Toby looked at a chalk-written message: ‘Gone fishing. Call Tim if I’m not back by the time you get here.’
Shining put a gentle hand on Alasdair’s shoulder. ‘Leave it to us,’ he said. ‘Tea for four in five minutes. I’ve never let you down yet.’
Alasdair nodded and Shining gestured for Toby to follow him into the lounge.
‘Tim?’ Toby asked. ‘Keith?’
‘Oh, you know what it’s like with names in this business,’ said Shining.
The lounge was a room filled with books and the ghosts of winter fires. A large sofa weighed down with shed cat hair and cushions that had given up the fight was pulled out at an angle. On the floorboards behind it lay a man who might have been dead. His bearded face was slack, mouth open and eyes half-hooded.
Toby felt they needed to call for help – a doctor, an ambulance, people who knew what you did with someone who had collapsed. Instead he was guided to sit on the floor on one side of the fallen man, while Shining, with the first concession to his age Toby had seen, threw down a cushion and lowered himself on to it.
Toby reached for the fallen man but Shining held out a hand to stop him. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Jamie has a special skill and I need to explain it to you before we begin. You won’t believe it, not until you experience it, but you need to know nonetheless.’
The old man straightened his legs as much as the limited space would allow. ‘Jamie is skilled in Astral Projection, which means he sends his consciousness out into a place that is not quite our world. A place that lies just above it. In that state he is open to things: signals, knowledge, impressions that we could not experience here in the hubbub and noise of the real world. Quite simply, he is the best Listener on the books.’
Toby fought the urge to comment. Shining had been right: he didn’t believe what he was being told. After all, you could not simply leave your body and travel elsewhere. Not really. You could dream. And perhaps you could fool yourself into thinking you were doing something more. Something magical. God, Toby wondered, is this bloke having a seizure while we just look on? Again he began to panic. They had to be doing something more constructive than this. He nearly insisted as much but Shining was talking again.
‘More than that,’ he was saying, ‘Jamie can share that journey. He can bring someone else with him. And sometimes that’s what you have to do to get him back. Because the Astral Plane is a dangerous and disorientating place. It’s a shadow of our world and there are things in there, unnerving things, that will do their best to waylay travellers.’
‘Things?’ Toby was struggling terribly now. The natural authority that Shining had held over him, the sense that he was not as mad as his beliefs would suggest… was rapidly diminishing. His words were too momentous for Toby to swallow.
‘Bad things,’ Shining said. ‘But no more than we can handle. Now take his hand.’
Toby reached forward and did so, Shining taking the other.
And then they were somewhere else entirely.
f) Astral Plane, Another London
They were still sat in the flat, but Toby knew he had moved. It wasn’t just the light, as tangibly different as England had felt after his months in the Middle East, but also the smell, or more precisely the lack of it. Perhaps you only become truly aware of your senses when you lose them. The smell of soft furnishings, old books and dust, the ash of the fire grate, the faint tang of disinfectant and the lingering odours of last night’s meal. A tapestry of smells that had clung to the flat, now all gone. The air was empty.
There was no noise either, no distant traffic, no clattering of Alasdair preparing tea in the kitchen.
This was a place where there was nothing. Nothing but the images of familiar things, washed out and turned grey by the light that fell weakly through a window that must look out on another country entirely. A country that, despite all his travels, Toby knew he had never set foot in.
‘Can you feel the shift?’ Shining asked. ‘The change in plane?’
The panic that had been a constant companion to Toby over the last few weeks – perhaps, if he was honest, years – returned in full. He was being forced to accept things he could not understand. All his control stripped away. It terrified him.
He let go of Jamie Goss’ hand and suddenly felt the real world crash back in on him. The sounds and smells had come back tripled after their momentary absence, and he was hit by the abrasive nature of a reality he had always previously taken for granted.
Toby began to hyperventilate and struggled to get to his feet. His heels slipped on the floorboards and he fell backwards, his head colliding with the bookcase and knocking a handful of John Dickson Carr mysteries down onto him.
‘No…’ he gasped through the panicked loss of breath. ‘… Concussion. Something wrong.’
Shining was there, his hands placed gently on Toby’s shoulders, his aged, gentle face insisting its way into his line of sight.
‘Don’t panic,’ he said, ‘you can do this. You are able. Able to do anything. Relax and go with it.’
I don’t want to go with it! But on the tail end of that thought was the voice of his father. A dismissive sneer. ‘Typical Toby,’ it said, ‘panicking at the first sign of trouble.’ But could you blame me? Toby thought. In his mind’s eye all he could see was his father, shaking his head slowly and dismissively.
Damn it, but he couldn’t have that.
His breathing slowed and he nodded at Shining. He wasn’t saying he believed him, but he wasn’t going to panic in front of him either.
‘Let’s do it again,’ said the old man, ‘and this time you’ll be ready. Take his hand and keep hold.’
With clenched teeth, Toby did as he was told.
And they were back in the foreign country that, according to his new Section Chief, lay just above the one he had always known.
He looked around, disorientated by the way that the edges of things blurred as his head swayed from side to side, as if the focus couldn’t hold when he moved too fast for it.
‘You’re in control. This is nothing you can’t do.’ The fact that Shining didn’t phrase it as a question meant the world to Toby.
‘You OK then?’ Shining asked.
‘I’m fine,’ he replied. ‘Well, maybe not fine exactly but… I’m OK. It’s OK.’
‘Good. Now what we need to do is get up and walk around. Can you feel Jamie’s hand?’
‘Of course.’ Toby looked down and only now did he realise that Jamie Goss was not lying between them. Nobody was. And yet he could feel the man’s hand firmly held in his own. ‘Where… ?’
‘He’s travelling,’ said Shining, ‘we’re still connected to his physical body, and through that we are still connected to our plane. Fix on it in your mind. It’s not a physical sensation, it’s not really there in your hand, but mentally, you mustn’t let go. Once we’ve begun to move around here that’s what keeps you grounded.’
Toby nodded, unable to trust himself to speak coherently, not when faced with impossibility after impossibility.
‘So,’ continued Shining, ‘we keep a hold of his hand, but we get up and move around. That’s easy; the hand will stay with us, its mental weight anchoring our palms wherever we go. Try it.’
Toby did so. Getting awkwardly to his feet he walked the length of the lounge and found that his superior was quite right. He could still feel that invisible hand holding his. He could stretch his own hand, move it, even clench it into a fist but the impression of that other hand stayed with him.
‘This is mental,’ he said, ‘utterly, utterly mental.’ Maybe I hit my head harder than I thought. Maybe this is a concussion and right now I’m poleaxed next to Goss in the middle of the floor.