as he continued to drag the garment down over his belly. The malformations looked like ripe tumours: they dangled in grapelike clumps from beneath his armpits, clustered around his nipples and made a ribbed embossment down the faint seam of his hairless belly.

Even now, after everything she’d gone through, Lana felt sick to the stomach.

There were small mouths in there, amid the globules and curlicues of flesh, and bright little eyes that blinked uncomprehendingly. A nose or a sex gland twitched; snot or semen spilled from its shiny, puckered end. Here was a whole community of beings, perhaps even the physical representation of the souls of people he’d consumed as repayment for debts even greater than her own, loans whose rate of interest was infinite.

“Bring the girl next time,” he said, smiling around his cigar. “I’ll show her a whole new world of hurt.” The cigar’s fiery red eye winked: just once, but it was more than enough to ensure she got the message.