here, at the very heart of the story he’d been so reluctant to tell?
He turned around to face the door. A figure loomed into view. It was a man, average height, stocky build. He was wearing a black woollen balaclava over his face and carrying a wooden baseball bat. The man stood in the doorway, legs apart, and hefted the bat. One hand gripped the handle; the other opened to receive the wide end of the bat.
“I…” Marc didn’t know what to say. This whole situation had become unreadable. He’d been flung from grimy reality into loathsome fantasy and then back again, and now he was so unmoored from the world that he felt unable to react to anything. “I’m sorry,” he said, not even knowing what he meant, what he was apologising for, or to whom he was speaking.
“Erik Best says hello.” The voice was flat, heavily-accented, and held the trace of a smile. More figures crowded behind the first, having reached the landing. They each had a similar bat in their hands.
“What do you mean?” Marc walked backwards, going deeper into the room.
The first figure stepped over the threshold, the bat swinging at waist level. He whacked it into the door frame and dust clouded at knee level, moving like a light mist. “Erik Best says hello,” he said again, as if that explained everything.
And in a way, it did.
Hadn’t Erik Best already threatened him once? He certainly didn’t seem like the kind of man who would repeat himself, or who gave second chances. This was what he got for messing with the wrong woman. It was his payback for sleeping with Best’s beloved. He should have seen it coming, but the truth was he’d been so caught up in events around the estate — and in particular those at Harry Rose’s house — that he’d failed to see the signs. This was the only language these people knew; the dialect of violence, or revenge and repercussion. It was always the same: you do what you’re told or you get smashed.
“I didn’t mean it…”
The other man laughed, entertained by Marc’s pathetic excuse. Marc laughed, too, getting the joke. But his laughter was mirthless. It was heavy with despair, the laughter of a doomed man.
There were three other men, and they too had entered the room. The four of them stood there, the bringers of some abstract apocalypse, and stared at Marc. They were calm, collected; clearly they were used to such acts of aggression.
“I can give you money.”
The lead figure shook his head slowly. He raised the bat and swung it through the air, sending off a warning shot. He took another step forward. Marc took two steps back. It was like some idiot dance, a warm-up for the choreography of busted heads.
Shadows moved around the room, splashing the ceiling, staining the floors. Marc watched them as they shifted across the boards, climbed the plaster walls and made strange patterns on the remnants of old wallpaper. There was a strange humming sound in his ears. He wondered if everyone who was about to be killed heard this: a muffled sonic boom, the soul’s implosion?
Then he realised the sound was an external one. It was coming from outside his head… outside the room.
He turned to the boarded window, his gaze drawn by the busy shadows. There was something out there, on the other side of the boards. He stared at the edges of the timber. The shadows bled through the gaps, like a thick fluid. The boards began to rattle, and then to shake. In what seemed like a couple of seconds, the boards were being torn away and a chaotic display of flapping wings surged into the room, filling all the spaces, swarming around his assailants and causing them to panic.
They were hummingbirds, and there were hundreds of them. But they stayed away from Marc, choosing instead to attack the other men in the room. He watched with difficulty through the screen of madly blurring creatures, amazed at the sight of the four grown men being pushed down to their knees. Hummingbirds pecked at them, pulling away strands of clothing and then of flesh. Screams mingled with the sounds of humming, and Marc turned away, appalled by the sight of so much madness.
When he turned back, the men were still. They lay on the floor, crumpled, broken and torn. The baseball bats were harmless now, discarded in the melee. The hummingbirds were silent — they hung in the air, unmoving, as if time had stopped, reality had frozen in place. Even their wings were motionless, as if someone had taken a photograph and this was the resultant image.
Marc walked forward and raised his arm. He opened his fingers and grasped at the flat, static image. He touched one of the birds near the front of the group, stroking its hard little beak with the tip of his forefinger. It felt like a stuffed bird: lifeless, essentially unnatural. He moved along the wall of birds, enraptured by their colours — at first they’d all seemed black, but now he could see that they were many-hued, things of beauty. He could hear no further sounds, even from outside the Needle.
When he reached the other side of the room, he stopped and turned around. As if drawn to the exact space where he was looking, four or five birds darted out of the frieze and flew headfirst at the back wall of the room. Sounds rushed in to fill the void; his ears popped. From outside there came deafening sounds of explosions, as if buildings were falling, roads and pavements were being torn up.
The birds hit the wall, backed up, and then flew at it again. Upon each kamikaze impact, the plaster cracked a little more; the cracks widened and set off a chain reaction. They crazed the wall, becoming deep zigzagging fissures. The wall split, the joints in the mortar turned to powder. Chunks of plaster, and then brickwork, fell away. Instead of revealing another room behind, the wall peeled away to show him something else, something that he could hardly believe. Thick tree roots mingled with the ruined brickwork, knotted and shredded.
He walked over to the damaged wall, stepping over the now dead birds that had sacrificed their lives to open up this wonder. He peered through the cracks and the dead roots and saw an expanse of flattened grass surrounded by the broad bases of huge oak trees. He bent over and stuck his head through the largest of the cracks, then stepped through, into the centre of the grove of ancient oaks that waited beyond.
As he climbed through, the trees spun away and he followed a trail of black leaves. The trees were replaced by what looked to be the base of a cliff. The cliff face was littered with openings which led into dark caves, and inside the mouth of one of these caves there stood four young girls dressed in raggedy clothes. He knew who they were immediately. They were the Gone Away Girls, and they were waiting for him.
He approached them in silence, hearing only the crisp black leaves crackling against the soles of his shoes. The earth had a heartbeat; he could feel it vibrating against the skin of his feet. There was power here, but it was old, tired, and unfocused. Like an ageing man at the point of death, it was troubled, confused, did not know what it was supposed to do or what it had done in the long-ago past.
Up close, he could see that the girls were dressed in animal skins, but the fur resembled nothing he had ever seen before. There seemed to be scales amid the pelt, and he was sure that he caught sight of eyes blinking at him from the garments, as if these were not the pelts of slain animals but living things, protective vestments that would attack if the girls were in danger.
Then, abruptly, they were once again just four girls dressed in torn but
They turned and entered the cave. Marc followed them, not knowing what else to do. He had not asked to be here, but it seemed that his presence was required. The girls were his welcoming party, and they were unthreatening, simply acting as his guides.
The cave walls were covered with strange paintings, but he could barely make them out because of the lack of light. He focused ahead, trusting the girls to lead him. He listened to their footsteps and kept going in a straight line, his arms held out at his sides to ensure that he didn’t collide with the cave walls. Before long, dusty light began to glimmer in the air before him.
The ground was smooth underfoot. The air was moist but not unpleasant.
Up ahead, the cave broadened out to form a cavern. Along the far wall were the entrances to other caves, but in front of these was a broken stone plinth upon which two hummingbirds fought. But, no, that wasn’t it. The birds were not fighting; they were balancing some kind of gemstone between the tips of their beaks. Their wings were a blur; they were soundless inside the cave.
“That’s the first tear ever shed here, in Loculus.” Abby stepped out of the shadows to his right and placed a hand on his arm. Her face was battered and bloody. She smiled. He had not seen her smile before, and it made her look beautiful, despite the terrible marks upon her face. Here, in this place, she looked different than she did in the
