Gary McMahon - Silent Voices

He looked at the small, exclusive crowd on the other side of the ropes, scanning their faces for anything other than a shallower version of the kind of hunger he’d seen breaking though Erik Best’s features. But all he saw were shining eyes, open mouths, and a never-ending demand to be entertained.

Marty would entertain them. Hell, yes. He’d show them something they’d never forget.

He’d show them Humpty fucking Dumpty.

IT WAS NIGHT in the Concrete Grove. Clouds scudded overhead, clustering around the pyramidal tip of the Needle. Shapes moved within those clouds — birds or shadows, or perhaps something else, something more sinister. The sounds of the estate combined to create a song of sorrow: barking dogs, a distant car or house or shop alarm, an occasional raised voice, the tinny beat of somebody’s stereo left to play dance music into the wee hours…

Brendan looked up from the book he was reading, feeling as if he were being watched. He experienced the sensation whenever he was alone, had grown up with it hounding his days and blighting his nights. He never felt safe, even when he was by himself — especially when he was by himself. It was as if something had stalked him across the years, keeping an eye on him, watching his progress. Whatever it was, this thing, it had been drawing closer, narrowing the distance between them as the years played out into decades.

Something was keeping a close eye on Brendan, and he knew in his heart that it had begun on the night that he and the other two Amigos had been trapped in the building outside the cabin in which he now sat.

He was reading a Stephen King novel and trying to pretend that fictional terrors were more frightening than real life, but he also knew that this was a lie. Real life was worse, always so much worse, than fiction… and hadn’t his life become a fiction, like something from the books he liked to read?

How many times had he gone over the same page in the book he was holding? It felt like time had slowed down and he’d been there for hours, reading and re-reading the same passage. But still the story made little sense, and the intricacies of the plot eluded him.

He stood up and went to the door, opened it and looked out at the night. Darkness lay like a shroud across the landscape. He blinked, his eyes burning for a moment, and then he glanced left, then right, before stepping out of the security cabin. The Needle loomed above him, watching him, just like whatever he and his friends had disturbed had always watched him, and in the same way that he often examined himself, in the mirror. Filled with doubt and mistrust; not quite believing the image that he saw reflected there in the glass.

The acne on his back had calmed down earlier, but now it was beginning to itch. He resisted the urge to scratch at it, and clenched his hands into fists.

No , he thought. Don’t touch it.

The thought of the telephone call he’d received from his boss only a couple of hours earlier filled him with a rage that felt like something sexual, a slow-building sensation demanding some kind of release. Brendan was nobody’s gofer, but right now, wrapped up in the arms of an endless night — a night that had lasted for two decades — he felt like he was bound to his old friends like a horse strapped into an ill-fitting harness.

This time Simon had gone too far; his actions were offensive. Brendan knew that he was probably overreacting, and that Jane would talk him down in the morning, but when it came to Simon Ridley, and the way that bastard had left them all here to rot, he often found it difficult to rein in his emotions.

The skin on his back and shoulders itched madly. He tightened his fists and dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands. One pain to take away another, like for like, tit for tat: it was like old magic, and the spell never failed.

Grinding his fingernails into the soft flesh, he forgot about his acne, and imagined his fingers digging right down into the skin and gristle and tearing through his hands, emerging from the other side dripping in blood.

Sighing, he looked up, at the second, third, fourth floors, and saw a shadow flit across one of the intact windows. Was it Banjo, the junkie, making a night-time patrol of his own, or was it something much worse? He remembered a man with a stick and a beaked mask, a figure who made a sound like maracas but in slow motion. They had called him a name, Captain Clickety, but he knew now that the simple act of naming your demon does not banish it back under the bed or to the rear of the wardrobe… sometimes a demon will like its given name, and it will reach out to embrace those that named it.

Sometimes the monsters were real.

He turned around and went back inside the cabin. Glancing at the novel, he was unable to pick it back up and finish the chapter. Not now; not tonight.

Not when it was night in the Concrete Grove, and the memories were so close to the surface that they threatened to break through and hurt him.

Once again, the skin of his back and shoulders started to itch. This time, he knew, it would be even more difficult to resist scratching at the wounds. Maybe they’d open up and bleed anew, causing new pain to layer over the old.

“SHAKE HANDS,” SAID the ref, pushing Marty and the Polish kid together at the centre of the ring. Marty stuck out his wrapped hand and the other man grabbed it, squeezed hard, and shook it once.

“ Zaraz cię zabiję ,” said the Polish kid — Aleksi. His name was Aleksi. Marty needed to remember that, if only to register who it was he had beaten.

The two men parted company, backing away towards their corners. The next time they came together, it would be all business.

There were as many variations of the rules in these bouts as there were fighters. This time, as was often the case with one of Erik Best’s fights, it was old school: fists only, no feet, no chokeholds, no head butting; no biting or gouging or elbows. The ref — a big man himself, another ex-boxer — was there to ensure that nobody stepped across the line and the fight was, insomuch as any illegal bout could ever be, a fair one.

Unlike boxing, there were no rounds to speak of. This was a fight to the finish. The man who remained standing at the end was the winner and would receive the entire purse. The loser would depart empty-handed and no doubt suffering from worse injuries than wounded pride. Such was the way of these things, and Marty was as experienced as anyone else he knew on the small, secretive bare-knuckle circuit. He’d learned the hard way, after the accident that ended his boxing career. At the time, he’d felt that he had no other option than to fight. He was a born fighter, so he simply continued along that same path.

People were shouting and screaming. Men and women jostled for position, trying to get a good view. The Barn was now a place of gladiatorial combat. The air was thick and heavy with the expectation of violence, and the audience moved as one amorphous mass, heavy and swaying, their sweat mingling and rising in a thin, steaming cloud. Couples grabbed at each other beneath the poor lights, in some savage act of foreplay. Others stood and watched, generating an altogether different kind of energy.

Marty ignored it all and moved slowly forward, raising his guard. Aleksi kept his own guard low, just as he had done in the videos Erik had supplied for Marty’s research. It was apparent that the kid relied on brute strength, but that was no match for speed, guile and ring craft. The two men circled each other like great beasts, each summing up the other, inspecting his opponent for weak points. The roar of the crowd was reduced to a whisper; Marty focused on the other fighter to such an extent that everything else faded away. His vision narrowed to a tunnel and he began to smell the other man’s musk. Soon he would taste him, like a tang in the air. His senses would be so attuned to the task, and to his foe, that his body would have recognised him in a dark room filled with a hundred strangers.