Free Nightsiders by Gary McMahon Page A

effort.” She giggled, and kept on tearing the stuffing out of the sofa.
    The floor was littered with detritus: fast-food cartons, beer cans, condoms, wooden crates, pages torn from pornographic magazines, and, oddly, cut flowers. The stems of the flowers were dry and brittle, and the petals had been scattered across the grubby carpet in decorative arcs. The room smelled bad, like backed-up sewage pipes.
    “What have you done to my house?” Robert stared at the walls. There were brown stains that looked like they might be feces, and when he raised his eyes to examine the ceiling, he saw that wads of dirty toilet paper had been balled up and thrown so that they stuck to the plaster.
    The blinds and curtains were drawn, and someone had set fire to the trailing edge of the curtains before extinguishing the flames to create a long charred hem that had left deposits of ash on the floor.
    “We’ve been making the place feel more like a home, making our mark, putting our stamp on things.” Corbeau moved toward his supine wife, reached out a hand and grabbed one of her breasts. She giggled again.
    Robert realized then that he was truly in the company of beasts: there was no other explanation for these people and the things they did. He cast aside his inbred middle-class liberalism and accepted they were monsters. It felt strange, going against everything he had been taught, to dismiss fellow human beings in this way, but his only hope for survival was to see them for what they were. No excuses; no theories or postulations. They were beasts.
    “Why are you doing this to us?” His shoulders slumped, but he knew he had to gain a degree of control. “Just tell me why.”
    Corbeau let go of his wife’s breast and walked back toward Robert. His feet crunched on food containers and broken glass. “We’re playing games, now. We’re just beginning.” His voice was quiet, but sounded louder than a jet engine in the stifling silence of the room. “We’re playing funny games.”
    Robert looked him in the eye, and reflected there he saw…nothing. No love, no hate, no empathy, no antipathy…nothing but an empty yearning for diversion, the need to be entertained. “But who are you?”
    Corbeau stopped in his tracks, spreading his legs apart as if to balance his weight in an unstable world. He put his hands on his hips and leaned back slightly, like a stage actor preparing to bellow his lines at an audience. His face looked odd, as if it didn’t quite fit on his skull.
    “Who are we?” He repeated Robert’s question, but with a tone of contempt in his voice. “I’ll tell you who we are. We’re the ones you don’t want to be reminded of. The ones born on forgotten council estates, and who grow up to steal your cars, break into your houses, and rape your wives and your daughters. We’re the ones whose names you never know, but whose faces haunt your CCTV dreams…the ones with steel in our bones and acid in our blood. The mad ones, the bad ones, the glad ones. We’re every lazy middle-class stereotype brought to life.”
    His face seemed to grow, to enlarge and inflate , and the light dimmed and flickered around him.
    “We are exactly who you don’t want to be, who you’re glad you’re not. We’re the ones who remind you to be good and careful, to do your jobs and pay your taxes and not get bitten on the arse. We’re the flipside, the underside, the nightside . We’re the damned, the damned, the damned…and we’re never going away. We are them; we are They .” His theatrical speech sounded rehearsed, scripted.
    When Corbeau stopped speaking, a silence seemed to fill the room, straining the joints in the construction. Robert expected timbers to creak and crack, windows to shatter, bricks to explode under the unbearable pressure of all that ghastly silence. But it did not happen. Instead, Monica Corbeau once more began to giggle.
    Nathan Corbeau took the final few steps toward Robert, stopping only when he was right