Gary McMahon - Silent Voices

The man’s face was badly scarred. The scars were old, shiny, and reflected the green light like plastic. His eyes were open, and the lids were thin and tattered, like paper. He had no lips, just nubs across the top and bottom of his mouth opening. He looked like he was grinning: he was the man who grinned forever, but who never quite got the joke.

His raised arm moved around his face with mechanical regularity, removing the remaining bandages. Marty expected the movement to stop when his ruined face was fully exposed, but it continued after that.

In fact, when Banjo reached the end of the gauze dressings, he kept on going, unwrapping strips of his damaged skin in the same long, loose coiling motion. It was like peeling an orange: the flesh came away easily, like rind, and fell to the ground. Next was the bone, which was stripped away in the same manner. And beneath that, inside the man’s skull, was a cluster of leaves. The dried leaves fell, falling to earth in a slow, spinning drift, and as Marty and the other men watched, something strange happened… Banjo was no longer there, and in his place there appeared an opening in the trees.

The screen had vanished; this was here, real.

Real trees; a real wood, and on the other side, a small, open space: a peaceful grove, within which they had once been bound and had pain inflicted upon their ten-year-old bodies.

All at once, and without hesitation, the Three Amigos stepped back into the ancient oak grove. There was no longer any doubt; each man wanted to be here, to settle old scores and put his ghosts to rest.

JANE SAT BY Harry’s bedside, crying into her fists. She had been unable to contact Brendan. She felt helpless, a useless part in a machine that had gone spinning out of control.

The doctors — the same ones who’d sent him home — didn’t have a clue what was wrong with Harry. His vital signs were all strong; the tests they’d run had come back negative. All the apparatus of modern medicine seemed to agree on the same result: Harry was fine, he was fit and healthy and should not be lying in a hospital bed in what was, for all intents and purposes, a coma.

“I need you,” she said, not sure if she meant her son or her absent husband. “Please come back.”

The heart monitor at the side of her son’s bed beeped rhythmically and steadily.

Jane closed her eyes and wished: she wished that Simon-fucking-Ridley had not come back into their lives; she wished that Brendan had never been friends with those other two boys; she wished that she could do something to save her son, her family, her very existence.

The machine continued to beep.

Harry did not move. His face was serene above the bed sheets. His hair was neatly combed into a side parting — she’d done it earlier, just to occupy some time and get rid of the nervous energy rushing through her body.

The hospital ward was busy. The nurses had pulled the curtains around on their rail to give her and Harry some privacy, but this was still a public ward. The family had no private health care; they had to accept whatever they were given. She could hear the hushed voices of other visitors, the soft-soled nurses’ shoes as they brushed across the tiled floor, the frightening sounds of other medical machinery. Somebody was speaking on the phone at the nurses’ station. They laughed, and then remembered where they were and began to whisper.

Jane reached out and took Harry’s small hand in her own, above the covers. There was no response from his body; his muscles did not even twitch. She felt empty, as if he’d turned his back on her, ignoring her show of affection. She knew this wasn’t true, that she was being silly, but it did not help. Her son didn’t even know she was here, at his side, crying for him.

“I need you to come back,” she said, this time speaking to them both — Harry and Brendan. Isobel was still at a friends’ house gearing up for the sleepover, ignorant of the hell Jane was going through. How did you tell a ten-year-old that her twin brother might die, and nobody could do a thing about it because they had no idea what was happening to him?

She closed her eyes, and for a moment — a second, at most — she thought that she heard Harry making a strange clicking sound, as if he were pressing his tongue against the side of his mouth the way he did whenever he saw a dog on the street or in a neighbours’ garden.

She opened her eyes, but of course Harry was just the same: he had not made a sound.

Jane let go of his hand and stood. She took out her mobile phone and checked it for messages. There were none. She went to the nurses’ station and told them that she was stepping outside to make a call, to see if she could contact her husband. The nurses smiled and nodded, and their eyes were filled with pity. Poor soul, they were probably thinking. He’s probably out at the pub, or in the betting shop.

Jane went outside. When she made the call, and there was no answer, she felt like smashing the phone. She leant back against the wall and wished again: but this time she wished her husband dead… and instantly regretted the thought, tried to take it back.

IT WAS A seamless transition from standing in that small, cramped, green-lit place to being here, beyond the screen of oak trees, just inside the grove. Simon accepted the passage with an unfamiliar calmness. It felt like some kind of Zen moment: his mind and body acted as one, unified against the strangeness that was showing more of itself to him at every twist and turn of this journey. He’d gone beyond fear. He wanted to embrace horror — the horror he’d always felt should belong to him.

Hailey was nowhere to be seen. Now that Banjo, their doorway, had helped them enter the place she’d called Loculus, she had fled the scene, leaving them to their own devices. She did not seem to have any power here. He wondered if she’d exhausted her energies that first time, when she’d helped them escape.

He glanced at the two boys he’d known back then, who had become men he barely knew at all, and wondered what it was they were meant to do — why they were here. They were all present to face their fears, he knew that. But at a deeper level, unknown forces were warring. The three had become pieces in a game that none of them could understand.

He recalled his most recent dream, when the Angel of the North had been bowed and broken, and a weeping woman had cradled the body of her children — her twin babies. It all made sense now, in a grim kind of way. That dream, he realised, was a prophecy, a glimpse of how things might be if they failed here.

Twins.

Two parts of a whole.

Yin and Yang: opposing forces.

Comedy and tragedy. Darkness and light.

This place, he thought, must exist in a state of turmoil: the balance shifting, constantly moving back and forth between opposing points. The Underthing — whatever it was — had sniffed out that Brendan was capable of producing twins and tried to claim him early, to tip the balance in its favour. That was why they’d been brought here twenty years ago; that was why they’d been examined by uncaring hands. It had not been sexual abuse, but a sort of medical examination, meant to find out which one was the future twin-maker. Then, before things had reached their terrible conclusion, Hailey had stepped in and helped them to get away.

He remembered, now; he recalled more than he ever had before.

Standing here, in the grove where they’d been tormented, he had a mental flash: Hailey standing between them and some huge, shapeless shadow, waving her arms, flapping her weird wings, and shouting, screaming, distracting it to give them a chance to get away. He could not remember who had managed to struggle free from the leafy bonds first, but after that, they’d acted together to break out and run free.