The Concrete Grove (23 page)

“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.

…A
ND 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

B
OATER 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.