Gary McMahon - The Concrete Grove

Something moved on the stairs behind him. It was a slow, heavy sound, like someone dragging themselves on their belly across the floor.

He glanced at the door to Helen’s room. It was open. He crossed the hallway and peered inside. The television was on, tuned once again to the static between channels. It bathed the room in an eerie light, and showed him that the bed was unmade and empty. But Helen had not been out of bed in years.

So where the hell was she now?

Tom turned to the bottom of the stairs. In the dimness he could make out a trail of moisture leading upwards. The carpet was wet; each step glistened, as if a giant slug had made its way up to the first floor.

He began to climb the stairs, keeping to the edge nearest the wall and clinging to the handrail. The light receded, staying down on the ground floor, but there was enough illumination bleeding in through the upstairs windows for him to see by. When he reached the top of the stairs the sound was much louder: a slow, moist slithering. He turned on to the landing and saw it there, hauling itself towards the bathroom at a slow, monotonous pace. A patch of light from the window at the end of the landing seeped towards it, like a yellow puddle. Its heavy grey body moved slowly; the large, clumsy fins pressed weakly against the floor and failed to get much traction as the animal inched along the floor.

The sea cow’s journey was agonisingly slow, but it at least had intent and purpose.

Tom walked along in its wake, watching the oversized mammal as it made its way towards the open bathroom door. The taps were running, filling the bath with hot water. One of the small lights above the mirror was on. Tom had no idea who had started to run the bath — certainly it couldn’t have been the manatee: that was impossible. Maybe he had done it, in his drowsy state. He could believe anything right now. He could even believe that a sea cow was hauling its massive bulk along his upstairs landing towards a bath-full of water.

“Helen.” His voice sounded tiny, so he said her name again. “Helen.”

At first the sea cow didn’t register his presence. Then, abruptly, its fins ceased their awkward movement on the carpet. The beast started to hitch its body around, pivoting on its belly and swivelling through 180 degrees to face him. It seemed to take ages for the thing to turn, and when finally it did the beast stared at him with tiny black, baleful eyes from a square, grey face that looked somehow familiar. It opened its black-slit mouth and made a strange hollow clicking sound. Its tongue was long and thick. The teeth in its upper and lower jaws were huge and jagged, like fragments of rock stuck into its gums.

Are they meant to have teeth like that?

The clicking sound came again. He’d heard it before; the other night on the telephone when no-one had spoken. On that first occasion, Tom had put it down to a wrong number or a crossed line, but that damn clicking sound had blocked his thoughts… just as it was doing now.

Clickety-clickety-click…

“Is that you, Helen?” Tom felt ridiculous, but at the same time he knew that the animal was indeed his wife — somehow, once again, Helen had become in reality exactly as he thought of her in his mind, taking the physical form of his imagined insult. But this time it wasn’t a dream; this time it was part of the waking world. The two elements had clashed, and this creeping horror was the result.

A fracture had appeared between the states of waking and sleeping, living and dreaming, and what crawled through that rift was the stuff of fantasy. The mental power utilised during the usual dream-state was finding another outlet, and Tom knew, without having to question the thought, that something was using that energy as fuel. Some thing was trying to break through, to open a doorway and move from one realm to the other.

He remembered his father’s warning and the phantom flying fists. The way the old man’s ghost had abused his bed-ridden wife, as she had taken the form of the manatee. It all meant something, but he was unable to solve the equation. This otherworldly form of mathematics was beyond him. He didn’t have the skills; the numbers would not add up.

The sea cow lurched in his direction, moving faster this time but still slow enough that he could easily outmanoeuvre it as the beast rocked towards him across the landing, clickety-clickety-clicking like a broken spindle. Only when he stumbled on the top step and fell badly, momentarily trapping his left leg in the gap between two stair rails, did he begin to fear what the sea cow might do if it caught up with him.

HOW THE FUCK did that happen?

Lana was sure she’d walked along a narrow ginnel that should have brought her out somewhere near The Dropped Penny pub, but somehow she found herself standing on top of the Embankment and facing in the wrong direction entirely. She stared down the slope and into the shadows at the bottom of the old railway cutting, picking out the broken timber railway sleepers in the sodium-tinted darkness.

The route she’d taken should have delivered her outside the pub. She knew that; it was a fact, non-negotiable. So what the hell was she doing here, at the opposite end of the Grove, and facing the wrong fucking way?

Her stomach ached, her legs hurt. Her insides felt battered.

“Keep calm.” She spoke out loud in an attempt to dispel the fear that was creeping up on her from behind, wrapping its arms around her shoulders like an old lover. Time was slowing down. She felt like she’d been out here for hours when in reality she’d only just left Bright’s grotty little gym.

She turned around and stared at the domineering shape of the Needle. This was the closest she’d been to the building in ages. She didn’t like how it looked; the phallic tower made her nervous in a way she could not easily define. It was worse now, at night, and standing so close to its graffiti-covered walls. Out here, in the cold darkness that was bruised by yellow street lights, she could imagine that the place had a consciousness — that it was sentient, and that it was watching her just as closely as she had watched the impassive tower block from her window, night after night, hating it for what it represented, her new life at the bottom of the pile.

“Bastard,” she said, directing the curse at both the building before her and the rotten excuse for a man she’d just left.

She knew what had to be done now. There was no other way. She had offered herself to Monty Bright and he’d taken his fill. Then the fucker had reneged on his end of a bargain he claimed had never been struck. Bright had proven himself to be a liar, a rapist, and a welcher. And in some ways this last was the worst of all.

He had never intended to cancel her debt, nor had he meant to leave her alone once she had given him what he wanted. This debt, she now realised, would never be paid. It was forever. He had his fingers in her life right up to the knuckle joints, and there was nothing that she could do to break his grip.

She started walking again, past the silent frontages of darkened houses and towards other buildings that had been boarded up and abandoned. Trying to ignore the pain, she kept her eyes on her surroundings. She didn’t like it here, at the centre of the Grove. The air felt different from that on the outskirts. It was as if the callousness that dwelled here had its source on, or under, the very streets she now walked.

Another narrow alley opened up like a mouth in the darkness, a street light picking out its redbrick sides and showing her the way. She headed for the opening, glancing back over her shoulder, and then ducked inside. The alleyway was long, the walls on either side of her were smooth and covered in the same kind of graffiti she saw everywhere around here: badly drawn sex organs, phone numbers and promises of gratification, declarations stating how big someone’s cock was and how deep someone else’s vagina. These primitive designs and renderings all seemed to focus on the subject of sex, as if that were the only language the artists knew how to use. There was nothing erotic about this paintwork, as there might be in true art: there was only crudity and banality, a strange, dull obsession with body parts and their basic functions.