Beyond Here Lies Nothing (The Concrete Grove Trilogy) (27 page)

She didn’t respond.

He slapped her again, leaving a red mark on her cheek, and then tugged her, dragging her limp body across the carpet towards the door. Still she chanted; she hadn’t even paused for breath. She just kept saying those same words, over and over, a prayer to whatever dark urban gods she thought might be listening.

Erik felt power flood through him. It wasn’t rage, nor was it hatred. This was a purer force, and it came from somewhere outside his body. Like an alien sun shining down on him, the energy warmed his body, cleansing him like a balm.

“This is it,” he whispered. “This is where it all ends.” He tugged the gun out of his belt and clenched his right hand into a fist around the handle. He brought it down, hard, on the top of her head. The sound it made when the base of the grip struck her skull was like a hammer blow. He hit her again, this time with the barrel on the side of the face. He felt her cheekbone crack. Her skin split and blood spattered, splashing the carpet and even the weird tower she’d made at the centre of the room.

He only wanted to scare her...

Erik was blind. He could see nothing beyond the violence.

He hit her again and again, shredding the skin of her face, shattering the bones of her skull, and yet still she continued to chant those words, through mashed, bloodied lips, and even when her broken teeth began to fall from her mouth.

...to scare her into loving him again.

When Erik stopped she was lying on the floor, curled up like a baby. There was blood everywhere. Still she chanted the rhyme, taunting him.

He was breathing heavily, as if he’d just done a tough workout. His gun hand ached, the knuckles were swollen. He raised his face to the ceiling and let out a wordless wail, an animal sound of pain and self-hatred. Then he returned his attention to the room, and what was in it.

Abby continued to mumble from the floor. She’d stopped chanting and was now trying to speak, but he couldn’t make out the words.

“Look what you’ve done,” said Erik. “This is your fault – you did this. I only wanted to scare you. You’ve made me into something that I despise.” He raised the gun and stared into the barrel. It would be so easy to end it all now: one bullet for her, one for him. Maybe that’s what had been coming all along. Neat and tidy: a smooth little suburban death. He pressed the end of the barrel to his cheek, and then moved it across to his temple. After a second, he pointed the gun at Abby, his finger tightening on the trigger.

“Please...” Her voice was weak. She was speaking through a mouthful of blood and shattered teeth. “Don’t kill me...”

“No, I’m not going to kill you. I love you... all I’ve ever done is love you. Can’t you see? Don’t you understand? I’ve loved you ever since I first met you, and when we lost our baby I would have kept on loving you, but you wouldn’t let me. Instead you went with other men and told me about it. You rubbed my nose in it, like a fucking dog that’s puked up on the carpet.”

“Sorry... hurting... everything hurts.” Her voice was unrecognisable.

For a moment he was acutely aware of the selfishness of his actions, the intensity of his feelings, but then he shoved that insight aside, ignoring it. Why the hell shouldn’t he be selfish? There was no one else to look out for him, to protect his interests. Ever since he was a kid, he’d been forced to look after himself. That made a man hard; it toughened him to the point that nothing could penetrate the armour he had worked so hard to put in place.

“You bitch... look what you did. Look what you did to us. We could’ve been happy. We were a family... a proper family...”

He could no longer bear to look at her, so he raised his eyes and stared across her collapsed body.

Behind her, there was movement. Thin silver branches, leafless and grasping, were slowly emerging from between the gaps in the conical mound of Tessa’s belongings. Like long, thin arms, the branches slid out, swaying in the air; gnarled twig-hands reaching for something that wasn’t there.

Erik tightened his grip on the gun. He approached the mound. The branches appeared to sense him and twitched towards him, turning from silver to brown. He raised the gun and took aim. His hand was shaking so he used the other one to steady the gun, just like he’d seen in the movies.

“No...”

Abby, still on the floor, was speaking to him. He turned around.

“Don’t kill it... our baby... our Tessa... she’s come back...” She spat out blood. There were gaps where a couple of teeth had been.

He swivelled and watched the branches. There were now patches of skin on them, like pale pink bark. As he watched, the patches grew, the skin, spreading like a stain to cover the rest of the branches. The branches became thin arms; the spindly twigs at the ends turned into small hands. Pieces of the construction fell away from Abby’s sculpture – jumpers, paintings, a My Little Pony duvet cover – and parts of a body were visible beneath. The sapling child was quickly transforming into flesh and blood, as if the process were speeding up because he was watching it happen. Like a low-rent Pinocchio, the lifeless simulacrum was gaining sentience.

His finger twitched on the trigger – a reaction that he was unable to control – and the gun went off. He managed to twist his wrist so the shot went wide, punching a hole in the wall near the window.

“Tessa?”

Her face formed quickly, like reversed footage of plastic melting, and he began to make out her lovely features beneath the mess of creation. What at first looked like a long, beaklike snout shortened to form her delicate little nose. The eyes opened, trailing strings like pizza cheese between the upper and lower lids. The eyeballs pushed outwards, and then settled back into the sockets. The eyelids blinked.

Erik dropped the gun. He fell to his knees and clasped his hands together as if in prayer.

The Tessa-thing stepped from out of the hollow cone, parts of her makeshift sarcophagus breaking away, the whole structure tumbling and falling to the floor. She walked towards her father and embraced him, enveloping him in her warm, damp flesh.

“Baby... my baby...” He was weeping now. He could hold back the tears no longer.

Abby had crawled across the floor and now lay at his side, reaching out towards them both. He felt her hands grabbing at his legs, and angled his body so that she could be included in the embrace.

The three of them, together again, reunited at last, right at the centre of the black hole.

The family unit was coming back together, reforming. The damage had been repaired. He had no idea what kind of magic this was, but he didn’t want to question it too deeply. In his experience, those kinds of questions usually led to trouble, and he didn’t want to wreck what had been made here, in a dim bedroom in a council house at the back end of nowhere.

This was not the kind of place where wonders were meant to happen. But here it was: here was wonder. Here was awe.

Then, weary and aching, he became slowly aware of a faint clicking sound.

He moved back, pushing Tessa away to create a gap between them, and what he saw made him question everything else he’d been thinking. The thing that resembled his daughter stood there, naked and genderless – with just a bare patch of skin between her legs and no navel or nipples –wearing a strange white mask in place of her pretty face. The front of the mask jutted out to form a hideous beak, and its eyes were hidden behind small black shades.

She raised her arms to the ceiling, spreading her legs and bending her knees to brace herself against the floorboards. Black leaves that fused together to become a long black cape or overcoat cascaded downwards, seeming to flow from her open hands, to cover her body, flapping at first like wings before moulding itself to her shape.

In one hand she was holding a short pointed cane.

It was only when she looked back down, staring directly into his eyes, that he realised the clicking sound was coming from Tessa. And then it occurred to him that this half-formed creature was not Tessa at all, but something that was using her image in an attempt to gain entry into this world.

He turned away from the image, unable to fully comprehend what he was seeing.

“Put on some clothes,” he said to Abby, trying to cling to anything that might represent normality.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

R
OYLE RUSHED ACROSS
the hospital car park, thinking the worst.

He’d received the call twenty minutes ago and had wasted no time in getting here. His car was parked at an angle, taking up two spaces, but he didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, he was lucky to have made it here without running someone down. He could remember none of the journey; he’d completed it on auto-pilot.

He barged through the main doors and headed towards the maternity wing. The hospital was quiet; people were pushing trolleys laden with breakfast into side rooms, a few patients wandered the halls in their dressing gowns, doctors and nurses with weary eyes and soft morning faces talking in low voices.

At the reception desk, Royle told a small, frail woman with thick spectacles who he was and why he was here.

“And we called you?”

“Yes,” he said. “I got a call not long ago to tell me that she was here.”

The woman checked her computer for the second time, the light from the screen reflecting in the lenses of her glasses. “What was the name again?”

“Mine?”

“No, the patient’s.”

“Vanessa Royle.”

Her eyes darted across the screen. “I’m sorry, but she isn’t on here... when exactly was she brought in?”

“She came in last night, with pregnancy complications, or so I was told. Listen...” He paused, trying to rein in his temper, and something occurred to him. “Oh, hang on. She might be down under her maiden name.” He shrugged when the woman glanced up at him, her face filled with tired pity. “Vanessa Mantel.”

“Mantel... ah, yes. Here she is. Ward Ten. Just go down the corridor there and turn right at the end.” A smile crossed her face, briefly but brightly, and then she dismissed him by peering over his shoulder at the other people milling about near her desk.

He walked through the doorway the woman had indicated and passed a couple of empty rooms, several closed doors, and a ward containing a group of pregnant women. When he finally reached the ward where Vanessa was staying, he paused and tried to gather his thoughts.

They hadn’t told him much over the phone, just that he needed to get down here because his wife had been brought in with complications. They told him not to worry, but to get here as quickly as he could. Not to worry... such stupid advice, especially when it came from someone at the hospital where your pregnant wife had been rushed in the early hours of the morning.

He remembered the sound he’d heard – or thought he’d heard – coming from her belly the last time he’d seen her. Hadn’t she also said that the baby had been kicking hard? Surely that was a sign that the baby was okay, that it was developing well. A dead baby couldn’t kick.

He closed his eyes, trying to banish such thoughts. But it was no good. This was his biggest fear, the terror that gripped him every night, part of the reason he reached for the bottle: that the baby would die, and it would kill his marriage when it did so. All he wanted, everything he needed, was in this building. He couldn’t face the idea of leaving it here, in a medical waste bag headed for the incinerator.

Fuck, why did he always have to think such negative thoughts... why was he so damned dark? Sometimes he blamed the job, but then he thought that he was probably drawn to become a police officer in the first place because of that darkness, which had always been at his centre: a hard little kernel of night. And wasn’t the alcohol just another way of trying to drown that seed, to render it powerless? Or was it just a way of watering it and helping it to grow?

He ran a hand through his hair, straightened his shirt collar, and pushed open the door.

He saw Vanessa immediately. She was in the bed nearest the door. Her face was so pale that she looked like a ghost of herself. She didn’t see him at first, so when he approached the bed she twitched in shock when he spoke.

“How are you?”

She smiled. “Okay. It’s good to see you.”

He felt like crying. He wanted to start punching and kicking the walls, tearing apart the place. “What happened?”

“Have you spoken to the doctor?”

He shook his head. “Not yet. I came straight up here, to the ward.”

A nurse walked over from her station. “Mr Royle?”

“DS Royle,” he said, not understanding why it was important to state his rank to this civilian. That wouldn’t help here. Death would not be scared off by official seniority.

“DS Royle... yes. The doctor asked me to let him know once you arrived. He’d like to talk to you, if that’s okay.”

He reached out and Vanessa’s hand found his. He squeezed it, looked down at her.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Go and see the doctor. I’ll be fine.” She squeezed him back.

He followed the nurse back out into the corridor, where she led him to a small, cramped room. The door was open and a middle-aged doctor sat behind a desk, squinting at a computer screen.