form of rest. That was the real reason he was afraid to do something about the addiction: if he didn’t have the drink, he might never sleep again.
He drove north, through Far Grove and towards the Concrete Grove. His skin prickled with the Crawl as he crossed the invisible geographical border between the two districts, as if his blood were answering some strange call. He knew the sensation was psychological rather than physical, but still it didn’t mean it wasn’t real. This place, it had became a part of him. He knew that he could never leave, even if he wanted to.
The truth was he didn’t want to leave the Grove.
Vanessa had tried to convince him to apply for a transfer on several occasions, but he’d never taken her seriously. Even when she left him, six months pregnant and not really wanting to go, he had dug in his heels and told her that he would never turn his back on this place – these people, the parents and siblings of the Gone Away girls. Even a transfer to nearby Newcastle was out of the question. It was only a few miles south, but Royle felt that it was too far away from the locus of whatever strange things had been happening round here for years.
He’d never discussed his suspicions in public, but he knew that there was something deeply wrong with the fabric of the Grove. Too many bad things happened; there was a lot of darkness under the skin of the estate. Royle didn’t believe in ghosts, or magic, but he did believe that a place could be wrong. Some places attract darkness, and this was one of them. Some places are seething with the Crawl.
The Concrete Grove, Royle knew deep inside his heart, was a Bad Place.
He slowed as he drove along Grove End, past the old primary school. He watched as school kids laughed and played, remembering that those poor girls had once done the same, oblivious to the darkness that was coming for them. But nobody would ever hear their laughter again; their innocent games would forever go unseen.
He parked on Grove Crescent, outside the Millstones' tiny two-bed semi-detached house. He didn’t get out of the car immediately. Instead he sat there for a few seconds, trying to centre his energy, to focus on what was important. He recalled the disturbance in the park the night before, and wondered what he’d almost seen there, moving through the bushes like a living embodiment of the sensation that he felt right now.
It had been yet another example of the badness that festered here, growing like a malignant tumour. He was certain of it; there was no doubt at all.
“Nothing,” he said. “It was nothing.” But he knew that he was lying to himself, just the way he lied to everyone. He could not speak aloud about his feelings, even to himself. Something was gestating here, and had been for a long time: something that wanted to be born.
He thought about Vanessa’s stomach and the life that was growing inside her. They didn’t know what she was having; Vanessa had wanted it to be a surprise. Royle was too scared to even imagine which gender the baby might be. He feared that if he thought too much about it, the baby might not come out right. It might be deformed. Or dead. What if the badness here had infected Vanessa, tainting the foetus? What if his seed had been bad, even before the baby was conceived?
What if the baby Crawled out instead of being pushed?
“Jesus...” He shook his head, closed his eyes. Why did he always have to be so dark? His thoughts were never optimistic. Perhaps that was the fault of the Grove, too. Vanessa had often said that the place – along with the job he did – had eaten away his insides, leaving behind an emptiness that he could never quite fill, no matter how hard he tried. Was she right? Was that what had happened to him? Were all of his strange thoughts about the estate nothing but the imaginings of a twisted mind, a brain attuned to darkness?
He got out of the car and approached the front gate. A figure was standing in the window, watching him. The curtain fell back into place and the figure glided away. Seconds later, the front door opened.
“Good day, DS Royle.” Tony Millstone was a ruined man. Before his daughter had vanished, he’d been something of a