Beyond Here Lies Nothing (The Concrete Grove Trilogy) (20 page)

³
Surely a metaphor?

⁴
I could find no trace of these notes. I assume they went with him, wherever he vanished to.

⁵
I have no idea what this means. Could it represent the nameless forces the villagers worshipped?

⁶
There’s no record of how many victims there might have been.

⁷
I got some of this story from obscure Fortean literature, and the rest has been told in the back rooms of certain pubs for decades, changing, like a game of Chinese Whispers, with each telling.

⁸
Again, this word. This place. Where is it? Is it here, in the Concrete Grove? How does one find it, and how to gain access? Was this the secret knowledge King Edward, through Terryn Mowbray, was seeking?

⁹
What’s with the black leaves again?

Marc set the notebook down next to him on the sofa. He leaned back and tilted his face up towards the ceiling, closed his eyes. It was madness. None of this could be true – it was all myth and hearsay, local legend given the kind of attention that it surely did not deserve. He opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling. There was a large cobweb in one corner; he could see the fat black body of a spider, motionless against the white plaster ceiling. The spider seemed to be watching him. Or perhaps it was dead.

“Why the hell didn’t you get yourself a computer, Harry?”

Harry’s system was difficult to follow. The books in the library were kept in some kind of highly personal and esoteric order, and he had found no more of the slender notebooks on the shelves. There wasn’t much written down. It must all be in Harry’s head, burned to ashes along with his body.

“What else did you know?” The spider moved; it was alive after all. The web shuddered. The spider was no longer there. But something was... and not just in the corner of the ceiling. Marc became convinced that it was everywhere, inside and outside the house; all around him, trying to get inside him. Something was coming.

“What is it that you were keeping from me, and are you trying to tell me now that you’re dead?”

He thought about the Pollack twins, and the Northumberland Poltergeist. He’d always known there was more to the story than a simple urban haunting, but who the hell would believe any of this? His publisher would laugh at him; they’d send him away without an advance. It was fantastic, improbable... more than that: it was fucking insane.

Other worlds, demonic plague doctors, links to a famous case of vanishing New World settlers, a monster called the Underthing... the more he dug, the more incredible all this seemed.

He closed his eyes and tried to pin down the facts. But facts were thin on the ground here; all he had to cling to was a bunch of ghosts and stories within stories.

Only one thing was certain. Doors were opening, or being opened.

Something was on its way.

Something was coming.

mummy went out to pub and daisy like a flower a sleep. sumbody else in the house wi me. i here him breething. captain clickety comign for me. he see me all the time even when he not here. he everwhear not just in the house. he all over the estate like grass and roads and houses. he lives in the needle but he can see through walls. he wants me and daisy like a flower because we look the same. two things the same make him stronga. two things the same fill him up like food. this time he bring others with him. they clothes are funny like old style in the museum or wot scarycrows have on. they smiling. some have blood on them clothes and faces. they hungry. I be food for them. me and daisy like a flower. a humingbird fly in the room. i go to play with it. keep it away from baby.

– From the diary of Jack Pollack, April 1974

PART THREE

Scarecrow Culture

“I heard its fucking heart beating.”

– DS Craig Royle

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

R
OYLE USUALLY WENT
over to Vanessa’s place once a fortnight for dinner. He wasn’t sure why they did this, or what she got out of the experience, but it meant that they could at least maintain regular face-to-face contact. It was part of the unspoken terms of their separation. Even though they were no longer officially together, neither of them could stand the thought of being apart, so they went through this stylised charade on a regular basis.

It had been her decision to temporarily separate – most of the major decisions in their lives were down to her – and although he’d never wanted it to happen, he could see the logic in her proposal. A bit of space; some time to contemplate what it was they both wanted; the distance he needed to pull himself together. His main fear – his
only
fear – regarding the situation was that she’d discover she didn’t want him back and that would be the end of them.

Vanessa still lived in the house they’d pushed their budget to the limit to buy, while he slept in that cramped little flat above the shops. He didn’t mind the arrangement, but he missed going home to her after a long, hard shift, missed pressing his body against hers in their double bed. But she’d never understood his anxiety as manifested in the Crawl, and his lasting obsession with the Gone Away Girls. His obsession with every case he’d ever worked on, if he was honest... it was this precise intensity that he failed to bring to their marriage, and it hurt her that he reserved it only for his work.

The car engine made a soft burring noise as he drove out into the Northumberland countryside, heading towards the small village where they’d set down roots. Royle had always been a city boy but Vanessa preferred to be out in the sticks, surrounded by trees and green fields and spaces that weren’t filled with the stench of motor vehicles and the sounds of a hemmed-in, overstimulated population.

It was dark now; the stars were out. The sky looked like a perforated black sheet backlit by a weak bulb. His hands ached as they gripped the steering wheel and his mind was filled with images whose collective meaning he found hard to define: a scarecrow with a missing girl’s face, a small crawling thing that remained out of sight, the mortally wounded body of a young man lying in a pool of blood.

These, among others, were the pictures he was forced to carry around with him, like unwanted family portraits of people he’d rather not be related to. He lived with these images; they were part of him now, central to who he was and what he had become. He wished that things were different, that he could have been a bus driver or a shopkeeper, or an internet millionaire... but he was a copper, and he always would be. Some things, it seemed, never changed, no matter how hard you wished they would.

When he pulled up outside the small detached house, he sat there for a little while, staring at the lighted windows and trying to define a shape beyond the glass. The Crawl was far behind him now; he could almost pretend that it didn’t exist, that it was something he’d once read about or seen in a film. This was real: the small, neat house in the country, his pregnant wife, the baby they’d made together, the untapped potential they had cherished before the darkness had come between them, driving a wedge between their feelings for one another.

Then, out of habit more than any sense of perceived menace, he glanced in the rear-view mirror to see what was behind him. Darkness bulged along the street, like food caught in a giant throat. Something flickered; a sense of quick, nervous movement. Even here he wasn’t safe.

None of us are
, he thought.
Not ever
.

The skin of his back and shoulders started to prickle; then it spread along his arms, reaching round to his chest, almost hugging him. The Crawl – it was here, even here, where he had mistakenly thought there might be safety. Somehow it had reached out, following him from the Grove, and managed to grasp hold of the rest of his life, tainting everything, polluting his thoughts and even his dreams.

He opened the door and got out of the car. A gust of wind blew along the street, buffeting him, almost knocking him off his feet. Then, a second later, the air was calm and still; there was not a trace of the wind he’d felt. Royle stared back along the street, in the direction he’d come. The darkness twisted, corkscrewing. He half expected to hear disembodied laughter.

Something’s coming
, he thought, but he had no idea where the thought had come from or specifically what it meant.
It’s on its way
.

Someone crossed the street, turning their head to glance in his direction. It was a small girl. She was wearing a dress but no coat. It was much too late for children to be out, unless they were up to no good – and this one didn’t look like the kind of kid who hung out on street corners, smoking fags and drinking cider with her mates. She was too sensibly dressed, and there was a sense of innocence about her that he could make out even from this distance.

The girl stopped in the middle of the road and stared at him. She lifted her arms as if she were about to take flight. Darkness webbed in the space between her arms and her body; black gossamer wings unfolding. Royle took a step forward, and the girl’s image seemed to waver, like a faulty piece of film.

He shook his head, closed his eyes. Opened them again.

The girl was no longer there. Wind gusted but he could not feel it. A soft clicking sound, like someone running a stick along metal railings, moved away from him along the dark street, fading into the distance. It was a sound he’d heard before, but he couldn’t remember where or when. He never could; it was like some kind of primal echo, a memory from a time that was lost to him.

Royle turned away and headed towards the house, the lights, his wife and unborn child. He opened the gate and walked up the path, flanked on either side by tiny lawns, flower beds Vanessa kept looking neat and tidy, even during the winter months. He took a few panicked breaths, trying to calm down, and then knocked sharply on the front door. Waiting, he gazed through the glass panel in the door and saw a wide, blurred figure approaching along the hallway.

The door opened and she stood there, an engorged angel, on the threshold.

“Hi Craig.” She smiled.

“Hi.” He stared at her narrow, pretty face, the bright maternity dress, the bulge she was massaging softly with both hands.

“Come on in.” She turned and walked into the house; he followed her, close to tears, tottering on the edge of absurdity.

The house smelled of beef casserole and Vanessa’s coconut body lotion. He glanced up the tight staircase as they passed alongside it, wishing that he could stay the night, sleep in their bed, hold on tightly to the woman he loved, had always loved, would never stop loving. Like a shadow of the past (or the future?), he saw a faint image of himself walking across the upper landing, heading for the bedroom they’d once shared.

“How are you today?”

She sat on the sofa as he entered the living room, stretching out her legs and resting her feet on the leather pouffe. “I’m achy.” She smiled. Her face was drawn and pale, her eyes were heavy-lidded, but still she was beautiful. “Had a few cramps, several hard kicks or punches in the stomach. I think this one’s going to be a kick-boxer.”

Royle sat down in the armchair opposite, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees. “Anything I can do for you, or get you?”

She shook her head.

He tried not to look at the framed photographs on the mantelpiece, the pictures on the walls, the magazines in the rack. Each ornament reminded him that he no longer lived here; every new knick-knack on a shelf was another barb in his heart because she’d bought it alone, without him.

“What about you? What kind of day have you had?”

“Weird,” he said, without thinking.

“Oh, yeah? How so?”

He shook his head, scratched his right knee with his index finger. “Somebody’s playing silly games on the Grove estate, leaving scarecrows in people’s gardens. Nothing major, just stupid stuff. Some kind of wind-up.”

“I see,” she said, leaning back on the sofa, her interest having dried up and blown away. “I’ll serve up dinner shortly. It’s beef casserole... your favourite dish.” She narrowed her eyes when she said it, as if to make clear that she meant nothing by the gesture. It was just a meal, nothing more.

“That sounds good. Really good actually. I’m starving.” He couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten, or even what he’d eaten. Probably some kind of junk food: a burger, a TV dinner warmed up in the microwave. Had he even taken breakfast this morning? But why the hell was he thinking about food when he should be down on his knees begging Vanessa to take him back, to give it another go? It was an indication of how his life was unravelling. Nothing was straightforward, every road had too many bends and he always got caught up watching the scenery.

Vanessa stood and waddled across the room to the kitchen door.