Page 36

Thirty-Two

I drove at a deliberate and steady pace, keeping the speed just a flicker under the limit. The white lights that arced over the motorway swept the inside of the car at regular intervals.

You are detached , I told myself.

You are calm.

That mantra had been with me my entire adult life, ever since I first headed off to university. Being detached and calm had allowed me to put the trauma away and protect me from emotions that had threatened to drown me back then. It had also been a guide for my professional life. When things went wrong in a secure psychiatric facility, you needed to keep yourself under control, and the more dangerous the situation, the calmer you had to be.

But I wasn’t calm. I wasn’t detached. And while I kept a careful grip on the steering wheel, it was all I could do not to put my foot to the floor and begin to swerve between the other vehicles on the motorway.

You’ve got half an hour until the last ferry to the mainland. So you’ll need to run.

But you’re good at running, aren’t you?

The man had done his best to sound impassive on the phone, his voice even detached and calm in its own way. But the anger just below the surface had been obvious; he was barely able to contain the hatred he felt, or control the violence that wanted to erupt out of him. And yet the instructions he gave me had clearly been thought through carefully. Half an hour until the last ferry off the island, and I needed my father’s car first. The man had left me with no time to think.

But the calculation was a simple one: there was somewhere I needed to get to, because if I didn’t then Sarah was going to die. Even as the man hung up, I was already sprinting up the hill that led toward my father’s house. I attempted to call Sarah as I ran, hoping against hope that I had somehow mistaken her voice on the phone. But her mobile was turned off. And of course it was. Whoever the man was, he was organized and efficient. He had taken her. And if I didn’t get to where he had told me in time then all that violence inside him would be directed at her.

Despite myself, I accelerated a little.

You’re good at running, aren’t you?

I conjured up a figure in the seat behind me. And even though it would do nothing to change the actions of the man in the real world, I allowed my subconscious to give that figure a voice. To let all the guilt and self-hatred that I’d hidden away for so long spill out into the car now.

It’s what you did that day, isn’t it? Ran away and hid like the worthless coward you are. You could have saved him. But you were too weak. Too scared.

I concentrated on the road.

What was it you said about me when you were still so sure that I was James Palmer? Underneath my behavior, I was just a little boy protecting himself. Maybe you should analyze yourself, doctor. Because that’s all you’ve ever been. Detached and calm? What a fucking joke you are.

Yes, I thought. You’re right.

All to hide the fact that he’s dead because of you. Because of all of you.

Yes, I thought again.

But because of you too.

The figure fell silent at that. I could feel the rage beating off it, hot and feverish.

That’s true, isn’t it? I thought.

You might not be James Palmer, but you’re someone who cares that he’s dead. And I think I was almost right before, wasn’t I? Whoever you are, you failed James too. And because you can’t bear to face up to that, you take your self-hatred out on other people instead. All the people who might also have saved him, and didn’t. They’re just stand-ins for how much you despise yourself.

You’re so fucking clever, aren’t you?

I shook my head.

No, I thought. I’m not. Because like I said, you’re right. I have been running. I’ve closed myself off from so many things. If I really was clever, I’d have dealt with it all a long time ago.

The truck in front was going too slow, so I indicated and pulled out to overtake. After I’d passed it, I pulled back in and forced myself to slow down to something approaching the speed limit. If I got pulled over then I wouldn’t get where I needed to be. I wouldn’t be able to save Sarah, assuming I still could.

As the lights washed over me, I registered a noise in the car and glanced down to my side. My mobile phone was on the passenger seat, buzzing softly, the screen illuminated. From the corner of my eye, I registered the incoming details.

[island—police]

I reached down and accepted the call.

“Dan?”

Fleming’s voice.

“Yes,” I said.

“Where are you, Dan?”

I looked around, trying to keep my hands steady on the wheel. The motorway was disorientating at night. The pulses of light and stretches of darkness had a hypnotic effect, and the empty blackness of the surrounding countryside made the outside world anonymous and indistinguishable. I might have been anywhere right now. Or nowhere.

“I honestly don’t know,” I said.

He hesitated .

“I’ve just checked in with the police at Rampton,” he said. “They had a call out to a flat there early this afternoon. Resident was a guy named Michael Johnson. That’s another one of the people who were at the rest area that day, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“He’s dead.”

I closed my eyes for a second. When I opened them again, the stretch of motorway and cars around me seemed entirely different.

“How?” I said.

“I don’t know yet. It’s developing. From what I can gather, they thought it might be a break-in gone wrong at first, but I get the impression that the scene is… different.”

“Different?”

“Bad.”

I tuned Fleming out, trying to think it through. Michael Johnson was the most recent victim in the chain, and he’d believed that if he didn’t report what happened to the police then he would be safe. And yet the man had killed him anyway. And from what Fleming had just told me, Johnson hadn’t been taken away for a second time like the other victims, with someone else forced to watch him die. He’d just been butchered in his flat.

I could still sense the figure in the back of the car.

The hate there. The rage .

“What are you doing?” I asked it.

“Sorry?” Fleming said. “What was that?”

“Nothing. I have to go, Liam.”

I hung up and tossed the mobile phone back down on the passenger seat. I needed to concentrate. I had instructions to follow. If I deviated from them, and the man killed Sarah, then that would be my fault. And whatever I had done as a child, I would never forgive myself if I failed Sarah now.

Another wave of light passed through the car.

I could still sense the figure in the seat behind me.

Why did you kill Michael Johnson? I thought. What are you doing ?

When the figure answered, it took me a moment to realize it was repeating my own words back to me.

I’m escalating , it said blankly.

It’s a mistake to think of my rules as being absolute. All they do is serve a purpose, and I’ll bend them if they don’t suit me.

And what suits you now?

The figure didn’t reply. I looked up and recognized the overhead sign lit up against the night sky ahead. The slip road was coming up.

What suits you now? I asked again

I realized that it’s the killing that brings me peace now.

I signaled and took the turning for the rest area.

A part of me expected the place to be as dark and dead as the fields around the motorway behind me, but of course, it wasn’t. The hotel to one side and the building ahead were both brightly illuminated, and the car park was swathed in an artificial light that washed the other vehicles of color and painted them all sickly shades of amber.

I drove in slowly, remembering what the man had told me.

You’ll know what to do when you get there.

A moment later, I spotted the old camper van. It was parked on its own, far off to one side, in one of the few small pools of darkness the car park offered. A shiver of recognition ran through me as I approached it and then pulled in beside. It was impossible for it to be the same vehicle I had seen here as a child. The Pied Piper’s van had been found in a country lane two decades ago, the man dead behind the wheel. When the investigation had run its course, it would have been either locked away or destroyed. It would certainly never have seen a road again.

But the similarities were uncanny. Streaks of mud obscured the license plate. There was the same black window in its side, the same dirt coating the metal. I couldn’t see if there were little handprints pressed into the muck below, but I could picture them there. As I drew level with the cab, I had the sensation that the vehicle beside me had passed through time somehow. That it had winked out of a moment in the past and then arrived, intact and unchanged, in this one, here in the present .

I could hear the sound of its engine rumbling softly.

The driver’s window was dark, the cab full of shadow. I could just about make out the vague impression of a figure seated motionless behind the wheel.

Thump!

A bright white face appeared suddenly against the glass, and I flinched. The cheeks and forehead were smooth and unlined. A thin line for a mouth. Black hollows where the eyes should have been. It took me a second to realize that I was looking at a mask that the man in the cab was holding up against the window. He tilted it to one side, as though it was turning its head to peer out at me. I could see the tip of his finger in the center of one black eye socket, like the pale smudge of a retina.

I waited, my heart beating hard.

And then my mobile buzzed beside me on the passenger seat.

I read the message he had sent me.

turn off your phone throw it out of the window make sure I see.

I hesitated, unsure what to do. On the one hand, he was right there . But the van’s engine was running, and I was sure the doors were locked, so there was no guarantee that I’d be able to get to him before he managed to drive away. Even if I did, I couldn’t be sure that Sarah was even inside. He could have left her somewhere else. Somewhere that she’d never be found.

I looked up from my phone.

The mask—still tilted—stared implacably at me.

Waiting for my decision.

I switched the phone off. Then I put the window down and threw it out, listening to it clatter away across the tarmac. Perhaps Fleming or Rampton police would trace it eventually; if so—if it came to that—then it seemed right that this would be the last place they could track it to. If I was going to disappear, it was appropriate for it to be from here.

The mask continued to stare blankly at me for what felt like an age.

Then it ducked away out of sight .

The camper van began moving forward. Not racing away, just crawling steadily out of the parking space beside me.

The implication was clear enough.

I released the handbrake and headed after it. Keeping a little distance. Following it around the perimeter of the car park, toward the exit back onto the motorway. The van accelerated up the exit that led out of the rest area, and I matched its pace. And then, a minute later, we were both part of the traffic there, the taillights ahead of me like a pair of red eyes staring unblinkingly back from the night.

I had no idea where we were going, and no idea of what was going to happen when we got there. But as the overhead lights began to wash over and through the car again, I had a sensation that reminded me of what happened all those years ago. The feeling that I was leaving the real world behind and heading toward an entirely different one.

Somewhere out of time where anything might happen.

A place where there would be monsters.