The Concrete Grove (33 page)

Even if she’d dawdled back from school, walking slowly and daydreaming in that way of hers… even then, she should be home by this time.

“Where is she… where?” Her hand gripped the receiver. Tom walked up beside her and raised his eyebrows:
What is it?

“She’s safe,” said Bright. All trace of humour had left his voice. It was his turn to be ‘all business’. “Don’t worry about that. She hasn’t been harmed. Not yet.”

Lana’s stomach clenched; knots tightened inside her body.

“She isn’t here, with me, but she’s safe. One of my associates has her. He called me earlier to say that he had everything in hand. You remember Francis, don’t you? The big lad?”

The giant. Boater. Francis Boater. He was the one who’d spoken out – albeit briefly and ineffectually – when they’d all been down there in Bright’s basement room. It was a slim hope, but at least it was something: he’d shown signs of regret, remorse and doubt. Maybe he was keeping her safe, and hadn’t laid a hand on her young body. Perhaps this giant was in fact her best chance for safety?

“So what do you want?” This time her voice was steady. Quiet, but resolute.

Tom grabbed her wrist but she shook him off. She couldn’t deal with him now.

“I want you to come and see me, Lana. I know that’s what you had planned anyway, there’s not much I don’t know right now. I’m in a special position, with access to all kinds of information.” He chuckled softly. It felt like his breath was right in her ear. “I have friends in low places, you see.
Very
low places.”

“When?”

“Tonight. Midnight. The witching hour. It’s so appropriate, isn’t it? I’ll be here alone… well, apart from Terry and some friends that can’t really be classed as
being here,
not really. I suppose you could say they’re partway here, and partway somewhere else.”

“What will you do when I get there?” It couldn’t be sex, not this time. There was no reason for such extreme methods. Last time, she had gone too willingly. The friends he mentioned were not the ones from before. She suspected that he was talking about another kind of friend entirely.

“I think you and me need to have a proper chat. A wee talk about things. It’s about time we put our heads together and discovered all our common concerns.” He was almost whispering now.

“Common concerns?”

“Well, your daughter for one. She seems to have gained access to somewhere I’d like to go – a place I’ve been trying to find for a long time. I don’t know how she’s done it, or what she’s used as a key, but a door has opened to let her in. And I want her to do the same for me: to open it up and escort me inside so I don’t get hurt or killed or changed into a fucking werewolf.”

“I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.” She closed her eyes. The dream that had become her life was taking another violent twist, leading her down a road she wasn’t keen to follow.

“Oh, you will. Once we have our talk, Lana, you’ll understand everything.” He cleared his throat: a small cough, dry and delicate. “Until midnight, then. Then we can get this show on the road.”

Lana was about to speak again, but the line went dead.

“What did he want?” Tom stood there with his hands crossed over his belly, unsure whether to touch her or keep his distance.

“I don’t know what he wants, but I do know what he’s going to get.”

Tom backed away. Just a single step, but it was enough to tell her everything she needed to know about the balance of power in this relationship. Tom’s help was limited now; his strength was finite, and he had almost reached the end of his reserves. He was merely a helper, an assistant.

It was up to Lana now. She had to take charge.

“Come on, Tom. There’s something I need to show you.”

“Is it the thing you were going to show me earlier, before?” He looked away, embarrassed by his premature reaction before the phone had interrupted them.

Lana didn’t care. Not now. All that was over; there was something else to be done. “Yes, that’s right. I’m going to show you how we’ll kill that bastard and get my daughter back.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“I
WON’T LET
anyone hurt you.” Boater stared at the girl, wondering if she’d ever wake again. “I promise…” She wasn’t moving. She hadn’t moved for what seemed like hours. He was pretty sure it was late – it certainly felt as if they’d been there all night, maybe even a lot longer than that. But the windows were covered with curtains of foliage and very little light was able to get through the dense green drapery.

When he’d followed her into the Needle everything he’d been feeling for the past few days had come into sharp focus. The vague yearning, the newly developed sense of shame, the fact that he no longer felt the urge towards violence… it all coalesced into a big ball of hurt inside him, at his core, and he had realised that he never wanted to hurt anyone again.

Somewhere deep inside the spirit of Francis Boater, a trigger had been pulled. Now all that remained was a delayed detonation: the single gunshot that would signal the completion of his redemption.

He’d had a long time to think about things, here in the seething darkness. He remembered his countless childhood agonies: his mother, the whore, who had made him watch while she entertained her clients; the constant struggle with his weight, and the fights he’d been in because of hurtful schoolmates. Then, after leaving school, there was the amateur boxing and the weight training that made him feel so alive and full of self-worth; the many emotionally-damaged women who’d been drawn to him because of his physical bulk and his capacity for violence, and then been repelled and ran from him for exactly those same reasons. And finally there was his time with Monty Bright, when he’d become a hired hand, a lump of muscle-for-sale: a Bad Man.

His entire life had been a tapestry of pain, an intricate pattern composed of interlinked traumas. Only now could he stand back and take in the full scarred picture. The girl had enabled him to see what had been so fucking obvious all along.

When he’d walked into the building she had slowed down until he was level with her, and then she’d taken his hand, encouraging him. They’d walked deeper inside, hand in hand, and Boater had felt a connection deeper than any other he’d experienced in his life. This girl, this small, vulnerable victim he had been sent to abduct, was his saviour.

They’d come into this room, and she had lain down on the floor, curling up her legs into a position that made her resemble a resting infant. Then, just as the shadows began to crawl across the walls and the sound of unseen trees creaking and leaves whispering in a wind he couldn’t feel started up all around them, she’d spoken to him:

“Keep me safe,” she said, her small eyes watching him in the darkness. “Watch over me and make sure I’m not harmed.”

“Of course I will,” he replied, his body growing cold but his spirit starting to rise. “I promise.”

“I’m tired.” Then the girl had closed her eyes. And she had not opened them again since.

“I promise,” he said now, hours later. The room had changed around him, becoming outside rather than in, taking on a quality of the external.

Thick fingers of creeping vines had sprouted from the walls, covering them like some kind of blight. The concrete floor had erupted in places, and thick roots had burst through, snaking in loops to return underground. The ceiling was now a dense canopy of leaves. When he looked up, Boater could see distant starlight through the heavy matting. The moon was full, even though outside, in the old world he had left behind, the moon had been a mere crescent.

Boater wasn’t afraid. None of this felt threatening. The real threat came from out there, back in the urban wasteland he’d turned his back on. The feral kids, the clamouring debtors, and Monty Bright’s lust for whatever power lay at the heart of the estate. But in here, sitting under the whispering canopy and held tight within an enclave of ancient trees, there was nothing to fear but the badness inside him – and that was something he was now abandoning, like so much unwanted rubbish.

“I was lost before, Hailey.” He knew that she wouldn’t respond, but had faith that she could at least hear him. “I was stumbling around out there, not even knowing who I was or what I could be if I really tried. But now that you’ve found me, I can see the potential I’ve always had. I can sense another man locked up inside my skin, and he’s fighting to get out.” Tears poured down his cheeks but he didn’t wipe them away. They were good and clean and pure; a baptism in this new world he’d found. Or had the place in fact found him? “He isn’t a Bad Man. Oh, no. He’s a good ’un, this one. He’s the good Francis Boater.” He was smiling. It felt strange, as if he’d never been able to smile before. He supposed that he hadn’t, not really. Not like this.

He got up and walked towards the door. It was closed, but it no longer resembled a normal door set within a fabricated frame. This door was a solid slab of living wood: a natural barrier. There was no handle, no keyhole. He reached out and pushed it open. The door swung on hinges of fibrous vines, helped on its way by the weight of Boater’s body as he leaned against it.

Beyond the door there was a crumbling section of concrete wall. Where before there had been a long grey corridor filled with dumped trash, there was now a shadowy landscape of trees and bushes and uneven ground that bled into a thick, syrupy blackness. The broken concrete wall looked like ancient ruins against this dark backdrop. Rotten teeth of brickwork poked up through the ground here and there, like reminders of another forgotten time in history.

A series of oak trees stood proud and massive and implacable, forming a tight circle around him. Darkness bulged in the gaps between their trunks. It looked as if the trees were protecting the small, ruined room in which Hailey Fraser now slept…

“The Grove,” whispered Boater.

He turned around and saw that the door was shut. The concrete wall was covered in a layer of plants; leaves and stalks criss-crossed to form a natural skin over the man-made shelter.

The landscape was gradually smothering the unnatural structure.

There were sounds of movement in the undergrowth. Nocturnal creatures hunted for food, made their way between entrance holes to their sets and burrows and led their young on secretive night-time journeys, exploring the limits of their world. Boater looked around, at the strange florae which hid so many scurrying scavengers. Huge hand-like leaves twitched beneath his gaze, exotic flowers closed their petals over bulging stigmas and stamens, and the tall stems of large plants shuddered like eager lovers in the night.

Boater fell to his knees, raising his hands in a mockery of prayer. The trees creaked; their language was splintered, unknowable. A chorus of plant life created a kind of song with nothing but their excited, jittery motion.

The vast, eternal woodland stretched away into a primeval forest of forever outside the circular grove of ancient oaks. The borders swelled fractionally, increasing in size as the landscape fed from the dreams of a broken man with nowhere left to go. He could almost feel the place breathing.

Somewhere out there, at the edge of his imagination, Boater knew that there was a better place, an alternative to the world he had always known. But he couldn’t enter that place – he didn’t have permission to stray past its invisible boundaries.

Yet still, he felt that he was being allowed to know a little of its history.

Whatever power he had stumbled across here was neutral and existed in a realm where human terms like good or bad meant nothing. Tattered and flyblown, the energy stored here responded only to human emotion – until then, it lay dormant, a battery awaiting a charge. But the Concrete Grove estate was a receptacle for negativity: only failure and regret could be produced in such a misbegotten location.

So the power here had mutated, becoming a reflection of the stew of fear and desire upon which it fed. Boater sensed that over time things had altered here, and once-ambivalent creatures had evolved into ravenous beasts, taking on grotesque faces. New shapes had formed amid the dregs of muddy magic, and they brought with them brand new hungers.

This place – Monty Bright’s so-called ‘splinter of Creation’ – had eventually been polluted by the world inside which it was hidden. And toxins had leaked back out through rips and fissures, slowly returning to the world outside the Grove, but in other forms entirely.

This realisation hit Boater like a blow to the stomach. He felt unmoored from his life for a moment, as if his entire body had been shaken off the planet by a violent force.

“If this is a dream, or if I’m lying dead somewhere and I’ve come here on my way to someplace else, please let it never end. Let me stay here forever.” He clenched his fists and held them high, making a promise that he could never put into words. This vow came from deep inside, beyond blood and tissue and bone: this was the promise of the man who was imprisoned in the hidden chambers of his own heart, the fabled Good Man that he had never been allowed to become.

“I promise,” he said, not even knowing what he meant by those words. But the Good Man knew. He understood everything, even the things which lay beyond words, behind the mask of language.

The Good Man knew it all.

“I promise.”