Gary McMahon - The Concrete Grove

Bright stroked his trailing hand across her backside as he pushed past her, moving towards a scarred wooden door on the right. It was almost identical to the other doors they’d passed. But this one was different in one major way: this was the one behind which she would find the face of her demon — the slobbering face of Moloch, the great and terrible beast.

She stared at the wall, at the peeling plaster, trying not to look at that closed door. She tried to empty her mind. All the sorrow and regret; the debt and the promises of violence. The only thing she allowed herself to see, in the darkness behind her eyes, was Hailey’s face: her beautiful child for whom she was putting herself through this nightmare.

Noises echoed down the stairwell, strange creaks and moans and popping sounds. The wooden stairs had many dark, dusty old landings, broken and jutting timber balconies that led nowhere, like viewing galleries. But they had only ever been heading to the bottom: right to the very base of Bright’s black pyramid. She’d heard the rumours about these basement rooms and corridors, but never had she expected to see them for herself. Nor had she expected those stories to be true — not really; not in a million years.

Standing there, in a shabby underground passageway with a panting man’s hand on her arse, she thought about the road that had led her to this point. Timothy’s mental breakdown had been the first step, but since then she’d had chances to alter the route she had taken. Surely there had been choices to make along the way — if she believed in anything, it was that. There was always, always a choice, and she had made the wrong ones far too often. Even now, in this squalid place, she was making yet another bad decision. But this time, unlike those other times, she really did have no other option. This was it, the pit, the private hell at the end of the road: a hell that consisted of this dark corridor, two grinning men, and a door to a room where she would have everything taken from her.

“Shall we?” Bright’s voice was soft, smooth, as if he were attempting to seduce her.

She set her jaw, tensed her body, and then forced her muscles to relax. “Let’s go,” she whispered. “Let’s get it over with.”

Bright nodded once, and then opened the door.

Lana was aware of the big man, Boater, using up all the space behind her, giving her no room to escape, should she even try. She took a step and turned right, into the room.

Inside there was not much to see. A single bulb hung from the ceiling, its paper shade too dirty to make out any kind of design or decoration. The walls were bare stone, with damp stains spread across them like dark, blotchy shadows. There was a double bed pushed up against the side wall, adorned with thin blankets and a solitary shapeless pillow. The floor was stone, like the walls, and there was a crude shower stall in one corner, like something from a book of pictures of a concentration camp she’d once seen. A man stood by the shower. She recognised him from before, when they’d visited her flat to give her Bright’s last warning. He’d been wearing dark clothes, then — threatening clothes. This time he was wearing nothing but black trousers and a vest.

More than the man himself, though, she recognised the single black leather glove he wore.

Terry , she thought. His name’s Terry . It was such a common name for a devil.

He’d been wearing two gloves the last time she’d seen him. This time he only wore the one; his other hand was bare… his prosthetic hand. It looked like some kind of out-dated contraption, with thin metal levers visible at the wrist and wide leather straps holding it in place on his forearm. He raised his arm as she stood there, standing just a foot over the threshold, and clenched his plastic fingers. Then, as she began to lose all sense of reality, he undid the leather straps and removed the false hand to reveal a shiny pink nub of flesh.

“Just wait ’till you see what he can do with that stump,” said Bright, standing right beside her. She turned and looked into his shiny face. His eyes seemed to have doubled in size and there was white spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth.

Terry, waving his stump around in the air, began to laugh. It was a quiet sound, almost polite: a gentle chuckle that was completely out of place given the situation.

She looked down, at his bare feet. He was wriggling his toes on the stone floor. For some reason the sight was more sickening than that of the naked stump, and Lana felt a wave of bile rising at the back of her throat.

She took another couple of steps, trying to impose herself in the weird isolated space that was the room, to exert some measure of control. She heard the door shut behind her. Then there was the sound of a key rattling in the lock, and then a series of blunt clicks as the only way in or out of that room was sealed, perhaps locking a part of Lana inside there forever.

“So, Lana Fraser,” said Bright, slipping off his jacket. “At last you deign to come and visit us, to offer us some kind of payment on your debt.” His body, beneath the jacket, was clad in a tight grey shirt. His arms were huge, the biceps oversized. He could barely even bend his arms to remove the outer garment without having to angle his body to aid its movement. He was deformed; a man made monstrous by the abuse of muscle-building chemicals and heavy weights. Like most small-time criminals, he had an obsession with physical strength, but his had become so acute, so outlandish, that it had altered his exterior to reflect, more or less, how he saw himself in his mind’s eye.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m here to pay it off. I want to bring this to an end, finalise the deal. Just like you said on the phone.”

Terry, still standing by the primitive shower stall, laughed again. He flexed his gloved hand; the leather creaked loudly in the silence that followed his abrupt laughter. He stared at her face, her eyes, and never broke eye contact even as he stripped off his vest. His torso was well-muscled, but not as barrel-like as his boss’s broad trunk. Blue-black prison tattoos — at least that’s what Lana assumed the crude, thick-lined renderings to be — decorated his upper arms. An odd-looking dragon draped its badly-drawn tail around his shoulder.

“Is that what I said?” Bright walked around and stood directly in front of her, cutting off her view of Terry as he began to loosen his trousers. Bright was pulling his shirttails out of his waistband. Then he began to undo the shirt buttons from the bottom up. “Yes, I suppose I did say that, didn’t I?”

“I know the score,” said Lana, trying to find strength from somewhere, anywhere. “I know what’s expected of me, and I’ll do it all. I’ll do you all, if it keeps you away from me in future, and away from my daughter.” She clenched her fists and refused to look away as he slipped off his shirt and folded it neatly before placing it on the floor, near the end of the stark double bed.

Beneath the shirt he was wearing what looked like a wetsuit. It clung to his oddly-shaped form like a second skin, accentuating the ugly, disproportionate muscle build-up around his upper body. Lana was so surprised by Bright’s ridiculous get-up that for a moment she forgot to be afraid, and a tiny smile flickered across her lips. She cut the smile short before it got out of control, wishing that she could have prevented it altogether. The last thing she wanted to do was antagonise these men: there was too much aggression in the room already; unless she was careful, there was the risk that they would lose all control and cause her some real physical damage.

They could fuck her, by all means — she was just about prepared for that — but please God, don’t let them break her.