Gary McMahon - The Concrete Grove

Or perhaps the world would simply keep on turning without him, unaffected by his ridiculous protest, and the damage his wife had spoken of would still destroy them all. One by one, like diseased trees falling in a dying forest, or plastic targets put down by gunshots.

Maybe nothing he did would ever matter, not any more. Not now.

Because what if his life was already over — if in fact it had ended ten years ago, right after the accident — and since then he’d just been playing catch-up?

He shut and then re-opened the door — just an inch or two, the way Helen liked it. When he leaned in close and peeked through the gap he saw a large, grey hairless mass on the bed. Fins twitched above the covers like the legs of a dog dreaming of the run. At last the sea cow was sleeping…

…then it was her again: it was Helen, asleep on the bed, her nightdress in disarray. His wife: the person who depended on him so completely. The woman he was meant to love.

As he moved away from the door, Tom had the terrible feeling that he was leaving behind one kind of darkness only to enter another.

HAILEY IS DREAMING again, but this time it’s different. She is not naked, for a start, and her surroundings are not at all familiar. She is standing barefoot in a dense wood, wearing sheets of flesh still warm and bloody from whatever animal they have been sliced from. She looks down at her body beneath the pelts, and sees that there are designs painted upon her swollen stomach in blood.

Signs and sigils; numbers and letters in a language she does not recognise.

A spell, a hex: some kind of protective charm?

She rubs at her skin with her fingers, trying to remove the blood, but it has already dried and marked her like indelible ink. She cannot remove the writing; it has made of her a book, a bible: a living chart filled with vague rules and instructions.

“Hello. Is anyone here?” Her voice lifts into the air, hits the canopy of trees, and then falls back towards her. The words fade, become silence.

Silence.

It strikes her all at once that she can hear nothing, not even the sound of her own breathing. Her voice was the only thing able to penetrate that wall of silence, and even her words could not survive for long once they left her mouth.

She feels as if she is standing in the middle of a movie scene with the volume set to mute. Her ears ring with pressure, but she cannot even hear an internal sound. There’s just a dull soundless throbbing, a gentle ache that is not entirely unpleasant.

She takes a few tentative steps forward and her feet make no noise on the leaf-coated ground. She feels her bare feet sinking into the mulch, the cold mud seeping up between her toes.

The pelts hang heavy around her, like a royal cloak. Their warm and clammy underside presses against her sin.

The air touches the exposed parts of her flesh, making her tingle where the blood-words have been written.

Her grotesquely distended stomach hangs like a sack of offal. Whatever she carries inside her is still, unmoving. She fears that it might be dead. The bloated flesh sways as she moves, its weight trying to drag her down towards the earth.

As she walks through the woods she begins to make out strange shapes high up in the trees. Weird stick-figures made of twine and twigs, tied and knotted and placed like decorations. They hang suspended from the branches, their tinder-stick limbs twitching in a breeze she is unable to feel: rudimentary bodies twirling, spinning, like children’s mobiles.

“Can anybody hear me?” The sound of her voice is shocking, but it makes no impact on this space, just bounces off invisible walls and falls to the ground, defeated. It feels as though there is a sheet of glass between her body and what she sees — and she is trapped, unable to break through and get inside.

The breeze ruffles the grass and fallen leaves but still she cannot feel it against her skin.

Something large and cumbersome moves through the undergrowth directly up ahead, turning a large, shaggy head to glance in her direction. Its haunches are wide and muscled; the flanks have been skinned: pink meat shows where strips of the creature’s hide have been cut away. It stops, turns, and looks at her. The face she sees is hairless and vaguely human in aspect. It blinks heavy eyelids, licks its lips with a fattened tongue.

As she watches it opens its mouth to speak, but she cannot hear what is being said. Its teeth are huge, yellow and glistening. These are the jaws of a monster.

The writing on her body begins to liquefy and run, the blood dribbling in narrow streams across her body. The pelts shift as if they are alive, tightening around her shoulders, and she begins to feel even more trapped.

The creature smiles; it is a sad, almost mournful expression. Then the beast walks away on all fours, like a great brown bear. Its humanoid face, in profile, looks fat and unwell, as if labouring beneath the weight of ills and agues.

Where the creature stood only a moment before, a thin, naked body now hangs. Upside down, arms dangling limp and lifeless, the body has been tied with lengths of hemp at the ankles and suspended like slaughtered game from the trees above. The body turns slowly, smoothly, and as she draws near she begins to recognise its shape, the tone of its skin, the colour of its hair.

“Mum?”

Her mother’s corpse spins slowly to face her. The torso has been cleaved, the rib cage forced apart like the white-barred doors of a cage. The stomach contents have been removed and the cavity stuffed with dry oak leaves. She is close enough now that she can reach out, take hold of a clump of that makeshift stuffing and pull it out. The leaves are attached, like a rope of handkerchiefs being drawn from the secret depths of a magician’s sleeve.

She does not weep. She is calm, existing at a place beyond grief. This is a normal thing, a natural event. Her mother has died and been taken into the bosom of nature, and then reinvented as a part of this enchanted place.

Acorns pour from the savage wound, dislodged by the motion of leaves as she tugs them aside. More acorns than could possibly fit inside her mother fall from her belly, released from where they have been stored in her womb: countless mutant babies waiting to be born into a world of wonder.

She looks at her mother’s face and the eyelids flicker open. Her eyes are acorns, too; highly polished, and smoothed down as if by a steady, nimble hand wrapped in emery cloth. Her mother’s mouth hinges open and vomits a stream of filth: dead bugs, the gnawed bones of small mammals, and hundreds of tiny wood-dwelling isopods that move in a single wave across her pale face, forming a crisp brown mask.

She drops to her knees and throws her arms around her mother’s neck, basking in that fountain of grime. Her mother’s skin feels rough as bark, and cold as all the lies she has ever told.

FRANCIS BOATER WAS used to waiting. He had been waiting for something good to happen for his entire life, and still the much-anticipated event was yet to arrive. Whatever it was — and Boater didn’t really know what that thing might be or where it would come from — he was still waiting.

“Is she gonna be long?” He stared at the skinny barman, flexing his massive chest in a way that he knew intimidated people. Boater used his bulk like other people used words: he hid behind it, communicated with the mass of gone-to-seed muscle that had turned to heavy fat. He couldn’t remember a time when he had been anything but big — but at least when he was younger, in his early twenties, his physique had been hard and knotted, like a stocking filled with conkers. Now that he was in his forties, he looked like an ageing mountain — or, as he thought on bad days, a stockpile of lard.