Gary McMahon - Silent Voices

Simon stared at his friend’s back. It was scratched and bloody, but nothing more. “Just a few scratches.”

“You sure? I mean really sure? I’ve suffered horrendous back acne my whole life. If what you’re telling me is correct, I’m cured.”

Simon walked over and touched Brendan’s back. His skin was hot and damp, but apart from a few old acne scars, it was clear of any kind of blemish other than the ones caused by the man’s own hands. “I promise,” he said. “The only marks on your back are either very old or the scratches you gave yourself.”

Marty hobbled over. “I still don’t understand any of this. What did you do in there? Did you defeat the… the monster? Is it dead?”

Simon shook his head. “No. I don’t think so. I think we just sent it away for a little while. How do you kill something that was never alive in the first place? It won’t bother us again, though. It’s done with us. We have nothing else that it can take.”

“It… it sniffed you. Hailey said that it could smell twins. Are you a twin?”

Again, Simon shook his head. “There are no twins in our family. I was an only child. Whatever the hell it smelled on me, it wasn’t that… maybe it just caught a whiff of my spirit, and decided that the fight was no longer one it could win? Who knows? I don’t have a fucking clue.”

The sky was dark. Night had fallen. He wasn’t sure how long they’d been inside the tower, but it felt like days had passed in the outside world. He remembered that time had no meaning in there; in the place Hailey had called Loculus — the little place, where dreams went to die.

“Let’s go home. Back to Brendan’s place, check on Jane and the kids. I have a feeling they’ll have their own story to tell, and it’ll make as much sense as ours.”

Brendan’s head snapped up. “What do you mean? You think they’re in trouble?”

“Not any more,” said Simon. “While we were fighting our demons, they had to contend with one of their own. But I’m certain they’re all okay, now. We won, didn’t we?”

The three men went silent for a moment.

“Did we? Did we win, I mean?” Marty looked like he might collapse at any minute.

“Let’s get you both seen to, eh? Then we can either talk about this until dawn and try to figure out what we just did, or fucking forget about the whole thing and move on with our lives. It’s your call. I’m too tired to even think about it.”

They moved off, away from the Needle, with Simon in the lead, Marty in the middle, and Brendan bringing up the rear, dragging his mobile phone from his pocket and checking the messages. He stopped in his tracks, the phone held against his ear.

“Oh, shit…” He listened to every message before allowing them to move off again.

“It’s Harry. He’s been ill again. But… well, according to the last message, he’s okay now. Jane’s still at the hospital, but she says he’s fine. They just want to keep him in a couple of days to keep an eye on him.”

Simon smiled. “He’s fine. The boy’s fine.”

Marty said nothing.

Brendan called Jane’s mobile and asked a lot of questions as he walked, promising her that he’d go right to the hospital once he’d cleaned himself up. He seemed a lot happier when he hung up, although he was crying. He even smiled.

“Yes, he is fine. He’s eating fucking ice cream and flirting with the nurses.”

Simon laughed, and turned back round, to look where he was going. He saw the figure only briefly, as it darted out from a ginnel that led to Back Grove Crescent.

Just before he felt a sharp punching sensation in his stomach, and fell to the ground, he recognised the baseball cap with the Scooby Doo badge on the front. The hat fell from the kid’s head as he ran back into the ginnel, palming the bloodied knife.

Simon smiled. What else could he do?

He realised now that they’d never really escaped when they were children. Time had no meaning in Loculus; twenty years in the real world might be a few days in the little place. Captain Clickety, and by extension the Underthing, had simply let them leave. Because it knew — it had always known — that they’d come back.

Take me , he thought. Take me back home, to a time when the world was smaller, the days were brighter, before the monsters were real and the damage was done…

Simon died with that ironic smile still on his lips. He tried to speak. To tell Marty something, perhaps even to explain the joke, as the other man cradled him in his arms. But he didn’t have the strength. He closed his eyes and accepted the onrushing darkness. Somewhere within it — from deep inside all of that vast black night — he heard a faint clicking sound, as if something approved of his passing.

The sacrifice had been accepted.

And still he did not know the reason why, or the full extent of what he had offered to save his friends.

TWO DAYS AFTER Simon’s death, Marty is on a train to King’s Cross. Brendan badly wanted to make the journey with him, but Marty told his friend to stay at home and look after his wife and kids. Harry is fighting fit, but he still needs a father’s attention. Jane needs some attention too, and even a woman that brave must be close to breaking point after everything she’s gone through.

If he is honest, he also doesn’t think Brendan’s in the right frame of mind. He is stronger than he looks, but Marty is stronger. Marty has always been proud to call himself a bastard, and it is a bastard’s errand upon which he finds himself.

The train pulls into the station. Marty disembarks, throwing his rucksack over his shoulder, and makes his way along the platform. The jostling hordes remind him of some of the crowds at the fights he’s been in, and it makes him feel slightly nauseous to be surrounded by so many people.

He has only vague memories of the mutant Humpty Dumpty creature emerging from the wound in his side, and of fighting it on the ground in that… other place. The place he now knows as Loculus. He tries not to think of it, but he knows that it will return to him always, in dreams. Loculus is a defective storage pen for such dreams; it is like a leaking battery, and the energy of dreams runs both ways, in and out of its borders.

He knows this now. It makes things easier to deal with.

He also knows that Simon Ridley somehow managed to save them all. The details aren’t clear, but the feeling that Simon has been a hero is embedded deep inside him, like a seed in fertile ground. And he hopes one day that seed will produce the flowers of memory. Then he can pay proper tribute to his friend, his saviour: the boy he wishes he could have known better as a man.

Marty turns left outside of the station, and follows the route he has memorised from Google Maps. The address was in Simon’s notebook back at the flat on Grove Court. Marty was forced to break in to salvage Simon’s belongings, because he had not been able to find the keys on the body.

The kid who murdered Simon is still out there somewhere. When he returns from this short trip to London, Marty has plans to track down the bastard himself. He’s already spoken to Erik Best, and there are a couple of good lads on the case. Hopefully, by the time he gets back to the Concrete Grove, they will have found him.

Then it will be Marty’s turn to play Humpty-fucking-Dumpty…

He finds The Halo easily. It is on a street corner, and the sign outside the pub is pretty hard to miss — a tiny transvestite angel with a big glowing circle around its head. He smiles as he glances up at the sign. Then he steps inside and heads straight for the bar.

“Excuse me,” he says to the man standing behind the bar reading a paperback thriller. “Are you Mike?”