“Who, or what, is the Underthing?” His mouth was still dry, but he made himself heard. He had to know. “Is it Captain Clickety?”
The girl’s smile was sadder now; it contained a capacity for misery.
“All energy is neutral in Loculus, and for a long time balance was achieved.” Her smile faltered, fell away. “Then human dreams turned bad; as Man evolved, became stronger, his dreams turned sour. Pollution entered this place; all this became tainted.” She hovered backwards, raising her arms. “That’s what the Underthing represents.
“Loculus is Heaven to some and Hell to others; freedom to one, a prison cell to another. It is nothing and it is everything.
“The Underthing is, in many ways, a prisoner of paradise. He wants to escape to the hell of the world in which you men live — a world I used to know. Loculus is held together by balance, two halves operating as a whole. The Underthing collects twins, clutching them to him in the hope that he can upset the balance — separate the two halves, split the two worlds and sneak in through the gaps. Not many twins are born in the Grove. In here, in Loculus, if there is the possibility of a set being conceived, he smells it through the fabric of the place, and he is drawn to it.”
Twins.
Marty glanced at Brendan, who had clearly come to his own conclusions.
“He wanted me all along… because of the twins. He knew I could have twins. He smelled them on me when I was ten years old…” Brendan was crying. Tears streaked his long, pale face.
Hailey spoke again, through the trees: “Captain Clickety is an avatar. The Underthing cannot leave this place, so he sends out tendrils. Once there was a man who tried to enter Loculus… a plague doctor, a man who hid his lusts behind the mask of medicine. The Underthing uses him occasionally, to walk abroad out there, in the Concrete Grove. Like a tentacle reaching for something shiny, Captain Clickety goes out looking for ways to upset the balance.”
“How do we get over there?” said Simon. “How do we get into this ‘Loculus’? You mentioned that before, when we were kids, we were doorways. What about now?”
She shook her head. “I’m afraid that time is gone. This time I have sent you a new doorway. I can’t do anything more. Last time I made myself known to the Underthing, and he’s been aware of my presence ever since. I have no special power. I’m just a mediator — all I can do is show you the way to go.”
At that moment something moved to Marty’s right. He spun around, adopting a defensive stance — guard up, covering his face, feet pointing forward, knees bent — and saw a small, thin man with a white mask over his face walk out of the tree-screen.
“This,” said Hailey, “is Banjo. He is your doorway. It’s why he’s here, what has kept him alive. He has this one job to do before he can be free of his nagging body and escape the demands of the world.”
Banjo stood there, in his stained clothes, his white mask — which Marty now saw was made of bandages — shockingly bright under the strange, diffuse green light.
“Go ahead, Banjo.” Hailey’s voice had adopted a gentle, motherly tone. “You know what to do.”
Banjo reached up and took hold of a loose flap of bandage, and then he proceeded to unwind the wrappings, turning the bandages round and round his head and gathering them in his fist. He kept on going, revealing yet more layers of white, until finally he uncovered what was hidden beneath.
The man’s face was badly scarred. The scars were old, shiny, and reflected the green light like plastic. His eyes were open, and the lids were thin and tattered, like paper. He had no lips, just nubs across the top and bottom of his mouth opening. He looked like he was grinning: he was the man who grinned forever, but who never quite got the joke.
His raised arm moved around his face with mechanical regularity, removing the remaining bandages. Marty expected the movement to stop when his ruined face was fully exposed, but it continued after that.
In fact, when Banjo reached the end of the gauze dressings, he kept on going, unwrapping strips of his damaged skin in the same long, loose coiling motion. It was like peeling an orange: the flesh came away easily, like rind, and fell to the ground. Next was the bone, which was stripped away in the same manner. And beneath that, inside the man’s skull, was a cluster of leaves. The dried leaves fell, falling to earth in a slow, spinning drift, and as Marty and the other men watched, something strange happened… Banjo was no longer there, and in his place there appeared an opening in the trees.
The screen had vanished; this was here, real.
Real trees; a real wood, and on the other side, a small, open space: a peaceful grove, within which they had once been bound and had pain inflicted upon their ten-year-old bodies.
All at once, and without hesitation, the Three Amigos stepped back into the ancient oak grove. There was no longer any doubt; each man wanted to be here, to settle old scores and put his ghosts to rest.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
JANE SAT BY Harry’s bedside, crying into her fists. She had been unable to contact Brendan. She felt helpless, a useless part in a machine that had gone spinning out of control.
The doctors — the same ones who’d sent him home — didn’t have a clue what was wrong with Harry. His vital signs were all strong; the tests they’d run had come back negative. All the apparatus of modern medicine seemed to agree on the same result: Harry was fine, he was fit and healthy and should not be lying in a hospital bed in what was, for all intents and purposes, a coma.
“I need you,” she said, not sure if she meant her son or her absent husband. “Please come back.”
The heart monitor at the side of her son’s bed beeped rhythmically and steadily.
Jane closed her eyes and wished: she wished that Simon-fucking-Ridley had not come back into their lives; she wished that Brendan had never been friends with those other two boys; she wished that she could do something to save her son, her family, her very existence.
The machine continued to beep.
Harry did not move. His face was serene above the bed sheets. His hair was neatly combed into a side parting — she’d done it earlier, just to occupy some time and get rid of the nervous energy rushing through her body.
The hospital ward was busy. The nurses had pulled the curtains around on their rail to give her and Harry some privacy, but this was still a public ward. The family had no private health care; they had to accept whatever they were given. She could hear the hushed voices of other visitors, the soft-soled nurses’ shoes as they brushed across the tiled floor, the frightening sounds of other medical machinery. Somebody was speaking on the phone at the nurses’ station. They laughed, and then remembered where they were and began to whisper.
Jane reached out and took Harry’s small hand in her own, above the covers. There was no response from his body; his muscles did not even twitch. She felt empty, as if he’d turned his back on her, ignoring her show of affection. She knew this wasn’t true, that she was being silly, but it did not help. Her son didn’t even know she was here, at his side, crying for him.
“I need you to come back,” she said, this time speaking to them both — Harry and Brendan. Isobel was still at a friends’ house gearing up for the sleepover, ignorant of the hell Jane was going through. How did you tell a ten-year-old that her twin brother might die, and nobody could do a thing about it because they had no idea what was happening to him?
She closed her eyes, and for a moment — a second, at most — she thought that she heard Harry making a strange clicking sound, as if he were pressing his tongue against the side of his mouth the way he did whenever he saw a dog on the street or in a neighbours’ garden.
She opened her eyes, but of course Harry was just the same: he had not made a sound.
Jane let go of his hand and stood. She took out her mobile phone and checked it for messages. There were none. She went to the nurses’ station and told them that she was stepping outside to make a call, to see if she could contact her husband. The nurses smiled and nodded, and their eyes were filled with pity. Poor soul, they were probably thinking. He’s probably out at the pub, or in the betting shop.
Jane went outside. When she made the call, and there was no answer, she felt like smashing the phone. She
