Beyond Here Lies Nothing (The Concrete Grove Trilogy) (32 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, no... what happened?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then the noise starts.

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

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

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

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are you?”

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

The Slitten
.

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

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

T
OM
S
TAINS WAS
drunk again. He was always drunk, but that was okay. Being drunk was how he handled the world; or, rather, how he liked to keep it at bay. Ever since his disabled Helen had killed herself he’d been aware of the world – of stinking humanity – reaching out to try and grab him by the throat. Helen had somehow managed to drag herself out of bed and throw herself down the stairs, snapping her neck. Some days – especially when he began to doubt his own memories of the incident – he wished that he had the guts to emulate her.

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