It was strange seeing his old friends again, especially together like that. They’d both changed quite a bit, but he would have recognised them anywhere. There was something about the way they moved, some trace of the children they’d been. Simon’s swagger, Brendan’s reticence… the boys had become men, and yet something vital had been left behind.
And there was the way that Simon had saluted him, just the way they used to when they were kids.
He knew why they were here. He’d picked up Simon’s messages on his voicemail. At the sound of his old friend’s voice, whatever was hiding within him — and he knew what it was; he just had trouble naming it now, because he suspected it could hear his thoughts — had turned right around inside him, hurting him. Doc had claimed that the wound was clean, that there was nothing inside, but Marty didn’t believe that. He could feel it, curling around his abdomen: a small, squat invader, using his body as a home. Part of him knew that none of this could possibly be real, but another part of him — the part that had been stunted as a child, not allowed to develop properly — knew that it was real, and he was being possessed, or haunted, or both, by something from a childhood nursery rhyme. The infant Marty Rivers’ deepest fears were manifesting inside the adult version; he was a cocoon, and soon that fear would hatch out, the egg within the egg, the horror coiled up within a nest of horrors. Soon it would return to the outside world, and Marty had no idea what might happen afterwards.
He turned away from the window and grabbed his drink. Whisky for breakfast again: this was becoming a habit. He took a sip and went through into the bedroom, where he stripped off his T-shirt and stood before the mirror. His body was smooth, the muscles visible beneath his skin. At first glance, it looked like he had a bit of a belly, like the unfit farts who hung around on the old estate. Then, upon further investigation, it was clear that the bulge in his abdomen was irregular; it wasn’t formed by layers of fat. There was something… unnatural, weird and disturbing about it.
He laid a hand on the bulge and felt it shiver. It was like being pregnant, he supposed, and the thought was almost amusing.
Almost.
He recalled a newspaper report from a few years ago about a man who’d gone through breast implant surgery after a drunken bet. There was full-spread story in one of the red-top newspapers, with photos showing the man proudly displaying his new breasts in a low-cut shirt, the top buttons undone to show off his cleavage. At the time the images had repelled Marty; they had made him afraid in a way that he didn’t understand, and this had quickly turned to disgust. Right now, standing before the mirror and examining his own altered form, he realised that it was the notion of invasion, of something foreign being present inside a person’s body that had caused him such grief. That was why he’d never liked women with fake breasts; the thought of something underneath their skin, nestling there, had always made him feel slightly afraid.
The shape slithered around inside him, coiling around his innards. It wasn’t painful. The sensation was even mildly pleasant. But the feelings it provoked were deeply disturbing, at levels he’d not even been aware of before. When he closed his eyes, he saw three boys bound by leaves and twigs in a secluded grove, and shadows moving, patrolling the boundaries like jailors.
“What do you want?” he said, speaking to the mirror. His silent invader tightened its grip and his heart began to pound harder. He thought of Simon and Brendan out there in the car park; he saw once again Simon’s splayed fingers making a fist as he waved up at the window, mouthing words that Marty had been unable to lip-read.
He knew what they wanted. They wanted his help. They wanted him to join forces and help fight something. Just like he’d been fighting his whole life, but alone, standing apart from the crowd. Now it was time to forget about being the lone wolf and reach out, take hold of someone else’s hand. Maybe he would feel another hand gripping his own, and whoever it belonged to would lead him out of the darkness in which he had always been lost.
Marty put on his jacket and left the room, then the flat. It was time to get things done.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THEY WERE SITTING at a table in the window, looking down at the river, drinking slowly, not speaking much; just waiting. Hoping for something to happen, waiting for the momentum to kick in and move them.
The bar — The Mill on the River — was new, with shiny tables and chairs and up-market clientele stopping off for a few drinks or a spot of lunch after viewing the paintings in the Baltic galleries. The bar (it was a bar, not a pub; to people like Simon and Brendan, there was a crucial difference) sat in the shadow of the old Art Deco style building, and benefited from its new status as one of the North’s top art venues.
Brendan wasn’t comfortable in places like this. He felt more at home in dingy drinking dens on impoverished estates, sharing space with drunken old men, youngsters already on their way down the slippery slope of drink-dependency, and broken-down single mothers looking for a brief window out of the hole they’d made for themselves. People in nice suits bothered him. He felt uneasy around them, as if he were an interloper and they knew it.
He sat opposite Simon sipping his pint — an expensive round; almost a tenner for two beers — and staring over his friend’s shoulder. The river was the same one he’d known all his life, but from this angle it looked different. The colour was lighter, the slight waves less threatening, the current moving at a slower pace that might not tug you under if you fell in. The river he knew and loved — and sometimes hated — would pull you down and kill you within seconds.
“Just relax,” said Simon. His face looked somehow loose on his skull, as if the last few days had tired him beyond anything he’d ever expected. Brendan knew the feeling. It wasn’t just Harry’s episode, the trip to the hospital and the night without sleep; there was a lot more going on than that. Like the river, his life had developed a weird current, and he was being dragged along by forces he would not have dreamed of months before. Even his own body was rebelling, taking on a life of its own. The skin of his back was trying to tear away from his frame, seeking a freedom that during darker moments he suspected might benefit him.
When he’d returned from the hospital in the early hours of the morning, he’d made sure his family were asleep and then gone into the bathroom. Stripping off his clothes, he’d been presented with a hideous sight: the flesh from the nape of his neck down to the base of his spine, just above his backside, was infected again. The skin had torn and split; viscous yellow fluid was slathered all over him. He was polluted; his body could no longer accept what was being done, the badness that he had held inside him for so long. His system was rejecting the filth; or was the filth simply coming out to play?
“I need to go to the bathroom.” He slid his pint glass across the table and staggered across the room, following the signs to the gents. As he pushed through the door he bumped into a man coming the other way, and snarled. The man — who was talking loudly into a mobile phone — stumbled aside, letting Brendan pass, and there was such a look of pity in his eyes that Brendan wanted to smash the guy’s face in.
He walked along a narrow hallway, bouncing off the walls, and came to the toilets. He pushed open the door to the gents and leaned against it, breathing heavily. His back felt soft, yielding more than it should against the wooden door, but there was no pain.