More Than This (26 page)

Nothing. Really nothing. So much so that a thought wanders into Seth’s head.

Did they?

Did they
lie
to him?

Were they
trying
to keep him away? If so, they hadn’t tried very hard. In fact, he almost thought they’d talked about it in such a way to make sure he’d come here to look.

By himself.

“No,” he says out loud. “They may have been a lot of things, but they weren’t –”

A shaft of light pours out across the small square as the door to one of the three main buildings opens.

The Driver steps out into the night.

Seth drops to the ground. There’s nowhere to properly hide, no building close enough to run behind. He can only press himself down into the grass and hope it’s tall enough to block the view.

The Driver is still some distance away, five hundred feet or so, silhouetted against the light from the doorway. It stands there looking out, as if it’s sensed something and is coming to investigate. It moves down the steps and into the courtyard, its footfalls echoing heavily across the small dell.

Seth tenses, preparing to run. It must know he’s here. It could probably see quite easily in the dark –

But then the Driver returns to the door and closes it. The light vanishes, and in the temporary blindness that follows, Seth holds his breath, straining to listen. He waits to hear footsteps again, but there’s nothing. Has the Driver moved to a softer part of the square, something covered with grass? Maybe it’s coming for him right now, on a new silent kind of footing –

And then a step. A clear step, just like when it came through the window of his house, a
thunk
of surprising weight.

And then another. And another.

The sounds of the footfalls are bouncing between the three buildings, confusing any sense of where it’s going. Is it coming toward him? Walking away? Seth risks raising his head farther above the grass, but all he can see is the glowing purple spot on his retina left by the light from the door.

Step. And another.

Growing louder, unquestionably.

There’s no choice. He’s going to have to run as fast as he can back to the tracks, make his way out somehow, run toward –

But then he realizes he can’t run to Regine and Tomasz. He’d bring the Driver right to them.

Step. Step.

“I’m sorry,” he finds himself whispering, to Tomasz, to Regine, to himself, not knowing what to do, where to go. “I’m so sorry.”

He stands to run.

And he hears the engine of the van start up.

He drops back down. Out there in the darkness somewhere, the engine noise grows in an oddly smooth way, as if the volume on it had been turned down and is slowly being raised again. It’s somewhere off to the side of the three buildings, maybe even –

Yes,
there.
Headlights, coming from around the corner of the farthest building, the one the Driver walked out of. The van moves across the square and turns down the main drive through the center of the prison.

Away from Seth.

It heads toward the southern entrance, the one Regine said was locked down. The Driver obviously has a way out into the world to patrol it, fulfilling whatever mysterious role it’s been assigned or taken on for itself.

Whatever it is, it’s leaving. The engine noise doesn’t quite disappear, but it grows more distant, distant enough for Seth to feel slightly safer. He spares a thought again for Regine and Tomasz, out there in the world, hiding somewhere while the Driver prowls.

“Be safe,” he whispers. “Be safe.”

He looks down toward the buildings again, toward the doorway – now shut tight, not a peep of light escaping from behind it. His night vision has returned. He can see the square in the moonlight now. See the buildings in their silent darkness.

See how they seem unattended.

The engine is still faintly whining in the distance, though it sounds so smooth, so efficient, that in a world with other cars, with any other sounds
at all,
you’d never hear it coming.

But still, it’s an engine that’s moving away.

The prison, for the moment, is possibly unguarded.

Seth rises. First to his hands, then with a deep breath, to his feet.

Nothing happens. Silence continues to unroll. The engine noise is now so distant sounding as to almost not be there.

Seth thinks, he
feels,
that he’s alone here.

And if it’s a story he’s telling himself or a path he’s supposed to be on or just another convenient thing that’s happened to lead him forward, well, does it matter, he wonders? Does any of it really matter?

Because he wants to know, more than anything, what’s behind that door.

He sneaks down to the nearest building of the three around the square, stopping to look in a window. It’s got prison bars on it, but inside, there’s only darkness. He flicks on the torch. Nothing happens until he hits it a few times, rotates the aging batteries, and hits it a few times more. It flickers to life with a light barely bright enough to read by, but it’s better than nothing.

Through the dusty wired glass that sits just behind the bars, all the torch illuminates is an empty corridor, stretching away from him. He can see the heavy-looking doors to rooms –
cells,
of course they are, actual prison cells. The doors have smaller barred windows set in them and none of them is leaking any light.

It’s a dead place, as dead as everything else.

The next window has a number of its wired glass panes broken out, but inside is more of the same. Another stretch of corridor, another row of darkened, empty cells, no indication of life or movement or activity.

No indication of any coffins, that’s for sure.

Before he can check the third window, the last before the corner of the building, the torch goes out and refuses to light again, no matter how much he curses over it. He sighs, but he doubts there was much more to see anyway. Prisons probably didn’t bother much with variation. He makes his way instead to the corner of the building, the one that leads on to the square.

It’s a concrete expanse, broken by the usual weeds pushing up through cracks. There’s not even the remnants of anything else – old benches, concrete planters, nothing – just an empty space that would have been completely bare before things started growing up through it. Another exercise yard, maybe, or perhaps just a clear area where there was nowhere for a prisoner to hide.

Each of the buildings looks the same. Ugly and square and unyielding. Not a curved line to be seen. One main front door to each and rows of evenly spaced windows, bars and heavy locks on every conceivable thing that might open.

Looking around, Seth wonders for a moment where the man who took Owen was kept. The prisoner whose name he
still
can’t quite bring to mind, no matter how many ways he tries to approach it.

Had the prisoner ever been in this square? Almost certainly. And had no doubt spent his empty time in one of these very cells. When he escaped, maybe he had hidden behind this same corner where Seth now stands.

Seth remembers that the prisoner hadn’t been regarded as a flight risk. The police said that even though he had occasionally been kept in solitary confinement, that was for his own protection, not for what trouble he might cause or that he might try to escape. He’d been a model prisoner. That’s what the officers kept saying to his parents on those awful nights when Owen was still missing, as if it was somehow supposed to be comforting rather than what it actually was, an apology for taking their eye off him at the most important moment.

Seth orients himself in the dark, mentally placing the train tracks on one side and looking up toward what must be the direction of his house.

The prisoner had been given a pass that day, that’s the story that emerged, one that allowed him to move freely from one part of the prison to another, to tend to the grounds, as he’d shown a talent for gardening. Yes, the memories are coming back to Seth now (but his name? What was his freaking
name
?). The prisoner had arranged it somehow so that one set of officers expected him to be in one place and another expected him to be somewhere else, so that for just long enough, no one was looking for him.

The police assumed he must have had help, but Seth can’t remember anything ever being explained beyond that. The prisoner had created a hole in time, a shaded, hidden chain of moments that allowed him to go – Seth turns a bit more, getting it right –
that
way, and sneak through fences and duck past guards (who may or may not have been looking away on purpose) until there was only one more fence to climb.

The fence into Seth’s backyard.

Seth spits onto the grass, his stomach sour. He had opened the door to the man. No matter what happens in the rest of his life, he will always have opened that door.

It wasn’t your fault,
Gudmund had said.
You were eight.

And oh, how Seth wanted to believe him.

He stares into the darkness, up toward where the prisoner had entered Seth’s life and taken Owen from it, returning him injured and broken.

Seth is angry now, remembering it.

Angry, and suddenly a whole lot less afraid.

He steps into the square and heads for the door where the Driver emerged.

It looks the same as the doors in the other buildings. No light comes from any crack or seam, nor through the windows on either side. Seth holds the torch up as he approaches, ready to swing it if he must at anything that might sneak up on him.

But there’s nothing, still. Just empty space and silence. All those barred windows looking down on him. Deserted, dirty buildings watching his progress.

The door is up a few steps and recessed a little, and as he moves to it, the moon is angled so that he’s stepping into shadow. He hits the torch a few more times, fruitlessly, then feels around in the darkness for some kind of handle on the door, finding one, never expecting in a million years –

It opens.

With a simple click of a lever, the door swings under his touch, pulling outward with an easy silence that seems as strange as the smoothness of the van’s engine. If ever a door should creak loudly, it should be one on the front of a darkened, empty prison, but it glides open like something hydraulic and modern.

Before he’s ready, before he ever expected, Seth is standing in front of an open doorway.

A doorway so dark it might be an entry on to deepest space.

He thumps the torch again, but more out of nervous energy than expectation.

He squints, trying to see something,
anything
in the black.

But there really is just . . . emptiness.

Nothingness.

A blank on the world.

Seth goes back down the steps. He walks to the window to the right of the door and peeks inside. The shadows are deep here, too, but he can see a little bit, enough to suggest that this building is like the last one, corridors and cells and the dust of years.

But the doorway to the entrance is still just deepest black, unnaturally so, like the rules of light and space are suspended in that single rectangle.

He can see
nothing
beyond it.

“It’s a trick of the light,” he whispers to himself. “A trick of the moon.”

But he stands for a moment longer, the world holding its silent breath, the empty nothing of the doorway staring back at him.

He reaches for the anger in him again. The anger at the prisoner who just walked away from here and ruined everything. It helps. He goes back up the steps, nearing the darkness, nearing the doorway.

The silence is almost deafening now, so solid that Seth begins to almost doubt it. Surely he should hear
something.
A breeze. The shushing of blown grass down the hillside. A creak as the building settles.

But there is only this void. Waiting for him to step through.

There could be anything beyond it, anything at all. It could be an entryway to a whole other
world,
for all he knows –

“Which is stupid,” he whispers, still staring into the blackness.

But out here, alone, in the dark, his mind begins to reel with possibilities.

Because maybe this place is a journey.

And maybe this door is its final stop.

Because if there is death anywhere here, it can only be beyond this doorway.

Maybe it
is
this doorway.

And if this place really is a kind of hell, maybe you have to die to leave it.

Maybe it’s as simple as walking through a door.

As long as it’s the right door.

And almost without trying, he begins to think about that day on the beach –

No,
a voice in his head says.
No.

But still, he thinks of that day, that
last
day, when he had calmly walked into a freezing, wild ocean and had
un
calmly been battered to death against a rock.

And woken up here.

Stop this,
he thinks.
Stop it
–

But he thinks about this morning, too – though that it’s still the same day he left to go running toward Masons Hill seems ridiculous, it was weeks ago, lifetimes.