Gary McMahon - The Concrete Grove

He put away his toothbrush and moved over to the bath, where he put in the plug and turned on the hot tap. Soon the room began to fill with steam. He stripped off his T-shirt and pyjama bottoms and sat naked on the edge of the tub, staring at the plumes of water vapour as they rose and gathered in the air. He began to see shapes forming: clenched fists, compressed faces with knotted features. Rudimentary heads shifting in the patterns made by the steam.

He twisted the hot tap off and turned on the cold, adding some bath oil. Testing the water first with his hand, he then turned off the cold tap and climbed into the tub. Despite the addition of cold water, the bathwater was too hot. It burned his skin, turning his legs red, then his belly. He sucked in his breath sharply as he lowered his upper body into the water. This was a small yet pleasurable pain; a brief and biting agony that soon faded as his body became accustomed to the temperature of the water.

As he lay there he pictured Lana, naked. Her soft curves were cupped by shadow, and the visible parts of her skin were almost luminescent. She stroked herself with her fingertips, running a hand across her breasts, down towards her stomach, and then to the dark patch below. A large shadow loomed behind her, stretching like a black sheet around her body…

Tom reached down and began to fondle himself. His hands were clumsy; there was little response to his self-attention. He tried to masturbate but couldn’t quite sustain enough focus. That shadow — a vast billowing presence behind the imaginary Lana — was too distracting. He knew what the shadow was, what it meant. It was the shape of her debt, a crude representation of what she owed to that man Monty Bright.

Angry and frustrated, he got out of the bath and stood, dripping wet, before the mirror. His reflection was smiling again, but this time he felt the expression mirrored on his face. The smile was bitter, cynical: there was not a trace of humour evident, just a cruel trace of thwarted desire.

He grabbed a towel and dried himself off, feeling as if he were tending to someone else — a man who was sick and not completely sane. His last ten years spent as a carer — a person whose sole aim in life was to appease the needs of another — had changed him in many ways, and some of them only ever peeked above the surface during times of great stress or anxiety. Sometimes he viewed the world as a place filled with those needs, and he felt as if he’d been cast adrift in a landscape of pain and disability.

He put on his night clothes and went back out on to the landing. The house was quiet; he couldn’t even hear the ticking of a clock, or the sound of traffic passing by on the street outside. He glanced at his watch. It was almost 2 AM. Even the night people had quietened down.

He walked to the top of the stairs and peered down into the dimness. It looked like the darkness was a sea. He imagined creatures swimming down there, in the shadows, perhaps even his wife had floated out of her bed to ride the night-time currents, her mouth gaping and her hands grasping.

Tom descended, gripping the handrail tightly. He realised that he was tense, perhaps even afraid. His strange experience in the bathroom had wrong-footed him, making him feel as if he and Helen were not alone in the house. He felt as if a stranger was moving through the rooms below, silently examining their belongings, picking up and inspecting the minutiae of their lives and judging them as worthless.

When he reached the bottom of the stairs he saw the stone wall in the hallway. He knew immediately that it was a portion of Hadrian’s Wall — perhaps even the same section where he’d picnicked with Lana and Hailey. It had emerged from the front wall of the house, near the front door, and looped around the door to return through the same wall on the opposite side, forming a barricade to prevent him leaving.

I am dreaming after all . So there’s nothing to fear.

But that was a lie. Everything was a source of fear: terror hid in every corner, and was displayed on every shelf and surface.

He stared at the crude segment of the wall. It was a surreal image: the arrival of something ancient in his home, the stone dirty and with patches of fungus spotted along its length. He wasn’t afraid of the wall. His feelings towards it were more complex. He experienced a rush of strangeness, a thrill of exhilaration at the sight of the old stone. Then, at a deeper level, he felt honoured that such a vision should present itself to him, a normal man, a struggling husband and potential adulterer. What had he done to deserve this? Why had he been singled out for such a reward?

Then, as he watched, the section of wall slithered, moving like a great, dry serpent. The old folk rhyme returned to him, and he recited it once again in his head:

But the worm got fat an’ grewed an’ grewed,

An’ grewed an aaful size;

He’d greet big teeth, a greet big gob,

An greet big goggly eyes

But there were no eyes on this worm. It did not even possess a face. It was a long, shifting portion of the ruined Roman wall, and its presence here was simply an indication of a deeper mystery.

The wall moved continually now; a moving barrier, blocking his way to the door. He knew it was meant to keep him inside, to hold him hostage. There was a grinding sound, stone upon stone, and he remembered Hailey’s comment about baby bones being buried beneath the foundations.

“Dreaming,” he said, feeling more awake than he had in days. If this was a dream, then it was a lucid one, and rather than succumb to the logic of the dream he would be required to act, to move freely through the dream and not simply become part of its story.

The door to Helen’s room was wide open. Darkness bulged from the doorway, pressing through the frame like oil. He watched it for a while, wondering if he should feel more afraid — his fear was slight now, like a vague notion of how people were supposed to react when confronted with the unknowable.

Without thinking about what he was doing, he began to walk towards Helen’s room. It felt right; part of the dream. He was meant to see inside that room.

As he drew closer to the open door he began to make out sounds: a soft, smothered grunting noise, like a pig snuffling at a trough; creaking bed springs; a gentle slap-slapping of flesh on flesh.

It sounded like someone was having sex in there.

That Man , he thought, wildly. Is it his ghost, returned to finish what he and Helen started? To finally consummate the relationship that was cut short by his death and Helen’s paralysis?

He stood before the door but could not see inside. The darkness was solid. Slowly, he reached out and pressed the tip of his index finger against it. The darkness bulged inward, like a balloon. Yes, that was it: a huge black balloon. But he was stuck inside the balloon and Helen was on the outside, in the real world.

Still he was not afraid enough to turn away, and even if he could, there was nowhere to go. The wall was still blocking his exit. He could either continue on, into the room, or return upstairs to confront his rogue reflection.

He stepped inside the room, his face pressing against the surface of the balloon, stretching the material, forcing it past its elastic limit… and then, with an audible popping sound, he was through and standing on the other side of the darkness.

The sounds were louder now, unfiltered as they were through that cloying blackness. Helen’s lamp was on, so there was enough light to see what was happening on the bed.

The bed.

Helen’s bed.

The same gathering of fists he’d seen at Hadrian’s Wall was inside the room, hovering above and around Helen’s bed. The fists were huge — each one the size of Tom’s head — and they formed a loose netting around something that was twitching and bucking at their centre. The fingers moved liked birds’ wings, flapping slowly; their motion was odd and slightly nauseating. Then, simultaneously, they all tightened once again into hard fists.