Gary McMahon - Silent Voices

Simon reached out and grabbed Brendan’s hand, clutching it. He didn’t care who saw them; he didn’t give a damn what it looked like. “But how did we get in there? That’s what I can’t remember. I didn’t even see the figure, although it was my idea to follow him. I don’t remember how the hell we got inside that place.”

Brendan looked deep into his eyes. “Me neither.”

Simon pulled his hand away, suddenly embarrassed by the contact. He glanced around the room, but nobody was taking any notice of their exchange. In The Dropped Penny, nobody eavesdropped on your conversation; nobody gave a damn about your business, whatever it was.

Brendan took a large swallow of his beer. He licked his lips.

“I went in there earlier,” said Simon. “I went in there again, by myself this time. That’s when I got mugged, as I came back out. They were waiting for me. But while I was in there, something happened. I saw things, things that shouldn’t have been there.”

Brendan pressed his lips together.

“I saw twigs, skinny little branches coming out of the walls and moving around like snakes, like they were trying to grow. They wrapped around my wrists, trying to bind me, like we were before. I heard a clicking sound, up on the higher levels. Clicking, like the sounds I remember from twenty years ago.” He had run out of steam, losing the rush that had forced the words out of him in a torrent. “I think I did. I’m not sure of anything anymore. I have these dreams… strange dreams.”

“I do, too,” said Brendan. “Nightmares, but they always seem so real at the time. It doesn’t even feel like I’m dreaming. Feels like… like real life, but flipped over, messed about with, shaken up into weird forms.”

Simon nodded. “That’s it. That’s exactly it.”

Brendan slammed one hand down onto the table, not too hard, but enough to make a loud, hollow sound. “You’re right. We have to find Marty.”

Simon listened to his old friend. For the first time, he seemed to be truly on board, to be taking all of this seriously.

“We need to find him and ask him if he’s been dreaming like this too. If he feels like something’s reaching for him, trying to pull him back, towards the past.”

Simon’s blood was racing through his veins. His skin felt hot. He was no longer cold: he was burning. “Is that how you feel?”

Brendan nodded. “Aye.”

“So do I, mate. So do I…”

Brendan closed his eyes and began to speak.

“Stop it,” said Simon. “Just cut that shit out, right now. You’re acting like a fucking child. We need to focus, we have to keep a grip on the situation.”

“What situation is that, then?” Brendan picked up his glass, but it was empty. He placed it gently back on the table. “How exactly do you describe what’s happening to us, if in fact there is anything happening to us and we’re not just going mad? Or always were mad, ever since some bastard locked us up in the Needle and abused us for a weekend.”

“A weekend that felt like an hour,” said Simon. “Remember that little fact? I do. When we came out of there, it seemed like we’d only been inside for an hour, but it had been two days. Two whole fucking days. I still don’t have that time back — do you?”

Brendan shook his head. “Okay, yes. I do remember that. It’s the thing that scares me most about the whole thing, those lost days. Where did it go? I mean, what the hell did we do for all that time? What did he do to us?”

“And who, or what, is he?” Simon pushed away from the table, suddenly uncomfortable within the walls of the old pub. “Let’s get out of here. The quicker we find out where Marty might be, the better for us all. Having that tough bastard with us will make everything seem a bit less oppressive.”

“Yeah, okay.” Brendan stood, pushing back his chair. “Let’s go. We have an appointment to keep with an old lady and a pot of tea. She might even have cake.” He smiled, and it almost reached his eyes.

Almost.

MARTY SAT ON his sofa with the blinds closed. The noise of the city — the busy quayside traffic, the lunchtime crowds surging towards pubs and cafes for their salads and panini and plates of antipasto — dimmed to nothing but background noise.

The television was on, tuned to a twenty-four-hour news channel, but he had the sound turned right down. A woman with shiny blonde hair and impressive bone structure mouthed banalities that he had no desire to hear. He stared at her face, at her flawless skin, and imagined it peeling back to show the bone beneath. For some reason, that made him smile.

Marty was stretched out, with his legs trailing on the floor, and he was wearing only a pair of baggy gym shorts. His torso was bare. He was sweating; his skin glistened, as if he had been sprayed with water. In one hand he held a whisky bottle, and in the other he had the acorn. He was rubbing the surface of the nut with his fingers, polishing it, making it shine. It was a reflexive action, something to use up his nervous energy.

He took a long swig directly from the bottle. The whisky was good stuff: Talisker, his favourite. The liquor burned all the way down his throat, a golden trail of soft pain that sliced right through him.

His stab wound was aching.

He had taken off the dressing to give it some air. The stitches had already started to come loose, fraying like the hem of an old shirt, and he had been bleeding again. There were balled up paper tissues on the floor near his feet, stained red. The bleeding seemed to have stopped for the time being, but the place where he’d been stabbed felt raw, as if it might burst open at any minute. That bastard Doc; he didn’t have a clue, had done a botch job when he’d stitched up the cut. But Marty couldn’t go to a hospital, because they’d ask awkward questions. Stab wounds had to be reported to the police — it was the law. And that would create all kinds of problems.

He rolled the acorn around with his fingers, and dropped it onto his tight stomach.

With his other hand, he put the whisky bottle down on the sofa, leaning it against a cushion, and grabbed the remote control. He flicked through the channels, but saw nothing to interest him. Daytime television was appalling; it made him angry. Sensationalist intervention shows with career-choice chavs taking lie-detector tests to prove if they were the fathers of grasping brats to appease women who were aged before their time and desperate to hang onto something, however vulgar. Property programmes with smug middle-class city-types renovating old houses they’d snapped up in repossession auctions. Quizzes made by and for the mentally subnormal. Panel shows featuring faded soap stars and ex-cruise ship singers scrabbling at the foot of the broadcasting table for the scraps of one final meal before they were carted off like old horses, to have their sagging tits and prolapsed vaginas turned into glue.

“Jesus,” he said, surprised at the anger in his thoughts, the absolute venom coming through from somewhere. He knew that he was furious because of the stabbing, and the way the fight had ended, but this was something different. He had not felt this kind of pure, incandescent rage for a long time — not since the accident that had cut short his dreams of a career in boxing. It made him light-headed. The anger was so uncut, so undiluted, that it felt like the prelude to some kind of sexual thrill.

He closed his eyes and saw her face. Sally: the girl who’d been killed all those years ago, when he was nineteen. He had loved her, or at least he’d thought so then, when everything was so uncertain, especially his feelings. But she had been young and pretty, and knew how to handle him. She had possessed the softest hands he’d ever known.