Gary McMahon - The Concrete Grove

Boater smiled. He didn’t know what else to do.

“I know, you all just think I’m a madman, using this as an excuse for some of my more extreme behaviour. Maybe you were right, at first. It was an appealing justification. But now, you unbelieving cunts, I know it’s all real.” He smiled, and his mouth seemed to open too wide, like that of a shark. His teeth were small and pointed. “It’s all real.”

“Monty…” Boater tried to bring his boss back down to solid reality. It was always the same when he did a lot of drugs, and those new steroids he’d got in from China were messing with him in a way that was particularly intense. “Lana Fraser. She’s waiting outside.” He really wished that he had not come here tonight. He could have been back at his flat instead, shagging that girl. The one whose name he couldn’t even remember. But he didn’t need a name to lay down with her; names weren’t important, not when all you wanted was a dirty fuck.

He wished he was there instead of here; he wished that he was balls-deep inside that girl, erasing all thoughts of Monty Bright and his twitchy madness, his unnerving talk of ancient powers and festering forces.

“Oh, yeah. Lana Fraser.” Monty stood, his crumpled suit looking cheap and vulgar in the dim light. “Bring the whore in here and we’ll start the fun.” He walked over to the wall and opened the safe, and then placed his beloved book on a shelf. He touched the book’s tatty cover once, with the very tips of his fingers, before shutting it away and locking the safe door. He placed the key in his trouser pocket and then turned back to face the room.

He walked right up to Boater, standing mere inches from him. Boater always noted the fact that Monty had a peculiar odour — he smelled of old paper and dust, as if the essence of that book was rubbing off on him.

The top of Monty’s head came up level with Boater’s chest. He was a small man, and his body was wrecked from years of drug abuse and punishing gym routines. But he was fast, and he was remorseless. Boater had once seen his boss bite off a man’s nose and spit it back into the victim’s open mouth. He had witnessed Monty laughing as he cut off a woman’s hand for refusing to pay a debt, either in cash or in kind. He had seen this man commit so many foul crimes, so much brutality. Rape and murder and mayhem. And in the past, Boater had liked it. He had enjoyed it. Maybe he had even needed it.

But not now. Not today, or for any time afterwards. Something had happened; a window had opened inside him, allowing in the light and a gentle breeze. When he closed his eyes he could see a grove of trees with acres of dense woodland beyond, and his nostrils were filled with the smell of damp foliage…

Something had altered. A transformation had begun. None of this felt right any more. He no longer enjoyed the vileness and vulgarity of his life. He didn’t want to hurt people, not ever again. He wanted to see that beauty, to hear the sound of the wind in the trees and lie on the soft earth beneath their branches — perhaps even sinking into the loam, becoming part of it, a part of nature.

“Bring the bitch in,” said Monty. “I’m ready for her now.”

He was not smiling.

Boater went to the door and opened it. He wanted to scream at the woman on the landing, tell her to run and never stop, to keep on going until she and her daughter were far away from here. “He’ll see you now,” he said instead. His back was sweating; his legs felt weak. This wasn’t right.

Lana Fraser walked into the room, trying to summon from somewhere deep within her an ounce of dignity. Her beauty was enough to make both men take a step back, giving her some space. Her face was her power, but all power, Boater knew, fell down in the presence of greater strength.

“At last you’ve come to see me.” Monty grinned. His orange skin creased around his mouth, forming multiple parentheses. His hair, slicked back with too much hair product, glistened like a beetle’s back. “I’m so glad you could… come .” The emphasis on the last word was not lost on any of them.

Boater wanted to leave, but he knew that he couldn’t. He was stuck here, right until the end. There was no turning back, not yet. But perhaps he could try to make amends later, after the fact.

“You mentioned on the phone that I could clear my debt.” Her voice was impressively strong. She didn’t falter. The words were spoken clearly, and without much inflection. It sounded like she was reading aloud from a written statement.

“Did I, now?” Monty walked across the room to a door located opposite the one she’d come in. He reached out and opened it, revealing a staircase beyond. “You’d better come down the back stairs, then, and meet my other associate. I’m sure we’ll all be fascinated to hear what you have to offer.” He stepped to one side, the mockery of a gentleman, and bowed slightly. “We work as a group here. We all like to join in. The last girl left with a face like a plasterer’s radio.” He was attempting to push her buttons, looking for her breaking point. Boater had seen it all before, and no matter how strong they seemed at the beginning, they all broke down at some point.

Lana Fraser walked purposefully towards the open door. She did not take her eyes from Monty’s face. She took in every inch of him — from his off-coloured solarium tan to his whitened teeth and his deceptively weak looking chin. Then she went through the door and stepped down into darkness.

Monty turned towards Boater, smiled, and winked. Then he followed her into the stairwell.

Boater waited for as long as he was able — thirty seconds, perhaps even as long as a minute — and then he, too, went through the doorway and started down into Monty’s hidden basement rooms. For a moment he felt that Monty himself was swallowing him whole, and sucking them all deep inside his mad, black heart.

THIS IS IT , thought Lana as she waited at the bottom of the steep, rickety staircase. No turning back, now . She stood in the gloomy little passageway and listened to the sound of footsteps on the wooden treads behind her. Light spilled from a few wall-mounted bulbs, but it wasn’t nearly enough to illuminate all the dark corners. Monty Bright and his man Boater were descending after her through the building, entering the belly of the beast… that thought almost made her smile, but then, when she thought about it, the image simply made her more afraid.

The belly of the beast , she thought. Monty Bright’s belly. He’s the beast . Or, if he was not the beast himself, then he was certainly in the service of a beast; a terrible creature ruled by laws of debt and lust and desire: an entity she suddenly and confusingly thought of as Moloch, the false god from the bible.

I will set my face against that man, and against his family, and will cut him off, and all that go astray after him…

Now where the hell had she dredged that quotation up from? She hadn’t studied religious texts since high school, in Religious Studies. Her mind was going into overdrive, throwing up insane thoughts and ideas and snippets of things she had learned a long time ago. Words and phrases that were meaningless in the context of what was happening right now.

It’s fear . That’s what’s doing it. Oh, God, I’m so afraid.

Was she really that clichéd, turning to God in her moment of terror? Why not turn to The Beatles? They’d be just as much use in a crisis.

“There’s a good girl.” Bright had finally reached the bottom of the stairs. He was standing behind her, with his body pressed up against hers. She felt sick; revulsion made her feel as if her skin were trying to turn inside out. She wished that she could peel herself like a piece of fruit and discard the tainted exterior that Bright had already pawed and tainted with his filth. “It’s good to see you being so nice and obedient, and waiting for me down here in the dark.” He laughed softly, but it sounded more like an expression of hunger than one of mirth.