The Concrete Grove

Is that what you’re trying to say?”

Boater nodded. He raised his head. He felt tired, so very tired.

“Look around you, Francis. Look at my walls.”

Boater turned his head and stared at the framed pictures and photographs. He’d seen them all, many times before. He didn’t know who any of the people in the portraits were, and the other stuff — sketches and diagrams of weird objects, buildings and places — left him cold. He didn’t appreciate art or culture. His idea of a good night out was to drink until he fell over, and the only films he liked featured lots of car chases and gunfights.

“That man over there. See him?” Monty walked over to the portrait in question, which hung next to a strange three-panelled print of demons cavorting in giant teacups and fragments of broken egg shells. The painting showed the face of a man with thinning hair and fleshy features. A funny-looking bloke, thought Boater. I bet he didn’t get much fanny.

“That’s Arthur Machen. He wrote stories and novels, a lot of them about another place that exists alongside our own. A place where there are angels and demons. A real place, mind you, not some daft country you can get to through the back of a wardrobe. No, Machen’s other place was a realm of spirituality. It was a world where faith and belief were very real, and they had faces… sometimes they were hideous faces, and sometimes they were beautiful.”

Boater stood there in silence, unsure of what his boss wanted from him. He looked at Monty, and then he looked back at the framed portrait. He pressed his lips together, and then moved them apart so that he could finish his drink. It was just a picture of an ugly old man. There was nothing more to see.

“What I’m trying to say, Francis, is that a lot of people have strange feelings and ideas. Some are equipped to express those ideas, and others keep them locked up inside. You’re changing, that’s all. Something is changing you. We’re all very close to something that’s exerting a kind of energy — a psychic power, I suppose, that’s altering the way we look at the world. It’s the place I’ve been trying to find for years, ever since I found that book, my little Bible. And possibly before that, without even knowing.” He pointed over to his desk, where his beloved copy of Extreme Boot Camp Workout was laying face down amid some scattered papers. “It’s all in there — even some of Machen’s words on the subject. He wrote a story called ‘N’, where he said that a fragment of Creation had broken off and landed in London, where it acted as a doorway to allow the mystic to intrude upon the everyday world.”

Boater’s head was throbbing. He felt like a man standing on a ledge, thinking about whether he should leap or turn around and walk away. Jumping had never felt so appealing. He understood none of this.

“I need you to do something for me, Francis.” Monty had changed the subject again. He often did this, swinging his conversation in unexpected directions. “This is a big favour. You’re the only one I can trust. Terry and those other clowns, they’re okay in a fight outside a nightclub, or to use as muscle when I need to claim a repayment, but you have certain sensibilities — especially now — that make you unique. You’re my man, Francis, my fox-in-the-box. You always have been.” He smiled, but his lips were stuck to his teeth and it made him look slightly odd, as if he were wearing a mask.

Boater resisted the urge to shudder and returned the smile. But it felt wrong, as if he too were forcing the muscles of his face into an unnatural expression.

“First let me show you something. Grab that bottle and let’s go back downstairs. There’s something I think you need to see.” He waited for Boater to move, and when he did Monty waited some more, watching his man, his fox-in-the-box, with eyes that betrayed a mean, seedy hunger.

Boater kept the whisky bottle in a firm grip. It felt like the glass neck of the bottle might break if he gripped it any tighter. For some reason, he wanted desperately to uncork the bottle and swig the entire contents down in one. He thought that if Monty attacked him he’d use the bottle as a weapon. Then he wondered why he was even thinking such a thing.

“Let’s go down, Francis.”

Boater glanced one more time at the portrait — what was his name, Arthur Mackem? The subject’s watery gaze seemed to take him in and then spit him out again, judging him as unworthy. He looked away, feeling ashamed. Why did he always feel so ashamed these days, as if he were somehow seeing the real Francis Boater for the first time and judging himself as worthless?

They went through the door and once again descended the old wooden staircase, with Monty in the lead. The disembodied landings seemed creepy and shadow-filled, as if figures stood just out of sight on the timber boards. When they reached the basement level, Monty turned and walked in a direction that led away from the ‘play room’ where they’d taken Lana Fraser.

Boater rarely came down here if it could be helped; he wasn’t comfortable with all that earth, and then the weight of the building above it, pressing down on his head. He liked to see daylight, a way out of the darkness, and this felt like they were turning their backs on the world above to seek solace in the musty darkness under the ground.

“I’ve never shown you this room.” Monty’s voice sounded flat, as if he were covering his mouth with something. “The only other people to have seen this place are dead.” It was not a threat. Monty was simply imparting knowledge.

Boater remained silent. The bulbs in the wall lamps guttered like candle flames. He listened to the sound of their footsteps as they made their way along the narrow passage, and ran his hands along the cool stone walls. He didn’t know why these underground rooms had been built — perhaps they were originally meant to be storage areas — but Monty loved it down here, in his private maze. There were rooms where beatings had been dished out, quiet corners where women had wept and other small chambers filled with drugs that would be sold on the streets of Newcastle, or handed out to the local dealers in the Grove for distribution closer to home.

Part of the myth of Monty Bright was stored here. The stories people told on the streets, the facts they twisted to become legend, had all started here, as fragments of Monty’s self-built reality.

“In here,” he said, pulling up short at yet another ordinary door. The paint had peeled. The wooden surface was pocked with small abrasions. “This is where I keep them.” His focus had drifted again, like it sometimes did when he spoke about the knowledge he had learned and the things he had written in his worn copy of Extreme Boot Camp Workout. Monty’s voice sounded like it was coming from miles away.

Boater was on the verge of turning around and making his way back above ground, where he could breathe some fresh, clean air, or at least the air that passed for clean and fresh in the Grove.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” said Monty, with a rehearsed air. Indeed, Boater had heard him use the phrase many times, usually in the moments before someone was beaten or cut or raped. Sometimes it even preceded a killing blow.

Monty unlocked the door, pushed it open, and blackness pulsed in the room beyond. Boater followed his boss inside, wishing that he had walked away after all. He didn’t like the feeling he got when he crossed over the threshold. It felt like someone had died in there.

“This is what I wanted to show you.” Monty reached out a hand and flicked a light switch. Dim light spilled down the walls and crept across the floor, failing to fill the far corners but illuminating the very centre of the space like a spotlight on a shabby stage. “I wanted you to meet my secret council.”

Boater looked down at the floor and saw a bunch of old television sets. Most of the screens were cracked; some of them were partially shattered. Each set was of a type that was now rarely sold. There were no flat screens here; no HD-ready plasma models. Just a lot of old, busted television sets like the one his mother used to have in the parlour when he was growing up.

“Monty…” But he didn’t know what to say. This was too weird. None of it made any sense.

“This is where I get my information. Can you see them in there? They tell me things: the bad stuff that’s going to happen unless I do something to prevent it.” Monty was down on his knees in front of the first row of televisions. He was reaching out a hand and brushing the screen with his fingertips, as if he were cleaning the surface of dust. “They help me. They advise me what to do.”

The screens were all dark. These television sets had not worked in years, maybe decades. Even Boater could see that. There was no doubt in his mind that nobody had watched anything on these things since the days when there were only three terrestrial channels available through a roof-mounted aerial or antenna.

“These are the lords of all I survey. They see everything. Their eyes are all around the Grove. They travel to different places, to people’s homes, through the airwaves and they spy on my debtors. Then they bring back