Page 33

James

August 2001

James lies awake in the darkness.

The room is pitch black and yet the air seems to be throbbing in his eyes and ears. He’s been lying here like this for what feels like hours, his nerves singing the whole time. What is he waiting for? He isn’t sure. There’s no way to tell what time it is. No way to know how many hours have passed since the man brought him up here earlier.

It had been the same as every other night, except for one small difference. Whenever the man closed the door in the past, James has always heard the sound of the key turning in the lock.

Click.

But not tonight.

He had lain there listening, waiting for it, but the sound never came. Tonight, the man has left the door to James’s room unlocked. But then, why wouldn’t he? He knows that James has accepted the truth now. The world doesn’t want him. It never had. Nobody has ever seen him; nobody has ever cared. And at dawn, the two of them will take the final step together. There was no more need for the man to lock the bedroom door earlier than there had been for him to worry that James would run away from him at the rest area.

Except that the man doesn’t know that. He only thinks it.

James listens carefully.

The house has been silent for hours now, surely? And if he leaves it much longer then it will be too late. So he slips out from beneath the thin cover and stands up.

Listens again. Hears …

Breathing.

He feels a burst of panic—suddenly sure that the man has been standing here in the room the whole time, motionless and invisible in the blackness. But that can’t be true. James remembers watching the door close. Later on, he saw the thin line of hallway light at the bottom go out.

It’s his own breathing he can hear.

With his palms out in front of him, he walks blindly across the room in what he knows to be the direction of the door. The floorboards are rough against the soles of his bare feet. When he reaches the wall, he takes a step to one side, feeling for the handle.

Finding it.

Then he turns it very gently. A centimeter at a time.

The door opens inward with the quietest of creaks. James listens again carefully. When he hears nothing, he dares to open the door a little wider, his hand trembling the whole time.

Then he steps out into the corridor.

It’s dark, illuminated only by a wedge of moonlight from the window at the far end. That’s where the stairs are. There are three doors in between. The nearest is the bathroom, but he doesn’t know what’s behind the other two. He assumes one of them must be the man’s bedroom, but he has no idea which one. They’re all closed right now.

James wishes that he had Barnaby here to protect him. But the man threw Barnaby into the sea on the day he abducted him, and so he’ll have to find the courage inside himself instead. He starts to walk down the hallway, one small step at a time, imagining that his feet are barely touching the ground. That he’s lighter than air. And it seems to work. He can feel the soft push of the carpet against his feet as he creeps along, but every footstep is as quiet as snowfall.

He reaches the first door.

If the man were to step suddenly out of nowhere, this is the final spot for him to claim he was just going to the toilet. The temptation to turn back is overwhelming. But he can’t do that. He fixes his gaze on that window at the end of the corridor: at the moonlight he can see through the dirty glass. At the outside world. The real world.

And he keeps going.

Past the second door.

The third.

And then he is at the top of the stairs. He looks back down the hallway, and all the doors there are still closed. There’s no sense of movement. And everything is silent, aside from a faint rush of air he can hear from around the window nailed shut beside him.

The stairs.

He places his weight down gingerly, one step at a time, keeping a gentle grip on the banister for support. The living room below him is lost in darkness at first, but the shapes there begin to resolve the farther he descends. He begins to move a little more quickly—wanting to run—but forces himself to slow down. The danger might be above and behind him now, but he can still feel it, hovering like a knife that will drive itself between his shoulder blades if he makes the slightest mistake.

He steps down into the living room.

Stands still. Listens again carefully.

And the house is no longer silent.

It takes him a second to realize what he’s hearing, and when he does, his skin goes cold. He turns his head very slowly. His gaze moves from the wall in front of him to the settee under the window at the far end of the living room, where the man is sitting.

James holds his breath.

As always, he can’t see the man’s face, but his gnarled hands are resting on his thighs, and an angle of moonlight lies over them like a sheet. They are entirely still.

The soft sound of his snoring drifts over.

James remains frozen in place, and the moment seems to go on forever. There’s nowhere for him to hide. All the man has to do is shift slightly and open his eyes, and he’ll see James standing there. And then he’ll hurt him very badly before killing him for this betrayal. Once again, James feels the urge to go back. It wouldn’t be impossible. He could creep up the stairs behind him. Return to his room. The man would be none the wiser, and he would still be alive.

But dawn is coming.

If he takes part in the killing in the morning then the last surviving fragment of him will be dead anyway. And once James realizes that, he feels a sense of resolve, that fluttering hope inside him replaced by a small core of steel.

He breathes out quietly.

Then he turns and moves into the kitchen.

The man has left the door to the cellar unlocked too, and the hinges creak as James opens it. It’s so dark that he can only see the very top step below him. Beyond that is just a black hole that seems to go down into the depths of the earth forever. He takes the first step. Then the next. Breathing in slowly as he goes, the air around him beginning to smell of freshly turned soil. Until he feels encased by the ground. This is what it must be like to be buried , he thinks. But he isn’t buried. He isn’t dead. He is alive.

His foot touches the cellar floor.

The darkness down here is absolute, and he doesn’t dare pull the cord on the light in case the faint illumination somehow reaches the floor above. But he remembers the layout of the room from when he was down here earlier. He takes four steps forward, moving to the wall where the old filing cabinets are, then reaches out above them in the darkness and begins to feel his way along the row of keys hanging on the metal hooks there. They chitter gently as his hand moves over them .

He finds the one the man used for the main gate when they left today.

It’s the only one he needs—that’s what a part of him wants to insist—except that it isn’t. It’s not good enough. So he keeps moving his hand to the left, searching for the other keys he saw earlier. He can’t find them. Time stretches out, threatens to snap. Has the man moved them? The voice in his head telling him to run grows impatient and shrill. The silence is singing. But he ignores it all. Focuses as best he can.

And …

There they are.

He stands there for a moment with the keys clenched tightly in his fist and his heart beating hard. God—can he really do this? He feels himself faltering. But then he becomes aware of all the invisible things in the room around him: all the souvenirs stored away in the bags and boxes that are lost in darkness against the walls to either side. This little room is a grave. There are ghosts here. And he can sense them in the air now.

You are strong , they tell him. You are brave.

You know what you have to do.

Yes, he thinks.

He knows exactly what he has to do.

A few moments later, he turns and starts up the stairs. The doorway to the kitchen is a dark gray rectangle far above, and he keeps his attention focused on that as he climbs, expecting the man to step into view at any moment. But it remains empty.

Back in the kitchen. He listens.

Nothing. The house is entirely silent.

And he’s about to start moving when he realizes that’s wrong—that it shouldn’t be. He edges into the living room. The man remains on the settee under the window, the moonlight still draped over his hands, his face invisible. He doesn’t appear to have moved at all.

But the snoring has stopped.

And yet there’s no going back now, is there? Not after what he’s just done downstairs. James imagines the man staring back at him from the black void where his face should be .

How worthless you are.

No, James thinks. No, I’m not.

The man turns his head in the darkness.

And then the snoring resumes.

There’s no reason to hesitate. James walks across the front room. He doesn’t need to tell himself that he’s lighter than air right now, because it feels like he really is. He walks past the man, into the small porch at the front of the house, opens the door just enough to slip out through and then—his heart giddy now, euphoria coursing through him—closes it quietly behind him.

It’s a cold night. The sky is clear and the moon is full, and the farm ahead of him seems so much brighter than the house behind. There’s no need for him to be quiet anymore—not out here. He runs as fast as he can across the hard ground, heading all the way down to the wooden pen at the far end by the trees. James hasn’t run this quickly in years, perhaps not ever, and he can’t remember ever feeling so alive.

The boy chained to the post is awake and alert. Perhaps he’s too cold and miserable to sleep, but it feels like he was expecting him. As James skids to his knees in the dust, he can see the boy’s bright eyes, and the terror there just makes the resolve in him fold over upon itself, becoming sharper and more defined, like the edge of a blade.

“What are you doing?” the boy whispers.

James takes hold of the padlock on the chain.

“It’s time to leave,” he says.

He works the first key on the ring into place. It doesn’t turn, so he tries the second. He feels untethered from the world now. Triumphant.

“Where are we going?” the boy asks him.

“We’re going home,” James says.

The second key doesn’t turn, so he moves onto the next. Three more to go. Glancing up from the lock, he sees the hope in the boy’s eyes now.

“Do you promise?”

“Yes,” James says. “I promise.”

The boy smiles at him.

And then everything is suddenly brilliantly lit, as though a camera flash has gone off, and the image of the boy’s face is burned into James’s mind as he winces and closes his eyes.

When he opens them a moment later, the brightness remains.

The whole compound is flooded with light.

“Oh God,” the boy whispers.

Still kneeling in the dirt, James turns his head.

The man is standing on the decking at the front of the house.

The two of them stare at each other for what feels like an age, and then the man shakes his head and taps down the steps. James feels the hope die inside him. It was a trap, he realizes. All along, the man was setting him one final test. Just to be certain he had him. Just to be sure he had broken him.

And now there’s nowhere to run.

The man walks slowly across the compound toward him, turning the knife in his hand around.

And as he gets closer, he begins to whistle his tune.