The Concrete Grove (22 page)

There was a sea cow on the mattress, a floppy grey manatee. It was huge, flabby, and grotesque. The fact of its existence was bad enough, but the juxtaposition of this fat, struggling mammal lying on its belly on Helen’s normal, everyday bed made the image seem even more nightmarish… and Tom knew that he was responsible for this representation of his wife’s inability to move, her utter acceptance of defeat. He always thought of her as a sea cow, and here it was, the metaphor made flesh.

But it got worse. Much worse.

Within the enclosure of floating, disembodied fists was a barely formed figure, a large, bulky rendering of a man. The man was naked, and he had his hands on the sea cow’s bulk. He was thrusting himself into the manatee, ravaging it from behind. His hands moved away from the thing’s plump body, and he began to strike it – slow, hard blows to the sides. Stinging body-shots, just like Tom’s father had done to his mother all those years ago, during the dimly remembered episodes of marital rape.

The beast writhed and jerked, but it slowly dawned upon Tom that these movements were not an expression of struggle. The animal was participating in the grim, abusive events: its frantic movements were actually spasms of pleasure. The man and the manatee were making love.

He was witnessing an act of mutual desire, a violent, blasphemous coupling of man and beast.

The ghost-fists shimmered with motion, rising from the bed. The inchoate figure at their core moved with them, carried by their awkward flight. The manatee tried to flip itself over onto its back, but its weight and the fact that it was out of water, stranded in an unnatural element, made the task all the more difficult. Finally, struggling for air, it gave up the fight and just lay there, sprawling and spent on the bed. But during that brief attempt to turn, Tom had seen its face:
Helen’s
face, on the body of a slobbering beast.

“Let it come,” said a voice that sounded familiar. “You’re almost there, but not quite. It’s reaching for you.” The hands parted, creating a shell-like hollow in the air, and Tom’s father stepped out from the fisted enclosure. “It’s reaching out for all of you.”

His father’s image was degraded, like damp tissue paper: his edges were soft and flaking away as he stood there; his pallor was ghastly. His mouth didn’t move as he spoke, and as Tom glanced down, taking in the full sight of this shoddy spectre, he saw that the man’s form was unfinished. There were no genitals; his sex act with the phantom manatee must have been nothing more than what, as a schoolboy, Tom and his friends had called a ‘dry hump’.

He tore his gaze from the ghost and looked over at the bed. Helen was herself again, and she was sleeping. Her skin looked slightly grey in colour. The folds of her bare skin glistened with sweat. The horror he had seen, the sight of the insane coupling, was just another phantom: a ghost of a memory mixed with the detritus of his insomniac mind.

“She used to like it, you know. Your mother.”

Tom looked back at his dead father. His face was crumpled, a bloodless mass of deconstructed tissue.

“She enjoyed the pain and humiliation. And then, afterwards, she would go into the bathroom and cut herself.” The figure wobbled slightly, threatening to topple forward, and then righted itself. Flecks of it fell away from the central mass; a slow fall of ghastly snowflakes. “She hated herself for what she saw as unhealthy desires. But I just loved all that dirty sex.” There was laughter, but it seemed to come from all around the room, emerging from every corner. Parts of the apparition’s face slipped away, falling to the ground but vanishing before they reached the carpet.

“Ectoplasm,” said Tom’s father. “The shit of the spirit world.”

Tom backed away; a single step.

His father took an equal step forward. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

“Then, why?” Tom was surprised at the sound of his own voice. It was stronger than he had expected. “Why are you here? In my dream.”

“It’s not a dream. Not really.” The figure’s shape was becoming less solid. Whatever kind of matter had formed the likeness of his father, that stuff was now losing its adhesive qualities. “This is the space between dreaming and waking. It’s where the old place exists – the oak grove and whatever lies beyond. There’s a doorway here, and it’s starting to open – just a crack, mind. But it
is
opening.” The voice had become faint.

“I don’t understand.”

His father shook his head. More of it came away, his features sliding off like crumbling meringue from a rotting cake. “There
is
nothing to understand. You’re there and I’m here. The other place, the one that’s reaching out to you and your new friends, is somewhere else. It’s simple, really. True Creation is always simple. It’s destruction that’s the tricky part.” Again, the smile; the rumpled, degrading smile. “Because nothing can ever be fully destroyed. There’s always traces, detritus, left behind.”

Then, before Tom had the chance to say anything more, the vision was gone. Small flecks of something white remained on the carpet, like crumbs from a midnight feast. Tom walked over, bent down, and tried to pick them up. They dissolved in his hand.

“The shit of the spirit world,” he said, quietly. That sounded just about right. It described his father perfectly: the man had only ever been shit, a composite person made of several kinds of human waste. Something better off flushed down the pan.

Tom stood and walked over to the bed. Helen was sleeping soundly. He adjusted the duvet, tucking her in. Part of him wanted to lean down and kiss her, but another part of him wanted to walk away and never come back. Again, he felt like a man split down the middle.

“Sorry,” he said, not really knowing what he was apologising for. Then he left the room and closed the door behind him. The snake-like segment of stone wall was no longer there. The darkness had lifted. Everything was normal again, if that word even meant anything now. He suspected that normal was no longer an option; the world had turned, his perception had shifted. That other place, the one he’d been sensing lately, and that his dead father’s bespoke phantom had spoken of, had noticed him, and nothing could ever be remotely normal again.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I
T WAS TIME.
It was coming. She could feel it.

Her belly was swollen, the skin there pulled so taut that it seemed as thin as tissue paper. When she peered down at those areas of her stomach that were visible between her clutching fingers, she could see rapid movement beneath – a frantic motion in her belly, like scrabbling hands. There was no pain; she was beyond that now. All she felt was a strange hunger, a terrible emptiness despite the thing –

Or things; what if there was more than one? Like twins?

– that was rapidly filling her stomach.

Hailey was lying on her bed, staring up at the bedroom ceiling. Her eyes stung. The back of her neck was burning. But still she felt these sensations as an outsider, an observer. Everything that was happening right now was taking place inside her – the external didn’t matter. Her existence had wound tightly around whatever was stirring at her core.

“Come on,” she whispered, almost cooing the words. “Come on out and see me.” She stroked the mound of her belly, feeling the hot, damp skin shift. “Come out, now.”

The hands responded by fluttering again. She knew there were no hands in there – not really – but that was how she had now begun to think of the movements within her body: quick-clutching hands, scrabbling around her internal organs.

The radio was on and voices were debating car crime in Newcastle. It was a late-night phone-in show, one that had won national awards because of its cutting edge approach. The radio was not Hailey’s – all of her stuff had been taken by the men who had come to intimidate her mum while she was out at school. She had found the radio in the bottom drawer in the kitchen. It was an old model, like something out of a film: black plastic and with a single tape deck built-in. Hailey only knew what a tape deck was because she’d seen them in magazines, in features on retro fashion and accessories. Like everyone her age, she listened to downloaded or pirated music on her MP3 Player.

At least she had done, before those bastards had taken her stuff.

The pressure on her stomach increased. Whatever was inside was straining to get out.

Hailey knew from physics lessons at school that there were forces constantly being exerted upon the world, the solar system, even the entire universe; pushing and pulling, acting and counteracting: a delicate balance of forces, both cosmic and prosaic. There were forces everywhere, shaping the very nature of reality with their endless activity.

But what if there were also forces that were not generated in this world, forces from somewhere else? A place
beneath
the world she knew. Somewhere with its own physical laws, which acted against our laws rather than alongside them? A place that was always looking for a way in, a breach in the walls between worlds…

And what if the thing (or things) inside her was a part of all that? A spore or a seed from that other place, something she’d picked up somehow, getting it under her skin. What if that seed were growing? And what if she, Hailey, was to be its way into the world?

The thought, however odd, didn’t trouble her as much as she expected it to.

She knew that she should be afraid, but she felt as calm as a prayer. Her mind was clear. All she was able to focus on was the movement inside her body, and she was unable to think of it in any terms other than the contents of an egg. A huge egg, its shell pure and white, and with the suggestion of something moving inside.

“I’m an egg,” she said, talking to the empty room, the white walls, the cheap-papered ceiling. “I am an egg, and this thing is growing inside me.”

She listened to her voice but the words didn’t seem like they belonged to her. Not for the first time, she felt like someone else was speaking for her, shaping her lips.

She pressed her hands against her belly once again. This time the movements inside became more frantic, responding to the heat transmitted through her palms.

“It’s coming,” she said, and this time the voice
was
hers. It could not possibly have belonged to anyone else. She recognised the longing, the desperation that hid behind the words – the same emotions that she detected whenever she said her father’s name, late at night, as she stared at herself in the mirror.

She wanted this. She really did. She desired it more than anything – apart from having her dad back, her old life returned to her. But this was the next best thing. It was the best that she could hope for.

New life. Of a sort. Hunger. Need. Maybe even a saviour.

Perhaps what happened here tonight would save her and her mum.

The movement inside her stopped. Silence filled the room. Then she heard a low humming sound. But the room was empty, she was all alone. None of the electrical appliances were on in the other room – the vacuum cleaner had been taken by those men, the washing machine too. Nothing was switched on that would make a noise even remotely like this one.

Even the radio had gone silent. Not even static came from its little mono speaker.

But the humming… it remained, filling her ears. Its volume was constant. Low, regular, and constant.

Hailey sat up on the bed and turned to face the window. The weight of her stomach was a pleasant ache. The curtains were open and the sky outside was dark. She often liked to look at the moon, the stars, and imagine that she was up there, high up in the night sky and flying. Drifting away from all this fuss and bullshit.

There was a large flock of tiny birds hovering outside her window. She could see them outlined against the deep black sky, their wings blurring, sharp beaks glinting in the bleed-off from sodium street lights. Hummingbirds, hundreds of them, perhaps even thousands. The same kind she’d seen in the Needle a few days ago. They hung there, on the other side of the glass, watching her.

Hailey swung her legs off the side of the bed and got shakily to her feet. Her legs ached, but again there was no real pain, just the vague sensation of aching, like muscle memory. She padded across the carpet and went to the window. The birds didn’t move. A dense cloud of freeze-frame motion, an unmoving flurry of beating wings. She wondered if anyone else could see them, or if this was some kind of vision meant only for her. Hailey’s perception of the world was changing by the minute, and where, before, such a thought would have struck her as crazy, it now seemed perfectly reasonable.

She was carrying a wonder inside her, so why shouldn’t there be more wonders on show just outside her window?

“Hello there…” She raised her hand and placed her fingertips against the window. The hummingbirds remained as they were, suspended in the air with their wings blurring, as if locked in place like tiny working machine parts in the mechanism of eternity.

“Yes,” she said, struck by the sudden insight. “That’s what you are: cogs in the machine. Just like me. Like all of us.”

Then understanding slipped away and once again her mind was empty, a container for whatever sights the night might throw at her.

She dragged her fingers soundlessly down the pane of glass, leaving faint marks to chart their progress. The marks faded quickly; the attendant hummingbirds began to float slowly backwards, moving away.