Silent Voices

wounds were smoothing over, becoming less repellent. His eyelids looked odd, without any flesh to the sides of and beneath the eyes, but at least they made him look halfway human.

He opened his lipless mouth, licked his front teeth — upper and lower rows — and then bared them like a wolf.

“See,” said the girl. “I told you so. You know you can always trust me. I’ll never lie to you, Banjo. We need to be honest with each other, if we stand any chance at all of stopping the Underthing. We need a bond based on trust.”

Banjo stared at the monster in the mirror, and thought that he wasn’t so monstrous after all. Certainly not compared to the one the girl was talking about. Because, compared to the Underthing, he was nothing like a monster… nothing at all.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SIMON WAS STANDING in the middle of the motorway looking up at the hill upon which he knew the Angel of the North should be standing. Light drizzle coated his skin like sweat, the sky yawned above him like some passageway into a cosmic room, and the sculpture was noticeable only by its absence.

The grass on the hill was long and unkempt, as if nobody had been here for years. A line of scrubbed dirt ran around the base of the rise, with trails springing off on either side of the hill — front and back. The path that led up to the sculpture was cracked and broken; huge portions of tarmac had been scoured away to reveal the uneven base course beneath. Ashen clouds lowered across the scene, unbroken by Gormley’s great northern masterwork. The scene was apocalyptic. The world had somehow ended, or was just about to.

Simon turned around and glanced along the road. It was empty. No traffic moved along its length, but far off, in the distance, dark clouds gathered like harbingers of chaos. He stared into the heaving black mass, but could make out nothing solid. There seemed to be protean shapes moving within the black folds — figures that kept shifting between people and animals — but he could not be sure. Perhaps it was just air currents causing the illusion of form and substance.

He turned back towards the hill, and right at its top there was now a small figure. The figure stood motionless, with its arms outstretched in the same pose as the Angel. He watched for a few minutes, but still the figure did not move.

“Who are you?” He knew that whoever it was would not hear the question. He was too far away, the light breeze was blowing in the wrong direction, and the air was thick and turgid. “Tell me who you are.”

The figure remained motionless. The sky darkened, turning the figure into a silhouette, or a black template carved out of the world, showing only darkness beyond.

Simon began walking towards the figure on the hill. He had no idea why he felt compelled to approach it, but something was calling him. His body responded to an impulse that was too subtle to explain, like the currents of the sea or the phases of the moon. He stepped onto the shattered footpath and dodged the worst of the damage. The stones were blackened, as if they’d been burned. He struggled to keep his footing; the path seemed to tilt and sway, but not in any way that his eye could discern.

He looked up, away from his shoes, and this time the figure had moved. It was standing in the same position, with arms outstretched like aeroplane wings, but it was now facing him. There was another difference, too: the figure was wearing a mask, with a long beak for a nose, and had about doubled in size. Simon knew that he should be running, to get away from the figure, but his legs refused to obey the command sent from his brain.

So instead he climbed the shattered footpath, up the hill, towards the beaked figure that stood so still and so silent in the darkness. He knew who it was; he had seen the figure before, in waking life as well as in dreams. It was Captain Clickety, the one who had taken their boyhood, the creature the three boys had followed to the Needle from Beacon Green twenty years ago. He was here; he had come back. But why had he returned, and for whom was he waiting up on the hill?

Simon felt only minimal danger. He suspected that Clickety had not come for him, but the one he wanted was linked to him. Was it one of the others — Brendan or Marty — and if so, why one of them and not him? There was a sudden pang of resentment then, of shameful envy, and he struggled to explain it. Like a knife in his gut, the feeling sliced him neatly and painlessly.

If there was horror to be had, why could he not be the one to experience it? After all this time, since running away and trying to build a life for himself, there was still a gap at his core, and that gap was the absence of horror. He knew that now; finally he could admit it, if only to himself.

The figure did not grow nearer as he approached it. “Come back,” he whispered, tasting the night: it was cold and coppery, like blood but with an underlying bitterness.

When he reached the summit of the hill the figure was gone. Its mask lay on the ground at his feet, staring upwards: an invitation. Simon bent over and picked up the mask. It felt smooth, soft, like silk, and there was little weight to it. He lifted it towards his face, turned it around, and stared into the back of the mask. Looking through the eyes of Captain Clickety, he surveyed the land. Vast acres of the earth lay scorched before him, trees had been felled and hacked into pieces, and the earth itself was churned and broken. This was the monster’s dream: it was how he saw the world in which Simon and his friends lived. Incapable of seeing beauty, it substituted a veneer of destruction.

Simon threw the mask away. He could not wear it, and he certainly did not want to view the landscape through its eyeholes for much longer. He could not bear the dreams of the damned. Because he knew that the thing which called itself Clickety was indeed damned — and that damnation had touched them all, twenty years ago. It touched them still, reaching across the years and travelling the blighted inner landscapes they held deep inside them. Damnation was a road he had built within himself, a route he did not want to take.

He became aware of a vibration, as if the ground beneath his feet were beginning to tremble. Slowly, he got down on the ground and placed his ear to the earth. Yes… there it was… a slow, rhythmic rumble, like vast machinery working somewhere deep beneath the planet’s crust. He recalled the Morlock machines from The Time Machine — a story he’d loved as a boy. Was he hearing them now, the shambling Morlocks and their infernal machines?

No, that was fiction. He could not retreat into stories, not any more. He needed to confront reality, no matter what the cost.

The vibrations grew stronger and Simon stood, afraid of what they might represent. Was something tunnelling through the earth, heading for the surface right under his feet, on the spot where the Angel of the North had once stood — and should still be standing, casting its protective wingspan across the region?

He backed away, moving across the top of the rise, and then lost his footing. He tumbled down, turning and spinning and coming to rest on the footpath at the base of the earthen platform. This, too, had been torn up, perhaps by some kind of construction equipment, or perhaps by the hateful hands of a giant.

He began to move, running away from the now-barren site of the Angel. He ran across the long grass, careful not to lose his footing again, and made for the main road. Still there were no cars in sight; the road was empty for miles… except for those churning black clouds, which had now begun to coalesce, to pull together and form a single vast shape on the horizon.

Simon stared in mute horror — or was it just an echo of horror, a faint tremor of the feelings he had experienced so long ago?

The Angel of the North stormed out from those dark clouds, taking huge footsteps to cover the ground between them. Simon stood and he stared and he watched as its massive steel feet rose and plunged, making great dents in the road, cracking the blacktop, zigzags snaking from the impacts.

It was coming. The Angel was coming, and it was going to kill him, to stomp him, to flatten him into the road surface. Simon had never been so certain of anything in his life.

He turned and ran, heading away from the gigantic effigy, moving south, wishing that he could reach London at a sprint, without pausing for breath. He should never have returned here, to this godforsaken place. It was no longer his home; he was not welcome within its borders.

Glancing over his shoulder, and exposed by the light of the moon, he saw that the Angel had drawn closer.