Gary McMahon - The Concrete Grove

“You’d better come in.” The voice came from the other side of the door. Bright knew they were there; he’d been waiting for them. Of course he had. He’d probably watched them every step of the way after they’d entered the building, sitting behind his desk with his eyes on a CCTV monitor.

“The door’s unlocked.”

Lana turned to him and nodded. Her eyes were wide and questioning, seeking confirmation that he was still willing to back her up.

“I’m ready,” he said, and steeled himself for the unexpected.

Lana turned the handle and opened the door. Light spilled out onto the dim landing. Tom followed her inside. Lamps gave off low-level light, which spilled across the carpet. The walls were covered in framed pictures and portraits. Some of them were nightmarish, others bland and unremarkable. Images of monsters hung next to stiff-backed men in Victorian suits, their eyes narrow and their faces stern and unflinching.

“Come on in,” said Monty Bright. “Let’s get this show on the road.” He sat in his office chair, with his feet resting on the desk and his hands clasped behind his head. His hair was slicked back, tight against his head, and shone in the oddly lambent light. His face looked like one of those paintings: unmoving, placid, hiding real feelings behind an immobile mask.

Another man stood against the wall at the side of the desk. He was broad, dressed in a dark suit, and was wearing leather gloves on his clenched hands. Six or seven old television sets stood on the floor, their screens cracked, their casings dusty and showing signs of handling, clean patches where large swathes of the dust had been cleared as they were carried into the room.

“You remember Terry, of course. And his stump.” Monty Bright grinned. For a second his teeth looked false, as if too many of them had been crammed into his mouth. “And you are?” He inclined his head, indicating that he was speaking to Tom.

The other man — Terry — took a single step away from the wall.

“I’m nobody. Nobody important.” Tom closed the door behind him.

“Oh, but we’re all important here.” Bright stood up. He wasn’t very tall. “We all have a role to play. This is something I’ve learned. Even the most humble of us has a part in all this.” He picked up a book from his desk — some kind of workout manual. It looked old; the cover was worn and faded. One of the desk lamps — the one situated nearest Bright — flickered twice.

Tom suddenly found the man’s name amusing, like an irony that was only now becoming apparent. He wasn’t bright at all — he was dark; as dark as they come. Even the light shuddered in his presence.

“Where’s my daughter, you prick?” Lana stood with her fists clenched. She looked ready for a fight, perhaps even to the death. She had put on an ankle-length black coat just before they’d left her flat, and she kept it buttoned up to the throat as she confronted the loan shark. Part of Tom wanted her to keep it fastened, but the vengeful side of him couldn’t wait to see her open that coat and get things started.

“She’s safe, just like I said on the phone.” Bright came around to the front of the desk. His chunky shoes, with their inch-high heels, clumped softly on the carpet. Everything to Tom seemed hyper-real, as if the world had taken on extra levels of vividness.

“Where.”

Lana stared right at him.

“Is.”

She opened her hands, slowly flexing the fingers.

“She.”

She was utterly in control of the moment.

“My, my…” said Bright, trying for amused nonchalance but failing, and betraying the fact that he was shaken by her apparent lack of fear. “My, but how you’ve changed, and in such a short time, too. The last time I saw you, you were washing spunk off your skin.” He folded his arms across his wide chest. The suit jacket strained at his upper arms and shoulders, as if the seams were about to burst.

“Tell me now, before it’s too late.”

Terry remained where he was, silent and threatening. Tom felt like he and the other man were simply an audience for this confrontation. The meeting playing out before them was like high drama: the finale to a play whose first two acts had been performed in private.

He watched copies of the scene repeated in miniature on the reflective surfaces of the television screens.

“Remember my associate, Francis? The large man. He has her. I don’t know where, he didn’t tell me, and I can’t get a signal on his mobile. Unless, of course, he has it turned off. I think he imagines he’s hunting down some kind of redemption, and your daughter is the means to him finding it.”

Lana’s posture relaxed. Her shoulders slumped.

“I’ve had Francis following your pretty little girl for a few weeks now, but lately he’s turned against me. I wanted him to bring her straight here, so I could put her downstairs, to keep her safe. But he had other ideas. Or maybe she did.”

“What is it you think she can do for you, Bright? A monster like you, trying to put your hands on a young girl. If you think I’ll let it happen, you’re even crazier than I thought.” Her voice was hard and clear. She was unafraid. Tom saw the steel within her, and it was almost enough to make him fearless, too.

“I’ve been looking for a way into somewhere that’s been hidden for a long time. It started for real with this book.” He held up the fitness manual. “It gave me the pointers, and I’ve kept looking for more ever since. It’s all in here: the evidence.” He leaned back against the desk, too short to actually sit on its top. Instead he just rested his backside against the edge. “It’s all in here; all the information I’ve managed to find. There isn’t much, but news about the place isn’t exactly in the public domain. Your daughter found an open door, and she’s been welcomed inside. She reached out and touched the power at the heart of the Grove, and it liked what it saw. She has a strange combination of innocence and yearning, and it seems that was all she needed to get over there, to the place I’ve been kept out of for so long.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? And what the hell is going on with all these TVs?”

“More evidence.”

Right then, as if they’d been waiting for a cue, the televisions sets flickered into life. The damaged screens flared, giving off a dull glow, and there was a series of clicking noises as the old cathode ray tubes sparked into life.

( Clickety-clickety-click…)

“What is this?”

Bright smiled. “Oh, just a little light viewing, to demonstrate what I’m talking about.” He looked at the screens, his face pale and washed-out, like a degraded image of itself.

Tom glanced at them, too.

On each of the screens there appeared the same scratchy, flickering image: a grove of massive trees, and at its centre what looked like a group of men in Halloween costumes. But the costumes were too sophisticated to be anything other than real — these were monsters, plain and simple. And Tom had already been introduced to their human counterparts.

Their legs were long and muscular, bent back like the limbs of giant crickets or grasshoppers. Their faces looked burnt; they possessed the shiny quality of scar tissue. It was difficult to make them out clearly, because the image was so grainy and incomplete, but there seemed to be five or six of them gathered at the centre of the grove of trees — the same as the number of television sets in the room. They jumped and hopped around the clearing, twitchy and excited.

“These,” said Bright, “are my friends. They came to me one night, as I was watching an old porno movie on a TV in some junkie’s squalid little bedsit. I can only see them on old television sets, for some reason. They don’t show up on digital technology. These monsters are old-school.”