Beyond Here Lies Nothing

PART TWO The Crawl

“Always ask for me.”

— DS Craig Royle

CHAPTER TEN

ROYLE WAS MAKING a coffee when the call came in.

His office at the Far Grove police station was small and cramped, filled with loose files and notebooks, but the one thing he could not do without was a decent coffee machine. He didn’t let anyone touch his machine — his machine; it was his personal property and he made sure everyone knew it — and often found himself the butt of station jokes because of his possessive attitude towards the appliance.

But Royle didn’t care. He liked his coffee, and that was all. He needed it to get through the day, and a few cups of Nescafe just wouldn’t cut it. His coffee had to be freshly ground, freeze-packed, and preferably from deepest Columbia.

He answered the phone, glancing at the machine as it dripped evil-looking black fluid from the filter into the misted glass jug. His mouth was watering. “This is DS Royle speaking. Can I help you?”

“Sir, it’s Sergeant Barnes here. We’ve had one of those calls.”

Royle focused completely on Barnes’ voice. “Okay, I’m all ears. Tell me what you’ve got.” It might be something; it was probably nothing. They usually turned out to be nothing.

“Mrs Millstone. She rang in five minutes ago. I’m not quite sure what the problem is, but she was scared. Upset. Something about a scarecrow… that’s all I managed to get out of her, I’m sorry. She wasn’t making much sense. She asked for you by name. Demanded I get you, actually.”

Royle thanked Barnes and hung up the phone. His coffee would have to wait. He was needed elsewhere. He rubbed at his cheek with his hand and felt the stubble rasping against his fingertips. He was tired, strung out, and needed some rest. The coffee was no longer enough. He was craving whisky. This was a first; he usually suffered these cravings later in the day, when he was weary and irritated. It was way too early to want a drink.

But there was a reason for his response: it had been one of those calls… that’s what everyone called them, on the rare occasions that they came in. One of those calls.

Basically, Royle had let it be known that he was to be informed if anyone with even the slightest connection with the Gone Away Girls case called in, no matter what the reason might be for the call. He realised that everyone on the force thought he was obsessed, and on his darker days he would agree with them. But this was both more and less than mere obsession. He’d promised each of the families that he wouldn’t rest until he found out what had happened to their girls, and he intended to make good on that promise.

He realised that this kind of honour was outdated, that it only ever seemed to feature in fiction — crime novels and Hollywood movies, stories about broken down cops trying to solve one last case before they retired. He also knew that it was a mistake to make such an impossible promise to a victim’s family. Yet still, it was what drove him. That promise — the fact that he’d made it in good faith and it had been accepted like some kind of lifeline — made it real. He wouldn’t stop until he found out what had happened to those girls. It simply was not in his nature to forget about them. Somebody needed to remember, to act as a witness, and the task had fallen to him.

Like a festering wound, the knowledge that they had been taken and nobody knew — or even cared — why or by whom burned inside him night and day.

He left the office and cut through the operations room, trying not to catch anyone’s eye. A few people nodded; one or two even said hello. Royle knew that he wasn’t well liked, and that he was only hanging on here because of his longevity and connections higher up the chain of command, but he didn’t really care. He’d stopped caring about things like friendship and career-building a long time ago. The only person who meant anything to him now refused to live with him, and that summed up how much of a mess he was in.

Outside, he climbed into his car. Reversing out of his space in the car park, he looked at his face in the rear-view mirror. His eyes were streaked with red; black smudges circled them. He looked like he hadn’t slept for weeks. In truth, he had not. The only time he ever managed to close his eyes and slip into unconsciousness was with the aid of alcohol. He was drink-dependent, maybe even an alcoholic, but the drink was what helped him at least get some form of rest. That was the real reason he was afraid to do something about the addiction: if he didn’t have the drink, he might never sleep again.

He drove north, through Far Grove and towards the Concrete Grove. His skin prickled with the Crawl as he crossed the invisible geographical border between the two districts, as if his blood were answering some strange call. He knew the sensation was psychological rather than physical, but still it didn’t mean it wasn’t real. This place, it had became a part of him. He knew that he could never leave, even if he wanted to.

The truth was he didn’t want to leave the Grove.

Vanessa had tried to convince him to apply for a transfer on several occasions, but he’d never taken her seriously. Even when she left him, six months pregnant and not really wanting to go, he had dug in his heels and told her that he would never turn his back on this place — these people, the parents and siblings of the Gone Away girls. Even a transfer to nearby Newcastle was out of the question. It was only a few miles south, but Royle felt that it was too far away from the locus of whatever strange things had been happening round here for years.

He’d never discussed his suspicions in public, but he knew that there was something deeply wrong with the fabric of the Grove. Too many bad things happened; there was a lot of darkness under the skin of the estate. Royle didn’t believe in ghosts, or magic, but he did believe that a place could be wrong. Some places attract darkness, and this was one of them. Some places are seething with the Crawl.

The Concrete Grove, Royle knew deep inside his heart, was a Bad Place.

He slowed as he drove along Grove End, past the old primary school. He watched as school kids laughed and played, remembering that those poor girls had once done the same, oblivious to the darkness that was coming for them. But nobody would ever hear their laughter again; their innocent games would forever go unseen.

He parked on Grove Crescent, outside the Millstones’ tiny two-bed semi-detached house. He didn’t get out of the car immediately. Instead he sat there for a few seconds, trying to centre his energy, to focus on what was important. He recalled the disturbance in the park the night before, and wondered what he’d almost seen there, moving through the bushes like a living embodiment of the sensation that he felt right now.

It had been yet another example of the badness that festered here, growing like a malignant tumour. He was certain of it; there was no doubt at all.

“Nothing,” he said. “It was nothing.” But he knew that he was lying to himself, just the way he lied to everyone. He could not speak aloud about his feelings, even to himself. Something was gestating here, and had been for a long time: something that wanted to be born.

He thought about Vanessa’s stomach and the life that was growing inside her. They didn’t know what she was having; Vanessa had wanted it to be a surprise. Royle was too scared to even imagine which gender the baby might be. He feared that if he thought too much about it, the baby might not come out right. It might be deformed. Or dead. What if the badness here had infected Vanessa, tainting the foetus? What if his seed had been bad, even before the baby was conceived?

What if the baby Crawled out instead of being pushed?

“Jesus…” He shook his head, closed his eyes. Why did he always have to be so dark? His thoughts were never optimistic. Perhaps that was the fault of the Grove, too. Vanessa had often said that the place — along with the job he did — had eaten away his insides, leaving behind an emptiness that he could never quite fill, no matter how hard he tried. Was she right? Was that what had happened to him? Were all of his strange thoughts about the estate nothing but the imaginings of a twisted mind, a brain attuned to darkness?