The Narrows Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  PART 1: CITY

  1 Dead Nettles

  2 Bex

  3 Intersection

  4 Moon Grove

  5 Foundling

  6 Gramma

  7 Traces

  8 The Bollard Game

  9 Tea

  10 Lacuna

  11 To Market, To Market

  PART 2: HOUSE

  1 Taken In

  2 Rosey

  3 Fault

  4 Laura

  5 Development

  6 Staked Out

  7 Dowsing for Beginners

  8 Re-entry

  9 Erosion

  10 Steven

  11 Collapse

  12 Old Bonds

  PART 3: VILLAGE

  1 Ted

  2 Wreckage

  3 Ryknild Street

  4 The Rimwoods

  5 Holly End

  6 Rabbit John

  7 The Kiftsgate Stone

  8 Ley of the Land

  9 The Dobunni

  10 Holda’s Song

  11 Proof

  PART FOUR: TOWER

  1 On the Outer Circle

  2 Into the Circle

  3 Urdrog

  4 Holly King, Oak King

  5 The Omphalos

  6 The Last Gate

  The Narrows

  James Brogden

  Proudly Published by Snowbooks in 2012

  Copyright © 2012 James Brogden

  James Brogden asserts the moral right to

  be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved.

  Snowbooks Ltd.

  www.snowbooks.com

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Paperback ISBN 978-1907777-59-2

  eBook ISBN 978- 1907777- 94-3

  To Mum and Dad, who filled my head with stories,

  and my wife and daughters, who inspire them.

  Prologue

  Birmingham, 1993

  PC Andrew ‘Rosey’ Penrose swung the thirty-five pound cast-iron battering ram nicknamed Big Eddie at the door of 144 Tyler Road. It shuddered but held firm, jarring his arms and rattling his teeth in their sockets, and for precious seconds he did little else except gawp in stupid surprise.

  Even fresh out of training, Rosey was not a small man – as his colleagues often observed, he was built like the proverbial brick shit-house – which was why he’d been given the enforcer to wield. An average methods-of-entry officer would get three cracks before handing it over to fresh arms, but Rosey had never taken more than one. Ever.

  At the time, those funny rune-like scratches in the paint – the ones that looked a bit like a spoked wheel – couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with it. Obviously this door was just a lot more heavily barricaded than anybody had expected.

  At the time. Looking back on the nightmare later, he would come to wonder at the world of guilt and recrimination in those three simple words.

  Then the DI was screaming at him to get his head out of his arse and open that bloody door now! and he swung again. It still wouldn’t budge, and with a sick feeling of failure he knew that there was no chance of taking the bastards by surprise; every second they were at more and more of an advantage. Christ alone knew what they were doing to that poor kid. With a snarl of frustration he gave Big Eddie one more almighty heave, which obliterated the spoked wheel rune completely, and the door smashed open hard enough to bury its latch-box in the wall behind, spraying shards of wood into the dim hallway.

  What followed was a barely controlled chaos of shoving uniforms and booted feet thundering into the house. There was crashing and yelling, and the DI actually shouting ‘Go! Go! Go!’ like he thought he was in a detective show.

  Rosey let them go ahead, handing Big Eddie to the last bloke along – it stung his pride, but rules were rules. Three strikes and you’re out. He flicked out his baton and went to support the door-opening officers, but he couldn’t resist taking a moment to see, as a matter of professional curiosity, what had made the door so hard. He couldn’t find anything. No steel plates, no bars, not even, as far as he could see, a simple chain. His Nan could have knocked it down.

  He shrugged it off. There was the ever-so-slightly more important business of finding the kid and the perverts who had abducted him, especially before they had the chance to do anything worse, thanks to his balls-up. However, in those few seconds the first rush of uniforms had passed him by, and for a moment he found himself alone in the hall.

  Opposite him was a closed door that hadn’t been there before.

  At least, he didn’t think it had; things had been a bit confusing. It wouldn’t have been out of place, anyway. The house was a bog-standard two-up-two-down; he’d grown up in one – all of his mates had grown up in them – and he could have mapped the place blindfolded. The door opposite should have led into a small front bedroom with a window overlooking the street.

  But in that case, how had everybody else charged straight past and missed it? His colleagues were further in the house and upstairs, storming through the living room and bedrooms.

  ‘Hey!’ he yelled forward. ‘There’s a room here!’

  By rights he should have waited for a second body to join him, because rules were rules, but he was buggered if he was going to be yelled at again, and he opened it himself.

  Instead of finding himself in a small front room, he was in another hallway. This one stretched ahead of him, at right angles to the entry hall and into where the next door should have been, completely against the direction the house should naturally have taken.

  He stopped, confused.

  The sounds of policemen clumping around in the rest of the house seemed fainter now, as if they were a lot further away than they should have been. The strange hall stretched away, oddly dark in spite of how close the open front door and daylight were, as if the shadows had taken refuge here, lurking in the corners. It was like one of those funfair rooms painted in forced perspective, where at one end you were a dwarf and at the other end a giant, but that was where the similarities with funfairs ended. Wallpaper hung in decaying strips, peeling away from plaster stained with damp and mould.

  There was something terribly wrong in this place.

  Abruptly, his personal radio squawked into life, making him jump. The reception was fuzzy, punctuated heavily with static: ‘…enrose… the bloody hell are you? …at once… hear me?’

  He snatched it up. ‘Sir! I’m downstairs, sir. There’s something very odd here. Do you read me, sir? Over.’

  Nothing in reply. Just blind, stupid white noise.

  And the sound of a small child crying.

  Years later, when he tried to describe what really happened – instead of the sanitised version which ended up in his official report – he found that he had little detailed recollection of searching the house, just a hazy and disturbing sense that whatever was there had been too large for the physical confines of the building. A nagging, itching memory of rooms, hallways, staircases, and galleries folding open and around themselves in tortured, impossible geometries.

  He understood that this sort of selective amnesia was his mind’s way of protecting itself – that if he pushed to remember exactly what the house had been like, he’d be carried off into its own peculiar insanity. Traces of it clung to his senses like the smell of burning on clothes; occasionally if he walked i
nto a strange room he’d still get the sensation that the walls and corners were hiding behind each other and that in the split second before he’d opened the door they’d hurriedly reordered themselves like secretive, grinning children.

  He followed the sound of crying through twisted rooms until he came to something like a child’s bedroom; it had a scattering of plastic toys, brightly coloured and pathetic against the bare floorboards. The smell of stale incense was pungent in the air, and the amber glow of a nightlight from one corner threw crawling shadows towards him. Hanging from the ceiling was a brass mobile of spoked concentric rings which rotated through each other in a way that hurt his mind more than everything else about the house so far – everything, that was, except for what was happening to the four-year old boy on the bed at the far side of the room.

  He was lying face up in the yellow glow, half-naked and spread-eagled on a grubby Transformers duvet, and crying with the dry grizzling sobs of a child near the point of exhaustion. One of his two kidnappers knelt by the side of the bed, his face bathed in fevered light.

  It looked for all the world as though he were praying or performing some macabre laying-on of hands, but Rosey never found out for sure, because when he realised where the light was actually coming from he lost it completely. He charged at the kneeling figure, even though it was like running across the deck of a pitching ship, and the other man barely had time to look up in surprise before he had been grabbed by the throat and thrown into the wall.

  ‘Where’s your mate?’ Rosey shouted into his face. ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ The kidnapper – or worshipper – was a lanky man wearing an old-fashioned and filthy trenchcoat. Retching for breath, he seemed to be trying to explain something, though all he could do in reply was hold up in one long-fingered hand a cluster of slender needles, as if that were meant to be reassuring.

  The boy bristled from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet with a forest of acupuncture needles, and where they pierced his skin it glowed as if from within; what Rosey had taken to be a nightlight was in fact the coalescent radiance of these thousands of pinprick stars. A galaxy of constellations in the flesh, radiating a blast-furnace heat. Appalled, he dropped the trenchcoated man in a boneless heap and moved to start plucking them out.

  Trenchcoat clutched at his ankles. ‘No!’ he wheezed. ‘You mustn’t! Not the right way! …must be done properly…’ but Rosey paid him no more attention than to plant a police-issue size-ten shoe square in his chest and send him sprawling.

  As he pulled out the first of the needles, the boy twitched and cried out, and something like a jolt of electricity shot up Rosey’s arm. ‘Sweet Leaping Jesus,’ he muttered. ‘The bastards have wired him up.’

  ‘…disastrous… consequences…’ wheezed Trenchcoat.

  Rosey, steeling himself for further shocks and sweating profusely in the unnatural heat, ignored him and proceeded to yank out the rest of the needles in great handfuls.

  By the time he’d finished, the room was dark and silent except for the exhausted whimpers of the child, the wheezes of a half-throttled man, and his own horrified panting. Whether it was coincidence or because of his actions, the house seemed to drop its defences at that point, and seconds later a small army of uniformed police barged yelling into the room.

  PART 1: CITY

  1 Dead Nettles

  Andy Sumner tried to take his mind off the knot of cold panic growing in the pit of his stomach by studying the posters in the travel clinic’s waiting room.

  Do You Know your Hep A from your Hep B?

  We cannot immunise against the desire to wear socks with sandals. That one was actually pretty funny.

  Malaria Hot-Spots, a map of the globe on which all of the countries where one could get malaria were coloured a bright, arterial red. Looming over it was a large pop-out mosquito, all spindly legs and grotesquely hunched back, the hungry needle of its mouth-parts ready to plunge into unprotected human flesh.

  Nope, not helping. The panic grew bigger, threatening to barrel its way up through his throat and out into the world.

  ‘You okay, hon?’ Laura was looking at him with concern darkening her eyes.

  ‘I’m fine, I’m good, I’m good,’ he lied and sat back down beside her. He picked up a dog-eared copy of Boat and Home and flipped through the pages without reading anything. ‘I mean, talk about rubbing it in. Do doctors actually think sick people want to read this stuff?’ Without looking up he could tell that she was regarding him with that particular female expression of bemused patience which said that she loved him even though at this moment he was acting worse than a child.

  ‘Is it the needle thing?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, you know, just a bit. But I said I’d be okay, didn’t I?’

  Just a bit. He was certain that it wasn’t a fully fledged phobia; by his understanding a phobia was an irrational overreaction to something, and he wasn’t convinced that it was irrational to dislike having sharp bits of metal stuck into you. She’d even helpfully looked it up for him – belenophobia: fear of pins and needles. Thanks, darling.

  Yes, he’d said that he would be okay, but what he’d actually done was completely fail to realise exactly where it was she’d booked the honeymoon until it was too late, or that a series of jabs was going to be necessary to get him there. Not that he felt he could be blamed very much – as far as weddings went, the received wisdom was to just let Her and Her Mother sort everything out, as long as you were smartly dressed and mostly conscious for the photographs. But Cuba was booked now. Had been for three months. More than just booked, in fact: she’d already bought a new swimsuit, and it was still only November. It was that booked. There was absolutely no way he was going to be allowed to back out of this now.

  Dear Christ, what was he doing here?

  The practice nurse popped her head around the door with a breezy smile and said ‘Like to come in?’

  Her room was small, with just enough room for a desk, something which looked promisingly to Andy like a minibar fridge, and a narrow hospital-style bed upon which he and Laura perched as she bustled around cheerfully and took their medical histories. Laura knew everything about hers and had even brought certificates to prove it. Andy, for his part, remembered one time when he’d put his hand through the kitchen window and had stitches, but couldn’t recall whether or not there had been any injections. As far as he knew he was inoculated against precisely nothing.

  ‘Lovely!’ smiled the nurse. ‘A clean slate. I’m afraid you’re going to be a bit of a pincushion by the end of this, my dear.’

  The ‘needle thing’. Oh yes, just a bit.

  Nurse Barton was friendly and professional, chatting with Laura about the wedding plans and how romantic it was that they were even coming to get their jabs at the same time. She dealt efficiently with the paperwork and turned to remove from the minibar fridge a pair of simple, one-shot, disposable syringes, which, to his surprise, were smaller than biros, rather than the savage medieval instruments of torture he’d imagined.

  Didn’t matter. He still wasn’t going to trust them.

  ‘We’ll get the first of your Hep B’s out of the way to begin with,’ she said, ‘and book you in for the second in a month, and then we can get you up to date with your tetanus at the same time.’

  ‘That sounds great,’ he said with a tight, wide smile.

  ‘Lovely, then. Let’s take care of the bride first while the groom gets his shirt off.’

  Laura, as prepared as ever, had dressed in a sleeveless vest top which kept her shoulders bare, whereas Andy had come straight from work in his shop uniform – shirt and tie and name-badge clattering (Hi! I’m Andrew. Welcome to the Games Barn!) and he started to untuck himself as Nurse Barton approached Laura with the first syringe.

  Laura looked back at him over her shoulder, dark hair tumbling down her bac
k, and tipped him a saucy wink like one of those Vargas girls painted on the noses of World War Two bombers. It might have been that which caught his breath, or it could have been the sight of the needle’s tip dimpling her flesh that did it.

  ‘Little scratch…’ said Nurse Barton, and the dimple disappeared as the needle broke the skin. A swift, sure plunge of her thumb, a small squish noise as the syringe’s contents were injected, and that was that. A single ruby-red drop of blood marked the spot, and Nurse Barton taped a wad of cotton-wool over it. Laura had watched the whole thing, fascinated.

  Andy suddenly found the room to be hot, stuffy, and claustrophobically cramped. Blood was thumping heavily in his head.

  ‘Next one. You don’t have to look if you don’t want to.’

  ‘Andy?’ said Laura, serious now. ‘Just stay looking at me, okay? Seriously, you cannot feel a thing. You’re going to be completely fine.’

  For a few moments he even managed to convince himself that this was true. It was going to be completely fine. How many of these were done across the country, every day? Millions, probably. Babies had them, for heaven’s sake. It was one of the safest, most routine medical procedures…

  ‘Little scratch…’

  …and then all he could see were mosquitoes the size of locusts swarming over his arm, feeding, feeding.

  The needle’s tip dimpled his shoulder.

  Andy’s recollection of what happened after that was not one-hundred percent reliable, because although he didn’t technically faint, he did, according to one paramedic who attended the scene, ‘grey out’ for a while. He was aware of a sudden loud bang close by, like a large firecracker going off, and the sudden splash of something hot and wet against his arm.