Thin Air (38 page)

Little Peter looked up. For one
dark moment, Jay was horrified, but then her body flooded with a
tide of relief. This was no hideous horror, but a little boy. He
did not look injured and he was smiling.

‘Chris, they never found me,’ he
said, and got to his feet.

Beside Jay, Dex was rigid, but
had lowered his arms from his face. ‘Are you dead, Pete?’ he
said.

The boy laughed. ‘Dead? No! I
knew when I was in the deep green place that I had to escape, and I
did. I disappeared. It was so easy.’

‘What is the deep green place?’
Jay asked.

‘The underforest, the place
beyond all shadow.’ He held his arms out to them, clenching and
unclenching his fists. Jay was reminded of Julie’s baby Melanie,
her starfish hands. She was back there, crouched in the ancient
oak, looking down into Dex’s secret hideaway. Only she was no
longer Jay. She was witnessing this through someone else’s eyes:
Peter’s.

It was not terrible anger, it
was not hurt or fear. The thing that made Peter run was a yearning.
That day, after the incident in the road with Gary, Peter had felt
merely tired of all the senseless altercation, the smallness of
everyone’s lives. He lacked the knowledge or the words to describe
this disappointment, and could only experience it as pure feeling.
He wanted to get away. He wanted to reach a place where he wouldn’t
feel this way, where life was different. He knew it existed, for
hadn’t he dreamed of it so many times? Images had come to him as
he’d swung on the old frayed rope at the top of the hill in the
wood. He would go there alone, often. As the twilight fell and the
wood breathed silently around him, the green would condense in his
head, until he was surrounded by a viridian mist, shot with purest
spring yellow. Peter had swung faster and faster, feeling the air
whoosh around him. Forest colours whirled and spun behind his
closed eyes. His swing was a pendulum, ticking into another time.
He dreamed of jumping from the swing out into the air, running back
through the forest to emerge onto a common devoid of human litter,
of people, of dogs. There would be no houses in the distance, no
telegraph poles, only endless landscape. On the swing, he was so
sure he could make this happen, but it never did.

Not in the way he imagined.

He was running through the
drooping, prickly grass on the skirt of the wood. Somewhere behind,
Chris was shouting his name, but Peter could not stop. His legs had
gone mad; they had become a blur beneath his body. Stupid Gary with
his stupid, ugly face. His eyes had nothing in them, they were just
jelly, and his mouth was a red hole of anger. Peter laughed as he
ran. Everyone was stupid: his stomping father with his dark,
closed-in face; his mother who fluttered like a limp handkerchief
on the wind; even Chris, who made trouble with people on purpose.
Peter knew he did not belong with any of them. The trees were
beckoning to him, urgently, shaking their branches, as if to say,
‘hurry, hurry.’ Peter ran beneath their shadow and the sounds of
the outside world faded away, as if the summer-laden branches were
a shutter that snapped shut behind him. He could hear only birdsong
and the tramp of his own feet. Spears of light pierced the trees,
illuminating the grass below, making it radiant. Among the tree
roots, bright red fungi bulged out of the ground, covered with
fairy spots.

Peter ran up one hill and down
another, further and further away from the common. He did not feel
tired or out of breath. He was a young stag bounding through his
domain, the sun warm against his hide. The trees were unbelievably
tall around him; he would not have been surprised to see a dinosaur
lumbering out of them. This was an ancient time; he could feel
it.

He came to a pool, where willows
dipped their lissom bony branches in the water. Behind him now he
thought he could hear the crash and rustle of pursuit; the hunt. He
was caught in a dream state, where half of him believed he really
was a stag and that hunters with dogs would bring him down. Another
part of him knew it was only Chris, desperately searching, perhaps
with Gary somewhere behind him, lumbering and hollering. Peter
ached to escape. He did not want to talk to anyone. He did not want
to go home.

He saw her among the willows, a
pale arm raised against a pleated tree-trunk. She could have
stepped out from the heart of the tree, a willow maid in soft green
robes. Closer to, she looked like a real woman, wearing a faded
summer dress covered in sprigs of green leaves. She held out her
hand to him, ‘Come here, little man. Come here.’ It was as if she
knew he sought a hiding place and she could show it to him. She did
not wait for him to take her hand. Once she saw he was following
her, she ducked beneath the willow branches and scrambled into the
undergrowth. He could hear her moving ahead of him. Her trail was
easy to follow. He came to a nest in the ferns and found her
crouching there. She beckoned, saying nothing. He went to her arms
and she held him down against the earth. She breathed as the forest
did, silently but immensely. She smelled of mown grass, of
mushrooms.

Someone crashed past them. Peter
felt heat, smelled sweat, shied away from the chaotic motion. Then
whoever it was had dashed away, further into the forest.

Peter lay against the strange
woman, who had her arms loosely around him. She did not speak, but
lightly caressed his hair, humming in an oddly tuneless way beneath
her breath. Peter felt totally at peace. Tales of his earlier
childhood drifted through his mind. Was this some fairy queen come
to claim him? Would he ever go back now?

After a while, the woman stood
up, pulling Peter with her. He offered no resistance - did not even
want to. Instead, he took her hand and walked with her from the
woods. Her name was Effie. She lived in a small house at the edge
of the common, where there were no telegraph poles, no urban sprawl
and the only dogs belonged to her. At night, they could hear the
sea as if it was only yards away. He lived with her for nearly ten
years.

Jay came out of a daze to see
the grave face of the boy looking up at her. Was he a ghost or just
an illusion? He still looked like a ten year old boy. ‘Why are you
here?’ Jay asked him. ‘If you disappeared from the world, did you
go to Lestholme? Was that where Effie lived?’

Peter shook his head. Jay
realised that as she’d been speaking, he had changed. She didn’t
notice the transformation until it had occurred. Before them stood
a young man, dark hair falling over his face, whose features were
sensitive, the eyes large. It appeared he could be whatever age he
chose.

‘It was a place like Lestholme,’
Peter said, ‘and maybe it’s even on the same layer, but it was
different too. It isn’t near here at all.’

While Jay and Peter had been
speaking, Dex had crept forward like a cautious yet curious cat.
Now he drew in his breath sharply, grabbed Jay’s arm and pointed at
Peter with a rigid finger. ‘That’s
him
,’ he said, his voice
full of wonder.

‘Yes, I know,’ Jay soothed.
‘It’s Peter.’ She wondered whether Dex was losing his mind.

‘No, you don’t understand,’ Dex
said, his face screwed up. ‘I mean this is the person who Rhys
Lorrance killed. I saw him
dead
.’ He turned to Lacey. ‘This
is a hideous thing to do - show me images of Pete - then this. What
are you trying to do to me?’

‘Hold on,’ Jay said. ‘Calm down,
Dex. We’re here to find answers. You don’t know who this person is
yet.’ She addressed the young man before her. ‘Are you Peter, whom
Dex knew as a boy?’

‘Yes. I was him.’

Jay glanced at Dex. ‘You see?’
She turned back to Peter. ‘Right. And are you also the person
injured in Rhys Lorrance’s house?’

‘He tried to hurt me.’

‘Dex thought you were dead.’

‘He
was
dead!’ Dex
cried.

‘Hush!’ Jay said. ‘Why were you
there, Peter? Had you followed Dex?’

Peter smiled. ‘No. Effie taught
me things. I learned about the world, the secrets behind it. Effie
gave me a responsibility. When I grew older, I met friends of hers.
These people are
aware
in a way that most are not. They
offered me training, and I took it.’

‘Dex was offered a similar
thing,’ Jay said, squeezing Dex’s arm, ‘but from the other side, so
to speak.’

Dex rubbed his face, uttered a
sound of anguish. ‘I can’t take this. I really can’t’

Peter took a step forward,
although he did not touch Dex. Jay thought she could see a luminous
blue glow emanating from Peter’s body that poured over Dex like
smoke. ‘You must find peace, Chris. Like I did.’

Dex closed his eyes, surrounded
by a caul of blue light. ‘Tell me how,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I
can’t see how.’

‘Acceptance,’ Peter said. ‘That
is the beginning of it. When I returned to the real world, as you
would call it, I knew things that most people didn’t. I knew how to
traverse the layers. I had an eye for truth and for the evil that
lurks in a human heart. I could smell it, and when a stench came to
me, I would have to find it.’

‘You are one of Lorrance’s
enemies,’ Jay said. She turned to Lacey. ‘Was this who contacted
you?’

She nodded. ‘Yes. It was after
what had happened at Emmertame. Peter had sought to disempower my
father...’

‘I failed,’ Peter said. He
clenched a fist before his face, and to Jay it felt as if he pulled
upon invisible strings that were attached to her mind. The images
were not as vivid as those of Peter’s childhood.

She saw shadowy forms around
her. Peter had waited a long time to come to Emmertame. He had
worked carefully, speaking to the right people, to infiltrate
Lorrance’s party crowd. Effie had said to him, ‘This man is an
enemy of the world’ and Peter had pledged himself to destroying
this evil. Jay saw that although Peter and his kind worked against
the powers of anti-life, they themselves were not above killing.
She saw the moment when Lorrance realised it was no cheap little
whore he held in his arms, but something more powerful, more
dangerous. He had been afraid, for just a few short moments, but
fear turned quickly to rage. He had acted rashly, perhaps out of a
sense of knowing his nemesis had smelled him out. It was true that
he hadn’t pushed Peter over the banisters. That had been the result
of a battle of wills, a battle Peter had lost. Jay felt the
sickening impact as his body hit the tiles; she felt the ruin in
the flesh, the broken bones, the burst organs. But Peter had
survived. She was with him in the cellar, felt him drawing upon the
energy of the forest to heal him. It had taken a long time.

Now, Jay looked into his face.
She did not know if he was more or less than human. This world
around her was not her world. ‘Lester Charney thought Lorrance
killed you for his benefit.’

Peter smiled bitterly. ‘Rhys
Lorrance would have happily let him believe that. He dares not
display weakness to men like Charney. I had got too close. Charney
would have been furious if he’d known.’

‘Why didn’t you get in touch
with me?’ Dex said angrily. ‘For fuck’s sake, you could have helped
me, warned me, got me out of that mess…’

‘I couldn’t. You were too close
to Lorrance. He had a certain amount of control over you and we
couldn’t risk exposure.’

It wasn’t just that
, Jay
thought. People like Lacey and Peter, who were perhaps just small
fry in the cabals opposed to Charney, considered themselves
superior to someone like Dex, or herself for that matter. They
weren’t that different to their enemies. She sensed they were
capable of using people just as dispassionately.

‘I tried to frighten Lorrance,’
Dex said. ‘I wanted him to think I was dead, that I could haunt
him.’

‘Then don’t you see?’ Peter
said. ‘He lost his power over you. You visited his house, invaded
his domain, yet he could not compel you to act according to his
will. That is your evidence of freedom. You escaped him the moment
you made the decision to slip out of reality.’

Jay found Peter’s tone
patronising. He knew that Dex’s fear had kept him shackled, and
part of him despised that weak human emotion. Peter directed his
attention towards her, clearly able to perceive her thoughts.
‘People like Lacey and myself, we are rare. You cannot judge us. We
have chosen to see beyond the safety nets, and that gives us
freedom. We can meet in all places of the world, all the layers,
and there are many.’ Before Jay could respond, he reached out and
curled his fingers around Dex’s hands. ‘You were not responsible
for anything that happened to me. Perhaps, in a way, the reverse is
true. If I hadn’t been who I was, and you hadn’t known me so well
when I was young, perhaps this world, the unseen, would never have
touched you.’

‘I didn’t recognise you,’ Dex
said, his voice bewildered. ‘When you were lying there. I just did
what Lorrance said.’

‘Don’t punish yourself for
that,’ Peter said. ‘I want you to know that you will be free. I can
help you cast out your demons.’

‘How?’ Dex asked, frowning.
‘Join with you and your people?’ He sneered. ‘That’s not the answer
I want.’

Peter shook his head. ‘That will
not be necessary. You need to finish what you started. Release the
songs.’

‘Yeah, right, that’s easy,’ Dex
snarled.

‘But it is. Release them here.
Release them from your heart, your mind. Sing them.’

Dex glanced at Jay, who
shrugged. ‘Try,’ she said. ‘It can’t do any harm.’

‘You must do this,’ Lacey urged.
‘It will make things happen.’

‘What things? Dex asked.

Lacey clenched her fists at her
sides. ‘It will smash my father’s nest to pieces. He’ll lose his
power.’

Dex hesitated. Jay could almost
hear his thoughts. He was wondering whether by handing Lacey and
Peter what they wanted he was merely shifting the balance of power
from one undesirable group to another. Like Jay, he was not
convinced Lorrance’s opposition was any better than he was.