“When I got there, he was regaling his cronies with stories of his youth — utter bullshit, like always, but they were a captive audience. When I interrupted him, he slapped me hard across the face. Instead of letting him see me cry, I ran away. I headed towards the Embankment. I remember the moon was huge… the stars stared down at me like bright little eyes, and when I saw it lying there in the gutter, breathing white mist into the cold air, I thought I was dreaming. It was a unicorn, like in the books I’d read. Something from a fairytale. But its horn had been sawn off about an inch away from its head, and its face was battered and bleeding. So I knelt down and I started to stroke it, crying and still ashamed — still hurting because that bastard had shown me up in front of the whole pub. The beast died in my arms, with me looking it straight in the eye. And do you know what my only thought was, the thing that kept going round and round in my head? Well, I’ll tell you. All I could think of was this: I want to meet whatever did this. I want to see what’s fucking crazy enough to kill a unicorn.”
The silence snapped, like a rubber band stretched past breaking point. Tom could have sworn that he heard it break.
“Monty, I don’t like this.” Terry was losing his grip. It was obvious. He was no longer a threat; his fear was nullifying him. He wanted only to be out of the room.
“Fuck this,” said Lana. “Fuck you and your sad little nostalgia trip. Where does your man have my daughter?”
Bright turned to her, his face ashen in the television light. “I have no idea. Really, I don’t. All I know is that he was following her through the Grove, and he caught up with her. That was the last time I was able to speak to him. That’s why I asked you here, to help me find her. To bring her in so we can find out what she knows about that place — the other grove, and the infinite garden beyond.”
“Do you really think I’d help you find my own daughter? The person I love most in this shitty world?”
“Of course,” said Bright, taking a step towards her. “If the price is right, you’ll do anything. You’ve already proven that. So let’s get this show on the road.”
Tom felt ill. The television screens were flickering. Their plastic shells looked soft and malleable. He thought about the famous painting by Salvador Dali, the one with the melting clocks.
“Yeah,” said Lana, slowly unbuttoning her coat. Her expression was flat and lifeless, like a death mask. Her voice was low. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
The creatures Tom had seen a few seconds ago were crammed to the front of each television set, pressing against the grubby, cracked glass and clamouring to be let out. Their faces were squashed, their limbs folded, their squat bodies pulsed and flexed, forcing the screens outward.
He glanced back at Lana just as she let her overcoat drop to the floor. It formed a black puddle around her feet, like spilled tar.
Lana was naked from the waist up. She had on a pair of tight leggings and some grubby running shoes, but her upper body was bare. The Slitten hung like bats from her breasts and beneath her armpits, but he could only see them when he looked to the side, watching them from the peripheral. She’d taught him that first, when she’d shown them to him that afternoon, nesting quietly in Hailey’s bedroom.
These, then, were the ultimate response to Bright’s media-monsters. The yin to his yang. Everything must have an opposite, and if Monty Bright’s hideous soul had helped create the things inside the televisions, then Hailey must have generated the Slitten to oppose them.
Everything that came next happened so fast: much too fast for Tom to fully comprehend the order of events. It was all he could do to keep up with the action, and ensure that he played his part to his best ability.
CHAPTER THIRTY
BOATER WAS SO tired that he could barely move. He’d been stuck in the same position for what felt like hours, ever since he’d gone outside the room to look at the scene which lay beyond the borders of everything he had mistakenly believed to be real.
After that, he had been gradually overtaken by a great lassitude, a strange sense of creeping lethargy that began at his extremities and moved inward. Finally he was unable to move from his spot on the ground at the centre of the oaks. Or even to think about moving. It was nice here, comfortable. The concrete walls had been stripped away, dissolved by the natural growth as he had watched in wonder. Small grey protrusions — perhaps the edges of unearthed foundations — could still be seen amid the thick tangles of low-level greenery, but they were too few and too scattered to matter.
The hummingbirds were still gathered around the girl, but now they had lifted her off the ground. It had taken a long time, and much effort had been expended, but somehow they’d managed to raise her a few inches above the soft, damp earth and they held her there, in a delicate envelope of blurred wings and muted primary colours.
Boater glanced down, at his body. Even this small movement took a long time. His muscles were stiff, unhelpful. Large thorns had burst through his flesh, erupting out of his chest. Branches had punctured his back, to twist inside him and exit through his stomach wall. He was being consumed by nature; this place, this ancient woodland, was absorbing him. First it had taken the building, and now it was going to work on him, transforming his flesh and sinew into a strange new entity — something partly human and partly plant. Soon the human parts would be gone, and all that remained would be an exotic new growth on the ground inside the grove, beneath the wonderful canopy of shading leaves and trembling branches.
Soon Francis Boater would be home. His journey could go no further, but even this far was enough. It was, he thought, a fitting end.
It was strange to consider this place as home, but it felt more homely than anywhere else he had been. His surviving family were scum, his friends were criminals, and the man he worked for was a monster. So why not just stay here, where he was truly accepted? Why not become as one with the loam and the natural fertilizer where he had so easily made his bed?
Another clutch of twigs slid out between his ribs, forcing them apart and weakening the bone. He heard the bones snap dryly, like desiccated wood, but there was no pain to accompany the sound. Herbaceous plant life did not know pain: it simply grew and withered, lived and died, as part of an endless biological cycle. His internal organs had fallen into his lower abdomen, becoming deciduous, like ripened fruit slipping from the bough.
Sunlight cut through the grove’s canopy, knifing the air and creating prison bars of light around him. Morning had arrived in this place without him even knowing that the night had ended. Boater sighed; the sound was weak, barely even there at all.
“I’ll watch over you,” he said, his voice breaking off, fading away. “I…” There was nothing more. He could no longer form the words in his spongy, fungal mouth.
The girl was still hovering above the ground, borne on hummingbird wings in a facsimile of flight. Like a broken angel she hung there, her school uniform hanging in tatters, one shoe on and the other cast away, where it sat beside an eruption of vine leaves. She swayed in the air, unsteady yet in no danger of falling back to earth. Her guardians — the birds that had taken over from Boater as her protectors — would not allow such a thing to happen.
Beyond the grove of oaks, in the denser, sun-dappled growth, large forms moved. Trees creaked and moaned; animals scattered through the undergrowth. Something was approaching, and its intentions were as unclear as everything else here — friend or foe, good or evil, the thing could be anything and everything combined.
Boater had realised as he sat there, sinking into the reality of the grove, that whatever forces converged here, they were ambivalent. Neither good nor evil, they simply existed, waiting for a time when they could be harnessed. Everything here was protected, and hidden within the fabric of the housing estate which had been raised upon the site of the original magical grove. He could see all of this playing out before him, like a projection on a screen. He was now a small part of the history of the place.
If only Monty Bright knew the truth. Perhaps then he would stop looking for something that didn’t exist, other than inside the mutated husk of his heart.
