Silent Voices (40 page)

Simon smiled.

Then he pushed again.

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

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

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

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

“Push with me,” he said.

Captain Clickety nodded.

“You can’t have him.”

Captain Clickety nodded again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was the Angel of the North...

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

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

Sacrifice.

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

Sacrifice.

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

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

Hummingbirds began to fall from the sky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes.

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

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

He barely even recognised himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“W
HAT THE FUCK
happened in there?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The three men went silent for a moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marty said nothing.

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

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

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

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

Simon smiled. What else could he do?

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

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

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

The sacrifice had been accepted.