“Can someone please explain what is going on?” Mandy shouted.
And the familiar sound of feedback. A sound that he had heard once before in the room, but couldn’t place it. He didn’t remember until he heard the voice.
“Hello, everyone,” the horse man said.
Sheppard wheeled around. Headphones jumped out of the way in surprise. They were all looking at the television, showing the same shot of the man wearing his horse mask.
Who is he? The horse mask, the horse man, C, the evil man. So many names—but none that count.
It looked like he hadn’t moved for three hours, had probably been watching everything. No doubt enjoying the show. Making them think they were getting out, then flipping the script.
We’re all in danger. More danger than we ever were before.
Now the killer knew there was no way out, what was to stop them killing again? Killing them all? Maybe the masked man wasn’t the main enemy anymore.
“Where are we?” Sheppard said, stepping forward.
“You’re underground, as you said. Exactly where really doesn’t matter for your current predicament, does it?” the horse man said, in that familiar muffled voice.
“Why are you keeping us here? You’ve got what you wanted,” Sheppard said, pointing to the corners of the room where he presumed the cameras were. “Your little game went exactly as you planned. I failed.”
Mandy stepped forward, slightly unsure of herself. “We named everyone in the room. How did we fail exactly?”
The horse man shifted his never-ending gaze from left to right, plastic eyes glinting in the light—Sheppard to Mandy and back. “It’s not enough just to name everyone. You could have done that at the start, for God’s sake. You had to know who killed Simon Winter and why. Captivity seems to have made you all brain-dead. Maybe I should have done this experiment somewhere more airy, more public.”
“Who killed Simon Winter?” Sheppard said.
The horse man laughed. “Well, I’m not going to tell you, am I? That’s the whole point.”
“The game is over. And I’m done with you. So just tell me.”
The horse man seemed to actually consider it. “Hmmm. No. You see your problem at the moment, Morgan, is that you’re not looking on the bright side. You’re still alive, ergo you still have time to find out.”
“What do you mean? You’re not going to blow up somewhere underground. I doubt that you even ever planned to. What’s the point in us cooperating now?”
“Because you haven’t exactly found an exit, have you? And because for about three hours now, I’ve been pumping air into your little room—at great expense I might add. So about two minutes ago, I stopped.”
Quiet—processing the information. “Wait...what?” Ryan said.
Unease settled over Sheppard again—control slipping away. “What do you mean?”
“I mean just that. I stopped. I cut off the air supply. If you look at the timer, it should be showing you your new countdown. Courtesy of the Great Fake Hotel.”
Just as Headphones had said. Sheppard looked to the bedside table. The timer displaying a new number—counting down again. Twenty-four minutes.
“It should be somewhere around twenty-five minutes until there’s no air left in the room. That’s an extra twenty-five minutes. You should all be thanking me. Although after about fifteen minutes, areas of brain function will probably start to shut down, so...”
“Liar,” Sheppard shouted at the television.
The horse man stopped. “You don’t have to take my word for it. Just listen. I’ve been circulating air in the room for the past three hours—that makes a sound. That sound you thought was the air conditioning? Is it there anymore?”
Everyone was silent. Sheppard strained to hear—anything. But he couldn’t.
“You’re sealed up all tight now.”
Mandy gave out a squeaking sound—suppressing a scream. Ryan looked like he was about to vomit, and Rhona clutched her headphones around her neck, as though for comfort. Only Constance seemed unperturbed.
Suffocating. Worse than being incinerated.
This had been part of the plan all along. Another step in breaking him down.
“You know, I think I’m done here,” Sheppard said, saying the exact opposite of what he was thinking. Inside, he was wondering how to get out of this. He was still wondering who killed Winter. But even if he worked it out, who was to say the horse mask would let him go? Maybe this was all for naught. “Who are you?”
“You still haven’t worked it out? Even after all this time, you still don’t know. That’s one of the reasons you’re here in the first place. You’ve bewitched everyone—most of all yourself. That’s exactly why I did this.”
“What?” Sheppard said.
“You don’t even know. I bet now you’re thinking and thinking about who I could be, but you’ll never work it out. Because you don’t function like a normal person. You don’t think, or feel, how normal people do. You’re a disgrace.”
His mind flitted from person to person—the protective shell around which he’d put his deepest, darkest memories finally chipping away. But it still wasn’t enough. His memory had fused a long time ago. All the drugs and drink had made him forget things. Especially things he repressed. Or, no, it couldn’t be called repressed when you forced it down to the back of your memory and left it there to rot.
“I told you right at the start, Morgan. I’m your best friend,” the horse man said, reaching up to grasp the mask. And Sheppard didn’t even get it then. That was who he was—he didn’t live in the past, couldn’t bring himself to. People came and went within him. It wasn’t strange to think he’d lose track of them all.
The horse man reached back behind his head. And pulled the mask away.
A man he didn’t even know he remembered. But he did. It was unmistakable. He was twenty-five years older than when Sheppard had last seen him. Now he was a man, his piercing eyes, wrinkles, his big smile. It was the smile that made him so familiar. That smile hadn’t changed. In a quarter of a century, that smile had not changed a bit. Sheppard found himself speechless, rasping for words to come out. The man on the television just smiled that smile.
The smile of Eren Carver.
47
“Hello again, Morgan,” Eren said.
What? How...?
Sheppard’s knees buckled. He fell to the ground—mouth wide.
How is this possible? And the more pertinent question—how did I not know?
Twenty-five years—it had been twenty-five years. And now he was here. How could he have forgotten him—how had he not known straight away who it was? Could he really be so naïve? All the memories he had buried deep with booze and pills suddenly surfaced. Mr. Jefferies. Eren’s dad being taken away by the police. It had made little Morgan Sheppard famous (what he had always wanted) but it had left Eren without a father. Eren was the only person the masked man could have ever been—and he hadn’t thought once about him.
Calling him Morgan. That was the first clue. No one ever called him by his first name anymore. His publicist, his agent, even his array of girlfriends—everyone just called him Sheppard. He had talked to his agent about it—it wasn’t like he hated his first name, but rather fell back on his last one. Sheppard is a good strong name, it’s a name you can hang your hat on. Biblical—if with a few typos.
The glasses. That had been the next thing. Sheppard hadn’t worn glasses in public, probably since his school days. He hated having them, so didn’t wear them much, preferring to strain his eyes. He was badly shortsighted, but he had learned to live with it. When he got older, he got contact lenses, but always had his glasses for around his flat where no one else would see. He remembered the first time he’d got glasses. His mother forced him to wear them every day, which he did. But he always took them off by first pe
riod—sick of them. He’d put them in his back pocket—joking (but not joking) that he hoped he would sit on them and break them.
It all made sense, but even now, as he looked at Eren’s face on the television screen, he couldn’t bring himself to believe it. Even with all the clues there in front of him and the truth staring him in the face.
“Eren?” he said, his face incredibly close to the television screen.
“Hello, old friend,” Eren said, smiling, “but it’s not Eren anymore. I found Eren a bit too homely, and a bit too ingrained in bad memories. It’s Kace now. Kace Carver. You like it?”
“Kace? What is that?”
“That’s my name.”
“No, it’s not. Your name’s Eren.”
Eren frowned. “We may have a history, you and me. But, I’ll warn you now, Morgan, do not attempt to pretend you know me. You left me all that time ago, and I have changed since then. So have you, although in your case it’s rather for the worse, I’m afraid, if that was even possible. Who would think that this is the way it would work out?”
“Wait...” Ryan. At least he thought it was. All he heard were the words. Couldn’t discern who it was anymore. “What is he talking about? Who is that?”
How to explain...
“Sheppard.”
“It’s come to the point in proceedings that I’ve been looking forward to the most,” Carver said. “It’s time for our hero, our protagonist, to explain himself.”
“Eren,” Sheppard said, holding his hand out to the screen, “stop this, let us out. Please.”
“No. I won’t. Because it seems throughout this whole charade, you haven’t learned a thing. You didn’t even know who I was.”
“But I know you now, Eren. I know you. I remember you. I remember everything we did together. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. We were best friends. I remember everything. Just please—let us go.” A tear rolled down Sheppard’s cheek. Crying—he hadn’t cried, he could never remember crying. Crying wasn’t something he did—that was for other people. “Please, Eren.”
“Don’t call me Eren,” Eren said. “I am not Eren.”
“Please let everyone else go. Please, this is between you and me. These people have nothing to do with it,” Sheppard said, sweeping his arm across the rest of the room.
Eren faltered slightly, peered closer at the screen. “That is uncharacteristically selfless of you. Are you okay? Do you have indigestion? I can only assume it’s to save some kind of face. You still think you’re getting out of this, don’t you?”
He didn’t anymore. He didn’t know anything.
“But no, I will not be letting any of you go. At first, I just thought I’d put you in there. Plop you all in there like flies in a jar and watch you buzzing around, not knowing what to do. But now I have the bite, the bite of curiosity. I want to see if you can do it. And more than that, I want to see you die. So keeping you in there to rot sounds good to me. But if you do it, if you manage it, I’ll let the others go free.”
The others...
“So I solve this and you let everyone else go?”
Eren looked frustrated. “Is your brain already that starved? I just said that, didn’t I?”
“Can someone tell me what is going on?” Mandy this time. But he couldn’t think about anyone else. Not right now.
“And what happens to me?” Sheppard said.
“I think we need a nice little chat,” Eren said, smiling again.
Sheppard didn’t move except to nod. “Okay.”
“Solve it Morgan, or die with your roommates. It’s your decision. But can you please do something for me?” Carver said.
“Yes—of course.” What a sniveling little hermit he’d become. He knew that Eren was his only way out. Didn’t Eren see that? Didn’t Eren see that he would do anything? “Tell the truth, Morgan,” Eren said. “Just for once in your life, tell the truth.”
Sheppard collapsed on the floor, finally admitting to himself he was crying. Eren Carver. The boy who had been his best—his only—friend.
But something was different. Something had happened to him.
And as his eyes stung with tears, he realized that what had happened to Eren was Morgan Sheppard.
48
“Sheppard. Sheppard.” Who was it?
The air felt thicker. Was that a real thing or was it just because he knew the air was in short supply—the oxygen decreasing by the second? He and his roommates were dying one breath at a time. He didn’t need a timer, he didn’t need a countdown to know that they were in trouble—more trouble than they had ever been in. Death by suffocation—death worming its way around your body, gripping the heart and squeezing the life out of it.
“Sheppard. Damn it.”
It was the image of himself choking in a corner, his eyes becoming redder, which made him get up. He pushed himself up by his hands and then tested his legs. They seemed okay and he got up on them.
Eren Carver. He had been right.
Sheppard had forgotten all about him. He had turned the memory of Mr. Jefferies’s death into a little ball and stuffed it at the back of his mind. He had written his own narrative of how those few months in 1992 played out—and started to believe it. And that made it all the worse. Sheppard held out a hand to skirt the bed as he got his balance back. Ryan and Mandy were still standing around, Headphones had somehow got back to her place under the desk and Constance had resumed rocking on the chair. It wasn’t enough to fail them once, or even twice. Eren was going to humiliate him as many times as he could.
“Sheppard?” Ryan said. The young man was halfway between anger and panic. Didn’t seem to appreciate being kept out of the loop. “What the hell is going on? Who was that? And what did he mean by telling the truth?”
“Please, Sheppard,” Mandy said. Looking at her, he realized there was no more hope in her eyes.
Headphones stared across the room, watching the timer. She appeared to be breathing through the sleeve of her hoodie, as though that might use less air.
Constance had shut her eyes and even looked asleep.
She obviously didn’t care anymore.
Sheppard looked at them all. All he had been running from, his entire life, etched across their faces. He remembered how he had been back then. He had just wanted to be famous. He smiled when he thought that that was no different to how he was now. All he wanted was to be known. Sometimes all we want is to be seen. An old thing Winter said once. He remembered it because when it got stripped down, that was all he ever wanted. To be seen.
Was this it? And as he thought about it, he was relieved. It was more than time. “I’m a liar. A fraud. That’s the simplest way of putting it.”
“What?” Ryan said.
“I am known as the Child Detective. But that’s not true. I did not solve the murder of George Jefferies in 1992, didn’t even have much of a part in it. The person who solved the murder was Eren Carver, the son of the man who did it. He was brilliant and fantastic in all the ways I could never be. He was my friend. And I betrayed him. And, for all intents and purposes, I assumed his identity. For twenty-five years. I told everyone I solved it. And Eren didn’t come forward because it had gone too far. Everyone truly believed it was me. Morgan Sheppard means nothing.
“That’s the reason we’re all here. That man on the TV is Eren, or whatever he calls himself now. He’s torturing me, proving to everyone else that I’m not who I say I am. And he’s right.”
His eyes fell, not able to hold anyone else’s gaze anymore. Eren was watching, and for all he knew, so were others. He hoped they were. It was time for Morgan Sheppard to die, or at least what Morgan Sheppard had become. The man was gone, cast away like a snake’s shed skin. It wasn’t by choice, but by need. And Sheppard didn’t know if that kind of made it forego the point.
No one moved around him, but he had
one last job to do. If he’d never done anything selfless in his entire life, let him do this. He had to rescue three of the four people in the room—one of them killed a friend of his, and the other three deserved to live. Hell, they all deserved to live.
The killer. We’re in here with a killer.
Sheppard had gone too far—he knew that too. He had gone beyond the bounds of his particular abyss to something bigger than killing and something bigger than mere deceiving. He was the man who fooled the world. And he guessed that he’d at least have that accolade right up until the very end.
Atonement was on a timer and dependent on shallow breaths.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Ryan said.
“It’s all true.” He breathed in and out—savoring it. And promised it was the last time he would do it. From now on, he would only breathe slightly. To give them enough time to maybe get out of this.
Mandy still looked like she was trying to process everything. But it seemed to have finally clicked for everyone else. Headphones was watching him with shifty eyes. Constance had regained a little bit of interest too, staring around. Ryan seemed like he was about to explode, going a reddish color.
“Are you serious?” he said, striding forward, like a peacock showing his feathers. “That’s what all this is about? I’m going to die because of you? Ever since the beginning, this has all been about you. Me, Mandy, Rhona, even Constance and Alan. We’ve all been nothing. Just things to get in your way.”
“I’m sorry,” Sheppard said. It was all he could say.
“You’re a joke,” Ryan said. “A sick, sick joke. How did you live with yourself?”
Very easily. “Ryan, I’m sorry. I didn’t want any of this to happen.”
“Well, yeah, of course you didn’t. But still...”
“Ryan, I need all of you. I need you to help me. I’m going to save you. I’m going to save you and Mandy and Headphones and Ahearn. Hell, I’m even going to save Alan’s body so he can have a proper burial. I know it’s the end for me. I know I’m a dead man walking. Eren isn’t going to let me walk out of here.”
Guess Who Page 23