Silent Voices (14 page)

Something moved behind him. It sounded like a mouse or a rat scurrying across the floor. He pretended that he had not heard the sound, preferring instead to focus on the doorway up ahead. Now that he was closer, he saw that there was soft green light spilling from the rectangular frame. The door was open. He smelled burning.

Burning.

But no, it was not the same as before: this fire would not hurt him.

He studied the open doorway. On the other side, positioned along the far wall, was a row of televisions. Their screens had been removed and fires had been set in the guts of the appliances. The flames were bright green. A small pyre burned inside the shell of every set.

Unable to turn away, Banjo stepped into the room. He closed the door behind him, yet he had no reason to block his escape route. He was puzzled by his own actions; his hand seemed to move of its own accord.

Banjo moved to the centre of the room. The walls were bare: no paper, no plaster, and no paint. Just squares of bare concrete. Shadows clustered at the corners of the room, at floor and ceiling level. The fires shed little illumination, despite the healthy green flames. The weak, swampy light spilled across the floor for a foot or two, and then diminished, expired, as if eaten up by those shadows. The flames did not destroy, they simply burned. They burned perpetually.

Banjo sat down in the middle of the floor. The concrete was cold, even through the seat of his jeans. He reached out his hands, opened them, and tried to gain warmth from the flames. He felt nothing. Banjo moved closer, shuffling forward on his backside, but still he felt no heat. The fires were cold.

Something shifted up above him, at the apex of wall and ceiling, and when he looked up he saw a long vine or a creeper curling back like a tongue withdrawing into its mouth.

The ceiling was growing a thin layer of vegetation. He felt so close to that other place – the one the girl had told him about – that he could almost breathe its air. The cold green fires crackled and popped; the air moved with a draught; the vines moved like snakes across the ceiling.

Banjo felt as if he was standing on the border, just about to take a step across but somehow barred from doing so. It was over there; he could see the rim of a new horizon. But he was not allowed into those territories.

A shape drew itself together from the shadows and the vegetation, forming a long, narrow ovoid. It made no sound as it slowly detached itself from the ceiling, hanging down on trailing vines, to drop onto the floor to his right. The shape was upright; it resolved into a figure.

The girl.

“Hello, Banjo,” she said, stepping out of the shadows. She was wearing the skin of an animal and her long black hair was knotted with leaves and twigs. Her bare legs were thin, the bones of her knees as prominent as her elbows. Her face was pale, narrow. She looked hungry.

Banjo smiled. She meant him no harm, this child of that other place.

“Thank you for your help.” She took a few steps towards him and then stopped. She opened one hand and a tiny hummingbird flew out of her fist, circled his head, did a lap of the room, and then flew into the shadows from which she had emerged. “It’s almost set now. Not long to go. All the pieces are in place, and we just need to wait for them to move closer together.” She smiled. Her teeth were stained dark from the leaves and berries she ate in order to survive.

Banjo nodded. He tilted his head, eager as a hound for his mistress’s affection.

“You remember me, don’t you?”

He nodded again, excited this time. Keen to impress.

“That’s right. It’s me. It’s Hailey.” She covered the next few paces in an instant, and suddenly she stood right before him, reaching down to stroke the side of his bandaged face. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s okay... I won’t hurt you. Not me.”

He realised that he was crying.

“Remember? I’m your friend. We help each other. We help each other hide from him – the other one. You remember him, too, don’t you? The bad one.”

Banjo pulled back, as if from the chill green fires in the television screens. He heard himself whining like a whipped cur.

“That’s right. The other one: the Underthing. It’s because of him you’re the way you are, with your face all torn apart and your mind in pieces. The Underthing did this to you. The television things were his. The Slitten were mine, but they’ve gone now. All used up. We all make our own monsters over here, in the grove and the little place beyond the grove. Some of them are forever; some of them are temporary, not meant to last beyond the moment when they are needed.”

He had no idea what she meant, but her words soothed him. They made him feel whole and happy and loved. He pushed his bandaged cheek into the palm of her hand, wishing that he could fly away, like the hummingbird.

“Here, let me help.” She crouched down in front of him, her white features hovering like a vision in the gloom. Her eyes were dark, nearly all pupil, and her cheekbones were as sharp as blades. “Let me take a look.” She smelled of fresh air and wild flowers and herbs – honeysuckle, jasmine and rosemary. Her sweat was nectar. “The doorway must be clean, unsullied.”

Banjo smiled; he opened himself up to her, yielding to her touch.

The girl began to remove the wrappings from his face. She did so slowly, carefully, smiling all the while. Her hands moved slowly and easily, and he felt no pain. The bandages came apart, peeled away, and fell from his damaged face like shedding skin.

“Oh, you poor, poor baby,” she said, and then she leaned forward and kissed his scarred cheek, keeping her lips there, cooling his maimed flesh.

Banjo was dribbling like a baby. She was his mother, this strange, sombre girl, and she loved him.

“It’s looking better,” she whispered. “Your face. It looks much better than before. Some of the power of the grove has touched you. I’m not sure how, or why, but it’s helped a little.” She removed her hands from his face. “Would you like to see?”

Banjo shrugged. He tilted his head again. Then, trusting the girl, as he always did, he slowly nodded his uncovered head.

The girl stood and walked across the room, then bent down to pick something up. The fires glinted on the reflective surface in her hand, and as she walked back towards him Banjo watched the play of the flames in the glass.

“Let’s see... come on, don’t be shy. Take a good look at yourself. Look at the doorway.”

The girl raised the shard – not a mirror exactly, but a piece of broken glass that served just as well. She pressed it closer to Banjo’s ruined face, and at first he twisted out of the way, trying not to see. But then, as she stroked his head with her free hand, he relented and waited for the looking-glass to show him what he had become.

The fires shimmered in the cloying, shut-in air. The girl said nothing. Banjo held his breath.

Then he stared into the glass.

The flesh had not grown back; his face still looked...
exposed
. It was raw and naked, like something denuded which should always have remained unseen. The bones were covered by a thin layer of tissue, but it was like paper. It wrinkled and threatened to tear apart when he tried to smile. And yet... madly, he
did
look better than he’d hoped. The girl had not lied about that. He could still see parts of his jaw through the holes in his sunken cheeks where flesh should have hidden them, but the ragged edges of his wounds were smoothing over, becoming less repellent. His eyelids looked odd, without any flesh to the sides of and beneath the eyes, but at least they made him look halfway human.

He opened his lipless mouth, licked his front teeth – upper and lower rows – and then bared them like a wolf.

“See,” said the girl. “I told you so. You know you can always trust me. I’ll never lie to you, Banjo. We need to be honest with each other, if we stand any chance at all of stopping the Underthing. We need a bond based on trust.”

Banjo stared at the monster in the mirror, and thought that he wasn’t so monstrous after all. Certainly not compared to the one the girl was talking about. Because, compared to the Underthing, he was nothing like a monster... nothing at all.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

S
IMON WAS STANDING
in the middle of the motorway looking up at the hill upon which he knew the Angel of the North should be standing. Light drizzle coated his skin like sweat, the sky yawned above him like some passageway into a cosmic room, and the sculpture was noticeable only by its absence.

The grass on the hill was long and unkempt, as if nobody had been here for years. A line of scrubbed dirt ran around the base of the rise, with trails springing off on either side of the hill – front and back. The path that led up to the sculpture was cracked and broken; huge portions of tarmac had been scoured away to reveal the uneven base course beneath. Ashen clouds lowered across the scene, unbroken by Gormley’s great northern masterwork. The scene was apocalyptic. The world had somehow ended, or was just about to.

Simon turned around and glanced along the road. It was empty. No traffic moved along its length, but far off, in the distance, dark clouds gathered like harbingers of chaos. He stared into the heaving black mass, but could make out nothing solid. There seemed to be protean shapes moving within the black folds – figures that kept shifting between people and animals – but he could not be sure. Perhaps it was just air currents causing the illusion of form and substance.

He turned back towards the hill, and right at its top there was now a small figure. The figure stood motionless, with its arms outstretched in the same pose as the Angel. He watched for a few minutes, but still the figure did not move.

“Who are you?” He knew that whoever it was would not hear the question. He was too far away, the light breeze was blowing in the wrong direction, and the air was thick and turgid. “Tell me who you are.”

The figure remained motionless. The sky darkened, turning the figure into a silhouette, or a black template carved out of the world, showing only darkness beyond.

Simon began walking towards the figure on the hill. He had no idea why he felt compelled to approach it, but something was calling him. His body responded to an impulse that was too subtle to explain, like the currents of the sea or the phases of the moon. He stepped onto the shattered footpath and dodged the worst of the damage. The stones were blackened, as if they’d been burned. He struggled to keep his footing; the path seemed to tilt and sway, but not in any way that his eye could discern.

He looked up, away from his shoes, and this time the figure
had
moved. It was standing in the same position, with arms outstretched like aeroplane wings, but it was now facing him. There was another difference, too: the figure was wearing a mask, with a long beak for a nose, and had about doubled in size. Simon knew that he should be running, to get away from the figure, but his legs refused to obey the command sent from his brain.

So instead he climbed the shattered footpath, up the hill, towards the beaked figure that stood so still and so silent in the darkness. He knew who it was; he had seen the figure before, in waking life as well as in dreams. It was Captain Clickety, the one who had taken their boyhood, the creature the three boys had followed to the Needle from Beacon Green twenty years ago. He was here; he had come back. But why had he returned, and for whom was he waiting up on the hill?

Simon felt only minimal danger. He suspected that Clickety had not come for him, but the one he wanted was linked to him. Was it one of the others – Brendan or Marty – and if so, why one of them and not him? There was a sudden pang of resentment then, of shameful envy, and he struggled to explain it. Like a knife in his gut, the feeling sliced him neatly and painlessly.

If there was horror to be had, why could he not be the one to experience it? After all this time, since running away and trying to build a life for himself, there was still a gap at his core, and that gap was the absence of horror. He knew that now; finally he could admit it, if only to himself.

The figure did not grow nearer as he approached it. “Come back,” he whispered, tasting the night: it was cold and coppery, like blood but with an underlying bitterness.

When he reached the summit of the hill the figure was gone. Its mask lay on the ground at his feet, staring upwards: an invitation. Simon bent over and picked up the mask. It felt smooth, soft, like silk, and there was little weight to it. He lifted it towards his face, turned it around, and stared into the back of the mask. Looking through the eyes of Captain Clickety, he surveyed the land. Vast acres of the earth lay scorched before him, trees had been felled and hacked into pieces, and the earth itself was churned and broken. This was the monster’s dream: it was how he saw the world in which Simon and his friends lived. Incapable of seeing beauty, it substituted a veneer of destruction.

Simon threw the mask away. He could not wear it, and he certainly did not want to view the landscape through its eyeholes for much longer. He could not bear the dreams of the damned. Because he knew that the thing which called itself Clickety was indeed damned – and that damnation had touched them all, twenty years ago. It touched them still, reaching across the years and travelling the blighted inner landscapes they held deep inside them. Damnation was a road he had built within himself, a route he did not want to take.