“Hailey? Is that you, baby? I’m here. I’ve come to get you.”
The air inside the grove began to darken, as if a dense black cloud had crossed the sun. Shadows crept into the open, sliding through the gaps between the trunks and out from beneath low-lying foliage.
The thing outside the grove started to move inward, making its way through the trees. It was huge, bulky and covered in thick, dark fur. Like a bear, it moved first on all fours and then reared up on its hind legs to clear felled trees and other random obstacles.
“Oh, no…” Lana looked around, but there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. The beast had seen her; it knew exactly where she stood and how vulnerable she was.
The thing dropped and loped on all fours into the clearing, with its large, shaggy head turned to one side. The creature’s flanks were huge and glossy and blood-flecked. Its heavy paws were large and threatening. Sharp claws curved like sickles from the ends of its rudimentary fingers; they scraped across the bases of the trees, cutting out swathes of bark.
“Please. Don’t.” Lana was powerless. Finally, she was afraid. She saw now the stupidity of coming here, of trying to bring back her daughter from a place that did not want to let her go. In fact, how did she even know that Hailey wanted to leave? What if she had been coming here for months, seeking solace and some kind of communion with the dormant forces that were now beginning to awake? Perhaps she had found her true home here, among the lost and ruined artefacts of other people’s dreams.
At last the beast turned its head towards her. Its face was human; she knew it would be, and even whose features she would see.
It was Timothy: her dead husband. His eyes stared at her from above grizzled, hairy cheeks, and he frowned as if in vague recognition.
Lana stood there and waited for him to come to her. She had been waiting like this for such a long time.
Standing on his back legs, Timothy lurched towards her, slashing at her with those long, lethal claws. He roared; the air shook. Birds took flight around them, rising from the underground to take to the sky. Lana felt slick warmth at her belly, and when she placed her hands there blood flowed across her fingers. She grabbed at the wound, trying to stop the flow, but it was no good. She was already dying.
She closed her eyes and felt her body being hauled into the air. She flew, slung up into the branches of the nearest tree, and then once again she felt those claws go to work on her stomach, slicing away her sense of self.
What felt like hours later she opened her eyes. The world was upside down. The bottoms of the trees were at the top of her field of vision; the rustling canopy was the ground. Her ankles ached. Her belly was empty. There was nothing there, just a cool breeze across the exposed inside of her gut. Steam drifted past her eyes, from the upside-down ground and towards the tumbledown, loosely-packed sky.
A small upside-down girl stood several yards away, fumbling with the hem of her dress. She was wearing the tattered remains of a school uniform, but her legs and feet were bare. Her small toes were filthy with soil. The trees and the foliage closed around her, keeping her beauty and her innocence close. The air held her like a gentle hand. She was part of this place now, and would never again be forced to endure the concrete agonies from which she had finally escaped.
“Goodbye, Mum.” Her voice was like music; the sound played on and on, repeating even after the girl had turned around and begun to walk away, into the trees, heading into the world beyond the grove. Lana recognised the song; she just couldn’t place the name of the singer, or join in with the words.
“
EPILOGUE
HAILEY WALKED AWAY from her mother, remembering the dream she’d once had — the dream that had now become real. She entered the dense shadows between the oak trees, and was lost in darkness for a little while. But when she came out on the other side, free from the grove at last, she was bathed in bright sunlight.
Far off in the distance, down a vast hill and across an expanse of low-lying open woodland which lay at its base, there was a dense forest of younger oak trees. And beyond that — who knew? Perhaps there were vast cities to explore, deep oceans to navigate. Monsters she might need to fight. Or perhaps all that existed was the eternal forest, and the primeval oaks, and the baleful shadows they cast.
Finally Hailey realised that none of this really mattered. Whatever was out there was out there, and all she needed to do was be willing to discover it all. There was nothing left for her where she had come from; all she had, everything she would ever need, lay ahead of her, in the trees and the shadows of her new home.
She had somehow come upon the central truth of this place, this grove within the Grove. At last it all made sense, and she repeated what she had learned silently inside her head, like a mantra to keep her company on the long journey that lay ahead of her:
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE CONCRETE GROVE does not exist, but it is in fact based on several council housing estates I’ve known, lived on, or lived near during my lifetime. The Needle, for instance, is based on the infamous Dunston Rocket in Gateshead, Tyne & Wear, and the idea for the circular layout of streets in the Grove was pinched from an old Scottish estate long since demolished.
I’ve tried to keep the geography of the North-East as true to life as possible, with only the occasional cheat invented to serve the mechanics of plot. Northumberland is, to my mind, the most beautiful part of England. Despite the fictional horrors I’ve placed there, I can’t recommend the area enough for a visit.
The people in this novel are real, every single one of them. They had different names when I met them, and their circumstances might not have been 100% the same as the ones in the novel, but I’ve known and mixed with the real-life counterparts of Tom, Lana and Hailey, Francis Boater, Terry, and even Monty Bright. If anything, the real characters were more outlandish than the versions I’ve created for the story.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANKS ALWAYS TO Emily and Charlie for showing me another world; to Mark West for his beta-reading skills and enthusiasm; Sharon Ring for taking chances; John Haslam and Mick Parkinson for moral support and match-day drunkenness; Emily again for allowing me to use our romantic weekend away to do some valuable research; Jon Oliver for commissioning a mad idea for three books from a one-page synopsis; and the whole talented team at Solaris for helping me pursue this vision and get a story that’s been in my head for decades onto the page.
