Gary McMahon - Beyond Here Lies Nothing

The old stone basement walls had been rendered with plaster and painted what was meant to be a soothing shade of white, contemporary lighting had been fitted, and new rooms had been created within the underground space… but still, the place held a sense of dread and expectation. To Royle, it was like walking into a military bunker. As he passed open doors, he half expected to glimpse inside those rooms men in shirtsleeves leaning over table-top maps of war, moving little plastic flags around as they planned their invasion. White collars, small round spectacles, pale skin, peering eyes.

Royle finally stepped out of the elevator and turned right, heading for the small on-site lab. The facility wasn’t much to brag about, but it was somewhere the two resident techies could examine evidence that was considered urgent or too sensitive to be shipped out to the technical team based in Newcastle. The apparatus they had was limited, but the technicians — Miss Wandaful and Charlie — were talented and dedicated; they worked until the job was done, and never gave excuses when things went wrong.

He approached the computer server room and paused to glance inside the open door. He listened to the humming of the big extractor fans as they sucked warm air out through vents and through hidden ductwork, keeping the machines cool. The air-conditioned breeze cooled his cheeks. A man in jeans and a blue police-issue polo shirt was examining the system, making notes in a small black book. The man turned around and smiled. Royle recognised his face but was unable to put a name to it, so he simply nodded in greeting and continued walking along the corridor.

The lab door opened before he could reach it and Wanda Harper — the head technician — came out, her fingers struggling to take the cellophane wrapper off a fresh packet of cigarettes. She didn’t see Royle at first, but when she looked up her eyes opened wider, as if she were startled.

“Ah,” she said. “Fuck it. I thought I had another fifteen minutes before the hassle arrived.” She smiled to show that she was at least half joking.

“Sorry, Miss Wandaful, but you know me — always a few minutes ahead of the game.” Royle watched as the woman slipped the cigarettes into the back pocket of her jeans, under the white lab coat. She ran her hands through her spiky dyed blonde hair and rubbed at her temples, as if trying to ward off a headache.

“Well, seeing as you’re here…” Wanda reached back and made a big show of opening the lab door. “Age before beauty,” she said, bowing her head in mock deference as he entered.

The small room was crammed so full of stuff that it could barely fit two people, so it was always a relief when one of the technicians was on holiday — as was the case this week. The tiled walls were lined with shelves, each one packed to breaking point with box files or rows of medical supplies — bottles, cardboard boxes, instruments in sterilising machines. The floor was littered with filing cabinets, small cooler boxes and portable freezer boxes. Everywhere there were random pieces of equipment, and Royle felt hemmed in, as if he’d entered a storage facility rather than an annexe of a functioning police station.

The scarecrow was laid out on a stainless steel gurney at the centre of the room, the left side of its torso covered by a creased white sheet. The gurney was usually meant for transporting bodies, or parts of bodies, and the strange, stiff, legless figure looked out of place beneath the harsh, bright lights of the lab.

“What do you have for me, Miss Wandaful?”

Wanda grinned. Everyone at the station called her Miss Wandaful. She’d spent a long time protesting against the occasional nickname when it first started up, until finally, after six months on the job, she made the mistake of telling a uniformed officer on a station night out that she actually liked to be called that. Nobody had called her by any other name since.

“Okay,” she said, standing at one end of the gurney. She moved slowly around to the side, pulling the white sheet fully off the figure and placing it to one side. “What we have here is a scarecrow.”

“Gee,” said Royle. “Do ya really think so?”

She carried on, unperturbed. “As you know, there was a photograph of Connie Millstone attached to the scarecrow’s head. From what we can tell, it looks like the girl might have been deceased when it was taken. I’m sorry.” She glanced at him, her face tense. “I was hoping to be able to tell you otherwise, but… well. That’s how it looks. We’ve sent the photo to the main lab for an in-depth DNA analysis. The results should be back in a few days. I can tell you now, though, there were no fingerprints present.”

The too-bright light made Royle feel exposed. His head was aching and his eyesight was blurred. He blinked several times in quick succession, to clear his vision. “Is this an assumption, a hunch… or is it a fact? How do you know she was dead when it was taken?”

“It isn’t fact,” said Wanda. “But it isn’t guesswork, either. From the photo, you can see that the girl’s skin has begun to take on the soft appearance of death; her muscle tone is nonexistent. If it was in colour, you’d be able to see the slight bruising caused by pooling blood and necrosis.”

“What else?” Royle wanted a drink. He was craving whisky.

“This is where it gets really weird.” She reached out and touched the pole that formed the central support for the figure. “This is made of solid oak. The head’s the same.”

Royle moved closer and stared at the pole. The bark had been stripped away; the nude wood looked like it had been smoothed down badly with a low-grade emery cloth. He examined the length of the body, resting his gaze upon the smooth, burnished head. Someone had removed its hat. The wooden head was virtually featureless; only the grain of the wood was visible.

He was reminded of Pinocchio, and of a show that used to be on television when he was a kid: Pipkins . It had scared him so much that he wet the bed. From what he could recall, the kids’ programme was set in an old toy shop where the stuffed toys and puppets were alive: raggedy old Hartley Hare, with his dead eyes and loose stitches; Pig, Topov, and the rest of the gang. Horrible, all of them — grinning dishevelled demons. Dusty, falling apart at the seams… the awkward puppets had populated his nightmares for years afterwards.

Wanda’s voice cut into his thoughts: “There are no oak trees within a twenty mile radius of the Concrete Grove estate.”

He nodded, backtracking from his shabby, flyblown memories. “Okay. I’ll admit that is a bit weird. Why use oak particularly and why go to so much trouble in the first place? It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t logical.”

“Oh, it gets better than that.” She turned and lifted a scalpel from a steel dish on a nearby trolley. Bending forward, she opened the scarecrow’s jacket and used the blade to make a long slit down the front of its charity shop shirt — the two halves of which were stitched together using some kind of thick, fluffy thread. “That’s some kind of natural fibre. Maybe hemp. Again, we’ve sent a sample to the lab for proper identification.”

Royle didn’t speak. He was captivated. He watched as the scarecrow’s innards were exposed.

“What we have here is a mixture of stuff, all kinds of rubbish. Burnt leaves, pieces of paper… all sorts of crap.”

Royle noticed for the first time that Wanda was wearing surgical gloves. He stared at her hands, pale and bloodless beneath the tight rubber layer, and watched as she raked around inside the belly of the scarecrow. A sudden terror filled him: what if she withdrew her hand and was clutching human organs, or, even worse, Connie Millstone’s hand?