to track down Marty… it’s freaking me out. He wants to get the three of us back together, like the old days.”
“The good old bad old days…” Jane’s voice held not a trace of humour.
“Yeah.” He reached up and grabbed her hand, squeezing it. “That’s exactly what they were.” Her fingers were hot, as if she’d been handling hot coals. “I’ll be fine. You go and sort the twins out and I’ll try to get some more sleep. If I don’t, I’ll be a nightmare later on.”
Brendan yawned. Dimness shimmered at the edges of his vision.
Jane curled up her nose, an expression she sometimes made when she was thinking. “Invite Simon over for dinner. Tonight. We can talk like adults, get some stuff out into the open for a change.”
“Aye,” he said, not fully registering what she’d said. “Okay.”
Jane left the bed and approached the window, where she shut the blackout curtains. Her body was diminished by the retreating light, like an oil painting being slowly erased by chemicals. She left the room without saying a word, grabbing her dressing gown from the back of the door. When he was on nights, she always kept the following day’s clothes in the bathroom, so that she could get dressed without bothering him. She was good like that: thoughtful.
Brendan lay down on his belly. His back was causing him too much irritation to put any weight onto the affected area. The acne was no longer hurting, just making its presence felt. He kept the covers down around his waist just to let the air circulate across the broken flesh. He closed his eyes. He didn’t even realise he was sleeping…
(…UNTIL HE WALKED across the room and opened the curtains, where he looked out of the window and down to the street. But the street was gone. In its place there stood a vast forest, a wall of trees whose trunks and branches reached up to form a canopy above the roof of the house, the roofs of all the houses. He could not see through the thick gathering of tree trunks; it was dark in there, the air black and dense and unwelcoming.
Even from here, this compromised vantage point, he could see that there were bulky things moving within the dense trees, flitting from trunk to trunk, hiding in the gloom. The sunlight did not reach them through the thick canopy; they were creatures of the dark, inhabiting the shadows.
He stared down at the bases of the trees, trying to pick out a pathway. The foliage there was bunched together, as if it had been left to grow for many years. There were no proper paths, no hacked trails through this undergrowth, and the trees were untouched by human hands.
All that lived there was whatever had always been there, hiding among the trees and the bushes and burrowing into the rich, loamy earth.
He opened his mouth to speak, but the trees began to shudder, silencing his voice before he could make a sound. A strong wind gusted through the forest, snaking between the tree trunks, and brought with it the stench of carrion. He could smell it even through the closed window. As he watched, the window glass began to stain, to darken, as if slowly tainted by smog. Just before he lost sight of the trees, he glimpsed something vast and ageless and shapeless surging towards him, causing the branches to quake and the trunks themselves to lean apart and uproot to make room for the gargantuan interloper…)
…HE DIDN’T REALISE he was sleeping until he woke up, still lying on his front, his mouth tasting like yesterday’s stale beer. His eyes were sticky. He struggled to open them fully, and settled instead on peering through slits.
The house was silent. Jane must have taken the kids to school, and then she’d probably gone for her morning gym session — or did she have a class, dancing or spinning or circuit training, something like that? He couldn’t remember. Everything was so hazy; his brain felt as heavy as a bowling ball as it shifted clumsily inside his skull.
He did remember her suggesting that he invite Simon to dinner, though, and right now it sounded like it might be a good idea. Meet on home turf; talk things through like adults. She was good like that, Jane. She always knew what he needed, even before he did.
He pulled his arms under him and straightened them, forcing his stomach off the bed. But there was something wrong — the action wasn’t as smooth and easy as it should be. He felt heavier than he ever had before in his life, as if… as if there was someone sitting on his shoulders… his acne-ridden, pus-weeping shoulders.
“What?” He could say no more; it was too much of a strain to even attempt it. He blinked his crusty eyes.
Whatever was perched upon his shoulders shifted its weight, scratching at the already ravaged skin. He winced, holding back a scream, and then flopped back down onto his belly. Panicking now, he reached up and around and tried to grab whatever it was, to throw it off his body. The thing — small and hard and slippery — scuttled across his shoulder blades, dodging his anxious fingers and adjusting its riding position.
“Come here,” he whispered. “Bastard.” He grabbed for the shape, trying to get a grip on its elusive form, but the thing moved further down his back, tracing the line of his spine. In the unnatural darkness, lying flat on his belly, Brendan began to suspect that he was going to die. Nobody would ever know what happened here, in this room, and he became convinced that this was an attack by a sliver of whatever power they had confronted that day twenty years ago, when they were held captive inside the Needle.
Something about this situation felt so familiar, as if he had been here before. Not here, in this room, but in this position, with something crawling across his back and tearing at his flesh. Infecting him… polluting the skin of his back and shoulders with a poison that would harm him for the rest of his life. Driving its fingers beneath his skin, probing his orifices, his most private parts.
Acting out of desperation now, he flipped over onto his back, ignoring the pain as his acne burst against the sheets, and let out the scream he had been holding on to since waking, hoping that it might break the spell.
Something small and fast darted across the mattress, dropped onto the floor at the foot of the bed, and scurried into a corner of the room. Brendan struggled to his feet and made his way to the window, pulling back the heavy blackout curtains to let in the light. He was blinded for a moment, bright sunlight taking away his vision. When he was able to open his eyes, he spun around and inspected the room. Nothing was out of place. Everything looked as it should: the books on the shelves, the photos, the pictures on the walls, the furniture. It was all so depressingly normal.
Had he still been dreaming? It was possible; it had happened before. If he was honest, it happened all the time. He would wake up, unsure if he was still trapped inside a dream or a nightmare, and everything around him would take on a sinister slant. Sometimes he would even see things, strange visions that he could not explain.
But no, that couldn’t be right. He knew that this time he had been awake, and there had been something inside the room with him, pestering him, harassing him.
He walked across to the wardrobe, reached up and opened the door at the top, near the ceiling. Fumbling through the DVD cases and the curled pages of magazines, he grabbed hold of what he thought was the acorn but it felt too big… much bigger than before. He used both hands to bring it down, and when he looked at the thing in his hands he was shocked to see how much it had grown.
The acorn was now the size of an Easter egg and covered in faint cracks, some were beginning to open up and give a glimpse of something fibrous, like dense webbing, inside. He turned the acorn around in his hands, and at the back, where he’d been unable to see, there was one crack that was much larger than the others. It was big enough, in fact, for something to have crawled out. An insect, perhaps, or a small mammal — something like a field mouse…
He held the acorn in his hands, peering into the crack. From what he could make out, the acorn was hollow, and it was empty. Whatever had emerged from this cocoon was still out there, in the world. Like a living bad dream hatched from inside a human skull, released to create mischief.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SIMON WAS DOING push-ups on the floor when his phone rang. He jumped up and grabbed the handset; it was Brendan???s home number, rather than Natasha trying to track him down again. For reasons he couldn’t even begin to think about, not until he had everything else squared away, he still did not want to speak to his
