Silent Voices

leant back against the wall and wished again: but this time she wished her husband dead… and instantly regretted the thought, tried to take it back.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

IT WAS A seamless transition from standing in that small, cramped, green-lit place to being here, beyond the screen of oak trees, just inside the grove. Simon accepted the passage with an unfamiliar calmness. It felt like some kind of Zen moment: his mind and body acted as one, unified against the strangeness that was showing more of itself to him at every twist and turn of this journey. He’d gone beyond fear. He wanted to embrace horror — the horror he’d always felt should belong to him.

Hailey was nowhere to be seen. Now that Banjo, their doorway, had helped them enter the place she’d called Loculus, she had fled the scene, leaving them to their own devices. She did not seem to have any power here. He wondered if she’d exhausted her energies that first time, when she’d helped them escape.

He glanced at the two boys he’d known back then, who had become men he barely knew at all, and wondered what it was they were meant to do — why they were here. They were all present to face their fears, he knew that. But at a deeper level, unknown forces were warring. The three had become pieces in a game that none of them could understand.

He recalled his most recent dream, when the Angel of the North had been bowed and broken, and a weeping woman had cradled the body of her children — her twin babies. It all made sense now, in a grim kind of way. That dream, he realised, was a prophecy, a glimpse of how things might be if they failed here.

Twins.

Two parts of a whole.

Yin and Yang: opposing forces.

Comedy and tragedy. Darkness and light.

This place, he thought, must exist in a state of turmoil: the balance shifting, constantly moving back and forth between opposing points. The Underthing — whatever it was — had sniffed out that Brendan was capable of producing twins and tried to claim him early, to tip the balance in its favour. That was why they’d been brought here twenty years ago; that was why they’d been examined by uncaring hands. It had not been sexual abuse, but a sort of medical examination, meant to find out which one was the future twin-maker. Then, before things had reached their terrible conclusion, Hailey had stepped in and helped them to get away.

He remembered, now; he recalled more than he ever had before.

Standing here, in the grove where they’d been tormented, he had a mental flash: Hailey standing between them and some huge, shapeless shadow, waving her arms, flapping her weird wings, and shouting, screaming, distracting it to give them a chance to get away. He could not remember who had managed to struggle free from the leafy bonds first, but after that, they’d acted together to break out and run free.

They had acted together. As a single unit… three separate parts, joining together to form a whole.

That was important to remember.

And that was all. He could recall nothing more. He probably never would. But at least, for now, he had his horror to hold — the sordid excuse for a life that he’d led could be traced back to an actual event, rather than the scattered fragments of shattered memory.

“Look.” Marty was pointing with one hand while he gripped his side with the other. He seemed to be in pain. His face was pale, his mouth twisted into something that came as close to a snarl as Simon had ever seen on a human being.

“It’s come back. It still wants us…” Simon watched as a great shadow roiled in the space beyond the trees, moving away from them like a mobile stain across the land. “Let’s go and give it what it wants.”

Simon led the way out of the grove of ancient oaks and into an open area. The sun hung miles above them, as still as a picture, and the hills rolled away to other patches of woodland, most of them burned and blasted. To the west, across a vale of green and grey, he could see the ruins of some kind of city. Cradled between two hills, in a shallow valley, the blackened buildings waited like a ghost of shelter. “What the hell is this place?”

It was all from his dream: a possible future, where everything was ruined.

Brendan turned in a slow circle, surveying their surroundings. “I don’t know, but we’ve been here before. This land — it knows us. It can sense that we’re here. Can’t you feel it?”

“Yes,” said Marty, still clutching his side. “It feels like we never really left.”

Simon nodded. The truth of his friend’s words dug deep, piercing his heart; and in a way, they never had left this place, not really. All they’d done was peek outside the boundaries of a prison and pretend that their lives were part of another world, a place where people killed each other for money, fucked each other for company, and bobbed and weaved like fighters inside a ring, never stopping, not even pausing for breath before they reached the grave.

Ahead of them, at the base of the slope on top of which they stood, the earth began to heave. Above them, the sky turned dark, as if a huge shadow was passing above them.

Simon looked up, and what he saw there scared him more than anything else he’d seen since returning to the Grove. The sky was filled with hummingbirds. There were millions of them, just hanging there, hovering in the air about a mile above the three men, waiting for something to happen. They stretched out like a patterned sheet, covering the sky for mile upon mile — so far, in fact, that he could barely see the blue edges.

This had happened twenty years ago, too. He was certain.

“What do they want?” Brendan’s voice was tiny; he sounded like a child.

“I think they want to watch us. Or maybe watch over us.”

There were no sounds other than those caused by the men.

The air was still.

The birds were silent.

Even that incessant churning of the earth was soundless, like a film clip with the volume set to mute. They all turned to watch the chaos of soil, shifting and turning as if a huge invisible shovel were digging there. Something erupted from the muddy surface, its segmented back breaking through the soft crust and rolling like the body of a withered serpent. Its hide was dark and wet, yet covered with a fine mesh, like old teabags. There were bright yellow boils along the ridge of its spine, and as it lurched upwards and forwards, thrusting itself out of the hole in the earth, Simon thought that he saw what might have been a face amid the mass of waste that had been compressed to form its long, thick neck. Then he realised that it was all neck. Like a snake, or an old-fashioned image of a sea monster, it arched its body and slammed back into the earth, sending showers of mulch flying.

The creature did not move any closer. It kept its distance, toying with them from afar, coy as a lover. Simon had seen this thing before. He knew what it was called, if not what it was.

He had seen it in his dream.

“The Underthing,” he said. “That’s it. That’s the Underthing. This time it’s showing itself.”

He glanced up, at the hummingbird sky, and saw that every tiny beak, every black eye, was turned in their direction. Whatever was happening here, it was larger than their experience. This meeting signalled a stage in the evolution of Loculus, and he was too dim, or too inconsequential, to be given insight into what form it might take.

“This isn’t how I had it planned…” He turned to the others, his eyes moist, his mouth open. “It’s not what I expected.”

A loud clicking sound broke the silence, splitting the air and causing the birds above them to shiver. It was the call of Captain Clickety, the damned and damning song of their childhood nightmares. If the vision of waste and corruption before them was the Underthing, then the avatar, the tentacle they’d named Clickety, was now to make an appearance in the endgame that was unfolding around them.

“He’s coming now. The Plague Doctor. Captain Clickety. He’s here.” Hailey stood beside them, her voice a whisper.

Simon wasn’t sure where she’d come from, but he felt glad that she was here, if only for moral support. Her