darkness near the ground was shifting.
He closed his eyes.
“I have something for you. I have a role for you to play, and I think it’s very important. I don’t know why yet, or how, but I’m sure it’s vital to the outcome of some game none of us can see. Like moving a chess piece, sacrificing a pawn.” He lifted his hands, pulled them swiftly apart, and then slammed them together, with Hacky’s neck caught between them.
Hacky’s knees buckled immediately.
Erik pulled back his right arm and slammed it straight right into the kid’s face. He felt the bones break, the warmth of the blood as it splashed his hands. Hacky went down like a dead weight. He had no fight in him; he was weak, a puny specimen. Erik grabbed him by the collar with one hand and hit him again with the other… again, and again, and again. His cheekbones turned to chalk; his right eye bulged obscenely from its socket; a few of those yellowish teeth, stained red now, spilled amid a thick wash of bloody saliva from his mouth and onto the ground. He twitched a few times, and then was still. Erik laid him gently on the ground at his feet and stepped away.
Monty came darting out of the shadows and clamped onto the side of Hacky’s face, suckling. The kid opened his mouth and tried to scream, but a long, fat appendage slipped between his shattered teeth, filling his ruptured throat, and choking him. Hacky thrashed around on the ground, but Monty gripped tight, eating away at his face, demolishing the already ruined flesh. The baseball cap fell to the ground and rolled a foot or so away. Erik bent down and picked it up, stuffed it into his back pocket; a small memento of this strange night.
Then he took a few more steps back, away from the scene. He didn’t want to see this. The further he moved away, the looser Monty’s grip on his mind became and he began to forget the details of what he’d done. There was blood on his hands. He wiped it off on his jacket. The sounds Hacky made as the life was choked out of him were difficult to ignore, but he turned his head and stared at the old, makeshift boxing ring.
After several minutes, the struggling sounds ceased. They were replaced by sucking, slurping, smacking noises: all the sounds of feeding.
Erik tried to feel something but it wouldn’t come. The more he was exposed to whatever forces had warped Monty Bright’s body into this small, stunted monster, the less human he became. He knew it was happening, and this knowledge somehow made things worse. But still he could not experience any kind of genuine emotion.
He turned around and made for the doors, shutting them behind him as he left the Barn. The night air was warm; in the sky, clouds were gathering, forming little clumps and clusters. The moon had finally reappeared, a partial face in the darkness, and the stars were coming out to see the show.
The thought, when it came, felt like so much more than it meant on the surface. Things were shifting, breaking free. Somewhere, doors were opening — or had already been open for some time — and something was trying to come through, from another place entirely. He stared out over the landscape, the familiar fields and the dark hills beyond, and was sure that there were trees he’d not noticed before. Their branches moved, clutching like hands. They were black silhouettes huddled against the blacker sky, strange growths that had shot up while he’d been inside the Barn, allowing himself to be used as a weapon.
To Erik, standing alone there under a weird, vivid night sky, this felt like the end of something he’d not even realised had begun. For years now, he’d been blind. He had orbited this great black hole, taking from it what he could, and now the black hole was claiming everything, including him, turning it all into cosmic debris, blasting it all into black flame. If he could open up his chest, exposing his innards, he’d find bits of charcoal, a charred ruin. He was a shell; no longer a real man.
His whole existence, his perception of what it meant to be alive, had changed now that he’d met a monster.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“HI.” HE WAS standing on the doorstep like an unwelcome visitor — and perhaps that’s exactly what he was, despite what she’d said earlier on the phone. He was beginning to get used to the fact that she always made him feel uncomfortable, and he could never be sure if he was welcome or not.
“I suppose you’d better come in.” Abby stepped back, turned and walked slowly down the hallway, her bare feet soundless on the worn carpet. Her feet were dirty, as if she’d been walking in mud. He wondered what on earth she’d been up to.
Marc followed her inside, trailing her into the living room. The lamp was on but the main lights were off. The curtains were open, letting in the light from the streetlamps.
“How about a drink?”
He could see that she’d already been drinking: a wine bottle, half empty, was resting on the table.
“Yeah, cheers.”
She left the room and returned with another wine glass and a new bottle, the belt on her dressing gown hanging loose, a flash of grubby thigh exposed under the flap. She topped up her own glass and then filled his, killing the first bottle. She sat down without tightening the belt.
“So how come you couldn’t sleep?”
“Bad dreams.”
He nodded. “I can sympathise. What about?”
“My daughter.” She sipped her wine. Her face was so pale that it looked bloodless. Her long fingers seemed to lack meat; they were all bone.
“I’m sorry… it’s none of my business.”
“It’s okay,” she said, standing. “Fancy some music?” She moved over to the stereo without waiting for a response and switched it on. Classical music came through speakers that were set high up on the wall, mounted on brackets in the corners of the room.
“I wasn’t expecting that.” He smiled.
“We’re not all hopeless fucking chavs, you know. I realise that people like you — journalists, the middle class, all you wankers — like to cast us in a set role, but a few of us have experienced culture.” She sat back down, drank from her glass.
He ignored the remark about class. He didn’t want to get into that now. “Shit… that’s not what I meant. I just didn’t realise you were into classical music.”
“I like to read, too. Dickens, Emily Bronte, Mary Shelley, George Orwell… surprised, aren’t you, that a fuckwit like me even knows who Orwell is?” Colour rose back into her cheeks, her eyes flared, challenging him.
He held up his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, okay, I’m a dick. I shouldn’t make assumptions.”
“No, you shouldn’t. Just because I live on a shitty estate, drink too much and sleep around, it doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”
He was unable to tell now if she was rattling his chain or being serious. She was a mystery, this woman. Perhaps that was part of the reason he was so drawn to her, why he found her so damned irresistible. Why he wanted to fuck her, even when he didn’t want to be near her.
“Sit down. You’re cluttering up the room.” She patted the sofa next to her, those long fingers twitching like the limbs of a pale mantis.
He sat down, took a mouthful of wine, wincing at a slight bitterness. She was much more animated than the last time he’d seen her, and he liked this version of her better. There was passion here, the type of which he had not even been aware of before. A fire burned deep inside her, but obviously she rarely let it out on show.
“I’m glad you called. I’ve been thinking about you.”
She turned to face him, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “Don’t get too cocky. Yours was the first number I could think of to call. All the other guys I know, they’d read too much into this. I was lonely. I got scared because of the nightmare. I just want some company, okay?”
“That’s fine by me.”
“Just don’t fall in love with me. They fucking all do that, and I hate it.”
