Sleepwalkers

by Tom Grieves

  Daz led them inside and the metal shutter slammed back hard behind them. He started to screw it back in place using a small electric drill – it was done in a matter of moments. Ben had expected dripping walls, crumbling concrete and rubbish on the floor – an extension of the debris from outside. He was surprised, therefore, to feel warmth, and see wall lights illuminating corridors which were carpeted and clean. It looked almost like an everyday, working office except for the posters, paintings and murals on the walls: a clenched silhouetted fist on a blood-red background, ‘Love not H8’, ‘We Are Not The Enemy’, ‘I Didn’t Vote’, ‘Who Would Jesus Hate?’ – these and the word No! (with its obligatory exclamation mark) painted in every variety of shape and colour imaginable, lining every inch of every corridor. Daz led them deeper into the building, past various empty offices. Through the glass, Ben saw overturned desks and scattered papers in some, while in others empty chairs were set in circles, as though ready for a meeting.

  ‘What was this place?’ he asked.

  ‘Local council offices,’ replied Daz with a yawn. ‘Sorry, I’m not really a day person. So, um, the council owned it but wanted something more central, more swanky and corporate. Liggers. They moved out, we moved in.’

  ‘We?’ prodded Anna.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Daz. They had reached the centre of the building. Stairs wide enough for three people to walk side by side led up and down, and there were also two lifts. Someone had written the word ‘Heaven’ next to the ‘Up’ button and ‘Washington’ next to the ‘Down’. The lift pinged and the doors opened with a complaining screech.

  ‘The lift’s been a bit temperamental ever since Marco tried to get his piano in and bashed the doors. We had to drag the thing up the stairs, but you know what those Brazilians are like about their music.’ He held the lift door open and gestured – after you. After a rather obvious hesitation, everyone got into the lift. A ping and a shudder, and the lift started to climb.

  ‘So are there many people living here?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Hard to say,’ Daz replied. ‘Folks are coming and going all the time. I thought you guys would like Serita’s rooms – she’s gone off travelling and we’re not expecting her back for six months.’

  ‘Nice,’ said Terry. ‘Where’s she gone? India, South America?’

  ‘Sierra Leone,’ said Daz with a slight glare. ‘She’s not a tourist, man.’

  ‘Right,’ Terry said, and everyone was quiet for a bit.

  ‘How come you have power?’ asked Toby.

  Daz was pleased with the question. ‘There’s a guy called Alan, got an engineering degree from Oxford. He rewired the place, connected us to the grid. Every now and then some suit out there gets grumpy and tries to cut us off, but Alan always finds a way to get the power back. We had gas for a while, but that’s gone now, the bastards. Still electric cookers do the biz and we’ve got wi-fi now.’

  ‘Wicked,’ smiled Terry.

  ‘Yeah, it’s secure, password-protected so you’ll need—’

  ‘Don’t worry about that.’

  ‘Oh yeah, you’re one of those, aren’t you?’ said Daz.

  ‘Daz doesn’t like anything new,’ Terry told them. ‘He’d be hugging trees if he could.’

  ‘No, no,’ blushed Daz. ‘I’m here, aren’t I? I’m where I’m needed. Can’t kick the system out in the forest, can I?’

  Terry patted his heart with a clenched fist. ‘Right on, brother.’

  ‘Oh fuck off,’ said Daz, but he was grinning. He smelled of stale incense.

  He led them out of the lift into another corridor, this one daubed with huge red letters: ‘No Logo!’

  They walked on, passing more right-on quotes on the walls on both sides. Anna nudged Ben. ‘Could this place be more of a bloody cliché?’

  Daz must have heard her. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Oh. Nothing, just how, it’s really very kind of you … Darren,’ says Anna. Daz looked at her, confused, then burst out laughing.

  ‘No, no, it’s not Darren, I’m Daz – you know, like the detergent – whiter than white. Name stuck cos I was always such a goody two-shoes.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Anna. ‘Does everyone have nicknames in here then?’

  ‘This isn’t a cult, honey. Whatever do you think we are?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like this.’

  ‘You like it?’

  ‘I … yes,’ she said uncertainly.

  ‘We’re just a bunch of people who have found each other through the same ideology. We won’t play the government’s game. We don’t do taxes, don’t do ID cards, don’t do plastic. We’re a community of believers in a different way of living. We’re just a group who all looked at the way the world was and thought, we don’t fit in. So we organise protests from here – try to stir up the students or the unions, you know. We’re not running away, we’re just … on pause while we work out a better way forward.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Toby.

  ‘We march, we protest, it’s like …’ he tried to find the right words, his hand waving in the air, ‘it’s like that book, War of the Worlds. We’ve built our own little world in here, hiding from the invaders, waiting for our turn to reclaim the streets.’

  Terry slipped between Ben and Anna as they followed. ‘If there is hope, it lies with the proles,’ he said with a smirk.

  Daz didn’t seem to hear this and walked on, finally stopping at a door which was painted red and green. Across it was daubed the words don’t trust anyone over 30. Ben stared at it and then looked at Daz.

  ‘Hey, don’t get all steamed up, I didn’t write it.’ Daz pushed the door open and switched on a light to reveal a small, square room with a door leading off it. The windows were barricaded shut, so the only light came from the sterile strip lighting. The walls had all been painted in rich greens, gold and scarlet. Indian Gods had been drawn next to naked dancers who twirled and writhed around them. Ben nodded politely, but inside he was groaning. The carpet was faded and singed with small burns.

  ‘Home sweet home,’ announced Daz. ‘You’ll need some bedding, but it’s dry. Don’t try to open the window or take down the shutters. We don’t want anyone knowing we’re in here. There’s another room through there and a communal shower down the corridor. Let us know when you’re moving on. Good luck and may the force be with you.’

  And with that, he was gone. Ben looked around.

  ‘I’ll get us some sleeping bags and a kettle,’ he said. ‘Some pillows and some basic foodstuffs.’

  But Terry wasn’t listening. He went to the other door, opened it and peered in. Ben saw another room, identical in shape and space but this time daubed in swirling purples and aquamarines.

  ‘You stay in there, Miss, we’ll share this other one,’ Terry said.

  ‘Thank you, but you’ve got to stop calling me Miss.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. So, shut the door, Toby.’ Toby did so.

  ‘Maybe I could get us a camp stove,’ Ben continued. ‘A can opener, some basic cutlery …’ He stopped talking when he realised that everyone was staring at him.

  ‘So, Ben,’ said Terry, in a tone that wasn’t entirely friendly. ‘Fancy telling us everything about you?’

  ‘Might take a while,’ Ben replied.

  Terry slipped down against a wall and folded his arms: I’ve got all the time in the world.

  ‘Alright, sure. I’ll tell you what I know.’

  Ben leaned against the wall, stared at the grotty carpet and told them about his wife and children. He talked quietly about his dreams and his nightmares, about the aches and pains that would come and go. And, more falteringly, he told them how he became more confused and less trusting. He didn’t tell them about the violence he’d meted out, but he hinted at a past that troubled him and actions which he did not wish to speak of. He told them about running, about the dead men in the van (although he alluded to a crash which had enabled his escape) and of his hunt for his true past. After a moment
’s hesitation, he told them that he was once a soldier, about the differences in his old life and the man he now believed himself to be.

  Toby would occasionally interject with ‘Me too!’ or ‘Yes, yes, just like that!’ adding his own experiences, with Anna giving a calmer, clearer explanation of what they thought had happened to him. As Ben talked the mood became quieter, a little sombre. It was clear that, as much as they knew, they still knew nothing.

  ‘And that’s sort of it, I suppose,’ said Ben, a little awkwardly. He looked at the others, unsure what more to say.

  It was Terry who spoke first. ‘You didn’t say what your dreams were like.’

  ‘Well they were … I don’t know … just … dark, scary, me doing stuff that I wouldn’t do, you know?’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘I don’t remember any of it clearly enough.’

  ‘Yeah you do,’ Terry replied. Ben looked at him and saw the challenge in his eye.

  ‘I’m not a threat to you.’

  ‘Why are you saying that?’ said Anna.

  ‘You know what Toby dreamed of?’ asked Terry. ‘We do. Every bloody detail. They did terrible things to him, shitty, fuckedup things and he’s told us all about it.’ He spat out the last three words to make his point. ‘Now what did they do to you?’

  ‘It’s okay, Ben,’ said Anna. ‘You can tell us.’

  ‘I’m not making it up, I just can’t, I don’t … the details aren’t …’

  ‘Did they hurt you?’ Anna asked.

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Terry. ‘They didn’t hurt him. He hurt them.’

  Ben was silent, ashamed of the dirty secrets that were about to be exposed.

  ‘You were a soldier, you said,’ pressed Terry.

  Ben nodded, staring at the cigarette burns in the swirly carpet, not wanting to catch Toby’s eyes. He didn’t care what Terry thought, or Anna so much, but he didn’t want the boy to fear him or to hate him.

  Terry got up, but kept his distance. ‘Why do you think they’d take a bloke from the army? What do you think they’d make him do in his sleep? That he wouldn’t do when he was awake?’

  ‘I’m not like that,’ was all that Ben could manage.

  ‘Tell you what,’ said Terry. ‘How’s about you have that room and us three will share in here?’

  ‘He’s not like that!’ blurted out Toby.

  ‘And how do you know that? In the – what is it, four hours? In the four hours that you’ve known him, what’s he done to make you so sure?’

  ‘Cos he helped me!’

  ‘When?’

  ‘In there!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the place, the room, in that … in that place …’ Toby stumbled into silence. ‘In the lab,’ said Ben, quietly.

  Toby pulled his knees to his chest. ‘We weren’t going to talk about it,’ he said.

  Ben went over and sat down next to him. Toby eyed him like a child who’s been tricked into a set of injections at the doctor’s.

  ‘What do you remember?’ Ben asked gently.

  ‘White walls,’ Toby began reluctantly. ‘Beds. Some nurses and doctors. Fancy machines. Windows with shutters.’

  Ben nodded. ‘Always closed.’

  ‘Yeah. But you could hear cars outside sometimes, couldn’t you?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Ben glanced at Anna and Terry who were silent. Anna nodded at him – keep going.

  ‘I woke up once,’ said Toby, ‘cos of this loud car horn, right outside. Everyone woke up. And one man started shaking and …’ he squeezed his eyes shut, upset. ‘He tried to get up, he was pulling at the straps and shouting and all the doctors were running to him. And then there was blood all over the ceiling.’

  Ben put an arm around him, pulled him close and the boy nestled into him.

  ‘Do you know where it is?’

  ‘No. You never knew how you got there, you’d just wake up and you were there on a bed, tied down.’

  ‘You don’t remember going in or coming out?’

  Toby shook his head.

  ‘I think I do.’

  ‘I remember going down in these big lifts. They had to be big cos they had to fit in a stretcher. And at the bottom there was …’ he paused, trying to remember.

  ‘A van?’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, that’s right, a van. I remember now. And they had to do that code. To open the doors.’

  ‘The shutters.’

  ‘A code. It was like a tune.’ Toby hummed a five-tone melody. ‘That was it.’

  Those five notes ran clear in Ben’s head like a long-forgotten nursery rhyme.

  Terry stepped forward, pulling out his mobile phone. ‘Sing it again,’ he said.

  Toby did so, and after a couple of failed attempts, Terry repeated the tune by pressing the right combination of numbers on his phone’s keypad. He turned the screen to face Ben.

  ‘Nine, nine, four, five, six. That’s your entrance code.’

  ‘And then the shutters would go up,’ Ben said.

  ‘What shutters?’ asked Toby, confused. ‘Oh. No, they changed those.’

  Ben stared at him – what?

  ‘Yeah, they had those old black shutters, but then they got changed. Don’t you remember? They got that big metal door instead. Sank down into the floor. Wow, it’s amazing how quickly it comes back. Must be because of you being here.’

  Ben tried to remember a metal door. He could have been walking past it, several times, earlier. He could have been standing right outside without realising it.

  ‘Do you remember him?’ Toby asked, and his voice wavered, as though it were a question he’d nearly not dared ask.

  Ben remembered a kindly old man’s eyes that stared down at him. A wrinkled hand that would have nurses scurrying in different directions at the merest flick or gesture. He nodded and his grip around Toby tightened.

  ‘He was quite kind to us, in a way, wasn’t he?’ asked Toby.

  ‘Yes, he was.’

  ‘You kept thinking he’d fall over, he was so old, but his eyes were always, like, twinkling sort of.’

  ‘I remember that too.’

  ‘And his hands, always moving.’

  ‘Like he was conducting that classical music he always played.’

  ‘Yeah!’ said Toby. ‘And his fingers would twitch along.’ He was pleased with the shared memory. ‘I sort of thought we were special to him.’

  ‘I think we were.’

  ‘Even though he told them to do those things to us.’

  ‘He can’t do them to you any more,’ Ben said. ‘He’s gone. You’re free.’

  But Toby didn’t seem reassured by this. He sat there, withdrawn, as though he didn’t believe the nightmare really was over. And Ben felt the same unease and doubt. He sat quietly for a while before he spoke again.

  ‘I think I know where it is.’

  They all looked at him, amazed.

  ‘And now we know the code to get in,’ he added.

  ‘You’re saying that like it’s good news,’ Toby said. ‘What the fuck do you want to go in there for?’

  ‘To get answers.’

  ‘You go in there and they’ll catch you. Mash you up.’

  ‘It’s okay, Toby.’

  ‘Are you on crack? You can’t go back there.’

  ‘I have to. Where else can we go? You want to live here for the rest of your life?’

  ‘I don’t mind. It’s alright. Bound to be loads of hippy chicks in here and they’ll be into free love and shit.’

  Ben looked at Terry. ‘We go by car first. Check it out. If I’m right, if it really is where I think it is, then we can have a think about how we get in.’

  ‘And then what?’ shouted Toby. ‘Once you’re in, then what’ll you do?’

  ‘I’ll do to them what they’ve made me do to others.’

  He felt absolutely calm as he spoke the words. There was silence in the room. He could tell they were scared of him. He’d talked about m
urder as though it were something casual, practical and easily done. Ben would never have talked like this, he thought. He found he was shivering again.

  SEVENTEEN

  There were three wards inside the lab. They took you up in a lift from the basement. Ben remembered a long corridor and that the wards led off it. There were other rooms and offices further along, but neither he nor Toby knew what they were for. Two of the wards, with white walls, hard-rubber floors and shuttered windows, could house ten or twelve beds. Doctors and nurses were always around checking on their patients, monitoring them, gauging their progress. It was normally quiet in there. The medical staff’s footsteps were muffled by the floor and there was rarely much noise from outside. It was a place for recuperation, rehab and rest.

  The third ward was different. It was smaller, and divided into three operating rooms. There were no windows here and the walls were lined with strangely shaped foam bricks that deadened all sound. And when you were brought in here, you’d be blindfolded and they’d put headphones on you. There were lots of machines in here; big, complicated beasts, covered in dials, switches and flashing lights. They made no noise. There was never any noise. When Ben and Toby spoke of this third ward they were noticeably quieter and more reticent. Whatever happened in there had scared them more than anything else had. In here was the man they spoke of; the old man who would control everything. This was his kingdom.

  Sometimes things would go wrong in the third ward. Ben couldn’t explain it properly, but he was sure that men and women had gone in there after they had become anxious or troublesome and they hadn’t come back out.

  Anna shuddered at the story, at all the tales that Ben and Toby had told that day as they steeled themselves to go back there: to see if Ben was right and the place really did exist as they said it did. She wanted him to be wrong. She was scared again, nauseous from it, and wanted all of this to be a stupid misunderstanding, a hilarious mix-up that could be happily explained away.

  Ben had gone off alone later that night, returning with sleeping bags and other gear to make their stay more comfortable. And a car. Anna had expressed surprise that a rent-a-car company was open that late at night and had felt stupid when his wry stare revealed that he’d stolen it. She would have protested that she didn’t do this sort of thing, but then again she’d stolen Toby.