I took off my muddy trainers and walked upstairs in my stocking feet. My parents’ bedroom was empty, the bed all made and everything very neat as usual, looking like a show house. In my own room I sat on the edge of the bed and flicked a half-made pampas-grass quill float that was standing in a jam jar on my desk. My father had made the desk for me. I opened its single drawer and shuffled through my Esso World Cup coins, Brooke Bond tea cards and old bus tickets. I stood up and looked out of the window to see if I could see my father coming back from the railway station.
There was something wrong. I knew it in my stomach first, where some sort of bitter fight was going on.
I went in the bathroom to see if I could resolve the dispute but nothing came. I washed my hands, a little unnerved by the sound of the running water, which seemed too loud for the emptiness of the house. Downstairs I turned the television on and glanced at the different channels. I thumbed the off switch and stood at the window looking out at the garage. Something gnawed at my insides.
Leaves were falling outside. There had been a subtle smoky taste in the air that I’d noticed coming back from the rec. The first bonfires of the season were being lit in gardens. Down back entries kids were sneaking the last illicit cigarettes of the summer holidays.
I wandered into the kitchen and pulled open the fridge door. There wasn’t much: some butter and milk, rashers of bacon wrapped in foil, and a hunk of cheese. I closed the fridge and hovered by the side door leading back outside. Through the frosted glass I could see the distorted form of the garage. I put my muddy trainers back on and opened the door. Going left, I walked down the passage between the garage and the back garden. There was a peculiar smell coming from somewhere that set my teeth on edge. And a low growling noise I couldn’t identify. I trailed my fingers against the side of the garage and slipped around the corner at its end. There was a mossy tree stump which I had to stand on to look through the grimy window in the back wall of the garage.
At first it was difficult to see clearly because of the two thicknesses of glass and the dirty swirling clouds of some kind of smoke. But eventually the details resolved themselves and made sense.
The car was in the garage and my father was sitting in the driving seat.
His head was moving from side to side, his mouth gaping open and snapping shut. His eyes met mine.
I stared at him for a few elastic seconds then dropped down off the mossy stump and sat in the soil at the base of the garage wall. I was panting for breath, my heart hammering, pulse racing in my temples. Sweat in a sheen across my forehead making me shiver. My hands shaking.
But I didn’t get up and run to open the garage door. There was still time, I knew, because he had been moving. He had seen me.
I turned around and pressed my ear to the side of the garage. I heard the low rumbling of the car’s engine, the chugging of the exhaust. The smell was sickening.
I got up and ran. I ran down the passage between the house and the garage and straight out into the road. A car slammed on its brakes, squealing to a standstill. The driver thumped his horn. Burning rubber stung my nostrils. I ran over the road and dived into the nearest back entry, the damp cobbles slippery under my feet. At the corner I bowled into someone coming the other way. Without looking to see who it was I picked myself up and carried on running.
I ran for about two miles until I simply couldn’t go another step and I collapsed on the canal tow path in a tangle of long dewy grass and dead broken branches. I buried my head and cried until it hurt. Soon the longed-for oblivion came and I blacked out.
A white-haired man out walking his dog found me and took me to the nearby police station because he couldn’t get any sense out of me. They took me home. I eyed the flung-open garage doors with terror. My mother had found him. I hadn’t warned her. I hadn’t done the one thing my father would have wanted me to do.
The engine had stopped because it had run out of petrol. Despite the open doors there was still a nauseating stench. The policemen covered their faces with handkerchiefs before picking their way past the lawnmower and gardening implements.
There was a length of garden hose running from the exhaust pipe into the car via the back window, which was still wound up almost to the top. The driver’s door was open and my father’s blackened hand hung out of it. I didn’t get to see his face again because a policeman turned me around and led me outside. We found my mother in the back garden tearing clumps of bindweed out of the earth. One of the policemen approached from the side very carefully and reached out to touch her shoulder. She twisted away from him and raked her fingers through the soil, digging up more strands of bindweed. The trouble had always been that no matter how many individual strands she pulled up, the roots remained. It always grew back.
The policeman tried to get a grip and she snapped her arm like a whip, showering him with soil and grit. Then she saw me standing there with the other policeman and that was when she started screaming.
I felt myself moving slowly, rising through clouds of black, star-flecked matter towards a glimmer of light that grew dimmer as I neared it. My body felt paradoxically weightless and tethered; either way I had little control over it. The sounds of small dogs and children playing together in some distant park seemed like a trick of memory.
I woke up in the children’s ward, a bare bulb dispensing a sickly yellowish glow above the end of my bed. When I tried to sit up I found myself unable to. I had been strapped in like the crossbreed children in the beds on my left and opposite. Next to my bed sitting upright with his legs crossed and wearing a white coat was Gledhill.
I gave up struggling against the straps and lay back. For the time being the runaway train that was my escape from the City had been shunted into a siding.
The Gledhill thing didn’t dismay me as much as it might have done; I was merely puzzled as to who was betraying me this time. Was it Stella? And had she set up the trap at Maxi’s dental surgery? Or had Stella been telling what she believed was the truth when she passed on the name of Gledhill? Had the authorities somehow received intelligence that I was coming looking for the ex-Dark wanderer?
For now, Gledhill just sat and watched me. I wondered what his brief was. Guard or professional observer? I heard footsteps approaching the bed. It was White Coat, eyebrows twitching. He exchanged a few words quietly with Gledhill then stepped closer to the bed and loomed over me.
‘How’s our King killer then?’ he asked sarcastically. ‘Enjoy your little sojourn in the Dark, did you?’
I hesitated for a moment. I had been waiting a long time for this, since the first time I encountered the Thin Controller.
‘Cunt.’
‘Security are on their way. You’ll soon change your tune then,’ he said. ‘This isn’t a fucking holiday camp, you know.’
I thought about answering him back but there was no point. I’d made my gambit.
‘In the meantime,’ he continued, ‘we are responsible for your comfort.’ He turned half an inch in Gledhill’s direction. ‘Make sure he’s comfortable please, Doctor Gledhill.’ With that he turned and walked out of my field of vision. Gledhill got up from his seat. The paralysed look to the left side of his face had not been an act, though in this new context it twisted his mouth into a snarl.
He bent down and I felt him grab hold of something and pull. The broad leather strap across my chest tightened and I gasped for air. He tugged on the other straps that restrained my arms and legs and I made no show of resistance. There was no point at this stage. I closed my eyes but although sleep beckoned I didn’t want to be sucked back into the Dark.