Networked: A gripping sci-fi thriller

by LK Chapman

  ‘Leave me alone!’ she said, ‘let me do it.’

  I made another grab for the scissors and succeeded in getting them away from her, though she tried to prise them from my fingers by digging her sharp little nails into me.

  ‘Give them back to me!’ she pleaded, but when I wouldn’t budge she gave a cry of frustration and scrambled underneath the duvet, curling herself into a ball with the covers twisted round her body, and I sat down beside her.

  ‘Is this because of what happened just then?’ I asked.

  Instead of replying, she pulled the duvet right over her head.

  ‘Because I can promise you that neither of us think any less of you because of it. In fact, I think even more of you.’

  Lily’s fingers appeared over the edge of the duvet, and then she drew it in more closely and held it tight. I put my hand on top of the bulge of her head beneath it, and she tried to wriggle away from me.

  ‘Lily, can you come out? I want to see your face.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘You believe me, don’t you?’ I asked, ‘that I don’t think badly of you?’

  ‘No,’ she said. Her voice was muffled, but it was easy enough to make out that single word.

  ‘Because I wouldn’t lie to you,’ I said, ‘I think what you did was beautiful.’

  Again, she shook her head under the duvet. I sighed, and rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand. It was so late, and so much had gone on. I certainly didn’t feel like I could sleep, but there was a kind of heavy weariness right through to my bones.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with masturbation,’ I said, and at the word Lily squealed and pressed the duvet as firmly round her head as she could.

  ‘You were just listening to what your body wanted,’ I said, ‘there’s nothing wrong with that.’

  Lily started rocking from side to side under the duvet. I was pretty sure that soon she’d burst out from underneath it just to try and shut me up, if nothing else.

  ‘Everybody wanks, Lily,’ I said.

  At this, she threw the covers aside and said, ‘stop talking about it! Stop talking about it! Stop talking about it!’ before throwing herself head-first against the pillow and dissolving into a flood of tears.

  I tried to think what I should say. It was hardly as if Lily hadn’t touched herself before and I was sure she knew there was no shame in it. But what could I say to make her feel better about doing it in front of Dan and me? I couldn’t exactly tell her that everybody did that, but I certainly didn’t think she’d done anything wrong.

  I stroked her hair while she cried against the pillow, but even when she’d stopped she wouldn’t turn to look at me.

  ‘Are you upset because you did it in front of Dan?’ I asked her.

  She nodded her head, but then she lifted her face from the pillow enough to speak and said, ‘partly.’

  ‘Are you worried what he thinks about you now?’

  ‘He hates me. Both of you hate me.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘come on, of course we don’t.’

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘Lily-’

  ‘I said leave me alone. Leave me alone, leave me alone!’

  I backed away a little bit, but I didn’t leave and I watched as Lily pressed her face back into the pillow.

  ‘Lily, I’m not saying what we did wasn’t... unusual... but all of us did it. Not just you. We wanted to watch you, so that’s what happened. We’re all adults-’

  ‘No!’ Lily said lifting her face again, ‘it wasn’t all of us. It was me. I brought us back here, I did it.’

  ‘So what if you did? What does it matter? I had an amazing time, and so did you. So did Dan, for that matter.’

  ‘You’re not listening,’ Lily said, ‘you’re not listening to a word I say.’ She started to reach for the nail scissors where I’d put them down on the bedside table. ‘I’m going to make this right.’

  ‘No, Lily,’ I said, rushing back over to her, ‘please don’t do that. You don’t need to do that.’

  ‘I do.’

  I sat beside her on the bed and watched as she picked up the nail scissors, touching the blade softly against her skin.

  ‘Go away then,’ she said. ‘Or do you want to watch or something?’

  ‘Please, Lily,’ I said, reaching out for the scissors, ‘don’t do this.’

  For a long while she carried on looking at the blade against her skin, but then with a deep sigh she stopped and handed the scissors to me.

  ‘Take them away,’ she said, ‘and go away. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.’

  ‘Is she okay?’ Dan asked when I joined him in the living room.

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  ‘Do you want me to talk to her?’ he asked, ‘I wasn’t sure whether I should go after her or not. I thought perhaps she’d feel more comfortable just talking to you-’

  ‘She’s cut herself,’ I said.

  Dan looked at me. ‘Shit,’ he said, ‘is it bad?’

  I showed him the pair of blunt nail scissors and said, ‘no, it’s not bad. But... it’s the first time she’s done it for years.’

  Since Lily didn’t want me anywhere near her, I sat down on the arm of the sofa and looked at the desk where a few minutes ago she had had such an incredible experience, while Dan picked up the pad containing all the drawings of Lily.

  ‘These are...’ he said, but he couldn’t seem to find a word for it. I held out my hand for the drawings and when I flicked through them I saw instantly what he meant. They were extraordinary images, bold and raw and striking. I’d never seen Dan produce anything like this before, they were captivating, bursting with energy and the mood of that moment. Despite the fact they contained minimal detail, were little more than outlines, they seemed to portray so much- almost more because they were so sparing, so that every dark line across the page was critical, mesmerising. There was no doubt that they were the best thing I’d ever seen him draw by hand.

  ‘You’d hardly believe it happened if it wasn’t for those,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘I could show them to her,’ he said, ‘do you think that would make her feel less bad about it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. It was really hard to predict how Lily would react to anything. Sometimes things I thought would make her feel better made her feel worse- and vice versa. There was no denying the pictures were beautiful, and that what Lily had done was a beautiful thing, but I’d already seen that convincing her of that might be a seriously long road.

  I handed the drawings back to him, and he gazed at them again. I knew at some point I was going to have to face the fact that he was in love with her. But right now, it didn’t actually seem that important.

  …

  I tried to talk to Lily again a bit later, hoping she would have calmed down and managed to get things in perspective, but to my surprise when I went into the bedroom she was fast asleep. I watched her for a couple of minutes, wondering what to do. I wanted to talk to her, to make sure she was okay about what had happened, but I didn’t want to wake her so instead I just got into bed and tried my best to sleep.

  I guess I must eventually have dropped off because by the time I woke up the next day the bedroom was bathed in such bright light I thought it must at least be noon, if not even later, and Lily was no longer by my side. To begin with I assumed she was just having a shower, or maybe in the living room with Dan, but when I tried to find her, I couldn’t. She didn’t seem to be in the flat at all. To make matters worse, Dan looked like he was only just waking up, so I wasn’t sure he’d know what had happened either.

  ‘Dan,’ I said, ‘where’s Lily?’

  He sat up, pushing the duvet away from him and rubbing his eyes.

  ‘It’s alright,’ he said, ‘she’s fine. She told me she needed to go out for a bit of space, think things over. That’s all.’

  ‘What?’ I said, ‘go out where?’

  ‘Nowhere much,’ Dan said,
‘she just said she was going for a drive.’

  I stared at him open-mouthed, but he seemed to have no idea what the problem was. Finally, after about four seconds of my speechless shock, he remembered and said, ‘oh, shit.’

  Chapter 35

  ‘How long ago was that?’ I asked.

  ‘It was like, literally seconds ago. It was probably her leaving that woke you up.’

  I ran to the window and looked out, but my car was gone and the road out of our little cul-de-sac was empty. Wherever she was going, she was already on her way. I tried calling her phone, but unsurprisingly it was off.

  ‘How could you have let her go?’ I asked Dan, ‘what were you thinking?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He was pacing back and forth, panicking. ‘She said it so naturally I didn’t even think twice. I completely forgot she can’t drive.’

  ‘We’ve got to go after her,’ I said.

  We didn’t know where she was headed and neither of us was even dressed, but within a few seconds I’d pulled on a pair of jeans over the top of the shorts I’d been wearing in bed, grabbed yesterday’s t-shirt off the floor, and we both ran outside to Dan’s Mini.

  ‘Well, go then,’ I said to him as he sat at the wheel, rubbing his forehead anxiously.

  ‘Where?’ he asked, ‘she didn’t say where she was going.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you have just asked her?’ I said, ‘I mean, it’s bad enough you forgot she can’t drive, but why didn’t you ask her where she was going when she said something so vague? I mean, who the fuck just goes for a drive?’

  ‘Alright,’ he said, ‘I know I screwed up. I was... I was still, fucking, asleep when she came in. It’s a miracle I can remember anything she said, believe me.’

  We started driving round, but without any idea where she was, it was totally useless. By the time we’d driven out of the estate, taken a few turnings largely at random and found ourselves cruising down a little country road bordered by thick green hedges, I was already giving up hope. There were hundreds upon hundreds of different routes she could have taken. Thousands of different places she could be.

  ‘But, she can drive a bit though,’ Dan said hesitantly, as if he was terrified I was going to start yelling at him, ‘didn’t you try and teach her?’

  I had tried to teach her. She wasn’t actually too bad, but driving had made her so nervous and upset that in the end we’d decided it wasn’t worth it. It had seemed like we were just putting her through a whole load of anguish for not that much benefit. She could walk to Winterbourne Flowers from our flat anyway, and when she finished late some evenings I picked her up or mum dropped her home.

  ‘It’s not that she physically can’t do it,’ I said to Dan, ‘it just scares her. Especially fast roads-’

  And then I knew. Fast roads. It seemed inevitable that if Interface was going to make Lily drive- and let’s face it, what had happened was surely down to him- he’d make her do the kind of driving that she found the most daunting. Probably he’d suppress her fear or something- I mean, he’d have to or there’s no way he’d ever get her to do it. But as soon as I said about the fast roads, I knew where she’d be headed.

  ‘Turn around,’ I said to Dan.

  He looked at me. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I know where she’s going,’ I said.

  I explained my theory as Dan pulled into a little track on our left to turn the car around.

  ‘You really think he’ll make her go on the motorway?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  Dan was so anxious that he grazed the hedge as we turned round, and the sound of all the branches hitting the car was enough to make me wince as I thought about Lily out there on her own.

  ‘I’m not going to be able to catch her up in this car,’ Dan said as we sped back the way we came, ‘you do realise that.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘So what’s the plan?’

  I thought for a while. I didn’t really have a plan. All I knew was that if Lily was in trouble I wanted to be as close to her as I could. But at the same time, Interface’s experiments did tend to follow a pattern.

  ‘Well, I’m guessing it’ll be like all the other shit he’s done,’ I said, ‘he’ll carry on making her drive for a bit, then he’ll probably just stop and observe the fall out.’

  We reached a junction and I told Dan which way to turn.

  ‘But if he just stops controlling her and she’s in the middle of the motorway...’ he said, trailing off. He didn’t really need to finish the sentence.

  I tried to get Interface to talk to me by saying his name over and over in my head, thinking perhaps he was “observing” from our minds again, the way he had after making Dan and Lily touch each other, but he wasn’t having any of it. I felt like he could probably hear me, but he had his experiment going on, and that was that.

  I swayed between moments of clarity when I told myself we’d get to Lily somehow, that she’d be fine, that nothing would happen, to moments of panic that made Dan turn to look at me because I ended up tapping my foot continuously in agitation. It didn’t help that it was such a long way to the nearest motorway and the thought of just sitting waiting that long was unbearable. Every time I saw a small black car somewhere up ahead or on the other side of the road my heart was in my mouth as I thought it might be Lily- but it never was. In fact, when I got a clearer view half the time the cars didn’t even look anything like mine. I was driving myself insane.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ Dan said when we were about halfway to the motorway. ‘I just... I can’t think straight when I first wake up. I’ve gone over and over it and I can’t believe I let her go-’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Dan insisted, ‘it isn’t. I feel like all of this is my fault. She was only so upset about what she did because I saw it, because I drew it-’

  ‘She was upset that she did it at all,’ I said, ‘it’s not your fault.’

  Dan was quiet for a moment and I watched all the cars speeding by on the other side of the road.

  ‘Dan,’ I said slowly, ‘I know you’re in love with her.’

  His shock at my words was sufficient that he didn’t notice a patch of slow traffic up ahead and I had to shout to stop him from ploughing straight into the back of a white van.

  ‘Jesus, Nick,’ he said, ‘why would you say that?’

  ‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ I said, ‘I’d rather you just told me if it is. Don’t make it worse by trying to deny it.’

  I gave him a good few seconds to carry on trying to deny it though, and when he didn’t, it felt a bit like someone had reached in and started squeezing the life out of me from the inside out. I didn’t feel right. Everything seemed to hurt, like I’d been put together in the wrong order.

  ‘Nick,’ he said, ‘look, it’s not like I meant-’

  ‘Forget it,’ I said, keeping my eyes fixed resolutely on the road ahead of us, ‘all that matters is that we find Lily.’

  Eventually I could see the motorway to our right, just the other side of some scrubby bushes, and I felt a burst of relief. But as the verge between the slip road and the motorway narrowed and narrowed to just a small strip of grass, I thought about Lily doing this. It was just inconceivable to me that she’d have been able to join the motorway. All I could think of was the time I’d taken her to a little stretch of dual carriageway ten minutes drive or so from our flat and her saying ‘oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ as she tried to change lanes. In fact, it seemed so unlikely that I began to wonder whether I had got this entirely wrong. This was Lily, my Lily, and as I watched a couple of particularly tall lorries rumble past I thought how tiny and vulnerable she must feel in our little car all on her own.

  We’d been on the motorway hardly any time when Interface decided to make contact, and when he spoke in my head, I drew my breath sharply in surprise.

  ‘What is it?’ Dan asked.

  ‘Interface,’ I said.

 
; ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ I asked Interface.

  ‘Talking to you,’ he said. ‘Why, what do you think I’m doing?’

  ‘I swear, if you’re actually alive, I’m going to kill you,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, it’s nice to speak to you too. How about we get to the matter in hand?’

  I was still checking frantically out of the window for signs of Lily.

  ‘You won’t see her yet,’ Interface said, ‘she’s up ahead. You did well at working out where she’d be going, by the way, though if you’d got it wrong, I would have corrected you.’

  ‘So she’s okay?’ I asked, ‘how much further ahead is she?’

  ‘I can show you, if you like?’

  Interface’s idea of showing me was quite extraordinary. He spread through my mind like a rash, before filling it with a vision seen through Lily’s eyes- though it took me a second to realise it, because it wasn’t like what she could see appeared in some little area of my own sight, or inside my own head- though I suppose it must have been inside my head- but it felt like I was seeing it through my very own eyes. Like I wasn’t in the passenger seat of Dan’s scruffy car anymore looking through a bug-spattered windscreen at a van for a double-glazing company- suddenly I was sitting in the drivers’ seat of my car, except the hands on the steering wheel were female hands- Lily’s hands.

  I couldn’t tell where she was from what I was seeing. There was a field of some brown, dry looking plants on her left, and overhead a big concrete bridge. But what concerned me the most was she was in the outside lane and going pretty fast.

  But I couldn’t think straight with this disconnect between what I was seeing, what I was thinking, and where I knew my body physically was. I couldn’t understand how I could be in two places at once. And not only that, but alongside my own emotion I realised I could feel a bit of what Lily felt- total concentration, engagement, confidence, power. She was enjoying herself. But when I closed my eyes- knew I had closed my eyes- and I could still see what she saw, that’s when I really freaked out.