Silent Voices (32 page)

He stepped forward, approaching her. Her eyes were white, with no pupils, and her lips were thin, like blades. Silently, she repeated the same word, again and again and again... the same single word.

Doors swung open inside Simon’s memory, and a wind gusted through the empty halls of his mind. It was coming; something was on its way now. So he waited. Bracing himself against this alien earth, watching a giant woman as she repeated a silent warning, and wishing that the Angel would move, just an inch, he waited for whatever was coming.

Underthing.

He heard the word as if it had been spoken, but not by the woman. By someone else, twenty years ago... a girl, a young girl called Hailey.

Underthing.

This was the thing that had taken him, taken them all, the foul creature that had stolen their youth, tainted their future, and torn apart the foundations of their friendship. This was what had called him back to the estate, and finally, after all these years, he recognised the monster they had followed into the Needle, the beast with no name, just a description:

The Underthing.

Simon knew that this was a dream, but if he allowed it to happen, and the events whose aftermath he could see took place, nothing would ever be the same again.

The doors in his mind stayed open, and his worst fears came lumbering through, wearing so many masks that he could not help but realise they were still hiding, still concealing themselves. One mask at a time, piece by piece, Simon began to discover what had been hiding in his darkness.

TWENTY YEARS AGO, WHEN THE DAMAGE WAS DONE

T
HEY ARE WAITING
on the platform, huddled beneath an old tarpaulin they discovered folded under some bushes not far from the old Beacon Hill railway platform. The sheet smells of piss and alcohol; when they found it, Marty said it must have been used as a tramp’s bedding. They all laughed at that, but still they hauled the sheet back to their base camp to use as a cover.

The night is clear. Thin clouds are just about visible, high up in the seamless black of the sky. The moon is somewhere between half and full, and it shines down like a spotlight upon the area where the boys have made their den.

Night birds sing in the dense undergrowth, or hop between tree branches. When they close their eyes and keep quiet, not making a sound apart from their breathing, the boys can almost fool themselves that they are not on the outskirts of a grey conurbation, but somewhere out in the countryside. For a moment, anyway, before the sounds of distant engines and alarms intrude upon their reverie and spoil the lie. Then reality comes flooding back, and something inside them dies.

“Can you hear something?” Brendan’s voice is low, timid. He does not move.

“Like what?” Even Marty sounds cautious. “I didn’t hear a thing.”

“Shush...” Simon pulls the tarpaulin down and peers over its edge, scanning the ground below the tree.

Something rustles in the bushes to the right of their position, making them shake. Then, softly, a low clicking sound begins to build, rising gradually from near silence to a soft, low, ratcheting noise.

“What is it?” Brendan tenses beneath the sheet; they all feel it, the fear that has crept up on them, taking them by surprise. Like the arms of a drunken parent, it clumsily envelopes them, making them feel unsafe.

“I dunno. Sounds like a rattlesnake.” Simon moves slowly across the platform, towards the edge of the plywood base. He lies down on his belly and gently pulls himself towards the platform’s roughened lip, staring down at the ground. Low branches shudder; the sound builds, dies down, and then builds again.

“Captain Clickety,” says Brendan, his voice now not much above a whisper.

“What’s that?” Marty shifts, making the platform creak.

“I dunno. It’s just a name... something from an old nursery rhyme or summat. I remember it from infant school. I think it’s something we used to sing in class. That’s who I saw earlier: Captain Clickety.”

The movement down below ceases but the sound continues, as if once begun it might never stop.

Then, softly and in a childish sing-song voice, Brendan begins to chant:

“
Captain Clickety

He’s coming your way

Captain Clickety

He’ll make you pay

Once in the morning

Twice in the night

Three times Clickety

Will give you a fright
”

Simon glances over at his friends. “Shut up,” he says. “Just shut up. That’s creepy.” He feels his eyes blinking rapidly, and doesn’t seem able to stop them.

Brendan smiles, but there is no humour in the expression. As young as he is, Simon realises that the smile is one of desperation. What he doesn’t know is what to do about it, how to put things right and make the world feel safe again. Perhaps when he is older he can be that kind of hero, but now all he can do is endure the confusion.

“There’s somebody down there.” Simon hears his voice before he even knows what he is going to say. “Right under us. Hiding in the trees. I don’t think he knows we’re up here.”

The platform creaks again.

“Don’t move,” says Simon. “He’s there.” He doesn’t understand how he knows the presence is male, but that’s how it feels: like there’s a man down there, peering up at them from the shadows.

There is nobody there, beneath the platform on which they are huddled, but for some reason he feels the need to push his friends, to coerce them into action in the only way he knows how. On the surface, he believes that he is trying to allay their fears by confirming them – by giving the boys something they can turn their attention towards, they might stop being so afraid of the things that don’t matter. But under this, where the part of himself he can never understand holds sway, he realises that he is simply pushing for pushing’s sake. He has always done this, ever since he was an infant: at nursery, at school, at home. It was the only way for him to get noticed, to command attention. Otherwise, he would have blended into the background, becoming unimportant.

So he pushes, just like he has always pushed.

The lies trip from his tongue.

“He’s moving away now... he’s in the trees and he’s moving. It’s some guy in a funny costume. I think it’s the same guy Brendan saw earlier: the one in the bird mask with the walking stick, the weirdo. That one. The creepy one. Captain Clickety.”

He watches the unmoving bushes, the unambiguous trunks and boughs of the trees, the dancing shadows as they skim across the ground – and that’s all they are, trees and bushes and shadows. It feels good to push, but he knows that it shouldn’t. He knows it should feel bad.

He knows that he should be terrified. But he isn’t; he’s excited.

“Let’s follow him,” he says, clamping down on the smile before turning again to face his friends. “Let’s spy on him. He might be a robber. We could find his treasure. Like Tom Sawyer, in the caves. Remember?”

Marty says nothing, he just stares out into the darkness, his face thin and pale and unreadable. Brendan shakes his head, but Simon knows that he can change his mind. All it will take is the right kind of pushing, the application of pressure from a certain angle. That’s all it ever takes, with anyone, and Simon has the gift of finding those angles, picking them out and exploiting them for his own purposes.

“Come on,” says Simon, goading the others. Then, smiling, he says the magical words that are guaranteed to get a response, asks the question that can be answered in only one way by a couple of ten-year-old boys:

“What, are you too scared to come with me?”

It doesn’t take long for them to climb down out of the tree, leaving the half-built den behind, the loose tarpaulin fluttering gently in a slight night-time breeze.

Each boy’s actions confirm the actions of the other two: they are a team, a unit, acting as one entity, each permitting the others to behave in a certain way. They walk slowly through the trees and head towards the lonely lane of Beacon Grove Rise. Right will take them to the derelict railway platform, where older kids go to take drugs, drink beer, and muck about. They turn left towards the centre of the Grove, and eventually the Needle.

A tall figure moves up ahead, heading towards the cut-through formed by Grove Nook. Simon glimpses it for but a moment, and it might just be shadow play, but he convinces the others that it is the one they need to follow – the creature that will now forever be known as Captain Clickety, just like the character in that creepy old rhyme. A shape without an identity, a fear with no real purpose... a nameless, faceless entity that will haunt them all until the day they die.

“It’s him, isn’t it?” Brendan’s question hangs in the air; neither of the other boys even needs to provide an answer.

“Come on,” says Marty, assuming the dominant role in the group. Simon has sown the seeds; the others are simply falling into their natural grooves, taking up their allotted positions in the simple structure of the small gang.

They walk along the street in single file, turning left as they reach Grove Terrace. There are no cars on the road at this hour. The house lights closest to the boys are all turned off, the windows dark. Even the usual urban sounds seem to have been suspended for a little while – no barking dogs, no distant alarms or revving engines. A pocket of stillness exists in the night, and they have entered, crossing its borders to stand at the edge of a new place.

The boys cross the road, walk along Grove Street and step onto the Roundpath, the narrow walk-around circling the Needle. The large building hovers above them, as if cast adrift from its concrete foundations. It seems to totter and sway, and as they approach the place they feel a sense of dislocation, as if they have ruptured something, broken through an invisible wall. The upright tower of the Needle straightens like a snake discovering it has a backbone after all, and the few unbroken windows on the upper floors seem to collect all the available light in the area, transforming into small, bright screens.

Simon looks up, at those grim windows, and upon them he sees played out, like a movie, scenes from his own life: his mother and father shouting, his much younger self hiding in the bedroom wardrobe and weeping, an endless queue of wine bottles lined up along the skirting board in his parents’ room... all the hurt and the frustration, the pointlessness of his existence is summed up in those scant few images, and he knows that he is not going to turn away. He is going to enter the building and find out what has gone inside there before him, and perhaps even discover something miraculous within its walls.

For a long time, Simon felt like he was nothing, just a speck. His parents did not love him; his teachers thought he was a waste of space. Then he found that he could manipulate those people into noticing him, and he focused his energy on making that happen.

But this is something different. The situation in which he finds himself, poised at the edge of revelation, makes him feel that the world is ready to notice – not just his family and friends, not even all the other people who live on the estate. The world. The planet. The very earth itself might look at him as he strides across its surface, making footprints in the muck and the filth and the squalor.

This might just be his chance to be somebody.

“I’m going in there,” he says, moving forward, his body moving with a sense of great ease, even of inevitability. “I’m going to see what’s happening.” He feels no fear, only a sense of what he will years later recognise as longing. For his entire young life, Simon has only ever been shown the banal, the prosaic, but here is something that could elevate his experience. Here is evidence of the sublime.

“Me, too,” whispers Marty, gripped by the same spell, the same dark magic.

“Wait for me,” says Brendan, as he catches up with the other two boys. “I’m coming, too.” But the he does not sound as convinced as his friends.

The tower does not move an inch.

The earth beneath their feet is stiff and unyielding.

The night closes like a fist around them.

PART FOUR

The Three Amigos Ride Again

“It’s not what I expected.”

– Simon Ridley

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

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

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

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