preferred to think that it was the threat of going back to prison; he’d served three years for sexual assault when he was in his early twenties, and the experience had scarred him enough that he could not ever face another visit.
She pushed open the bedroom door and stepped inside. The curtains were closed, but dim light penetrated the cheap material. The room looked as if it were filled with dust; the air shuddered as she moved through the space. Harry was a motionless mound in his red plastic Lightning McQueen bed with the
Harry didn’t seem to be moving at all. She was worried that he’d stopped breathing. She knew that she was being silly, that the doctors had given him a clean bill of health, but still… when you were a parent, it paid to be just a little bit paranoid.
Slowly she crossed the room and stood at the side of the bed. She reached down and pulled back the quilt, revealing the sweaty top of Harry’s head. His hair was soaking. She tugged the quilt down past the back of his knees (he was sleeping on his belly, as always). Still Harry did not move.
“Hey, kidda. You okay?”
He did not even stir.
Jane’s heart felt as if it were gradually climbing her chest, inch by inch, making its way towards her throat. She swallowed; her throat ached. She heard a strange humming sound, but it was only inside her head.
“Harry?” Her voice was croaky.
She reached down and nudged his shoulder, just a little, barely hard enough to move his little body. Then she did it again — harder this time, applying more pressure, easily enough to wake him.
Harry was still.
“Harry… baby… wake up for Mummy.”
She dropped down onto her knees at the side of the bed. Her hands ran over his back, feeling beneath his armpits to see if he had a temperature. His skin was cold; too cold. Not icy, not quite, but cold enough to be of concern. She rolled him over, onto his back.
“Harry!”
His face was pale. His lips were a light shade of blue. His eyelids did not flutter; the muscles in his face were loose, relaxed. She shook him, hard, trying to wake him. “Harry! Time to get up!” Her voice had become shrill, the tone rising as the panic set in. She fought hard to keep herself under control, to keep calm, but she recalled the hummingbird that had erupted from his throat, and the convulsions on the bedroom floor. Nobody seemed to want to talk about the hummingbird, at the hospital. They ignored it in the hope that it would go away, much like the bird itself had flown out of the room. The convulsions, though, fascinated them. They’d loved the fucking convulsions: they were normal, regular symptoms that could be studied and explained away. They were nothing at all like the insane image of a tiny American bird being expelled from a little boy’s throat.
She picked up her son and ran for the door, cradling his head in the same way she’d done when he was a baby. She hurried downstairs — not too fast, just in case she fell and broke both of their necks — and made her way to the phone. She called an ambulance first, quietly amazed at how calmly she was able to handle the conversation.
She hung up the phone and pressed her fingers against Harry’s neck. There was a pulse; it was strong, regular. He wasn’t dead. That was good. It was something she could hang on to, a rope to cling to in the darkness, which was rising slowly from the floor like a thick mist to consume her.
Then she called Brendan, to tell him what was happening — even though she didn’t have a fucking clue what was happening. She needed him here, with her, not on some stupid wild goose chase with a couple of blokes who had never really been his friends, not since childhood, and perhaps not even then, because they’d all been too young and far too selfish to know what friendship really meant.
She punched his number into the phone and listened to the ringtone, holding her boy against her breathless chest and wondering if she still had the strength to speak.
It was only when she got the recorded message, saying that his phone could not be reached, that she began to cry.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
AS THEY APPROACHED the Needle, Marty couldn’t help but think of a scene from
The Three Amigos were back in town, and this time they wouldn’t go down without a fight.
“What’s so funny?” Brendan stared at him, his brow creased and his eyebrows slanted.
“Nothing,” said Marty. “Just a daft thought, that’s all.”
He stared up at the tower block, feeling a strange sense of black-tinted nostalgia. The last time they’d all been here together, something monstrous had occurred. None of them could recall the details, but the act had spread a rancid shadow across the rest of their lives. It seemed melodramatic to think in those terms, but it was true. No other language could do the thought justice: there was nothing subtle about what had happened to them here, and he only wished that he could remember what it had been.
Or did he?
That was the big question, wasn’t it? Did he really want to know what had gone on inside those tall concrete walls? Was he so eager to find out what had been done to them, when the sturdy upright panels had been so readily shunted aside to reveal a dark grove of trees and whatever waited beyond them, its intentions darker still?
Even now, standing before the building, he was unable to answer his own questions.
The sides of the tower looked black in the odd afternoon light, as if they were covered in oil. The blackness had a metallic sheen, and it shimmered. The illusion did not last; it was gone in moments, but it was long enough for Marty to realise whatever they had come to confront knew they were here. His stomach lurched; the thing within him shifted slowly, deliberately, chafing up against his internal organs and rattling like a prisoner at the bars of his ribcage. He was convinced that he felt a tiny hand-foot clutching his liver, and his chest took another knock from the wrong side… the inside.
He clutched at his side, gritting his teeth against the pain.
Whatever Doc said, he was convinced that he was carrying around inside him some kind of cartoon demon, a hand-drawn phantom from his childhood, a monster that had leapt from the pages of a book he should never have been allowed to read.
“So,” said Simon. “Are we going to do this? Now, in broad daylight?”
Brendan nodded, quiet again.
“If this was a horror film, we’d wait till after dark before coming snooping around in a derelict tower block.”
Brendan giggled, but it didn’t sound quite right, like a pressure valve, a release of pent-up tension.
“Fuck it,” said Marty, tensing his body, trying to ignore the tenant inside his gut. “What have we got to lose?”
“Everything,” said Brendan. Now he was deadly serious; there was no hint of humour in his voice.
“Nothing,” said Simon, moving forward and fumbling with his keys as he approached the gate in the hoardings. “Nothing at all.” He waited a moment, looking up at the sky. Then he glanced back down at the ground, as if establishing his position in the universe. “This isn’t exactly going as I’d planned,” he said. “Not at all, if I’m honest.”
Marty tried not to sigh. He was growing impatient, but he didn’t want to let the others see. “How do you
