Dispel Illusion (Impossible Times)

by Mark Lawrence

  ‘Bloody hell!’ The driver, a small bald man with an improbably deep voice, waved his fist as a white van overtook us with the barest of margins in the face of oncoming traffic. ‘Idiot!’

  We drove on a quarter of a mile, staring at the back of the van, which, having got in front of us, seemed in no particular hurry to get anywhere.

  ‘Jesus please us!’ our driver rumbled, stepping on his brake.

  ‘What the—?’ In my seat beside him I found myself straining against my seatbelt in a momentum-induced attempt to headbutt the dashboard. All around me loose objects migrated towards the windscreen.

  We left a lot of rubber on the road but to the driver’s credit we managed, albeit by millimetres, not to hit the van in front of us as it came to a grinding halt. The car behind us did a far less good job of it, but had five times the space and came to a smoking halt a yard or two behind us.

  I looked round to see if Mia was alright.

  ‘Ow!’ She rubbed at her collarbone where the seatbelt had dug in. Without it she would have joined the loose change and tissues on the dashboard.

  ‘Fucking maniac.’ The driver unbuckled himself and set a hand to the door.

  That’s when I saw Charles Rust limping round from the passenger side of the van, a predatory grin on his face. He hadn’t changed since the day I last saw him, holding that knife on me in the cave. Not one hair. I reached over the driver to pull his hand from the door. ‘He really is a fucking maniac. That’s exactly what he is. Get us out of here and there’s ten grand in it for you.’

  The man didn’t have to be told twice. As fortune had it, we’d come to a halt beside a turning off the main road and, with a deft bit of reversing and hauling on the steering wheel, our driver had us pulling away as Rust reached for the nearest door. I craned my neck along with Mia, both of us watching out the rear window while our old nemesis dwindled into the distance. He appeared to be waving rather than shaking his fist.

  ‘Where does this go?’ I asked as we bumped along the increasingly narrow lane, hemmed in between high hedges.

  ‘I don’t know, mate.’ The man tapped his satnav. ‘I wasn’t planning on coming this way.’

  The satnav spoke into the pause. ‘In one hundred yards, slow down and make a U-turn.’

  ‘It’s a dead end!’ Mia said. ‘He forced us down here so there wouldn’t be witnesses.’

  Looking back along the winding road I could just make out the top of a white van speeding along between the hedgerows. ‘Shit. Call the police!’

  ‘I lost your phone. I think it went under the seat.’ Mia started to unbuckle her seatbelt so she could hunt for it.

  ‘Control. Control!’ The driver was talking into his radio. ‘Control?’

  We were out of range, though. Cambridge lay over twenty miles behind us.

  Farm buildings loomed ahead, a gate sealing the rutted track.

  ‘We’ll go in there,’ I said as the driver slowed. ‘He’s only after us, so he should leave you alone. Once he’s gone by, call the police and then run for the road.’

  ‘Right . . .’ The driver came to a halt before the gate and started hunting in his pockets for his phone. The momentary road rage he’d shown back on the main route was well and truly gone, and his hands were now shaking so much I wondered if he would be able to dial, if he ever managed to extract the thing from his jeans.

  Mia and I scrambled out as Rust’s van sped into view. We ran for the gate and I was still fumbling with the chain when Mia vaulted over.

  ‘Run!’ I shouted, somewhat redundantly since she was doing just that, and followed her through the yard, aiming for the end of a long cow barn. We rounded the corner, spattering mud with each step.

  Mia turned, wide-eyed. ‘He’s coming!’

  ‘We should hide.’ The driver would be calling the police and nobody on the farm could handle Rust. We needed time for help to arrive.

  ‘Over there!’ Mia pointed to a machine shed, a tall barn through whose huge doors I could make out at least two tractors standing in the shadows. She took off again and I followed in her wake, slipping and sliding around the turn.

  The farm seemed deserted. Perhaps they were all out doing . . . agriculture . . . in the fields. I’ll admit that my knowledge of farm life is pretty sketchy. I couldn’t, for example, name any of the dangerous-looking equipment facing me as I came to a halt in the barn entrance. The walls seemed to be hung with torture devices made of sharp metal. The rational part of my mind was telling me that they were the sort of things tractors drag behind them to break up the soil, but the rest of it was screaming that we were about to walk into some kind of Bedfordshire version of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre where Charles Rust would be the least of our worries.

  ‘C’mon!’ Mia beckoned me forward and ran on between the two tractors, both of which were far larger than I had imagined they were from a distance.

  In the movies, barns are full of hay, great piles of the stuff ideal for hiding in. This barn seemed to favour sacks of fertiliser pellets, bales of wire fencing and, for some unknown reason, bitumen in metal barrels. The wild thought that a half-decent chemist could make an excellent bomb out of this stuff crossed my mind. I quickly opted to leave hastily constructed weaponry to MacGyver and looked for somewhere to hide instead.

  Mia lay down behind three 500 kilo bags of Carrs Fertiliser and pulled some discarded sacking over her. She waved me away to find my own spot. It proved maddeningly hard to find somewhere. Suddenly my body seemed too enormous to fit into any likely hole, and all the time I knew that Rust was limping inexorably towards us. Any moment now he would be standing silhouetted in the doorway, sniffing the air like a fox.

  I hurried up the ladder to the split level and settled for crouching between a big plastic barrel, contents unknown, and a large filing cabinet that had been co-opted into some sort of service. It was pretty gloomy up there, and I felt fairly inconspicuous. Fairly inconspicuous, that was, until Rust rattled one of the main doors open a little wider and then turned the lights on.

  ‘Miiiiaaaa!’ He called her name out just like his younger brother had all those years ago, and the chill of it ran through my bones. ‘Miiiiaaaaa!’

  I realised that I was actually very easy to find if he decided to come up and search for me. I crept forward, looking for a better alternative. Down below I could hear Rust moving about, starting to poke around. Terror had my hands shaking, a cold sweat sheathing my body. Maybe this was where I finally split away from Demus. Maybe he and his Mia made a different decision on the road. One that saved them. And now me and my Mia were going to die.

  ‘Mia?’ Rust rattled an oil drum. ‘Where aaaaare you?’

  Up above I was failing to find anywhere better to hide. It seems easy when you’re a kid; hard when you’re six foot two and trying to hide from a grown-up. But also, I was growing increasingly concerned by Rust’s fixation on finding Mia. Perhaps he thought that if he kidnapped her, I would do what he said. Or that going after her would bring me out into the open. He was right on both counts.

  My hands were trembling like the taxi driver’s and no part of me wanted to move in any direction but ‘away’. Even so, I focused on Mia and inched towards the ladder on my hands and knees, hoping to get a view of Rust’s progress as he hunted for her. I almost reached it, but must have scraped the floorboards too loudly or something, because Rust suddenly went quiet; and just as I was expecting to hear an ‘Aha!’ as he pulled Mia from her hiding place, I heard instead the sounds of someone climbing the ladder at speed.

  Without thinking, I rolled on to my back and swivelled so my feet faced the ladder. Then, trying to dig my nails into the boards to anchor me, I struck out at the ladder with both heels. The effect was less impressive than I had hoped, but I did knock it back about a yard. It was still a fair way shy of the tipping point where the whole thing would fall over in the other direction, but even so, when it jolted back the base must have slipped some and now only six inches of the ladder pok
ed over the edge.

  I got to my feet and saw that Rust was already starting to continue his climb, his single black eye fixed on me, teeth showing in a snarl. I had time for one more kick before he reached me and I took it, shoving the ladder violently to the side. The base slipped back a little more and the top end lost contact with my level of the barn. Rust and the ladder slammed forward into the floor. If his fingers had been in the wrong place they would have been pulped, but instead he rolled away, seemingly unharmed. I know if it had been me, the only way I would have left the barn would have been on a stretcher.

  ‘Nick.’ Rust looked up at me, blood running from the corner of his mouth. ‘Long time no see.’

  ‘I can’t do anything for Guilder,’ I called down, trying not to let my voice shake. ‘I didn’t make the barrier and I can’t unmake it. But I can pay you triple whatever he’s paying you. I’m rich now, and Guilder’s money is gone.’

  Rust wiped his mouth and spat out something that looked worryingly like half a tooth. ‘It doesn’t work like that, Nick. Not once I’ve been paid. This isn’t about money. It’s about obligation.’

  ‘Well, I still can’t help Guilder.’

  ‘You can do anything, Nicky-boy. You’re the wunderkind.’ His cold eye slid over me. ‘Or rather, you were. Now you look like the man in the cave.’

  He turned his gaze back to the ground floor, scanning the sacks and barrels. ‘You stay there for now. I’ll just check down here for Miss Jones and if I don’t find her I’ll be up to join you presently.’

  ‘The police will be here any—’

  ‘Even if I had let your little taxi driver make his call – which I didn’t – it would still take an age before anyone showed up. This is the real world. Nobody arrives in the nick of time to save you. The authorities arrive after the event, tag the bodies, photograph the blood spatters. It’s always been that way. Always will be.’

  Rust looked away and walked out of sight beneath the split level in a direction that would take him to Mia’s hiding place.

  ‘Wait!’ I shouted after him. ‘I’ll do it. Whatever you want! I’ll go with you.’

  I heard Mia’s shout as he found her. More anger in it than fear. I threw myself down on my chest and hung over to see, the blood immediately running to my head, making my eyes prickle. Upside down it was hard to make sense of the scene; the lights revealed so much machinery along with the sacks and barrels that my eyes had difficulty separating one thing from the next. Then Mia screamed, this time in pain, and I saw them both, Rust emerging from behind some kind of wheeled hopper with Mia before him, her arm twisted up beneath her shoulder blades.

  ‘Get off her!’ I looked around wildly for some way down. Another ladder, a rope, anything. I even considered jumping and I am not in any sense good with heights.

  Rust flicked his gaze towards me, that familiar malicious amusement on his face, but the smile was short-lived. Mia stamped on his foot and managed the seemingly impossible feat of twisting free without breaking her arm. She ran for the exit, but Rust seized a fence post from a stack of them and with a roar threw it after her like an overweight javelin. It struck the back of her leg and she went down below my position, sprawling across the floor with a tooth-rattling impact. Rust was on her moments later, despite his bad leg. Something had broken inside his mind, the veneer of reserved professionalism gone along with any thought of using Mia to compel me to do his master’s bidding, and in its place was a wild dog’s naked aggression. In a fury he threw her over with one hand, grabbing up the fence post in the other, a good four feet long and thicker than my arm. I lay paralysed in the moment as he hammered it down at her face as if pounding grain.

  Some instants, though they offer no time in which to act, somehow refuse to let you go. I hung between heartbeats, watching the woman I loved sprawled across a concrete floor as the fence post drove down towards her face. A face I knew every line of. A face I’d seen nearly every day for a quarter of a century. Mia Jones. The need for her still ran through me like a fever after all these years.

  Terror filled me to overflowing. Terror at what that savagely driven piece of timber would do to the fragile bones of her face, at what it would do to the brain behind it.

  And in the next moment the post smashed down on to concrete, missing her by millimetres as she snapped her head aside. Rust drew back for a second thrust, but by then I was already falling.

  I hit across his shoulders and back with horrific force. I’d slithered over the edge without any thought for the consequences and fallen head first, arms out before me. If I’d missed, then the impact with the floor would definitely have killed me. As it was there was a crunching thud, a cry of agony, possibly from me, and I rolled away, blacking out with pain.

  The next time I saw anything it was through one eye with my head lying on the barn floor, looking out towards the too-bright day through the main doors. Mia was up and running again, and somehow Rust was giving chase. He threw himself after her, catching her ankle like a rugby player tap-tackling an opponent. I saw Mia stumbling on, unbalanced and predestined to fall, arms pin-wheeling. Hanging on the wall she was careening towards was something resembling a bead curtain, except instead of beads, it was chain links, and large metal spikes jutted out at regular intervals. I prayed to a god I didn’t believe in for her to miss it, but the only gift I got was that the thing’s name popped into my head. A chain harrow. And then she hit it, side on, arms still flailing.

  The air had yet to return to my lungs and the loudest shout I could muster came out as an agonised hiss. But still I managed to start crawling towards her. Rust stood a good ten yards ahead of me, though, fence post in hand again, drawing back for the swing like a baseball player as she hung on the spikes. He lined the blow up against the base of her skull. I tried to stand, but only reached my knees, watching helplessly again as Mia waited for an impact that if it didn’t kill her must surely be the one that would rob her of her memories and leave her drooling and broken.

  I tried. With everything I had in me I tried to get to my feet. But the strength had left me. The horrible finality of it all twisted inside me like a fist that had closed around my heart and lungs. And in that moment of pain and desperation, just like the young men lying torn by shrapnel in no man’s land, crying out for all to hear, it was, for reasons I could never explain in words, my mother who I wanted.

  Time decelerated again as though wanting to draw out the cruelty and make the moment last an eternity. With aching slowness Rust began to lean into his swing. At the same time some dark, unexplained shape detached from the shadows behind the door at his back. Fragments of a second stole by and with each one’s passing the shape behind Rust seemed more human. It held something out before it. Some kind of stick or pole. The pole struck Rust below his shoulder blades and he lost his grip on the post, which went spinning through the air in a lazy arc that had it smashing into the cab of the nearest tractor.

  Rust turned my way, staggering. The daylight streaming through the doorway behind reduced him to a silhouette, stealing away details. He took three more paces and fell forward. The pitchfork that had been driven through him stood proud from his back, swaying to and fro.

  Finally, spitting blood from my mouth, I made it to my feet and stumbled towards Mia. She, in turn, pushed away from the chain harrow seeming miraculously unhurt, as if somehow she had contrived to evade every one of the four-inch spikes standing ready to receive her.

  ‘I’m OK.’ She spluttered a laugh. ‘I think I am . . .’ She patted herself to make sure.

  Then, together, Mia seeing for the first time that we weren’t alone and me recalling it with sudden surprise, we turned towards the figure standing empty-handed by the door.

  ‘Mother?’ I took a step towards her, astounded. ‘Mother?’ My sixty-four-year-old grey-haired mother, standing there in her outdoor coat and a sensible pair of wellingtons. ‘What . . . How . . . I don’t understand.’

  Her eyes flickered towards Rust, sti
ll lying where he fell, the pitchfork standing from his back, blood spreading out beneath him. ‘You asked me to come here and save your life,’ she said. ‘So I did.’

  CHAPTER 16

  2011

  ‘I did what?’ I doubt that many people ever expect their elderly mother to kill someone. Still less to do it in front of them and then claim that you were the one who told them to do it.

  ‘You asked me to come here and save Mia,’ Mother said. She glanced again at the body. ‘I wasn’t sure I would do it in the end, but I came anyway. I mean, he was going to kill her, so I shan’t get into trouble for it. I shouldn’t think.’

  Mia stood at my side supporting me, or maybe I was supporting her. Both of us were rather stuck for words, but it was Mia who asked the important question. ‘When was it that Nick asked you to come here?’

  ‘In the hospital.’

  I frowned. ‘. . . Addenbrookes?’

  Mother’s face softened. ‘No, of course not. In the hospital that night when you went in for your first chemotherapy session.’

  Mia turned to stare at me in confusion.

  ‘Demus!’ I said. ‘I saw him talking to you. And when I asked you, you pretended not to know who I was talking about and then changed the subject. I always wondered what he said.’

  ‘What you are going to say to me,’ Mother corrected. ‘You said a lot of things that a fifteen-year-old Nicholas would never tell his mother. You told me enough about your father and our life together to convince me you were telling me the truth, or at least that it was worth allowing the possibility that you were. You told me that I had to carry on as if we had never had the conversation. That was the hardest part. Knowing that you were going to get better and not being able to tell you that you were. Not knowing how to act. That was a very difficult year, Nicholas.’