The Man Who Vanishes_a gripping horror thriller spanning 3 timelines_One Man. Everywhere.

by J M Gonzalez Riley

  He sat down and stared at the floor with her.

  Clara sagged next to him. A full minute passed, then she sat up straight, pulling her shoulders back. She seemed to have made a decision.

  ‘What now, then?’ she asked, turning around to look at him.

  ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘I meant about the man who vanishes.’

  Simmons looked at her.

  ‘Oh God,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘It’s just so hard to believe.’ He told her about Frank and the MOD man, about the chase earlier on that day, about the man running inside the tube station, and about the accident.

  Clara’s eyes grew wide.

  ‘It was on the news!’ she said, standing up. ‘A man fell on the track and died! It was him!’

  Simmons sat up, his mouth open. He hadn’t had a chance to even check his phone since Frank dropped him off earlier this afternoon.

  ‘They showed footage of him running into the station,’ she continued. ‘It was him.’

  Simmons felt guilty. Now he knew for certain: they had chased him to his death. He looked down and Clara sat next to him, squeezing his hand, guessing what he was thinking.

  The sat in silence for a while.

  ‘How long have you lived on your own, Clara?’ Simmons couldn’t believe he had asked her that. He had just blurted it out, without thinking.

  She took her hand away from his, taken aback, suddenly embarrassed. But she answered the question.

  ‘Ten years,’ she said. ‘Since my parents died. I have no other family to speak of, so I stayed put in the city, here, in my parent’s house. You know the rest.’

  Simmons felt like an idiot. He stood up quickly, placing his mug on the glass table.

  ‘I… I should go. I’m sorry.’

  Clara stood up, went to him.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ she was saying. ‘It’s OK.’

  Simmons put his hands up, tried to head for the door before his embarrassment killed him off, but she came and held him, sensing his turmoil, and before he knew it he was holding her tight to him, kissing her urgently. And she was kissing him back.

  She is as lonely as I am. How could I have not noticed?

  They clung on to each other tightly, well after their lips had parted, holding each other in the eerie silence of the living room.

  Finally, Simmons looked into her eyes and saw that her tears had dried. He felt a wave of sorrow wash over him, felt the need to hold her tight again, to comfort her.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he whispered, shaking his head.

  And then they were kissing again, falling gently on to the settee.

  10

  Present Day

  Kayn walked along the deserted road. Above him, the big orange moon cast feeble shadows in his wake. As he waked, he listened to his footsteps echoing off the dark wall that ran alongside him, wondering what lay beyond it. He did not know where he was, but he could hear the faint rumble of the city, somewhere in the distance toward which he was headed. He did not remember the rain ceasing, but his clothes were dry.

  Who were the men who chased me? he wondered.

  He could remember the man with the grin and the ponytail. He had been about his own age, maybe a bit younger, unlike the two older men who had stumbled out of the café after him. He remembered going into the tube station and falling down the escalators, on to the platform.

  The man had looked down at him as he had lain on the track, burning up. His eyes had been bright with triumph, as though he had finally found him after a lifetime of searching. And he had spoken to him. He had said: I found you, Kayn.

  So the man knew him. And yet, he had no recollection of the man.

  Kayn shuddered.

  The sound of a train reached him, like a distant memory. He stopped and turned. The train rushed along the open night, casting light upon shadows from each of its windows. The bright light hung in the air, picking up speed toward him, and Kayn suddenly realised the railway track lay beyond the dark wall.

  He waited, listening to the rush of air and metal that shook the high wall and disturbed the night, watching the top of the train as it screamed past.

  After the train passed, he resumed his walk. He kept on walking along the deserted road, stepping in puddles along the way, breaking their calm surfaces. He kept his breathing even and his pace light. A gust of wind rose out of nowhere, ruffling his hair, making him shiver. And then the rain began to fall.

  After about a mile, the wall on his left gave way to an arch: a bridge in which to shelter. Kayn stepped inside, dripping with rain, scanning the hollow of orange brick and painted art.

  His footsteps echoed inside the structure.

  Satisfied that he was alone, he sat back against the wall and watched the puddles in the street, boiling with rain.

  A shape moved in the dark, underneath the bridge.

  Kayn looked up suddenly. There was a man, looking down on him.

  ‘I know who you are,’ said the man.

  His clothes hung from him, wet with rain and urine.

  ‘I am Kayn’ said Kayn.

  The man’s beard was matted with dirt, hiding his face.

  ‘A man with a story,’ he said, peering at him through punctured, red eyes.

  Kayn looked back at the puddle. He saw faces there, of the men who had chased him.

  ‘I have no story,’ he said.

  The man fell next to him with a grunt. There was a bottle in his hand, wrapped inside a dirty brown paper bag. He unscrewed the top and took a swig from the bottle. A warm and sickly smell reached Kayn. It smelled like urine.

  Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, the man offered the bottle to Kayn.Kayn took it and drank from it. He didn’t feel thirsty, but he didn’t know what else to do.

  ‘I haven’t eaten in three days,’ said the drunk, taking his bottle back.

  Kayn nodded, slowly, understanding. His throat was on fire.

  ‘I don’t eat either.’

  The drunk arched his eyebrows and then laughed. The acoustics of the brick structure amplified and distorted the sound of his voice. It sounded eerie. Then he broke into a coughing fit that made him clutch at his chest painfully. He hunched over where he sat, breathing noisily into his ragged lungs until the pain passed.

  ‘Where are you from, stranger?’ he said when he had recovered, his voice weak.

  Kayn closed his eyes.

  ‘I don't know.’

  The drunk nodded, took another swig.

  ‘I like a man from nowhere. Like myself.’

  Kayn watched him with interest.

  ‘I’m William Thorpe,’ said the drunk. ‘My friends call me Napoleon,’ he added, then burst into the raucous laughter that ended abruptly with another fit of coughing.

  ‘I don’t know who I am,’ said Kayn when the echoes died.

  Napoleon arched his eyebrows. He took a big swig and said, ‘I like you. So, I’ll tell you my story.’

  He put the bottle down on the ground before him.

  ‘I had everything, once,’ he began. ‘My own house, my own business, my own wife and kids...’ He looked at the puddle that was forming under their feet, and sighed. ‘I gambled it all, everything. Life’s a gamble, I said to her. But she never understood me, that woman. She never could. I think I’d always known that, deep down.’

  He picked up the bottle and drank some more, drank it empty and cursed, pitching it into the shadows where it shattered noisily.

  ‘But I still have my mind,’ he said, grinning, tapping his temple. ‘I could do it all again, if I wanted to.’

  The black van moved against the darkness of the night, in time with the rain, like a silent predator. A sharp beam of light cut across the darkness, shinning under the bridge, searching the shadows, echoing against the orange brick. And then came the scream, high like a banshee, a white sound bouncing against the orange brick, freezing the rain for the smallest of moments. Two men spilled out of the van, shapes in the night, ru
nning underneath the bridge. But when they got there, there was only the screaming drunk.

  Almost as fast as he had joined the cool blue, Kayn felt himself pulled out of it, drawn like an electron into the cold magnet of reality. He was standing on the rail track, inside the high wall. The bridge was beneath him.

  The track gleamed dully under the cold moonlight, stretching away into the distance, shimmering in the rain. Kayn thought of the train, the rushing metal, and jumped off the track. He ran across the cobbles, almost tripping over on two occasions, and leaped up at the wall, hooking his hands over the top. His body slammed into the brick, but he managed to hold on, winded, grazing his fingers where he held on to the rough concrete. When he caught his breath back, he heaved himself up and over, dangling from the other side of the wall for a moment, his feet about half a metre off the road. And then he was back on the empty road, his ankles stinging from the jump, a sharp pain in his right knee making him wince.

  He looked around him, trying to work out how far he had travelled down the road. On the near side were houses, old and leaning, some boarded up, some lit up, all uninviting. He scanned the distance, saw the bridge where he had left the old drunk, dark and sinister, spilling slivers of eerie orange light onto the road.

  He saw the black van, under the bridge.

  He gasped when he realised that he was standing in the middle of the open road, making an easy target of himself. And as if his thoughts had betrayed his presence, the van’s headlights suddenly came to life, bathing him in their full beam, cutting out his shape from the night and the rain. The van’s engine roared and he saw men emerging from the shadows of the bridge, running to the van and clambering inside it with haste. And then the van slammed forward like a fist, coming straight for him.

  Cursing, Kayn turned and ran, away from the bridge and the oncoming headlights, down the empty road, past the boarded up houses. The van came after him, eating up the ground between them.

  Kayn’s head filled with the sound of his breathing. He tried to ignore the pain in his knee and focused on the sound of his heart pumping. Fear oozed out of him like sweat, a rising panic taking over him. He knew he could never outrun the van, so he looked frantically for an opening in the shadows cast by the houses.

  A footpath lay up ahead, dark and foreboding. As he reached it, he slowed down, almost slipping and falling on the wet road. He turned into it and picked up his pace again as best he could, headed for the unknown, his right leg trailing behind.

  Moments later, the van’s tyres screeched behind him, at the entrance of the footpath, and Kayn realised how close it had been.

  He ran along the narrow footpath, plunging into darkness when the moonlight fell behind the rooftops. He heard the van side door sliding, and another slamming. He ran, keeping his right arm outstretched, feeling his way along the rough brick wall with fingers that glowed warm and stung with fresh cuts and thin blood.

  Finally, he reached the end of the footpath and came out into a quiet street, where he took the smallest of pauses to quickly survey his surroundings.

  Grey houses like those on the outer road surrounded an unkempt grass square at the centre. There was a burnt out car on the grass, rocking to the rhythm of the couple inside it. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted some youths stepping out of the shadows, moving swiftly toward him.

  ‘Just where the fuck d’you think you’re goin’, mate?’

  When they reached him, one of the youths flicked his wrist with a practised move and there was a sharp metal click. The moonlight fell on the knife blade.

  Kayn stepped back, fearfully.

  A girl with bad skin joined the youth at the front, smiling.

  ‘Do him in, Roy,’ she sniggered.

  The rest of the posse converged around him, cheering, laughing.

  Then came the running footsteps, out of the footpath, and the youths’ faces looked up and froze for a moment when they saw the men from the van.

  ‘The fucker’s got his mates with him,’ somebody shouted. The air around them seemed to explode with curses.

  The youth called Roy turned his knife in the direction of the approaching men. The rest of the gang turned with him, their faces hard with anger. Unnoticed, Kayn moved slowly away from the circle, edging toward the grass square.

  The car had stopped rocking.

  The men from the van wore identical black suits.

  ‘What the fuck’s this? A fancy dress party or somethin?’ Roy sneered. The posse roared with laughter.

  ‘It’s the Blues brothers!’ said another, and the square filled with cheers and shrill squeals.

  ‘Come on lads,’ said one of the men. ‘Step aside. This is not your business.’

  The laughter ceased at once, and knife blades clicked smoothly, catching the moon’s glint.

  ‘Everythin’ ‘ere is our fuckin’ business, you twat!’ Roy screamed. ‘This is our fuckin’ ground.’

  There was a pause, a standoff between the two groups. There were only four men in black to eight of the youths, not including the couple in the car. It unsettled Kayn to see that his pursuers were not in the least intimidated by the posse, but merely stood watching them with sharp, calculating eyes.

  Finally, the first of the men lifted his hands up in surrender, showing empty palms. He stepped forward, smiling, and struck the youth Roy with lightning speed in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him and sending the knife flying.

  Before anybody could register what had just happened, the other men had charged into the rest of the gang. Kayn heard a yelp as one of the youths was punched hard in the face. He watched as the boy’s head turned sharply, followed by his body, and went sprawling on the ground where he lay still under the falling rain.

  In the next moment, the rest of the youths were fighting back. Two girls were screaming abuse as they hurled themselves at one of the men. Kayn saw the man strike one of the girls coldly, knocking her unconscious. The second girl flung herself at him, biting him hard in the arm. He screamed and beat her off with his other arm. Then, as he turned, he was stabbed by one of her friends in the back.

  The man dropped to his knees and the youth stepped forward and gave him a hefty kick in the ribs. As he went down, the man held on to his attacker’s foot. Kayn watched as, with surprising strength and grim determination, the man gave the foot a sharp, vicious twist. The bone popped loudly and the youth collapsed in a heap, screaming in agony at his broken ankle. The vicious girl seemed too horrified to move.

  Close by, another of the men was being circled by two gang members who were trying to stab him but who were too scared to get close enough to him.

  Kayn bumped into the burnt out car. He started, crouching out of the way, when he saw the young boy behind him. Inside the car, a girl with plastered down hair stared at the brawl with wide eyes and an open mouth.

  Kayn backed away from the boy, who was watching him intently, leaning forward, ready to leap at him at any moment.

  There was a sharp sound in the air. A booming crack.

  Somebody shouted.

  ‘He’s got a gun!’

  One of the men was holding a weapon, pointing it in the air. Everybody backed away from him suddenly. Around the square, windows filled with people peering out at the scene.

  ‘Get help,’ one of the men said, pointing to the man on the floor with the stab wound. The youth with the broken ankle squirmed on the ground, whimpering in despair. The girl with the bad skin ran to him, dropping to her knees at his side.

  One of the men spoke quickly into a cell phone. At the top of the square a black van spun its wheels, careening down the street. And then another, illuminating both sides of the square. The youths fled the scene, forsaking their wounded friend and the girl who huddled close to him, disappearing into cracks in the houses.

  The first van swerved and mounted the square, its wheels spinning on the wet grass. The other screeched to a halt where the youths had been moments earlier.

  A tall
man with gaunt features stepped out of the van and walked toward the man with the gun.

  ‘Where is he?’ he asked.

  The man with the gun shrugged, looking all over the square.

  ‘He’s vanished again.’

  11

  Present Day

  When Simmons awoke, he almost yelped in surprise. He was wrapped around Clara’s arms. In her bed.

  She was fast asleep, the faint trace of a mile playing on her pert lips. The previous night came back to him, the talking, the kissing. One thing had led to another and they had ended up in the bedroom.

  He smiled and nodded, pleased with himself. He felt warm and hard, and reluctant to leave the bed, but they had a lot to do today.

  He pulled himself gently off her, lifting up one of her arms and ducking under it, then repeating the manoeuvre with the other arm. Clara stirred, moved her arm back, searching for his comfort, but he ducked out of the way again and sat up beside her, one foot on the floor. Clara opened her eyes and looked up at him, but her gaze was blank and she let her lids drop after a moment, falling fast asleep.

  Simmons stepped off the bed as gently as he could, then padded quietly into the kitchen, picking up his underwear on the way out. He re-emerged ten minutes later with hot coffee and buttered toast on a tray, waking Clara up by shaking the bed with one foot, hovering over her with a radiant smile.

  ‘Good morning, sleeping beauty! I bring you goods to savour!’ he said, cheerfully.

  Clara squinted up at him. Simmons looked at her expectantly, and then she smiled, closing her eyes and letting her head fall back on the pillow.

  ‘Wake up!’ he said, shaking the bed again. ‘We’ll be late for work!’

  Clara moaned, looking at the time flashing on the bedside table. Simmons propped her up with one hand and placed the tray on her lap, taking his own mug from it.