Gary McMahon - Silent Voices

The photograph was of Harry. It was old, tattered, taken a few years ago, but it was definitely Brendan and Jane’s boy.

He felt Brendan sway at his side, as if he were about to pass out. Simon clenched his fingers around Brendan’s palm, pushing his brotherhood, his love, towards his friend.

“Push with me,” he said.

Captain Clickety nodded.

“You can’t have him.”

Captain Clickety nodded again.

Behind him, down the slope, the Underthing was writhing in a paroxysm of fury or excitement — it could have been either: anger at being faced down, or delight that the game was almost over and the twin was within its grasp. Everything hung on the cusp in this moment.

“No,” said Simon. “I’m not afraid of you. Not anymore. I’ll fight you. We’ll fight you.”

His friends were effectively hobbled by their own fears. Brendan was silent and swaying; Marty was repeatedly whispering the words “Humpty Dumpty” under his breath. It would have been a comical sight, under other circumstances, but now, in this situation, it was simply horrific.

Simon could smell burning shit and vomit and Parma violets. He gagged, the stench reaching the back of his throat.

Captain Clickety flipped the photograph over, showing him the reverse side.

There was another image forming on the white paper, a shot of Harry in a hospital bed, his face slack, the features blurred yet still recognisable. Jane sat at his side, holding one of his hands on the clean, white bedclothes. On her face was a look of anguish, so intense it almost burned through the page.

Suddenly Simon knew what he must do. He realised why he was here, what his role was meant to be. He’d spent twenty years envying the others their horror, and wondering why it was that he retained no horror of his own. Now he knew why that was; the knowledge came to him in a flash, like a migraine.

This was the horror he’d always been looking for, the terror that he’d spent his life tracking down without even knowing it. The dreams of the Angel; the prophecies of apocalypse. The Angel, he now realised, was meant to be him.

He was the Angel of the North…

And what was it that angels did? What was their great purpose?

Angels, like the hummingbirds hovering above him, were messengers. They had sacrificed their humanity to serve at the shoulder of their god.

Sacrifice.

This was his purpose; it was the reason he was here, the mission he’d come back to accomplish.

Sacrifice.

He smiled. “Take me instead. Leave the boy and take me.”

Pushing… pushing hard… pushing for something he did not quite understand…

Hummingbirds began to fall from the sky.

At first they plummeted one by one, and then in clumps, like debris from a volcanic eruption. They fell around him, missing him by inches, but not one of them came into contact with him.

Captain Clickety was crippled beneath the deluge, his arms raised uselessly to protect his head. The clicking sound was by now cataclysmic; it was the sound of tectonic plates shifting in this strange, symbolic dream-world, of great stones grating together on the ocean bed.

Here was Simon’s horror. This was his terrible prize.

Captain Clickety’s lenses and mask were knocked off his face, and beneath these was another, smaller mask exactly like the first.

He straightened, stretching to his full height, reached up and removed this mask, too. There was yet another one underneath. He was a being made entirely of masks; a walking lie, a deception. One mask after another was torn from his face, and the hummingbirds continued to fall.

This, Simon realised, was the birds’ own sacrifice, their way of confirming his thoughts, telling him that he had been right.

“Take me,” he whispered, opening his hands and letting go of his friends — perhaps relinquishing his grip on those childhood friendships forever. The two men fell to the ground at his sides, kneeling like tired suitors before a prospective bride.

Gradually, the rain of birds ceased. The sky cleared. The surviving hummingbirds flew off in groups, letting back in the daylight.

Captain Clickety shuffled forward. He was broken, spent; a thing past its use-by date. His arms and legs hung from their sockets like a marionette’s. The Underthing was no longer raging in the ground behind him. It had returned to whatever sewers or underground conduits served as its home, fleeing in the face of defeat, not wanting to watch as its plans were torn down.

Captain Clickety sniffed, like a dog, inhaling Simon’s scent. His hat had come off and his head was bald and white, an extension of the beaked mask. He kept sniffing and sniffing, and then, finally, he stopped and slowly nodded.

Yes.

The sacrifice had been accepted. Perhaps this had been required from the start; there was a chance that Brendan had never been the one, that it had always been Simon, and only now was the truth being told.

Simon reached out and took the final mask from the face of his nemesis, his childhood fear. He crumpled it easily in his fist. This stagnant puppet of deception, this last bedraggled lie, wore nothing but a paper face. Beneath the final mask was nothing but a broken mirror. Simon stared into his shattered reflection, wondering what all of this could possibly mean. He studied his empty eyes, his sunken cheeks, his dry lips.

He barely even recognised himself.

Captain Clickety fell into a heap of greasy sticks and rags on the ground. The avatar was no more; he had been torn apart by the simple act of sacrifice, a show of friendship that monsters like him would never, ever understand. To love was human, not divine; to hate was simply monstrous.

The Three Amigos would live to ride another day, and everything that came after this would be different, cast in a new and uncertain light. Rather than a band of three, each would set off into his own sunset as his own man, liberated, freed at last from the terrible bondage of a shared past.

“What happened?” Brendan rose from his knees, topless, his shirt cast aside, his skin scratched and torn by his own fingernails. “Has it gone?”

“I’m not sure,” said Simon. “I’m not sure about anything.”

Marty staggered upright, to complete the group. He was bleeding from a gash in his side, stitches pulled free and dangling like threads. “Did you see it?” His face was ashen. He was crying openly, unconcerned by his show of what he usually saw as weakness. “Did you see Humpty-fucking-Dumpty?”

Simon shook his head. “I don’t know what I saw… or what I’m seeing now.” He looked up, at the brightening sky. A few straggling hummingbirds flew in circles above them, watching over these final few moments. “But I want to go home.”

They turned around and walked towards the grove of oak trees, no longer afraid of what they would find at its centre: just the shadows of forgotten youth, frayed lengths of rope, and husks of memories that even now were losing their power over them.

For a moment, he thought he saw a ghostly outline of three small boys, holding hands as they stood in a row before the trees. Their outlines shimmered and they were gone; he had seen nothing, after all.

“WHAT THE FUCK happened in there?”

They were standing on the Roundpath, outside the Needle. Simon had locked the gates and was returning the keys to his pocket.

“What the fuck happened?” Marty was clutching the remains of Brendan’s shirt to his side. The blood was still flowing, but slowly.

“Would you do me a favour?” Brendan, still topless, turned around and presented his back to the group. “Tell me what you see there, on my back?” He still sounded afraid, but it was fear of a different kind.