by Tim Lebbon
The past . . .
Cain’s father had never been good to him, though perhaps he was too mad to be truly bad. He had seen Cain as a project, his own subject for experimentation. Cain had tried his best to block those many terrible memories, and they had receded into his dreams, driven underground by his efforts at Afresh. The physical evidence of his past—the impossibility of what had happened to him—was locked away in the chest. He would never open it again, but he knew that he could never lose it completely. Having independence was another step toward creating a whole new life for himself.
Still, those dreams.
Walking back from the shops, Cain took time to really assess the neighborhood. The buildings were a surprising mix of styles and periods, ranging from Victorian town houses—much like the one housing his new flat—to brand-new modern executive homes; five bedrooms, large gardens, and four-wheel-drives in the double garage. There were clutches of council houses mixed in with unique self-built homes. A terraced street backed onto a court of luxury apartments. It gave the whole area a surreal atmosphere, as if it had never known itself, nor what it wanted to be. A young businessman in a sharp suit walked along the pavement, talking into a hands-free telephone wrapped onto his ear. Cain nodded, but the suit was too busy to reciprocate. Minutes later, a gang of youths approached and asked if he had a light. Cain shook his head, unnerved, and they drifted off with a polite “Thanks, mate.” Halfway home, he decided to sit and watch people pass by. He used to enjoy doing this at Afresh, but there the strollers were mostly mad.
He found himself outside a small park—little more than a fenced-in area of grass and shrubs, and some tattered play equipment—and sat on a bench dedicated to “Dear Jack.” The takeaway meal was going cold, but he had a microwave, and besides, the air this afternoon smelled so much fresher knowing he did not have to return to Afresh that evening. No more day passes, no more weekly evaluations, no more prodding and poking, no more trial journeys, no more mornings with the Face smiling down as he woke up, no more evenings with the Voice asking how he was, where had he been, whom had he seen. His time spent at Afresh since his father’s death—years, though he had lost track of just how many—was a good time in his memory. He had been treated well and, for the first time in his life, allowed to join in with the community. Interaction was good, they were always told. Whether he had actually wanted to join in, he was still not sure.
The street where he sat was quiet, salubrious, well kept. The few houses facing the park were all slightly different, extended and renovated versions of the same original plan. The cars in their driveways were new, high-performance models. His father’s house had been a little larger than any of these, isolated out in the country. That’s where they had found Cain.
A man went by walking his dog. Cain smiled, and the man averted his eyes and hurried on, tugging the dog on its leash so that its nails skittered across the pavement. Cain opened his fruit jellies and started eating. He had developed a liking for them at Afresh, and they were still the only sweet he remembered ever having tried.
A woman approached, searching through her handbag, muttering to herself and cursing, quietly at first and then louder. A few steps away from Cain, she dropped her bag. Its contents spewed across the pavement; lipsticks rolled, tissues fluttered, notebooks and pens and purse collided and stuttered into the gutter. A mobile phone spun on its end and then hit the ground with a crack.
“Fuck!” The woman squatted and began gathering her belongings. She did not appear to be aware of Cain’s presence.
“Need some help?” he asked.
“Shit!” She jerked upright and almost fell over backward, eyes wide and startled, and her thoughts were a stew of nasty, vile images, ideas that should have driven Cain away, but they were seen and experienced by another part of him.
“Get away from me!” she said.
“I was only offering to help.” He went to kneel down, reaching out for a lipstick that had rolled his way.
“I said get away! I don’t need any help, not from you!” The woman hurriedly gathered her things and shoved them in her bag, pocketing the phone after a cursory glance at its cracked face.
“Really, I’m only trying to help.” Cain felt stupidly ashamed, as if this woman’s reaction were his fault, not her own. The need to explain himself was annoying, but he did not want her thinking bad of him. Not that vileness, that pure viciousness which scored her eyes from the inside out, unpleasant in the extreme.
She stood and stared at Cain for a moment, and he was sure that she was about to apologize, offer tales of missed meetings and lost phone numbers, an empty apology that may at least make him feel a little better. But her face did not change. A big car cruised by, adding a roar to her voice.
“Keep . . . the fuck . . . away from me!” She hurried away the way she had come, not glancing around once. Cain watched her go, and it was like saying good-bye to a bad smell. His mind cleared, the taint of her thoughts—expressed through her eyes, her voice, her stance surely, how else could he know?—burned away by the afternoon sun.
“Well, someone needs to work on her manners,” he muttered. A bird landed on the railing behind him and sang its agreement. Cain turned slowly, careful not to scare it away, and he listened to its song, watching its chest vibrate with each warble until it flew into the park.
Back at the house, the other residents still kept to themselves. Cain stood in the downstairs lobby for a while, listening, hoping that one of them would emerge from a flat or come home from work and meet him. He wanted them to accept him, to know that he was living here now, a part of the house’s small community. He still felt strangely unwelcome, as if the house would reject him at any moment. Perhaps it was the silence—he hated silence—and the crazy idea that seconds before he had entered the front door there had been TVs blaring, laughter, doors slamming as people moved from one flat to another, mixing and mingling and being involved in one another’s lives. And yet he also remembered a story he had read once, in which everyone in a block of flats was so reclusive that they ignored a brutal murder in their own courtyard. For them, everything was somebody else’s problem.
The lobby was still. If this was the heart of the house, his entering had caused it to miss a beat.
He started upstairs, and halfway to the first-floor landing he paused as something annoyed his ear. Shaking his head, scratching with his finger, swallowing hard, none of these cleared the sensation. It was as if a fly had flown in and was hovering against his eardrum. He moved on, and two stairs later realized that he was hearing music.
Cain paused. The sound came from so far away that it must surely be outside the house, beyond the street, aimless. He held his breath, expecting the music to recede as a car moved away, but it was still there. He moved up to the landing, stood outside Flat Four, and knew that the music was coming from inside. He could almost see the timber in the door shimmering and shifting as it transmitted the sound, becoming fluid under such relaxing notes. It was pan pipe music, the type the Face would play at Afresh to calm someone gone wild. The music of the elements; soulful, soothing, evocative. There was no particular tune, no identifiable melody, but it held an allure that bade Cain stay and listen. He remained on the landing with his Indian meal cooling in the bag, bottle of wine in his other hand, dusky sun shining through the landing window and lighting dust motes dancing to the music. The pipes continued. Cain began to think about energy and how it formed, the subtle vibration of the universe all around him, how matter did not matter, and that was not his way of thinking at all.
The music stopped. He shook his head again, this time trying to recapture the tickling against his eardrums. There was a thump from inside Flat Four—a door slamming, perhaps—and then total silence once more.
Cain walked up to his flat, glancing at the scored door next to his before entering. That was a heavy door, and those were deep scratches. He would ask Peter about them tomorrow. There was much that Peter had yet to reveal. But time wa
s on Cain’s side—time was his now—and with freedom the likes of which he had never known beckoning, there was no reason to rush things at all.
Occasionally, when Cain knew things he should not, he tried to attribute it to nothing more than observation. Anything else was too frightening. He had read a lot since his father’s death, fiction and nonfiction, and sometimes he could close his eyes and read people like an open book.
Chapter Two
Silence
His father has not allowed him to talk for over a week.
The room is utterly silent. The door remains closed, apart from when his father comes in with a meal or to remove the toilet bucket. Then the lights flicker on and off as a signal for Cain to wear his earplugs. They are the same set he has been using for a week, and they are filthy, smelly, greasy. But he cannot open his mouth to tell his father about them, because if he does there will be trouble. Before putting him in the room his father warned him of this, and though the “trouble” was unspecified, Cain knows what it will be. He has experienced such trouble before.
He looks down at himself and is surprised to see that he is a small boy. His mind has aged, expanded by his years of reading at Afresh, used to dwelling on the cruelties of time and contemplating what his life may become. But the body here now is small, unformed, weak. The arms are thin. The legs are scrawny. It looks as though he has not exercised in months. He raises his hand and stares at it for a long time. He finds the scar on his left thumb, put there when he lost his temper at Afresh and punched out a window to let in birdsong. But he was eighteen when that happened. The hand he is looking at now belongs to a little boy, and the scar is a pale reflection of its original. This hand has never punched anyone in anger, never laid itself across a woman’s breast, never clasped himself in secret pleasure. Cain wishes for a mirror, but touching his face is enough to convince him that he is a grown mind in the memory of his small boy’s body.
The knowledge leaves him strangely flat. His childhood is nothing to covet. He is here, in this room, and somewhere out there his father’s life continues. Somewhere farther out there, real life works its way through time, passing hours and minutes, days and hours, in whatever cycle nature or God has set it upon.
In here only silence, and time frozen in place.
Cain opens his mouth to wake up his dreaming self, but a noise like an air-raid siren blasts into his skull. He screams and the siren roars again, a brief, unbelievably loud burst of white noise right inside his head. This time he does not scream, but as he clasps his small hands to his ears and leans forward—he is sure there will be blood, his eardrums feel hot and tingling—he utters an unintentional whine of pain.
The siren explodes again.
Cain bites his tongue while the pain slowly ebbs away. He stays hunched over, staring at the concrete floor, certain that there are eyes upon him. He should feel love in their gaze, but it is something far baser that prickles at the back of his neck. Though it is not malevolent, he does not care for it at all.
At Afresh he read many books about torture when he could get them. The Voice had decided that they were unsuitable reading, and Cain’s argument that they had no right to hobble his intellectual development fell on deaf ears. The Face merely smiled and nodded in agreement, and then left the room filled with books on philosophy, history, and science. But another one of the patients smuggled books to Cain’s room with his fresh bedding, and he immersed himself in what was one of the oldest of the Arts.
Torture had been around ever since humankind discovered its thumbs. Cain read of its use for spiritual fulfillment and enlightenment in ages past, and as a means for extracting information in more recent, so-called civilized times. There were books that detailed the psychological implications on both the tortured and torturer. Others concentrated on the more gruesome side of things, reveling in descriptions of dismemberment, eye-skewering, limb-chopping, genital-burning atrocities. Some writers considered torture from biblical times, while others posited that modern society was creating more monsters every day. Now, they suggested, rather than torture as ritual or for information, it was mostly practiced for pleasure.
And yet, through all his reading, Cain could ally none of it with what had happened to him. It had been torture, there was no doubt of that, but the reasons behind it were far less clear. He once read of a Russian self-mutilation cult that expressed love through pain. The idea was grotesque, the facts unbearable, the feel of the story awfully familiar.
None of this knowledge belongs in that small boy’s head, and yet it is there, because the older Cain is dreaming this memory. He opens his mouth as if to talk, wincing against the expected siren, but it remains silent. His heart thumps in his chest, blood rushes through his ears, and he is terrified that if he concentrates long enough on these sounds, the siren will hear them as well.
The more he listens to his heart, the louder it becomes. At first it is little more than a sensation, a movement in his chest as familiar as breathing, and equally ignored. But then it changes from a sensation to a sound, louder, louder still, until he begins to suspect that his father is outside crashing his hand against the door. The room is empty of all but Cain—a good home to echoes—but loud though it is, something deadens this sound. It is as if there is something unseen with him in the room.
Cain closes his eyes and tries to quiet his runaway heart, but it grows even louder. He opens his eyes again, stands as silently as he can, paces the room. He hears a humming, but perhaps it is coming from him.
The lights flicker off and on.
“The old fuck’s coming,” a voice says. Cain—both the child Cain, petrified at his situation, and the adult dreamer even more scared at being back here—spins around to see who has spoken. But there is nothing in the room with him, no one else. Only a shadow where light should fall.
The door handle dips, and Cain reaches for the dirty ear plugs.
The crashing continued. Irregular, loud, hard enough to make pictures rattle on the walls. And then a shout joined in with the banging and Cain sat up in bed, sweating and disoriented.
Home, he thought, I’m home, this is my home. He reached for the bedside lamp as the shouting began to coalesce into some sort of sense.
“Noisy bastard! Shut up! Shut up, there are people trying to sleep in here. Sleep! Know what that is? Understand that? Or do we now have an insomniac in place of a wheelchair-bound fucking psycho?”
“I wasn’t saying anything,” Cain muttered, and his voice seemed so much louder than the shouting and banging. I was completely silent, he thought. I had to be.
The pounding ceased, and Cain sat frozen in his bed, waiting for the next round of abuse. The man was still outside his front door. There was no sure way Cain could know that, but he was certain. There had been no footsteps receding across the landing, perhaps that was how he knew. Or maybe the shouter’s breathing was loud enough to make an impression, albeit subconscious.
Cain let out a breath he was not aware of holding, and there came a polite knocking at his front door.
“Can we talk?” the person asked. It was the same voice as before; shame and guilt could not hide that certain weight, that timbre.
Cain stood from his bed and opened the door out into the hall. He half expected to see the front door crashed from its hinges, but it stood firm, unmoved by the appeal hanging behind it.
“Cain,” the voice said. “Can we talk? I apologize for my abuse . . . though I assume by your silence that you’ve heeded me.”
“You know my name?” Cain asked, and his voice carried farther than he had intended. No siren erupted around him, no torture for his eardrums.
“Peter told me,” the voice said. “I’m sorry, I just wanted to know who I was sharing the house with now. After Vlad, I’m hoping it’s someone approachable. And your shouting . . . it was very loud.”
“Vlad wasn’t approachable?”
“Oh, no,” the person said, not elaborating.
Cain stood quietly for a
few moments, surrounded by a sudden silence loaded with promise. He hated silence and tried to imagine anything to fill it. The banging and cursing had been bad, but better than nothing.
“Are you still there?” the voice asked.
Cain smiled. Where would I go? He went to the door and drew the chains and bolt, swinging it wide, having no idea who he was about to see and what they would do once the door was open. The voice had been manic a couple of minutes before. But Cain trusted his instincts, certain that he would reveal a smile.
He even had an idea of what the smile would look like. He shook his head at what he should not know.
“I’m George,” said the man standing in the doorway, teeth bared in a grin bordering on a grimace. He held out his hand, and it was cold, clammy, shaking.
“I’m Cain,” Cain said, “but then, you already knew that. How are you?”
“Yes, fine. I’m sorry for having to wake you.”
“I’m the one that should be sorry,” Cain said. “I’ve been disturbing your sleep.”
Something passed across George’s features. Cain could not convince himself that it was anger—yes, George had been hammering at the door just minutes earlier, but that seemed to have been a vastly different person—but it was something similar.
“Well, you were very loud,” George said. His tongue flicked over his lips and he glanced down at Cain’s sleeping attire. Shorts, T-shirt, and socks. Cain had become used to wearing socks to bed at Afresh, where a midnight trip to the toilet involved crossing a corridor with a quarry-tiled floor.
Was I really shouting? he thought. Screaming myself awake from that dream of silence, perhaps? But the siren wouldn’t have let me come awake. It wouldn’t have allowed me to scream. He shook his head, and for a second he wondered whether he was still asleep. Perhaps his father was watching this from somewhere, always out of sight just behind him no matter how quickly he turned around to see.