by Shaun Allan
So if I knew I was dreaming, and I knew there was an existence beyond this fake reality, didn't that suggest that I wasn't actually dreaming? Was it like a crazy man knowing he was crazy, hence making him sane? Oh if only it was so easy - I could put Dr. Connors out of business.
But now I was confused. Was I awake or asleep? Was it live or was it Memorex?
I pinched my arm, hoping it would prove to be the latter. If I wasn't knocking out the zeds, that would mean I really had been visited by the spirit of my dead sister. It didn't work, but I realised that nothing was proven. If I could pinch myself whilst awake, there was nothing to stop myself doing so whilst snoozing. All I could do was wait. Whether I was in the land of the living, or in the Land of Nod, I'd either wake up or not. I stared into the wet night, listening to the drumming. At first chaotic, the sound seemed to slowly settle into a haphazard kind of rhythm. Almost hypnotic.
Almost...
* * * *
Chapter Six
I woke with a start. Was it possible to do that with a stop? Or with a finish? Why is it always a start? Not too long before I'd have been happy to wake up with an END. As my body jerked awake, the knotted tree trunk gave me a good kick in my back to remind me where I was. I could have told it that I hadn't forgotten, but trees are notoriously bad conversationalists, especially in the mornings. Well, without a hot Cappo and some toast, who isn't?
But... was it morning? Dewy webs dotted the ground like a warped game of Twister where all the spots were white or silver. Now that would be confusing – you wouldn’t know where to put your foot or hand. I stretched, wincing as my back breathed a sigh of relief at finally being released from the bark's surface. I wondered at who spun the wheel and who did the twisting. Spiders could cheat and squirrels only had short legs. It wouldn't really be a fair game. I'm glad I'd only played with my sister and friends.
The light had a hazy feel to it, as if it was on a dimmer that hadn't quite been turned all the way up. I could see a vague fog drifting across the fields beyond the forest, aimless and lost. I knew how it felt. The mist failed to reach into the confines of the trees, perhaps lying in wait for me when I emerged. No matter, I thought. I could handle a bit of fog. It was hardly a case of Mr. T versus Rocky Balboa, was it? Of course John Carpenter or James Herbert might disagree, but I'd have to take that chance. If the mist thought it was hard enough to try it on with me, let it have a go.
Big words from an escaped lunatic, don't you think?
It certainly felt like morning time. How early I couldn't tell, but the air had a definite crispness to it, like it was just out of the wrapping and hadn't been used yet. I felt guilty taking a breath, as if by exhaling I could possibly taint the atmosphere - but hey, I felt guilty taking the last jaffa cake from the box. It didn't stop me. The freshness of the air was sharp in my throat and nostrils, cleaning them out as it passed on through. I felt like someone had stuck a Dyson down my throat and sucked out all the grimy remnants of modern day’s pollution. It was as if every breath I'd ever taken had traces of muck and sludge mingled in it, and this clear morning air had scoured me out better than a hydrochloric enema. I could have been breathing for the very first time, instead of the twenty millionth or so.
How often do you breathe in a life time? I think I read somewhere that it was around twenty thousand times a day. It sounds like a lot, but it's only about fourteen times a minute, give or take the odd yawn or hiccup to spoil the flow. So that makes it about... erm... put the 1 on the doorstep... about seven hundred million or so in a century? Of course, if you're still breathing at a century then you're doing something right - breathing for one.
Anyway, today's felt like Numero Uno for me. My lungs had been plucked from my torso, chucked in a washer on 40° and hung on the line to dry, thereafter being shoved back in my body to start all over again. Refreshed, revived, replenished and renewed. I guess I'd been RE'ed in every which way but loose, Clyde. It was great. I was Samson before he'd nipped to the hairdressers for a quick wash, cut and blow dry. Whether it was Androcles or Saint Jerome who pulled the thorn from the lion's paw, I could do it with my teeth whilst blindfolded and with both hands tied behind my back. Unusually invigorated by the morning, I pushed myself to my feet, ignoring my protesting joints, and decided I was going to get my shiny metal behind into gear. If the men in white coats came a-hunting-we-will-go, then they'd have to catch me. If Dr. Connors was on the prowl, he'd have to find me. And if my dead sister wanted to stop by for a chat again, a-haunting-we-will-go, then she'd just have to call first so I could check my diary. Either that or she'd have to bring some Viennese Whirls. I hadn't had any for ages, and I just fancied one.
Of my sister, there was no sign. Maggots weren't wriggling towards the morning sun like turtles to the sea and the grass wasn't flattened where she'd stepped. No cockroaches crunched underfoot and I failed to see any globby bits of flesh, with hair still sprouting, hiding between the roots of the trees. My dream had been a dream and no more. Of course it had. Why did I feel the need to convince myself? Yes, it had seemed real, apart from her eye popping out and the like, but she was dead. It hadn't been real. Just a dream veering precariously close to the edge of nightmare without quite careening over.
Not that I'm saying my sister was a nightmare. She could sometimes be, though, a bit wee, a bit woo, a bit wah, if you know what I mean. Often even a bit WOAH! I didn't know whether to blame that on hormones or just general femininity. Who understood a woman? Not even women was my guess. And isn't any sibling a nightmare at times? Isn't it always a case of 'I can call you but if anyone else does I'll rip their head off?' Such it was with Joy and me. She did my head in, big style, sometimes, but she was still my sister. So why dream of her with a face melting faster than hot wax?
Go on, ask me another. Dare ya.
My shiny metal behind was loitering, I realised. It was looking for a reason to stay put and to not enter the big, wide, scary world. It didn't have to look too far, of course. Being the right hand scythe of the Big D was reason enough to cower, head between the knees, mooning the world, but I was having none of it. What could I do? Sit here, waiting to see if Joy would call again, or how long it would take me to starve or freeze to death? Sure, that sounded like a plan. Do nothing and nothing could happen. I liked it. But it didn't work like that. People died if I was simply walking through town. Hell, people died if I was sat on the toilet! Sitting tight and waiting for the end to see how bitter it would be wouldn't stop people joining the queue for the one last dance with the Reaper. No. I couldn't do anything so I had to do something.
A light breeze stroked my face and I smelled Jasmine.
Joy.
No again. It was probably the endless sea of rape seed or maybe a farmer had fed his cows some new additive so their doo-doo wouldn't smell quite so much like doo-don’t. My mind was playing tricks and fooling me into thinking I was smelling my sister when I couldn't have been. Dreams didn't leave odours. Go on mind - play your tricks. Have a laugh on me, I've got plenty to spare. God knows I didn't need them myself.
Get going!
I walked to the edge of the trees. For some reason I was nervous about stepping out. The tree line felt as if it was the edge of a cliff, the outside world an abyss daring me to leap. Naturally, that was nonsense. OK, so maybe there were snipers hidden in the bushes along the road side, waiting for me to make the wrong move so they could take me out with a single shot? I checked my body to make sure there were no red dots giving me the targeting equivalent of measles - a fatal dose. There were none. Obviously. I was being silly. If 'they' were looking for me - the men in white coats, the police, the nameless, faceless, They - I didn't see how they could possibly have found me yet. If I didn't know where I was, how could anyone else? Short of hiring one of the Charmed Ones to swing a pendulum over a map, what could they do?
A tracker. Perhaps not all those injections were the happy drugs being pumped into me. Maybe one little prick (ooer missus) really was a microsc
opic, subcutaneous computer chip and right now satellites were spinning high overhead shouting down to the Big Bad Wolf that "HEY! HE'S OVER HERE!"
And the Big Bad Wolf, or Wolfey as he likes to be called, will huff, and he'll puff, and he'll bloooooow me away.
Well. Here's one small step for Man and a dirty great jump for little ol' me.
I stepped forward. I didn't feel a bullet tear through my chest and bury itself all nice and snugly in my heart. Half a dozen SWAT teams didn't fall from the sky as helicopters zoomed over. And the men in the nice white coats didn't rush me and bundle me into the back of an unmarked van ready to return me to my very own padded cell. I was still alive, untouched and currently unnoticed. I had to admit to a little disappointment. Not at the absence of a bullet through my brain - the suicidal tendencies had realised I was a bad bet, so they'd left me in favour of some other troubled soul. The disappointment stemmed from the fact that I hadn't thought beyond that one step. Because no-one had pounced on me like a cat on a rat, it meant they also hadn't taken my choices. I still had them laid out before me like a car boot sale, some going for 50 pence and some for the grand price of a couple of quid. And I was the boy in the sweet shop unable to decide between the gob-stopper and the jelly worms.
Staying where I was would cost about £1.50. It had its merits but was overpriced to be honest. Besides, I'd taken that step now. I was out in the world and as comforting as the leafy canopy behind me might be, it was really a slow grave to China. I'd come from the right, so all that lay for me in that direction was a burnt out car and the corpses of a boy and a gull. My strait jacket could be in the belly of a whale for all I knew. So right was wrong. Left was best. Straight on would take me across fields and ditches and, in the distance, a small lake. It meant effort and no visible destination. Turning left and continuing along the road also had no visible, and possibly viable, end but it was more likely that a house or village would be that way. Roads generally went somewhere. They could take their time arriving, meandering about, taking in the sights along the way, but they usually got there, somewhere, by the time they were finished.
So the road it was. Its surface was smooth as if it had been newly lain only last week. The central lines, a white seam stitched into the black, were as sharp and as crisp as the day they'd been painted. Either the road was a brand spanker, which would wind up all those guys with their fancy sat-navs, or it was hardly used - a back passage to the arse end of nowhere. Whichever it was, it still had to have a purpose. A to B or Y to Z. It couldn't be just A to ?, because what would be the point? Would the road be bothered, in that case, by its aimlessness? It could be that the road was sentient. Perhaps it wandered the world, settling where it wanted, and was just having a rest here in the countryside. And I was an itch on its back, an irritation disturbing its slumber.
I walked to the sleeping asphalt serpent, unsteady across the freshly flooded furrows of the field. More than once I stumbled, and my feet were becoming weighed down with the mud they were collecting. I'd easily gained a couple of inches in height by the time I exited the field, a much cheaper option, I thought, than a pair of heels. I could market this to those who were vertically challenged or catwalk models. I could just see Naomi Campbell flashing a pair of sludge covered plimmies the next time she was showing off Versace's latest collection. My shoes were slurping each time they were pulled from the mud, and my legs began to ache with the effort. I reached the road with relief and stood for a long moment, enjoying the feeling of increased height while the ache seeped from my legs. Top of the world, Ma!
It only took a few steps along the road for me to realise I'd have to clean my shoes. Apart from the tell-tale footprints I was leaving as a trail for any possible pursuers, every step was awkward and an struggle. I stopped and knelt at the road side, peeling my plimsoles off gingerly between my thumb and forefinger. The edge of the road merged with the stumpy hedgerow that ran along the side of the fields as if the workmen who'd put it down had thought to nicely tuck it under. It meant that there was no kerb to scrape the muck from my soles so I tried to use them heel to heel, toe to toe, one shoe being the spatula to clean the other. I suppose partial success can still be classed as success, if you're a half-full kind of guy (which I like to think I hopefully am), so I should have been pleased that the mud didn't want to leave its new home having finally escaped the field. As much as I scraped, it simply served to swap the mud from one shoe to the other. Finally I dropped one shoe, the left, to the floor and used my fingers, the middle and index serving as a mini plough driving through the muck and flicking it off back towards the field from whence it came. I was half way through the second shoe when I heard the squeal of dirty brakes and looked up to see the back end of a van pulling towards me, reversing lights lit, as lights have a habit of doing.
* * * *
Chapter Seven
Do you think lights sleep when they're switched off? Taking the chance to snooze a while before being called, once more, into action, capes flaring in the wind and capital L emblazoned on their chest? Or do they just sit there, bored, twiddling their filaments, hoping someone would wander by and give their switch a little flick? Do they burst into brightness and savour every moment of life until they are condemned to go back into the darkness again by a second casual flick? Maybe, baby, they prefer the darkness. Could it be that the sixty watt bulb hanging leisurely from your living room ceiling dragged itself into powering up.
"Oh, no. Here we go again! Can't a bulb just be left in piece?"
Who knew? "Not I," said the fly, chomping away on a big meat pie. "Ask me another."
OK. Flies buzz. They don't talk. And they don't chomp either. They vomit and suck. So sue me.
The van was white, or at least it had been in a former life. Hysterical comments such as "Clean Me" and "I wish my wife was this dirty" were finger written into the grey grime that coated its surface. There was a covering of dirt so even it could almost have been sprayed on, a sexy new alternative to the usual metallic blue or red of lesser vehicles. The originality of the graffiti raised a smile on my weary lips. They were the sort of slogans that were very funny and at the same time were decidedly not so. A bit like "Computer users do it with lots of RAM." I mean, come on people! Nevertheless, I smiled, just before I thought...
..."Shit!"
Panic overtook humour in the outside lane as I saw a white van coming towards me. They'd found me. They'd found me and they were about to run me down! At that moment I knew what a deer or rabbit felt like. Ambling across a road, minding their own business, when suddenly they're blinded by the glaring high-beam headlights of a car or truck bearing fatally down on them. Feet became fused with tarmac as if roots had somehow grown and eyes stared unblinking into the bright, smiling face of Death. Reversing lights - headlights. Same thing. Either way, a few tonnes of metal was heading my way and it meant business.
But I couldn't move. I knelt, frozen, one filthy shoe hanging from my limp filthy fingers. I couldn't breathe, let alone flee. How had they found me? I glanced up at the sky half expecting to see the tracking satellite hovering overhead, waving to me.
"Gotcha!"
Brake lights replaced the white reversing and the van slowed to a stop a few feet away. I dropped my shoe and reached down to retrieve both it and its partner. It was an automatic move as my eyes were fixed firmly on the bringer of my doom. I heard the crick of the hand brake being yanked on, the cogs clicking in derision of my fate. The red lights, feral eyes watching me, winked off. A click. The driver's side door opened slowly, as if whoever might be there was intent on dragging out my terror. Time became the tortoise to my heartbeat's hare, anticipation the razor blade of my nerves' wrists.
A booted foot, the wellington once green, now brown and streaked settled onto the road, the extending leg clothed in worn, equally dirty jeans. I could see the hand that gripped the door handle. Big. The type that could grip my throat and happily squeeze. A beaten red checked shirt sleeve covered the arm.
Then the man himself. Bigger than he could possibly be to fit inside the van's cab. The shirt strained across his huge barrel chest. It was tight enough across the biceps to look sprayed on. A few days growth of brown-on-the-cusp-of-red bushed across his chin. Cold blue eyes, startlingly clear against the muddy exterior of the figure - not muddy in the same way as my shoes, more so in his complexion and general state. As if he'd worked for a hundred years in the open air, shovelling and digging and building. He was muddy. Almost craggy. He smiled, his teeth as startling as his eyes.
"Ey up, mate," he said, his voice rising up from his boots. "You after a lift?"
I opened my mouth, but couldn't think of what to say. A lift? He wasn't going to drag me up and throw me into the back of his paddy wagon? He could have easily, probably with his little finger. Well, maybe with both. A lift?
I blinked and woke up, a baseball bat whacking me into reality.
The van. It wasn't any sort of paddy wagon. The institute, the police, the CIA, NSA, FBI, OAP, VIP, QED, KFC wouldn't have vehicles as dirty as this one. They'd either be a crisper white than untrodden snow or a darker black than midnight's shadow. They'd have a Transit as a minimum, not this. What was it? An Escort van? Astramax? Small, nippy and suitable for shifting a few bags of fertiliser. Or, maybe, the odd body. They'd be high-tech, this was low spec.
And the man. He didn't wear black, have shades and talk into his cuff. He didn't have a long white coat and I was fairly sure he wasn't as dextrous with a hypodermic as he was with his milking hands. I wondered if his surname was Giles. He looked so much like a typical - stereotypical, in fact - farmer he'd probably left his flat cap on the passenger seat.