Out of Time (2 page)

He had had nightmares like this before, intensified after his father left. Always he was being chased by men out to kill him and he running, running but waking at the point of death, sweating and shivering - but safe. He had perfected a technique for dealing with these attacks from his unconscious by realising that he was asleep, knowing that he had only to run long enough and hard enough before waking up in his own bed, in his own room, the normal world solidly around him. Now he waited for the moment of release.

It did not come. Instead a sharp blow caught him on the back of his neck and stunned him. Joe stumbled and then ran on in an agony of bewildered despair. He could see the park railings where so recently he had stood, contemplating the possibility of a cup of tea. Should he run in? He decided against it, fearing to be surrounded. He raced on, uncertain of the direction he was taking.

A warm liquid trickled down his back, sweat ran down his chest and into his eyes, preventing his seeing ahead. Lost in a vortex of sound, of breathlessness and terror, the throbbing in his ears was indistinguishable from the clamour behind him. If only he could wake up. Hate was at his heels.

He zigzagged to avoid the nets and as he did so his body hit wall either side. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the legend ‘Cat Walk’. So that was where he was. The local graveyard for cars lay beyond. As he hurled himself to the end of the passage another blow caught him on the back of the head. He threw himself forward, expecting a net to close over him, and braced himself for a final struggle. There was no need. His pursuers had not followed.

He fell to the ground, into silence and oblivion, a blank, black abyss.

It was dark when he woke, not the dark of his room but the dark of a night sky. He was lying in the open. No stars but a pale moon occasionally obscured by moving clouds cast a thin light. He tried to rise. Movement was agony but he staggered to his feet and looked around. The tall beech trees of a nearby wood rustled in the warm breeze; on the other side of Cat Walk he could make out the pitch outline of houses pressed one against the other, their belfries like gaunt gallows pointing towards the sky. His senses now more attuned to his surroundings, Joe heard a chorus of creaking sounds, moans, thuds, squeaks, rattles, not regular but persistent and alive, like an old house talking at night. He held his breath and waited and then moved a step forward, colliding painfully with something tall. He pushed past it and moved towards the town, preparing to negotiate his way through abandoned cars but, looking closely, was shocked to discover that they no longer existed. The object with which he had collided was a wardrobe leaning crookedly like a drunk, its doors swinging in the wind. The waste ground was the depository for discarded furniture, chairs, tables, benches, planks piled on one another in crazy confusion. This could not be.

Cold and trembling, he wrapped his arms around himself in a futile attempt at comfort. The Gap jumper stuck to his back. Blood. He was wounded, needed help. He had to get home. He stumbled towards Cat Walk but tripped over an obstacle in his path which, he realised with a jolt, was one of the nets, its pole broken in half. Joe kicked it aside and moved cautiously forward until he reached the far end of the passageway. There was neither light, movement nor sound in the town but clearly visible in the moonlit sky were the stark outlines of the belfries, each suspending a now silent bell, the agents of evil that had made him a fugitive.

He walked through the familiar streets, the park to his left, he turned into blessed Fairfax Road, his eyes fixed apprehensively on the houses but they were shut up, silent. He read the nameplate with deliberate care, tracing the letters with his fingers.

Nothing had changed, the front of his house was as he had always known it, squat, undistinguished, home; only the bell was unmistakably on the roof, a malevolent, alien guard. He looked up at his bedroom window and wondered if he was lying in his bed dreaming that he was standing outside, wondering if he was lying in his bed... If he threw a stone would it wake him? Would his mother be inside, asleep, in a house that appeared to belong to a fiercely hostile stranger? Should he wake her, assure her he was all right, had not been drinking or caught up in a fight, though he wondered how to explain his torn clothes or his wounds. Mum could be fierce. He did not relish the idea of confronting her with an absurd explanation of the state he was in.

He put his hand on the gatepost, his pottery numbers reassuringly still there, slipped the latch and pushed it open, bracing himself for the familiar squeak. The gate made no sound, swinging on well oiled hinges. At the front door he took his key out of his pocket but after a moment’s hesitation decided the risk too great. He stepped instead into the flower bed that still held his imprint from the attempt, an eternity ago, to break the window. Closed wooden shutters obscured his view of the interior.

The garden door was now unlocked and he stole into what had once been familiar green space. There were no flower beds now, no lawn and, worst deprivation of all, no old, gnarled apple tree, in earlier years his tree house, his fantasy world, his hiding place. Instead, rows of poled beans, carrots, cabbages, cauliflowers marched in subdued rows towards a garden shed. Inside, an array of garden tools, a scythe and a sickle were dwarfed by two man-sized nets reaching from floor to ceiling. Joe saw them with a shudder and felt his wound. The net so carelessly kicked aside in the waste ground must have been the one that hit him. He picked up a sack from a pile, put it round his shoulders and stepped out.

He looked long at the house, studying its darkened windows, wondering if normal life continued inside. Had he ever got home? He could not remember. He had surely returned from school, eaten a meal, watched TV, gone to bed. And if he had not, had his mother missed him on her return from work, had she wondered where he was, tried to reach him on his mobile, asked round his friends’ houses? He could imagine her anger and anxiety building up as he failed to appear. No light shone from her window, but then if the evidence of his eyes could be believed, it was no longer her window, it was the man’s. Joe resisted an overwhelming temptation to call out in the hope that she was there but to reveal himself was too dangerous. He moved to the back hedge and burrowed through to the lane that ran parallel to the houses. As he walked along it towards the town centre he considered whether to seek help from neighbours. Then he heard footsteps. Perhaps it was someone he knew, perhaps it was Mr Bernard, a large pot-bellied man who worked at the local hospital returning late after his night shift. Perhaps he could explain…

Joe shrank into a wall. Three figures emerged from the end of Fairfax Road, making towards Acacia Avenue, two men dressed in long, straight, black coats, heavy boots on their feet, either side of... whom?

Peering more closely to make sure he was not mistaken Joe saw with astonishment that, between the two guards, for that was clearly what they were, was the man who claimed to own number twenty two, his face stricken, ashen grey. A shirt with sleeves tied tightly back, Joe presumed it was a straitjacket, imprisoned his arms. What had he done, what crime committed to be picked up in the middle of the night and brutally taken away? This, like everything else that had happened to Joe since his fall, seemed evidence of some tangible evil. He watched with apprehension as the men dragged their prisoner away and out of sight, leaving the unlit streets empty and silent. He hesitated. If the man had gone, dared he go inside the house? But what if he had a wife, or someone else lived there? He was not prepared to risk it.

The park gates were locked but at the side two railings, in his own world, were worn thin by countless generations of schoolboys. Now they stood straight and sturdy but Joe found, to his surprise, they still yielded to his pressure, allowing him to slip inside and walk across to what was called The Field though it was no more than a grassy area. It looked wild and forlorn. Joe made his way to the copse on the far side.

It was as he sought the shelter of the trees that he heard steady drumming as though someone were beating the ground. He inched forward, bracing himself for another surreal image. What he saw was hardly surreal, merely inexplicable, laughable in its ordinariness. A small girl of about eight or nine was skipping with frightening intensity. Skip, skip, skip. Her face, he could see even in this dim light, was taut and grey, her body so thin it was almost transparent. Her hair fell in thin strands to her shoulders, now moving with the rhythm of the rope. Skip, skip, skip.

A rustle. To Joe’s alarm a couple emerged from his far right, the man’s face tight with fear, the woman’s hunted, drawn and weary, eyes darting from side to side as though expecting retribution. They approached the girl, took the skipping rope from her, wound it round its handles and moved silently away in single file, the man first, then the child and lastly the mother. Joe followed at a distance, reaching the railings in time to see them go down Rose Avenue and into Jarvis Road. They disappeared inside number fifty six but as he turned away he noticed a twitching curtain in the house next door.

Uncertain what to do next, he retraced his steps to the corner of Fairfax Road and again studied the nameplate with painful longing. He looked back at the familiar streets where he had spent his childhood. He could remember walking as a toddler down the then never ending Fairfax Road, his small hand comfortingly in his mother’s. ‘Then’ was his time of innocence, of hope, of a golden world with mother, father and dog, Ricky a cocker spaniel, now long dead. They had had to put him down because he had contracted leptospirosis, a disease deadly to humans. His murder, as Joe thought of it, coincided with the beginnings of his parents’ breakup and his first taste of the relentless loneliness of misery. Nothing was ever the same again.

He experienced now a similar sense of closure, of terminal alteration to his life. Why this should be he could not understand, knew only that a desolating sense of loss left him unable to move. Fairfax Road, ordinary, pedestrian Fairfax Road seemed like a lost paradise that he could never regain. He looked at it with longing, etching its contours into his memory, then silently retraced his steps to Cat Walk. He stopped only to grab the broken net in the hope that, with it gone, they - the townspeople who had hunted him like an animal - would forget.

Shivering now, Joe clutched the sack round his shoulders, made his way through the sea of furniture and, throwing himself down on an old creaking bed, fell into an uneasy sleep.

JOE woke to the early morning sun and the improbable vista of an open sky. He searched in vain for familiar sights, for his crumpled duvet half trailing on the floor, for window curtains blowing in the wind, posters staring down from his pock-marked ceiling. He could see only dark stacks of unfamiliar furniture, hear only the call of birds, sounds and images to which he could not connect. He grasped at memories from the previous day and slowly, like phantoms from a dream, the happenings that had brought him to this improbable place came into focus. His aching limbs, the dried blood on his neck, a throbbing headache, bore witness to the reality of his predicament.

Joe’s was not an imagination in which wild fantasies took place; only in dreams and sometimes lying half asleep was he invaded by images with scant connection to his humdrum life as though an alien world, concealed in his unconscious, needed to make its presence known and pull him into its orbit. The sense of dislocation this produced often left him bewildered, unable to pick out threads that would restore reality. So it was now. The alien world had taken over but instead of the changing, disconnected world of his dreams, the place in which he found himself was clearly defined, substantial.

The furniture, now that he saw it in daylight, was weather-beaten, crumbling and old, beetles munching into its heart, he could hear their million jaws. It must have once been imposing for it was dark, solid and occasionally finely carved. What kind of houses had it come from? It resembled no furniture Joe had ever seen, except in Gothic horror films. It had the same exaggerated quality.

He felt exposed, the only human in the absurd panorama of wooden detritus going to waste. He put his hoody over his head and painfully made his way towards the nearby wood. This at least was territory he knew and he climbed over the alien contents of unknown homes towards it. He reached its welcoming shade gratefully and paused a moment to look back. The waste ground looked incongruous, a Stonehenge of ghostly, rotting sculptures. Nearby a staircase climbed into nothingness.

A stream flowed through the wood. One carefree spring weekend he and Martin had traced it to its source, their first independent foray, camping two nights en route. He looked for the well worn footpath. That this too had ceased to exist was all of a piece with what had gone before but he struggled on through tangled thickets and fierce bramble bushes until he reached the stream’s cool waters. He drank, stripped, cleaned his wounds and lay submerged. The throbbing in his body subsided and he rolled onto the bank and lay unmoving as he tried to unravel the fantastic events of the past day and night. They did not yield to logic, nor to any remembered experience. Only in the most outlandish video games did he inhabit places of such wild improbability. Absurdly, he wondered if he was caught inside one, a figure manipulated by electronic impulse. He pulled himself back sharply. That was the stuff of science fiction, yet the game was the same, the challenge to escape, to find a way to take him back to where he rightly belonged. This was not a matter of pushing buttons but of using every mental resource to find an exit point. He searched for a gap in events, a point at which his own volition could empower him but could see none. Circumstances beyond his control were in command and he would have to play their game, follow their signs.