Gary McMahon - The Concrete Grove

“Tom?” She called into the house, but there was no reply. It was dark in there, but she could make out a figure in the entrance hall, standing at the bottom of the stairs.

Lana took a step inside. “Come on, Tom. Let’s get Hailey, and then we can get away from here. We can hide out up in the Highlands, or somewhere. Find a place where they’ll never catch up with us.” She knew she was lying: there was no way out of this, not now. The best she could hope for was to save her daughter. Little else mattered.

Tom was standing over the body of a very large woman. She was motionless, and lay face-down at the bottom of the stairs, her nightdress hitched up to show her massive, creased legs and her saggy, crumpled buttocks. Her head was twisted brutally to one side, forced around at an unnatural angle.

“It attacked me,” said Tom, staring down at the woman’s corpse. She was clearly dead: her face was as white and crumpled as old linen sheets. “I fought with it, and we fell down the stairs. Powerful beasts, these things. So, so strong… like a fucking ox, or something.”

“Tom… what are you talking about, Tom?”

His head spun around to face her. His eyes were huge, eating up the residual light in the room. “This,” he said. “The fucking sea cow.” He kicked the corpse but it barely moved. It was too heavy. “Clickety-clickety-click.”

She ignored that last part, unable to even grasp at its meaning. “This… this is your wife?”

He shook his head. “Don’t be stupid. I don’t know where Helen is. This is the sea cow. It took her place, and it attacked me. Up there.” He raised a hand and pointed up the stairs.

How the hell had she managed to get up there? She was paralysed from the waist down. Had he dragged her out of bed and up the stairs only to throw her down? “Tom, I think you need to take a look at her and try to focus. Really look at her. Look at your wife.”

He was crying now. “I wish I knew where she was. I need to find her, to make sure she’s okay, and then we can leave. You, me and Hailey. We can leave all this shit behind us and start a new life.”

“Tom.” She was losing patience now. The old Lana might have taken the time to talk him down, to make him realise his mistake, but the new Lana, the warrior woman, couldn’t spare the time or the effort. “I’m going now, Tom. I’m going to get my daughter. You’ve killed your wife, do you hear me? You killed her. I can’t help you, not with this. There isn’t the time.”

He sunk down to the floor, onto his knees. Slowly, with great care, he reached out and began to stroke the dead woman’s fleshy cheek. Her eyes were open. White foam was dried around her mouth, like a crust of salt. “Where’s Helen? Such gentle creatures when you see them on telly, but you’re not gentle, are you? You stole my wife.”

Lana turned away and made her way slowly to the door. When she stepped outside, emerging into the cool night air, she reached behind her and shut the door firmly, making sure that it was tight to the frame. She could at least do this for Tom: give him some peace and some time to figure out what he had done.

In the distance, over the estate, the sky was bright with reflected flames. She could see the Needle beyond the capering yellow light, sticking up like a thick, grey finger pointing towards the stars.

“I’m coming, Hailey,” she whispered as she started to run. “Mummy’s coming.”

IT DIDN’T TAKE Lana long to reach the outskirts of the Concrete Grove. People were milling in the streets, trying to get a good look at the fiery display. Two fire engines were parked on Grove Lane, with groups of firemen working to put out the blaze. It looked like they’d managed to catch the fire in time to stop it spreading, and they were in the process of limiting the damage. The gym was already ruined, a blackened shell, but the nearby properties were undamaged apart from soot-stains on their frontages. Most of them were empty, anyway, and the rest were rented properties. Nobody in authority would care about the fire: even the landlords could claim on their insurance, and the evening’s destruction would be considered nothing more than an inconvenience.

Not a living soul would mourn the dead. Men like Monty Bright, and his enforcer Terry, were never really loved. They were only ever feared, and when they died the communities they lived off like parasites let out a collective sigh of relief.

Maybe later, when all this was over and if she survived the night, Lana would return here to lay flowers for the poor junkie, Banjo. It was the least she could do, even if by sending him to his death she had shown him little mercy.

The air was hot as she jogged along Grove Side, towards the centre of the estate. She moved away from the blaze, and by the time she had entered the mouth of Grove Street, along which she could join the Roundpath, she was once again growing cold. She pulled the overcoat tighter across her chest, all-too aware that she was still half-naked beneath its thin covering. She checked the buttons, making sure that they were secure, and continued along the street to the end, where she slowed her pace once her feet crunched on the loose material of the circular pathway which ran around the perimeter of the Needle.

Pausing for a moment, she glanced up and looked at the tip of the building. A dark mass had gathered around its pyramidal glass peak: not smoke, not clouds, but hundreds of tiny birds. The air was filled with a distant humming; now that the crackling of the fire was behind her, she could hear the sound of the birds’ wings as they beat gracefully against the air.

Hummingbirds , she thought. More fucking hummingbirds .

Were these things guardians, or harbingers of some kind? She recalled one of the words she’d seen written across the map of the estate in Bright’s workout book. Psychopomp.

A soul conductor; a creature whose job it was to guide the souls of the recently deceased to the afterlife, the other side, the place that she had never believed in. Was that the role of the hummingbirds? Did they accompany people as they crossed over, journeying from this place to that other — from the Concrete Grove to the grove beyond?

Her mind was racing. This was all mad conjecture, but it made as much sense as the ravings of that crazy man Monty Bright — him and his alternative world, his parallel universe that existed within the estate. His rambling speech and the book — what little of its contents she’d had the chance to skim — both seemed to suggest that Bright had been searching for a fragment of Creation, a sliver of the Garden of Eden. But what if he was only partly correct and the garden he had been seeking for so long was actually a wood, a forest, a dark tree-filled land that acted as a depository for lost dreams and nightmares? And what if the doorway to that place was a grove of ancient oak trees, over which had been constructed a concrete tower block?

Hailey had found a key to unlock that door. Bright had called it a mixture of innocence and yearning, but whatever unique qualities her daughter possessed, they were currency here. Lana had always told Hailey that she was special, but had never really known it for sure, until now.

Something deep within her responded strongly to the theory: she felt that the place towards which she was now heading, the realm Monty Bright had died trying to find, was like a failing battery, powered by the dreams and desires of the people who gathered around it. And in a place like the one she’d left behind, a blasted, godforsaken pit like the Concrete Grove, the only charge this battery could receive was negative.

So the forces here had mutated, becoming toxic. They had changed, and sprayed out their waste like a buried nuclear core going into a slow, decades-long meltdown.