Gary McMahon - Beyond Here Lies Nothing

Erik knew that these were the faces of every person Monty Bright had ever trapped when he was still in business as a loan shark; they were his debtors, the people he had controlled and finally absorbed, making them a part of his monstrous whole. They were free now; their debts were finally paid. Their recession of the spirit was over.

He walked across the room and peeked through the gap in the curtains. Nothing had changed; they were all still waiting for him out there, wanting him to come out. They were demanding blood, and they would not rest until they had it. His blood, primarily, but the blood of a hostage would suffice. It would give them a good story for the evening news.

He turned away and went back upstairs. Abby was sitting against the radiator, shivering. She’d managed to scrape away most of the tape, releasing her hands. She rubbed silently at her reddened wrists.

“We’re trapped,” he said.

She looked up at him, into his eyes. Her face was battered; dried blood was smeared across her cheeks; the area around her left eye was swollen. “You did this… you trapped us.”

“I know. I had no choice. I’m weak… a weak man. All my life I’ve pretended to be strong, but I’m not. Never was. My father used to beat me and masturbate over my shaking body. My mother would sit in the chair, drinking brown ale, and laugh about it. My brothers were all maniacs, and I followed them down that path. Nobody here gets out alive. This place — all the places just like it — is toxic, a waste dump for humanity. All of our dreams, our hopes, are rotted away. This is the end of the line and none of us asked to be here…” He faded, unsure of what he was trying to say. “This is all there is. Beyond here… there’s nothing. Even the place Monty wanted to get back to, it’s just shit: another world of shit that exists inside this one.”

“Let me go, Erik. Finish untying me, and I’ll take our daughter downstairs. We’ll get you some help. I’ll tell the police that you lost your mind for a little while, but you’re better now. You’ll get therapy. They’ll mend you. We can be together again.”

He sank to his knees and placed the gun between his thighs. “I wish I could believe you. That would be nice. But you’re lying, I know you are. I can smell the lies on your breath.” He shook his head. “You don’t understand. We’re all monsters. None of us chose this route, we didn’t do it deliberately, but the world turned on us and changed us into beasts. Nobody out there gives a flying fuck about any of us. They demonise us in the news and in TV shows. They call us names and give us hoods to wear. And we accept the role they force upon us — we adapt and we take it on, sucking it all down, because we don’t have anything else. All we have is their disdain, their hatred, and we fucking lap it up like beaten dogs.”

His breath was coming in short little hitches, like that of an asthmatic. He could barely speak, so he stopped talking. He bowed his head and looked at his hands. They were cupping the gun, feeling its dread weight. The barrel of the gun was a tiny, endless black hole, sucking him down: a reflection of the black hole around which they all orbited.

“What are you going to do now?” She shifted against the radiator, loosening the tape around her ankles.

Erik remained silent. There was nothing left to say.

HE SHOULD HAVE come here earlier, right at the start. This was where it all began, at least for the Pollack family. It was where they had lived with their ghost, and where they had finally given in to the pressure it had brought them.

This was where he’d been raised… perhaps even where he’d been born.

He’d tried to get to Abby’s house first, to ask her if she’d come along with him to the Needle. But the road had been blocked: police tape and official vehicles, TV news vans and spectators. There was something going on, and it looked to him as if Abby might be in trouble. It didn’t take a genius to realise that her ex was involved — that fucking gangster Erik Best. He hoped that Abby got out of it in one piece. The last thing he wanted was to go to her funeral.

He stood outside the main entrance to the tower, looking up at the building. It loomed above the construction hoardings, a battered monument to man’s failures. The sky was dark around its apex, as if storm clouds were concentrated there, drawn to it by strange energies. Small birds hovered outside the upper floor windows, making dark patterns against the charcoal sky.

“I’m here,” he whispered. “I’m home.”

Home…

He knew the truth now. He had always known it, deep down inside, where he could never quite reach the information. Marc was the baby that he’d read about in Harry Rose’s notebook. He’d come here looking for a story to write up, and had instead found his own lost plot strands, the loose threads of his existence.

He was the baby; the third Pollack child, the only one to have survived the unknown horrors the family had endured here, inside the Needle.

There were no memories of ever having lived here, just a large blank spot, as if someone had wiped that part of his brain clean. His earliest childhood memories were of the car crash that had killed his parents, and then of Uncle Mike.

He’d left Uncle Mike as soon as he was old enough to look after himself, gone to University to study journalism, blotting out his fractured childhood, fabricating new memories to smother the ones that didn’t exist anyway. He’d been successful, until now. Harry Rose’s notebook had opened up a crack in his mind, allowing images to seep out: a bare room with a crib, an uncarpeted floor, two dirty-faced young children, a man with a beak for a face… and there was nothing more, just the grubby taste of fear at the back of his throat.

“It’s me,” he said, confirming the fact, trying to make it stick. “I’m the baby… I was there, in the flat. I was haunted.” And in many ways, he still was: haunted by the past that he could not remember, and by the screams of the siblings he had never known. Little Jack and Daisy-like-a-flower; the twin sibling who had never lived: he detected a trace memory of fondness for his brother and sister — much in the same way that he loved the characters in all the best books he’d read as a child.

Of his parents, if indeed that’s what they had been, there was no clue.

Then, as the cracks opened slightly wider, he had a glimpse of something else: a man and a woman, dressed in dark robes, kneeling beside a television set draped with a black cloth. Lying on the cloth was what looked like a hen or a chicken, but it was covered in blood. The man and the woman were chanting, rocking back and forth, and the shadows around them looked alive, not like shadows at all…

There was nothing more, just that single snapshot, like an isolated scene from a film.

They tried to give me to Captain Clickety.

The thought was like a knife through his heart. It could not be denied. It came with the image; a nice little package, all wrapped up in despair. He knew it was true — he felt it. His parents had tried to sacrifice him, as part of a deal to protect the twins. But something had gone wrong. Instead of him being taken, and the man and the woman rewarded with whatever it was they sought, the entire deal had fallen through. The ghost had left them… but it had taken with it something vital that he and the twins were unable to live without. Their souls, their life-force… whatever it was that made them who they were.

He didn’t think he’d ever find out what had soured the sacrifice, but none of that mattered now. His book would never be written, because he was a vital component in the plot. There was no way that he could write a story that was still happening, with no real ending in sight. He was a reporter, not a novelist; he dealt in cold, hard facts, not blood-hot fiction.