Silent Voices

The figure is either hideously deformed or wearing some kind of mask. The bone-white face is pinched forward and outward to form a long beak with a sharpened end. The large, bulbous eyes look like swimming goggles, but with black frames and lenses.

The figure is terrifying. Fear has taken Brendan’s voice, and only when he realises this does he regain the ability to communicate.

“Lads!” He turns and glances towards his friends, and then back again to where he saw the figure. It has stopped and turned towards him in the short time when his attention was elsewhere; he feels its gaze, even through the absurd goggles. There is a thin walking stick in the figure’s yellow-gloved right hand, and it raises it, like a weapon or a magician’s wand, pointing it in Brendan’s direction. The other hand, also covered by a dull yellow glove, makes abstract shapes and patterns in the air, the fingers moving in intricate contortions, as if they are tying knots out of nothing. He knows that he should not be able to pick out such minor details at this distance, but somehow he can. It is as if the figure has grown more vital in his perspective, like an embossed image standing proud from a flat background. The effect is disorienting: he feels sick, his head begins to pound; his eyes water as the figure looms in his vision, drawing closer and increasing in definition without taking even a single step towards him. It must be an optical illusion… a trick of the light.

Then he begins to hear the clicking sound, like fingers snapping along to some otherworldly tune.

Brendan opens his mouth, but no words come out. He stares at the figure, at the way its coat flaps about the thin body even though there is no wind to cause the motion; the way the material bulges and rises slightly in front, as if a rogue gust is trapped under there, between the figure’s long, thin legs. Then, one by one, what looks like several additional limbs seem to emerge from beneath the hem of the coat, their small, bare, two-toed feet kicking and flapping as they descend awkwardly to the ground.

“Quick, lads! Come here!” His voice sounds raw, as if his throat has been damaged, his mouth parched. But at least he has found the strength to speak.

He glances away and then back again. The figure is no longer there. A beam of sunlight blazes in the spot between the trees where the figure had stood, making the air look as if it has caught fire. The two trees that had framed the figure seem to bend fractionally outwards, making the space bigger than before and straining beneath the pressure of reality.

“What’s up?” Simon is standing beside him, reaching down to help him complete the journey from sitting to standing. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Brendan turns his head and stares at his friend, at his wide, amused eyes. He feels the small pimples on his forehead tighten; the larger ones clustered across his back and shoulders begin to pop, covering his flesh in a warm, sticky excretion. He doesn’t quite know if he’s still afraid or simply relieved that he was just seeing things out there, beyond the trees.

Should he be glad that his imagination is creating phantoms, or should he be afraid that it has done so to fill some kind of gap in his brain?

“I think I did,” he says, shaking now, unable to hold back either a scream or a laugh — he’s not sure which — for much longer. “A ghost… or a monster.”

PART ONE Learning to Speak

“Sometimes you have to go back just so you can move forward.”

— Simon Ridley

CHAPTER ONE

SIMON RIDLEY SAT at the window and stared out at the seething darkness of King’s Cross. His torso was bare; he’d spilled some wine on his shirt earlier, when he’d been preparing a late dinner, and it was warm enough in the flat that he had not bothered to put on a clean one. The July sky was clear and the thin, fragile clouds drifted like skeins of semen in bathwater.

The room was dark, too. He had not turned on the lights. The dinner he’d made sat cold and untouched in a bowl on the kitchen counter, the pasta stiffening and the tomato and garlic sauce congealing like old blood. He rubbed his face with his hands, and realised that he needed a shave. His head felt emptied, hollowed out.

A creased, padded manila envelope lay on the dining table before him, and he tried his best not to look again at the printed handwriting. The package had been posted here, to his home address, rather than the office, and it had arrived after he’d left for work. So he’d only seen it when he got back a few hours ago, after leaving the office early because of the overnight car journey he had scheduled.

The book sat next to the discarded packaging, the outer edges of the cover slightly blackened, perhaps by fire. The title was illegible, the author unknown. But he knew what the book was. Once, a long time ago, it had belonged to Simon. He had owned it in another lifetime.

The book was called Extreme Boot Camp Workout by Alex ‘Brawler’ Mahler. It had once belonged to Simon’s father, a man who enjoyed keeping fit more than he liked spending time with his family. Simon had lost track of the book years ago, when he left home to come to London. But now it was here, back in his hands.

A helicopter hummed past his window, miles away but still visible in the crisp evening sky. Simon turned his head and watched it go by, reminded of something he had seen or been told of a long time ago but could not quite grasp with any level of clarity right now — something to do with hummingbirds.

He reached out and touched the other item that had been inside the envelope along with the book: a single immature acorn, its shell caught in the process of darkening from green to brown. Carved roughly into the shell were his initials: SR. His fingers traced the letters, and then he pulled his hand away, as if he were afraid to touch the thing for much longer than a few seconds.

His laptop sat open on the table, its screen the only bright spot in the room. The web browser displayed an article from the Northumbria Times newspaper. It was old news, from before Christmas. November, to be exact: almost nine months ago. He couldn’t even remember what he’d been doing back then. Lately his life seemed to be running away from him, leaving him with vague, unsubstantial memories of business meetings and social events, deals and parties and random encounters with people who held little interest for him.

The article was about a fire on a housing estate in Northumberland which the locals called the Concrete Grove. Simon had grown up there, and left as soon as he was old enough to get out on his own. But despite him not setting foot back there in the best part of fifteen years, the place had never really left him.

You can take the boy out of the Grove…

According to the reporter a small gym owned by a local gangster had been set alight, and the fire had killed two people: the owner, Monty Bright, and one of his associates, a man called Terry Bison. Both men’s bodies had been so badly disfigured in the fire that they could only be identified by partial tattoos and dental records. The second man had also been identified by his prosthetic arm.

A few columns down the page, printed as an unrelated side bar, there was mention of unidentified birds gathering over the local landmark known as the Needle. The old tower block — derelict for decades — seemed to have been the focal point for the congregation of tiny birds on the night of the blaze. Hundreds of them had hovered around the tip of the tower, remaining there for half an hour, and then disappeared once the blaze was under control. It was reported as a natural phenomenon, a weird bit of local colour.

A hard copy of both of these articles had been included in the envelope, along with the book. Their headlines were crudely circled in red pen by whoever had sent him the package. Simon had no idea why anyone would send him these now, so many months after the fire in the report. The postmark on the front of the envelope showed that it had been sent from the northeast. It didn’t take much to put the clues together and realise that someone from