could he stand back and take in the full scarred picture. The girl had enabled him to see what had been so fucking obvious all along.
When he’d walked into the building she had slowed down until he was level with her, and then she’d taken his hand, encouraging him. They’d walked deeper inside, hand in hand, and Boater had felt a connection deeper than any other he’d experienced in his life. This girl, this small, vulnerable victim he had been sent to abduct, was his saviour.
They’d come into this room, and she had lain down on the floor, curling up her legs into a position that made her resemble a resting infant. Then, just as the shadows began to crawl across the walls and the sound of unseen trees creaking and leaves whispering in a wind he couldn’t feel started up all around them, she’d spoken to him:
“Keep me safe,” she said, her small eyes watching him in the darkness. “Watch over me and make sure I’m not harmed.”
“Of course I will,” he replied, his body growing cold but his spirit starting to rise. “I promise.”
“I’m tired.” Then the girl had closed her eyes. And she had not opened them again since.
“I promise,” he said now, hours later. The room had changed around him, becoming outside rather than in, taking on a quality of the external.
Thick fingers of creeping vines had sprouted from the walls, covering them like some kind of blight. The concrete floor had erupted in places, and thick roots had burst through, snaking in loops to return underground. The ceiling was now a dense canopy of leaves. When he looked up, Boater could see distant starlight through the heavy matting. The moon was full, even though outside, in the old world he had left behind, the moon had been a mere crescent.
Boater wasn’t afraid. None of this felt threatening. The real threat came from out there, back in the urban wasteland he’d turned his back on. The feral kids, the clamouring debtors, and Monty Bright’s lust for whatever power lay at the heart of the estate. But in here, sitting under the whispering canopy and held tight within an enclave of ancient trees, there was nothing to fear but the badness inside him — and that was something he was now abandoning, like so much unwanted rubbish.
“I was lost before, Hailey.” He knew that she wouldn’t respond, but had faith that she could at least hear him. “I was stumbling around out there, not even knowing who I was or what I could be if I really tried. But now that you’ve found me, I can see the potential I’ve always had. I can sense another man locked up inside my skin, and he’s fighting to get out.” Tears poured down his cheeks but he didn’t wipe them away. They were good and clean and pure; a baptism in this new world he’d found. Or had the place in fact found him? “He isn’t a Bad Man. Oh, no. He’s a good ’un, this one. He’s the good Francis Boater.” He was smiling. It felt strange, as if he’d never been able to smile before. He supposed that he hadn’t, not really. Not like this.
He got up and walked towards the door. It was closed, but it no longer resembled a normal door set within a fabricated frame. This door was a solid slab of living wood: a natural barrier. There was no handle, no keyhole. He reached out and pushed it open. The door swung on hinges of fibrous vines, helped on its way by the weight of Boater’s body as he leaned against it.
Beyond the door there was a crumbling section of concrete wall. Where before there had been a long grey corridor filled with dumped trash, there was now a shadowy landscape of trees and bushes and uneven ground that bled into a thick, syrupy blackness. The broken concrete wall looked like ancient ruins against this dark backdrop. Rotten teeth of brickwork poked up through the ground here and there, like reminders of another forgotten time in history.
A series of oak trees stood proud and massive and implacable, forming a tight circle around him. Darkness bulged in the gaps between their trunks. It looked as if the trees were protecting the small, ruined room in which Hailey Fraser now slept…
“The Grove,” whispered Boater.
He turned around and saw that the door was shut. The concrete wall was covered in a layer of plants; leaves and stalks criss-crossed to form a natural skin over the man-made shelter.
The landscape was gradually smothering the unnatural structure.
There were sounds of movement in the undergrowth. Nocturnal creatures hunted for food, made their way between entrance holes to their sets and burrows and led their young on secretive night-time journeys, exploring the limits of their world. Boater looked around, at the strange florae which hid so many scurrying scavengers. Huge hand-like leaves twitched beneath his gaze, exotic flowers closed their petals over bulging stigmas and stamens, and the tall stems of large plants shuddered like eager lovers in the night.
Boater fell to his knees, raising his hands in a mockery of prayer. The trees creaked; their language was splintered, unknowable. A chorus of plant life created a kind of song with nothing but their excited, jittery motion.
The vast, eternal woodland stretched away into a primeval forest of forever outside the circular grove of ancient oaks. The borders swelled fractionally, increasing in size as the landscape fed from the dreams of a broken man with nowhere left to go. He could almost feel the place breathing.
Somewhere out there, at the edge of his imagination, Boater knew that there was a better place, an alternative to the world he had always known. But he couldn’t enter that place — he didn’t have permission to stray past its invisible boundaries.
Yet still, he felt that he was being allowed to know a little of its history.
Whatever power he had stumbled across here was neutral and existed in a realm where human terms like good or bad meant nothing. Tattered and flyblown, the energy stored here responded only to human emotion — until then, it lay dormant, a battery awaiting a charge. But the Concrete Grove estate was a receptacle for negativity: only failure and regret could be produced in such a misbegotten location.
So the power here had mutated, becoming a reflection of the stew of fear and desire upon which it fed. Boater sensed that over time things had altered here, and once-ambivalent creatures had evolved into ravenous beasts, taking on grotesque faces. New shapes had formed amid the dregs of muddy magic, and they brought with them brand new hungers.
This place — Monty Bright’s so-called ‘splinter of Creation’ — had eventually been polluted by the world inside which it was hidden. And toxins had leaked back out through rips and fissures, slowly returning to the world outside the Grove, but in other forms entirely.
This realisation hit Boater like a blow to the stomach. He felt unmoored from his life for a moment, as if his entire body had been shaken off the planet by a violent force.
“If this is a dream, or if I’m lying dead somewhere and I’ve come here on my way to someplace else, please let it never end. Let me stay here forever.” He clenched his fists and held them high, making a promise that he could never put into words. This vow came from deep inside, beyond blood and tissue and bone: this was the promise of the man who was imprisoned in the hidden chambers of his own heart, the fabled Good Man that he had never been allowed to become.
“I promise,” he said, not even knowing what he meant by those words. But the Good Man knew. He understood everything, even the things which lay beyond words, behind the mask of language.
The Good Man knew it all.
“I promise.”
And the Grove responded as it always did: with infinite patience.
After a while Boater felt calmed. His tension slipped away, lifted from him by the tranquillity which had returned to the Grove. The undergrowth was still and silent. The night felt empty and airless. The stars flickered in the vast black sky, providing just enough light so that he could see.
He stood and returned to the room, going back through the hewn timber door and closing it firmly behind him. When he looked, it was a normal door once more. Cheap plywood panels, a plastic handle, steel hinges.
He turned to face the gloomy interior of the room. The rate of growth across walls and floor had intensified, making the mulch beneath his feet seem thicker and the covering on the walls even denser than before.
Hailey’s sleeping body was obscured by what he at first thought was a dark cloud, or a mass of shadows. But as he moved further into the room, drawing closer to the girl, he saw that she was being shielded by scores of tiny, coloured birds. There was no sound; they didn’t move. The entire tableau was like a painting, a still-life image.
Then, just as the birds noticed him, movement returned to the scene: their wings beat faster than his eyes
