Tom smiled. He backed away, leaving the door wide open. He stumbled, fell, and watched in silent awe as the uppermost branches of a mighty oak tree shattered the pavement right outside his house and the gnarled trunk began to rise, rise, rise, like the long, straight arm of a god reaching up towards that darkened sky, fingers unfurling to grab at whatever it could catch.
He smiled. This was it. They were here. Nothing would ever be the same again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
HIS MIND BUCKLING under the force of the revelation, Marc knelt on the floor in the grubby room and breathed deeply, as if he were underwater. One hand rested palm-down on the floor by his feet; the other gripped his side, where a stitch had developed. He opened his eyes and stared at the peeling walls, dotted here and there with obscene graffiti, the boarded window, the floor upon which tatters of carpet still clung like stubborn scabs. Someone had painted the word Flange on a wide skirting board; six-inch-high letters, bright red against the scabbed white paintwork. The floorboards in one corner were curled up, like a row of tongues.
“I’m the baby,” he said, breathing normally again. “I was there… I was here… I’m the baby.”
This explained his reticence to really commit to the book he was writing, and the fact that he found it so easy to create excuses not to write, not to research too deeply. Harry Rose had been a distraction. That was the truth. Rather than being drawn to the man because of the information he had (which turned out to be a lot more than he’d ever hinted at), Marc had used the old man to divert his attention from the actual work of writing his account of the Northumberland Poltergeist.
His parents had not died in an accident. They’d driven off the road deliberately, to end whatever nightmare they had started when they refused to offer baby Marc as a sacrifice. That was why the memory of the crash had always seemed so unreaclass="underline" he’d filled in the blanks himself, giving a context that was false. They were holding hands when his mother swerved the car off the road. They were in it together; it was a suicide pact.
He stood, shaky and exhausted. His body felt bruised, the result of a massive force rocking him to the core. He stood at the centre of the room and wondered what the hell he was supposed to do with this new-found knowledge. He had an entire history of which he’d previously been unaware; a whole new aspect of his life had opened up like a dark flower.
He stared at the walls, at the flaps of wallpaper. He recognised the pattern on a strip that hung down like a window blind: pale yellow sunflowers, with thin stems and oversized heads. A sudden flashback assaulted him: he was lying in his crib, crying. The television was blaring; his small, chubby hands were reaching for those pale flowers…
A sound distracted him: somebody was moving around downstairs. He heard crunching footsteps, a door banging open and then shut, and more footsteps slowly climbing the stairs.
Slowly, he backed towards the door. The sounds grew louder; whoever it was, they were heading for this exact spot. Fear gripped him, holding him in place. Who was this coming for him now? Who even knew that he was here, at the very heart of the story he’d been so reluctant to tell?
He turned around to face the door. A figure loomed into view. It was a man, average height, stocky build. He was wearing a black woollen balaclava over his face and carrying a wooden baseball bat. The man stood in the doorway, legs apart, and hefted the bat. One hand gripped the handle; the other opened to receive the wide end of the bat.
“I…” Marc didn’t know what to say. This whole situation had become unreadable. He’d been flung from grimy reality into loathsome fantasy and then back again, and now he was so unmoored from the world that he felt unable to react to anything. “I’m sorry,” he said, not even knowing what he meant, what he was apologising for, or to whom he was speaking.
“Erik Best says hello.” The voice was flat, heavily-accented, and held the trace of a smile. More figures crowded behind the first, having reached the landing. They each had a similar bat in their hands.
“What do you mean?” Marc walked backwards, going deeper into the room.
The first figure stepped over the threshold, the bat swinging at waist level. He whacked it into the door frame and dust clouded at knee level, moving like a light mist. “Erik Best says hello,” he said again, as if that explained everything.
And in a way, it did.
Hadn’t Erik Best already threatened him once? He certainly didn’t seem like the kind of man who would repeat himself, or who gave second chances. This was what he got for messing with the wrong woman. It was his payback for sleeping with Best’s beloved. He should have seen it coming, but the truth was he’d been so caught up in events around the estate — and in particular those at Harry Rose’s house — that he’d failed to see the signs. This was the only language these people knew; the dialect of violence, or revenge and repercussion. It was always the same: you do what you’re told or you get smashed.
“I didn’t mean it…”
The other man laughed, entertained by Marc’s pathetic excuse. Marc laughed, too, getting the joke. But his laughter was mirthless. It was heavy with despair, the laughter of a doomed man.
There were three other men, and they too had entered the room. The four of them stood there, the bringers of some abstract apocalypse, and stared at Marc. They were calm, collected; clearly they were used to such acts of aggression.
“I can give you money.”
The lead figure shook his head slowly. He raised the bat and swung it through the air, sending off a warning shot. He took another step forward. Marc took two steps back. It was like some idiot dance, a warm-up for the choreography of busted heads.
Shadows moved around the room, splashing the ceiling, staining the floors. Marc watched them as they shifted across the boards, climbed the plaster walls and made strange patterns on the remnants of old wallpaper. There was a strange humming sound in his ears. He wondered if everyone who was about to be killed heard this: a muffled sonic boom, the soul’s implosion?
Then he realised the sound was an external one. It was coming from outside his head… outside the room.
He turned to the boarded window, his gaze drawn by the busy shadows. There was something out there, on the other side of the boards. He stared at the edges of the timber. The shadows bled through the gaps, like a thick fluid. The boards began to rattle, and then to shake. In what seemed like a couple of seconds, the boards were being torn away and a chaotic display of flapping wings surged into the room, filling all the spaces, swarming around his assailants and causing them to panic.
They were hummingbirds, and there were hundreds of them. But they stayed away from Marc, choosing instead to attack the other men in the room. He watched with difficulty through the screen of madly blurring creatures, amazed at the sight of the four grown men being pushed down to their knees. Hummingbirds pecked at them, pulling away strands of clothing and then of flesh. Screams mingled with the sounds of humming, and Marc turned away, appalled by the sight of so much madness.
When he turned back, the men were still. They lay on the floor, crumpled, broken and torn. The baseball bats were harmless now, discarded in the melee. The hummingbirds were silent — they hung in the air, unmoving, as if time had stopped, reality had frozen in place. Even their wings were motionless, as if someone had taken a photograph and this was the resultant image.