The Concrete Grove (38 page)

A small upside-down girl stood several yards away, fumbling with the hem of her dress. She was wearing the tattered remains of a school uniform, but her legs and feet were bare. Her small toes were filthy with soil. The trees and the foliage closed around her, keeping her beauty and her innocence close. The air held her like a gentle hand. She was part of this place now, and would never again be forced to endure the concrete agonies from which she had finally escaped.

“Goodbye, Mum.” Her voice was like music; the sound played on and on, repeating even after the girl had turned around and begun to walk away, into the trees, heading into the world beyond the grove. Lana recognised the song; she just couldn’t place the name of the singer, or join in with the words.

“
Not yet
,” she breathed. Then the world – this one, and the one outside, where she never again wanted to set foot – went dark and the relentless sound of humming filled the emptiness that had always been inside her, taking away the fear at last. “
Yes
,” she whispered. She was ready to go now. There was nothing left to keep her here.

EPILOGUE

H
AILEY WALKED AWAY
from her mother, remembering the dream she’d once had – the dream that had now become real. She entered the dense shadows between the oak trees, and was lost in darkness for a little while. But when she came out on the other side, free from the grove at last, she was bathed in bright sunlight.

It’s like a dream. I don’t hurt anymore
.

Far off in the distance, down a vast hill and across an expanse of low-lying open woodland which lay at its base, there was a dense forest of younger oak trees. And beyond that – who knew? Perhaps there were vast cities to explore, deep oceans to navigate. Monsters she might need to fight. Or perhaps all that existed was the eternal forest, and the primeval oaks, and the baleful shadows they cast.

Beautiful
, she thought.
It’s beautiful
.

Finally Hailey realised that none of this really mattered. Whatever was out there was out there, and all she needed to do was be willing to discover it all. There was nothing left for her where she had come from; all she had, everything she would ever need, lay ahead of her, in the trees and the shadows of her new home.

She had somehow come upon the central truth of this place, this grove within the Grove. At last it all made sense, and she repeated what she had learned silently inside her head, like a mantra to keep her company on the long journey that lay ahead of her:

Everything is beautiful and nothing hurts
.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

T
HE
C
ONCRETE
G
ROVE
does not exist, but it is in fact based on several council housing estates I’ve known, lived on, or lived near during my lifetime. The Needle, for instance, is based on the infamous Dunston Rocket in Gateshead, Tyne & Wear, and the idea for the circular layout of streets in the Grove was pinched from an old Scottish estate long since demolished.

I’ve tried to keep the geography of the North-East as true to life as possible, with only the occasional cheat invented to serve the mechanics of plot. Northumberland is, to my mind, the most beautiful part of England. Despite the fictional horrors I’ve placed there, I can’t recommend the area enough for a visit.

The people in this novel are real, every single one of them. They had different names when I met them, and their circumstances might not have been 100% the same as the ones in the novel, but I’ve known and mixed with the real-life counterparts of Tom, Lana and Hailey, Francis Boater, Terry, and even Monty Bright. If anything, the real characters were more outlandish than the versions I’ve created for the story.

Gary McMahon

Leeds

2011

Coming April 2012

SILENT VOICES

Gary McMahon

Twenty years ago three young boys staggered out of an old building, tired and dirty yet otherwise unharmed. Missing for a weekend, the boys had no idea of where they’d been. But they all shared the same vague memory of a shadowed woodland grove... and they swore they’d been gone for only an hour. Welcome back to the Concrete Grove. The place you can never really leave...