Gary McMahon - Beyond Here Lies Nothing

“There are a lot of receipts in here — from local shops, petrol stations, that kind of thing. All used as stuffing. What makes them special is that they’re all dated to the exact same time and date.” She stopped and looked up at him. Sweat was beaded on her forehead. Her eyes were shining, eager. She loved her work. “Can you guess when that was?” Her teeth glistened beneath the lights.

Royle nodded. “The day Connie Millstone went missing.”

Wanda nodded. “Bingo. There are also a lot of dried leaves: oak, maple, rowan, rosewood. Each one a species that isn’t present in this area. You have Charlie to thank for that information, by the way. He’s the nature buff. I emailed him some digital images and he looked at them on the beach in Mexico. Isn’t technology wonderful?” She winked. “Rather than stuff this thing with any old kind of rubbish, someone was extremely specific about what they used.” She lifted her hand. Leaves spilled between the fingers. “These things have a special significance to someone, but I’ll be shagged if it means anything to me.”

“So there’s some kind of meaning here. A message. Perhaps even some kind of ritual, perhaps?”

“You tell me. You’re the detective man.”

“Have you sent samples of everything to the main lab?”

“Yes.” She backed away from the gurney, slipping off the rubber gloves. They made a smacking sound as she peeled them from her fingers. “They’re doing every kind of analysis they can think of: chemical, fingerprinting, DNA, the whole deal. We’ve done some of the basic stuff here, of course, but we couldn’t find a thing. No fingerprints, no apparent residue. Nothing. We need to look deeper. They have a lot more sophisticated equipment in the city than our shitty little budget allows for.”

“Sorry. I wasn’t having a dig. Just being thorough. Like you always are.”

She smiled. “I know. It just pisses me off that we can’t get any decent kit in here. Charlie and I have all the skills but none of the resources. If I wasn’t so stupid, I’d fuck off and work in the city. The big lab, where my skill set would be appreciated.” She leaned back against the sink, opening the pedal bin with her foot and dropping the gloves inside. She wasn’t wearing any shoes, just the paper slippers used in hospitals. And morgues.

“ I appreciate you. Don’t know what I’d do without you sometimes.”

“Fuck off, copper,” she said, but she was smiling again. The bags under her eyes were huge and dark, like bruises. She was putting on weight. Her bleached hair looked as dry as straw. The teeth she’d recently spent a lot of money on having repaired and capped looked fake, plastic. The job was taking its toll, showing up like minor injuries or subtle deformities on her body.

Mine, too , thought Royle. This fucking job, it’s killing us all .

He looked again at the scarecrow. He could have sworn that the head had not been turned that way, facing in his direction, the last time he looked, but it was difficult to be certain. There were no eyes, so it couldn’t be looking at him; no mouth, so it was unable to grin. But he felt like it was doing both of those things. The smooth, bare wooden head that lacked even the merest hint of a face was watching.

And it was laughing.

ERIK SAT ON a dining chair and stared at the cat box. He’d found it in the lock-up garage and used it to transport the… the what? That was the big question, wasn’t it? Just what the hell did he have in there anyway? What the fuck kind of creature had those kids found and brought to him?

When Hacky had gone outside and left Erik alone in front of the glass reptile tank, he’d taken a while to summon his courage. Erik was a brave man, sometimes insanely courageous when forced into a tight situation. He feared nobody. There had been times in his long and eventful life when he’d stood and fought opponents twice his size, or had a go when he’d been outnumbered and backed into a corner. He never ran; never turned his back on a fight. It simply wasn’t in his nature to back down and walk away. But in that lock-up garage, crouching there in the shadows and staring into the glass tank, he’d never felt so much like running.

Erik was miles outside of his comfort zone on this one; his fighting distance had narrowed to almost nothing. He had no frame of reference whatsoever for the thing that had been waiting inside that tank. It was alien, from outside his realm of knowledge. He had no idea how he should even react to its existence.

There was a sound from the cat box; a low, trembling exhalation. He tried to tell himself that it was an animal noise — a mewling or a snuffling, something like that. But it wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t. The sound was… well, it was much too human to be labelled in such a way. The sound, he admitted to himself, was a voice.

“ Hungry .”

It had been saying the same thing since he’d brought it back here, over and over again.

“ Hungry .”

Erik stood and walked across the room. He waited at the low coffee table upon which he’d placed the battered cat box. Something moved again inside. He heard the sound of tiny nails — fingernails — scratching against the plastic walls of the box.

“Monty?” Even as he said the name of his friend, he had trouble connecting it to the thing in the cat box. He didn’t want to admit this, even to himself, but he knew what was inside that box. “Is it you, mate?” This couldn’t be real; none of it was happening.

But it was happening. He was here, enduring it. This was not a dream. It was reality — or at least what passed for it in these uncertain days.

He waited to hear the same response he’d been getting for the past half an hour.

“ Hungry .”

He dipped into a low crouch, his hamstrings complaining as he lowered himself towards the floor. He peered at the slats in the box, glimpsing slow movement between them.

“Fucking hell, Monty…”

He reached out and flipped open the cat box. The lid was on top, so he had to come up out of his crouch to look inside.

The thing… Monty… Monty Bright… that’s what it was, who it was: it was his old sparring partner.

It was lying on its back looking up at the ceiling; the smooth skin of its small, shiny face caught the light. He remembered Monty as a big man, a hard man. He’d taken all kinds of shit to pump up his muscles, and worked out manically at his own gym, lifting weights and doing a lot of heavy bag work. He’d been short but huge; his wide build had been that of a battler.

Now he was small and vulnerable, like a baby, a damaged — or deformed — infant.

Monty’s face was more or less the same as he remembered. It was recognisable, at least, and that was something he could hang on to. Same eyes; same blunt nose; same round head with the hair shaved off. The eyes, in fact, were identical to the way they always had been: clear and intelligent, the eyes of a thinker rather than a brawler.

The rest of Monty was unrecognisable.

The fire at Monty’s gym had been bad, and everyone assumed that the owner had died in the blaze. But surely fire couldn’t do this to a person? Fire blackened and burned; it charred and cooked the meat on the bones. It didn’t… it didn’t shrivel a victim down to a tiny, mutated replica of themselves.

The thing’s body looked as if it had been compressed somehow, crushed and shortened and reduced by the application of phenomenal pressure. Erik remembered how, as a child, he’d put plastic crisp packets in the oven and within minutes of enduring the intense heat, they’d come out shrunk to a fraction of their original size. The same thing had happened to his old friend: the man’s physique had more or less kept its natural proportions, but they’d been reduced by something like a factor of twenty.