The Concrete Grove

“They said that you were with someone — another woman.”

He stared at her face, her slack cheeks and her closed eyes. Her small, hard nose. Her slit of a mouth and the multiple chins beneath.

“I don’t mind. I know you have needs. You’re a man, still a young man, really, and you can’t deny your desires.”

She was asleep now: he could see that she was. He knew her well enough, and had spent so many years by her side, that he could not fail to recognise when she was no longer awake. Yet her speech was crisp and erudite. She was speaking lucidly, unhurriedly. Her words were as clear as the sound of falling water.

“But they said she’s dangerous. The TV people. They told me that she’ll hurt you. Something’s going to happen, and everyone will suffer. We’ll all pay a price, a debt that’s owed. We’ll all get hurt because of her.”

She’s sleeping, he thought. Talking in her sleep. She does this all the time — don’t get freaked out. She knows nothing.

But he was freaked out. In fact, he was terrified. How could she know that he had been with a woman, and one whose very presence made him weak and senseless with desire? It wasn’t real, couldn’t be. This was some kind of fluke, a random circumstance. There was no way on earth that Helen could know, and there certainly were not any people inside the television to divulge the information.

He looked over at the screen, needing to keep an eye on it, to watch it more closely. The static was going crazy. It was like a swarm of monochrome bees trapped in a jar, bouncing off the glass walls, confused and trying to get out, get free, back out into the open.

“She’ll break everything. Cause damage. They told me this, the TV people. They had skinned faces and long, bent-back legs. There were tiny birds with bright wings hovering around them and landing on them, sitting in their open palms.”

The television screen bulged. Just once, like an air bubble. Then it went dark. Reflected for a moment in that jet black surface, Tom saw something that could not possibly be his father’s face, no matter how much it resembled the man’s features.

“She’ll open doors that should stay closed.” Helen’s voice was drifting now, growing weaker, quieter. “She’s going to let them out, and… she doesn’t know… it.”

Then she went quiet, apart from her ragged breathing, and the faint sound of her little snores.

Tom prepared to get up and leave the room. The face in the television screen — the one that he refused to acknowledge looked like his dead father — was no longer visible. He shifted his weight on the mattress, causing it to creak and rock slightly beneath him.

I’m seeing things, he thought. That’s all.

Helen sat bolt upright, her eyes open wide. They were all white: no pupil. Just big white marbles stuck into the pale dough of her face. Her mouth dropped open, her tongue lolling like a fat dead worm. “Kill me.” She said. “You deserve better.” Her eyes were normal now; the pupils were dilated but at least they’d gone back where they were meant to be. Her face had regained some of its firmness, and looked less like the face of a corpse. “I know you want to, Tom.” She slipped back onto the pillows, her eyes closing. “I know it’s what you want.”

Tom stood and backed away from the bed, terrified that he might disturb her and the whole performance would start up all over again. He moved towards the door, keeping one eye on Helen and the other on the dead television screen.

“Maybe I want it, too.”

He could not be certain that she said the words, but he heard them anyway, inside his head. The stale air in the room buzzed with energy, like the air before a storm. Helen’s statement — whether real or imagined — was stuck in his head, refusing to budge. The words hung there like dead animals nailed to a wall: a reminder of something bad, the first bloody act in a chain of events that could not be prevented from running its course.

He backed out of the room and tried to shut the door. He could not remove his fingers from the handle; they were glued there by fear. Perhaps if he remained where he was, with his hand on the door, then nothing Helen had predicted would happen? Perhaps he could stop the world, simply by standing there, unmoving.

Or perhaps the world would simply keep on turning without him, unaffected by his ridiculous protest, and the damage his wife had spoken of would still destroy them all. One by one, like diseased trees falling in a dying forest, or plastic targets put down by gunshots.

Maybe nothing he did would ever matter, not any more. Not now.

Because what if his life was already over — if in fact it had ended ten years ago, right after the accident — and since then he’d just been playing catch-up?

He shut and then re-opened the door — just an inch or two, the way Helen liked it. When he leaned in close and peeked through the gap he saw a large, grey hairless mass on the bed. Fins twitched above the covers like the legs of a dog dreaming of the run. At last the sea cow was sleeping…

…then it was her again: it was Helen, asleep on the bed, her nightdress in disarray. His wife: the person who depended on him so completely. The woman he was meant to love.

As he moved away from the door, Tom had the terrible feeling that he was leaving behind one kind of darkness only to enter another.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

HAILEY IS DREAMING again, but this time it’s different. She is not naked, for a start, and her surroundings are not at all familiar. She is standing barefoot in a dense wood, wearing sheets of flesh still warm and bloody from whatever animal they have been sliced from. She looks down at her body beneath the pelts, and sees that there are designs painted upon her swollen stomach in blood.

Signs and sigils; numbers and letters in a language she does not recognise.

A spell, a hex: some kind of protective charm?

She rubs at her skin with her fingers, trying to remove the blood, but it has already dried and marked her like indelible ink. She cannot remove the writing; it has made of her a book, a bible: a living chart filled with vague rules and instructions.

“Hello. Is anyone here?” Her voice lifts into the air, hits the canopy of trees, and then falls back towards her. The words fade, become silence.

Silence.

It strikes her all at once that she can hear nothing, not even the sound of her own breathing. Her voice was the only thing able to penetrate that wall of silence, and even her words could not survive for long once they left her mouth.

She feels as if she is standing in the middle of a movie scene with the volume set to mute. Her ears ring with pressure, but she cannot even hear an internal sound. There’s just a dull soundless throbbing, a gentle ache that is not entirely unpleasant.

She takes a few tentative steps forward and her feet make no noise on the leaf-coated ground. She feels her bare feet sinking into the mulch, the cold mud seeping up between her toes.

The pelts hang heavy around her, like a royal cloak. Their warm and clammy underside presses against her sin.

The air touches the exposed parts of her flesh, making her tingle where the blood-words have been written.

Her grotesquely distended stomach hangs like a sack of offal. Whatever she carries inside her is still, unmoving. She fears that it might be dead. The bloated flesh sways as she moves, its weight trying to drag her down towards the earth.

As she walks through the woods she begins to make out strange shapes high up in the trees. Weird stick- figures made of twine and twigs, tied and knotted and placed like decorations. They hang suspended from the branches, their tinder-stick limbs twitching in a breeze she is unable to feel: rudimentary bodies twirling, spinning, like children’s mobiles.

“Can anybody hear me?” The sound of her voice is shocking, but it makes no impact on this space, just bounces off invisible walls and falls to the ground, defeated. It feels as though there is a sheet of glass between her