Keeping her foot between the doors to keep them open, she cast her gaze around for something to jam the lift. Of course, there would be stairs and Kyle would use them but that would take longer. She needed that time.
There was an upturned cafeteria chair within reach, one of many strewn about messily. Perhaps the staff fleeing the island had pushed them over in their haste to get out.
Moses was nearby, though she didn’t look in that direction.
She couldn’t think about that.
Blessing the days recently spent in yoga, Thea stretched flat out on the floor, her arm out while still keeping the lift door jammed with her foot. Her shoulder didn’t throb quite so much now, but it wasn’t up to helping out in any way. High on the walkway above her, she saw a bleached-blond-framed face bob into view. Kyle was trying to work out what she was doing. She didn’t want him heading for the stairs yet. Maybe he thought she’d become prostrate with grief or shock. Or she’d fainted. Or started hallucinating again. She stretched some more. It felt like she might tear a muscle somewhere any second, but she managed to claw her fingers around the chair and shove it into the lift entrance.
The doors banged open and shut on it uselessly, a giant mouth masticating a piece of gristle.
Then she ran.
The glass doors were there. They were so close she could see the smudges on them, handprints of people either gone from the island, or dead. She didn’t look back because there was nothing to look back for; she needed no final picture of the hell this place had become.
She skidded to a halt.
Nothing to look back for.
Thea was close enough to touch the glass.
She was wrong. She’d forgotten.
Rosie.
How could she have forgotten Rosie? She was still in the building, if Rory had been telling the truth. Hidden somewhere and unconscious, making it too difficult for Thea to move on her own. She couldn’t drag her through the corridors, down to the beach and into a boat all by herself with Kyle chasing her.
Wouldn’t it be more sensible to escape and then send back help, especially as Kyle was, at this moment, leaping down the stairs towards her?
She should leave – Rosie was probably dead.
She couldn’t leave – Rosie might be alive.
She had to go back for her.
She had to because … well, it was her fault she was lying in that hospital bed, wasn’t it? Rosie had followed her and her pointless little quest to find a face in the monastery window. If she hadn’t, she might still have been happily sticking pencils in her hair and flirting with Ethan, not lying motionless in a hospital bed.
Thea could watch Ethan die, she could walk over Delores’s dead body, she could look away as Moses hit the ground … but she could not run out of this building without knowing she’d at least tried to help Rosie. If she did that, she would know that the island had changed her forever – and she wouldn’t be able to live with the person she’d become.
The glass of the front doors was cold. It felt good on her forehead as she rested her head against it. She gave herself a moment. Carefully and deliberately she pressed her palms against the glass as well. The imprint of her hands joined all the others, a smudgy marker, a sign that she too had been here. She had been alive in this place. Once.
She took a deep breath and faced the nearest corridor.
Chapter 50
‘Why are you ’ere?’ The man eyed Vivian suspiciously.
‘I would have thought that was fairly obvious. The sign said rooms available. I want a room.’
The pub’s name, “Sanity’s End”, was probably going to be more accurate than Vivian had at first thought.
The train journey had done terrible things to her bones, but worse things to her soul. So much emptiness had stretched out around her, fields and fields with just a horizon line where they met sky, no friendly rooftop or chimney buttressing the void. The light had begun to dim as the mountains set in. Vivian thought they might provide some relief from the unwavering flat lands but they proved to be worse, great hulking things bending down to work out whether the little train chugging through them was worth crushing.
The station had been deserted but there had been a dog-eared noticeboard, the plastic covering warped and brown in places as if someone had tried to set it alight. She’d phoned the only taxi firm available.
Despite the fading light, she could see the island through the pub’s streaked windows.
‘Why are you ’ere? No rooms available.’
The man had appeared like a terrible magic act from behind a stained velvet curtain, which was still half open and gave a peek into a cluttered living space beyond. A muted television flickered light over a defeated chair, a scuffed side table and carpet that rightfully belonged to the Sixties.
‘Clearly not for a pleasant holiday,’ she muttered to herself and then decided to lose any attempt at subtlety. ‘What’s going on over on that island?’
She was sure he paled a little; it was hard to tell because his face looked as if it had been left out too long in bad weather.
‘What island?’ He narrowed his eyes.
Vivian fought down the urge to laugh, but instead pointed through the window. ‘That island, right there. The one we can both clearly see.’
He sniffed. ‘Oh, that island. Ain’t nothing there. Used to be. Monastery and the like. People used to come to take their stupid pictures. All gone now.’
‘But there is something there, isn’t there? Ing Enterprises owns it. My daughter came here not so long ago and then went over to that island to take part in their trial. She told me.’
The man sniffed. ‘No.’
‘No?’
‘No. Looks like the trial’s over. They’re moving out.’
Vivian snapped a glance at the island, but it was a late winter’s afternoon and she wasn’t able to make out anything more than a blocky, misshapen lump. ‘Why?’
‘Why would I know? They’d not tell me.’ He opened a ledger with a thump, the spine breaking immediately to the right page. ‘You can’t ’ave a room.’
The trial was over; Ing Enterprises was moving out. Vivian fumbled in her handbag and retrieved her phone once more – no messages, no missed calls. But if this man was right and Thea was at this moment sailing over to the mainland then this was exactly where she wanted to be.
She plonked her bag on the reception counter. ‘Why bother opening if you don’t want anyone to stay?’
There was silence. The man sniffed again and crossed his arms over his chest. ‘I’m a man of ’abit.’
Behind him were two large keys hanging from hooks on the wall. There was a conspicuous streaking in the dust around the key on the third hook, as if someone had carelessly swiped it from the wall recently. Vivian put her hands palm down on the reception desk and, feeling the stickiness under her fingers, instantly wished she hadn’t.
‘My daughter’s name is Thea.’ Vivian’s voice softened. ‘She’s twenty-seven and I am very proud of her: she’s funny and smart and worth much more than she thinks she is. Do you have children, Mr—?’
She thought he might not reply, but he did. ‘Alastair. Name’s Alastair.’
Then he shuffled his feet and loosened his crossed arms. Only a little. ‘Gotta boy. Don’t see ’im much,’ he said.
‘You see, Alastair; my funny, smart, precious girl came here because she doesn’t sleep very well and that made her desperate. Desperate people do silly things. And the silly thing she did was to put her trust in those people on that island. They promised to fix her, even though she doesn’t need fixing in my opinion. And then I stopped hearing from her.’
Vivian held Alastair’s gaze.
‘It’s been a long day,’ she carried on. ‘I don’t admit this to many people, but I’m getting old and long days make me tired so I need a room for the night. I’ll most likely be out of your hair in the morning and you can say you’ve never heard of me.’
She saved her
best until last: ‘I’ll pay extra.’
Alastair let his arms drop to his sides. He scratched at his head and then examined the result under his fingernails. Frowning, he got out a handkerchief so grubby it could keep a microbiologist busy for weeks and blew his nose.
‘Money fully paid upfront,’ he said. ‘No loud music, no animals, no extra guests permitted in your room. There’s a TV but we don’t get much of a reception up here. No meals provided. Ain’t got no chocolates or petals and ain’t gonna get ’em neither.’
Vivian got out her purse and Alastair fetched a key, which, when he pushed it over the desk towards her, she saw was the kind of heavy black metal that wouldn’t be out of place in a Victorian prison.
He kept his hand on it and cleared his throat.
‘It sounds to me,’ Alastair said thoughtfully, ‘like this girl of yours would be the kind of girl to leave a nice comment on one of them feedback card thingies what have to be sent off …’
Vivian suspected this was, perhaps, a breakthrough moment. That, or the man was having some kind of episode.
‘My name’s Vivian.’ She held out her hand. ‘Vivian Mackenzie.’
He took her hand and crushed it in his, holding on to it for his next words.
‘If they have finished out on that island’ – he gave her a long, considered, knowing look – ‘I’ll need to start makin’ a living with my own customers.’
He let go of her hand and she massaged some life back into it.
The perfect idea popped into her head like snapped cartilage.
‘Excellent!’ She smiled brightly. ‘Now, I wonder if you know anyone who could lend me their boat?’
Chapter 51
Thea really was a lab rat in a maze with another rat literally on her tail.
Something smashed somewhere. Thea ducked instinctively and whimpered to herself.
The black spots in front of her eyes sinuously twisted into shapes to distract her – rabbit ears, bow, teardrop – until she had to stop, place a hand on the wall and take some deep breaths, too afraid to close her eyes in case she disappeared into sleep or hallucination. Now her discs were off, sleep was claiming her, inch by inch.
What if she fell asleep just as Kyle rounded the corner? He could slit her throat while she talked to imaginary owls.
The corridor was as bright and white and glossy as it had always been, like the shine on panna cotta. No, she couldn’t think about food. The last thing she’d eaten had been those crackers back in the lighthouse: thin, diet things made mostly of air.
A floor plan would have been great. She couldn’t really remember how she’d got to the clinic when she’d visited Rosie here in this Staff Bubble. There had just been corridor after corridor, swirls of cream that all looked the same. Not that there was any guarantee that Rosie would be there anyway.
Were there footsteps behind her?
Skidding to a halt, she listened. Even her swallowing sounded loud and she realized how thirsty she was, recalling how little of that tea she had got to drink back in Delores’s office. Blood pounded in her ears.
There.
Footsteps. Running.
Thea moved, doors flashing past her, some open, some closed, hardly looking as she turned a corner and nearly hurtled straight into a man sitting on the floor.
It was Richard.
The last time she had seen him, he had been in the hospital room next to Rosie with a group of people trying to restrain him. He was dressed in just a pair of pyjama bottoms, his feet dirty and bare, eyes blank. She had seen that vacant stare before, on a laptop screen – Ted sitting next to Moses, silent and empty. It had made her heart jump faster then, but this was real and right in front of her.
Richard did not move.
Slack jaw, slack arms, neck wilting under the effort of supporting his head, he slumped on the ground, eyes dulled and lifeless.
But he was alive. Thea could see the gentle rise and fall of his chest.
There was no time to stop and wonder how he had got there, nor to think how, if her hallucinations continued, that might be her soon, alone and empty on a cold, tiled floor.
Now she was on an incline, the corridor curving around and up slightly suggesting that this was maybe an outside wall. Everything was so white, so clinical, it felt like a nightmare – running and running and searching through these white corridors and never getting anywhere. At any moment she expected to come to a dead end and get an electrical shock for taking the wrong turn, a zap for her rat-mind.
The footsteps followed her.
These were all just rooms and offices and labs, no sign of a medical wing. Signs! Signs would have been useful! Thea ran past room after room, shoving doors open, glancing in, moving on. So quiet, so deserted. Everyone fled by now. The company made the decision. Delores had told her that, back in her office. Thea didn’t want to find out the decision they’d made.
Another corridor, big double doors at the end.
But this corridor wasn’t white.
Tramlines of red cut a path on the floor. They led from each room and then joined into one track heading straight for the double doors. It took a while to sink in, her brain soggy and flopping about.
Tramlines = dragging.
Dragging = something heavy.
Red = blood.
People had been dragged – no, not people – bodies had been dragged to that room at the end. There were no handprints on the walls, no signs of struggle, only the odd red footprint where the someone doing the dragging had stepped in blood.
The company made the decision.
The picture popped into Thea’s head; she couldn’t help it. Moira from therapy, with her thick, round glasses – the woman who used to get up at night and eat while asleep. Maybe she had been lost in a hallucination, a nice one perhaps where she was surrounded by fluffy roast potatoes and buttery parsnips all dancing for her. Maybe she’d smiled at the person coming towards her, thinking them a part of her vision, or maybe she couldn’t smile anymore, locked in her own body, unmoving. Like the slaughtered cows Thea had seen once on television, the bolt pistol pressed to their heads, the jolt, their legs scrabbling for purchase as they went down.
No one at home waiting for them to call. No one to care what happens to them.
There had been no boat for the clients. No evacuation. Had she ever really believed there had been?
Those double doors at the end of the corridor waited for her.
There was a fly crawling on them.
If she really was the lab rat scurrying through the maze, she had found the end in that room, the rotten, decaying heart at the centre of it all. She knew what was in there and she couldn’t bring herself to look. There was no getting out. All paths led to that. She was just one more body for a company that wanted to erase what happened here, forget it, smooth it over like a plasterer smoothing over a wall, hoping the blood wouldn’t seep through.
She cowered in the corner of the corridor and was too numb even to cry.
Rosie was probably in there, not that Thea would be able to bring herself to go in and check.
She was the only one left.
No.
There was Richard.
Somehow, he had been overlooked, had wandered out of reach or been forgotten in some way: however it had happened, he was still alive. She may have failed Ethan and Rosie, but maybe she could help him, maybe she could at least try to salvage someone from this charnel pit.
She was not going to cringe in this corner. Instead, she was going to try; get up and keep on trying until they caught and killed her.
Running was not an option anymore for her battered legs, so she staggered back.
Richard was still there, she saw with relief, as she rounded the corner into the corridor. Taking a few steps towards him, she realized how long his legs were and worried about how she would get him up and moving.
That’s when Kyle appeared at the other end of the corridor.
He was closer to Richard than
she was, and he broke into a shockingly fast run, arms pumping. Hardly breaking his stride, he jammed the knife hard into Richard’s throat in one smooth practised move.
It was done with such force, Thea almost felt the punch of the blade in her own throat. She saw everything so clearly for one shocked moment. Wide eyes … arms twitching … the knife handle smooth and black and obscene …
Then Kyle wrenched it out.
He stepped over Richard like he was litter, the knife dripping in his hand and carried on running.
Straight for Thea.
Chapter 52
She had always been the last girl to be picked for school teams, but Thea ran like she’d never run before. She wasn’t hoping that she could beat the man behind her with that steely, emotionless glaze to his eyes, but she was hoping she could hide.
She was better at that.
Those double doors loomed once more, and she really didn’t want to, but she had no choice because that was the end of the corridor.
The double doors it had to be.
Dead end.
As she slammed into the room, a hand shot out and covered her mouth. A warm, living hand, gently but firmly guiding her back from the door, into a shadowed corner. The hand didn’t move but a face edged into her vision.
She blinked.
Rory.
He was holding a fire axe.
What he was still doing here, Thea no longer wanted to know. As he gestured to her to keep quiet and nodded to the door, hefting the axe, she knew what he was planning to do: hit Kyle as he came through. She knew lots of things in that moment. She knew she didn’t trust Rory. But she also knew that Kyle was going to appear any second and she hated him even more.
She grabbed the axe from Rory whose mouth dropped into an almost comical O.
There was no time to explain because Kyle opened the door and she swung the axe as hard as she could. It felt good in her hands, having something with which to fight back and she put all of her fear and hate and anger behind the swing, yelling gutturally. The blunt end of it missed its mark a bit but enough of it smashed into Kyle’s face and he stumbled.
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