‘Try harder, mushroom, or when we get out of here I’m going to sauté you in butter and thyme.’
‘You know, for a non-demon,’ Vaneclaw said, ‘you’re genuinely quite scary.’
‘You don’t know the half of it. Talk.’
The imp looked pained. ‘Look, I was not put on this planet to be the go-to entity for explaining things. But what happened to you guys in the restaurant in the forest?’
Hannah told the imp – from coming out of the fridge, to their interaction with the woman on the door, to what had happened to some of the diners and the chef.
The imp made a face. ‘You was lucky, to be honest. Lot of places, you’d have seen far worse.’
‘Worse?’
‘Basically,’ he said, ‘your grey-looking ones are lost. People who weren’t really there, ’cos they got something going on in their heads, crowding everything else out. Anxious people. Depressed. Worried, or missing someone so much that the real world seems like shadows. People with secrets, too. Like that woman with the red wine you mentioned – she’d be a drinker, but fighting it, white-knuckle style. Spends lunch worrying how often she can take a sip without someone thinking, whoa, she’s knocking it back. Can’t hear what people are saying. Can’t even taste her food, though she’ll force it down for appearances. In her head it’s just: Can I have another drink yet? Or now? Or now? She’s on her own in the crowd, always, stuck in a hidden life going on behind everyone else’s.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Hannah said.
‘Good,’ Aunt Zo said firmly. ‘What about the chef?’
The imp shrugged. ‘Dunno. Could be he’s spent a lot of time wondering what it would be like to …’ He coughed, looking at Hannah. ‘Do … bad things.’
‘And everyone else seemed normal because …?’
‘At that moment, their life makes sense to them.’
‘And this is what the world’s actually like?’
‘’Fraid so,’ the imp said. ‘Back in the day, before there was so bloody many of you, humans were a lot better at seeing the Behind. Now it’s only your shamans and what-not, your forty-days-in-the-wilderness types. The Behind’s a lot closer when you’re alone, too – which is why people are so mad keen on company, even if it’s only Arsebook or Tweetagram or whatever. It’s what keeps the back door from opening in your head. Noise. Distraction. Idle hands and lonely souls do the Devil’s work.’
Hannah ran across to Tinga and looked in through the window. The inside was empty. No chairs or tables. Dark. Dead. Forlorn. ‘But how come,’ Zo insisted as she and the imp followed her, ‘if the restaurant was real, we stepped right out of it into redwoods? And from there to here?’
The imp appeared to be attempting to sound wise. ‘If you love someone, then you’re together even if you’re a thousand miles apart. But when you’re kept apart, a day can feel like a month. Time and space don’t mean nothing. It’s more about what connects to what, and to who. Or is it “whom”? Dunno. The Behind is the little bit of Hell in all of us, bottom line.’
‘And that means …?’
Vaneclaw looked sheepish. ‘I have absolutely no idea. Heard the Devil say it once, though, so it must be true. Or else a total lie, of course. You know what he’s like.’
‘But if this isn’t my house, where do we look for Mom?’ Hannah said desperately. ‘Stop all this talking.’
Before the imp had a chance to answer they heard a voice from a dark alley on the side of the road. The voice was soft, but carried. It called out a single word, or a name.
And then Zo was running. ‘That’s her!’
Hannah was so caught out that for a moment she froze on the street corner, watching Zo disappear into an alley on the other side of the road.
Vaneclaw evidently understood nothing about this turn of events either. ‘What’s all that about?’
Hannah ran across and into the alley, the imp following. There was no sign of her aunt, but she could hear footsteps in front, running. ‘Aunt Zo!’ she called. ‘Stop!’
Hannah ran as fast as she could towards the right angle at the end of the alley, but the imp caught up with her and slipped around the corner first. They were back on the main street now, just along from the Rittenhouse Building, close to her dad’s favourite Starbucks. ‘Now what?’
Hannah looked around, glimpsed a shadow disappearing around a corner on the other side. ‘There!’
They ran across the street and into another alley. This led towards a two-storey parking lot. ‘Know this place?’
‘Yes,’ Hannah said. ‘It’s where we park if we drive downtown.’ She heard the sound of footsteps. ‘She’s in there!’
They sprinted into the lot. There were no cars inside, just two empty lanes under a low concrete roof. Columns stopped you from being able to see the entire space in one go.
‘I’ll look the other side,’ the imp said.
He ran away. Hannah walked up her lane, looking hard – but Aunt Zo wasn’t there. Vaneclaw came pelting back. ‘Nah,’ he said, looking worried. ‘We must have gone wrong.’
But then they heard footsteps again, still running. A voice calling out – Aunt Zo’s. She wasn’t calling for Hannah, though, and because of the echoing space it wasn’t clear what direction the sound was coming from.
The imp looked up at the ceiling. ‘Is there another floor?’
‘Yes.’ Hannah sped back out of the side and towards the ramp to the higher level. She started running up it, but then felt the imp grab hold of her again – this time grasping her hand.
‘Go easy,’ he said. ‘Got a bad feeling about this.’
Hannah shrugged him off and kept running. When she got to the top of the ramp she found herself in a wide, roofless open space. The sky was now shot with striations of violent, dark-orange cloud, as if a storm was coming. Pale lamps stood at each corner of the space, shedding enough light to show there were no cars parked here, and no sign of Aunt Zo.
There was something up there, though. A large shadow in the gloom at the end. About as tall as a child, but wider.
‘What’s that?’
‘Oh,’ Vaneclaw said, arriving a moment behind her. ‘That … would be a wolf.’
‘A wolf? A make-believe wolf?’
‘Maybe not. Lot of animals took to hiding in the Behind, once you lot invented guns. They slip in and out when nobody’s looking.’
At that moment the wolf raised its head and looked straight at Hannah. Its eyes burned golden yellow.
‘Though, to be honest,’ the imp added, sounding very unnerved, ‘real wolves don’t normally do that.’
‘Is it … safe?’
‘And they call me stupid,’ Vaneclaw muttered, grabbing Hannah’s hand and tugging her back towards the slope. ‘No, love, it’s not safe. Let’s go. Now.’
‘But what if it got Aunt Zo? She’s really scared of wolves.’
‘It didn’t. We’d’ve heard all the chewing.’
Hannah continued to fight him until she heard the sound of running once more, this time from below – and Zo’s voice calling out again. This time Hannah heard what she was shouting.
Aunt Zo was yelling her mom’s name.
So she allowed the imp to pull her back down the slope, keeping her eyes fixed on the wolf until they’d gone far enough to turn and run. They hurtled back into the lower level, where Hannah was consternated to see that things had changed at the opposite corner. Instead of being an exit back on to Walnut Street, now there was another ramp – leading downwards.
‘Nuts,’ Vaneclaw said glumly. ‘I hate it when that happens. That ramp’s a bloody metaphor, innit.’
‘A what?’
‘Posh name for structuring imps. Twisty little bastards. They infest stories like head lice, chucking symbols around. She’ll be down there, for sure.’
They ran halfway down the ramp. The scant light from above ran out, and they were staring into a very dark place. They slowed, going carefully, trying to judge the length of the slo
pe.
When it flattened out, it was almost totally dark. Hannah hurried out into the silky black space, her hands held out in front, and then remembered something. She quickly reached out and patted Vaneclaw very hard on the head.
‘Oi – what’s that for?’
‘He did it. In Siberia. It made you light up.’
‘Right, yeah, he can do that. You can’t.’
Hannah looked steadily into the darkness. She’d long ago learned that if you do this, your eyes eventually begin to adjust and may pick up detail you can’t see at first.
Nothing doing, though. There simply wasn’t anything to be seen. Then suddenly Aunt Zo called out.
‘Hannah – hurry! She’s here!’
Chapter 43
Kristen was lost.
Utterly lost. She had been running around the basement parking lot for what seemed like hours, or days, or years. She’d been on the move as soon as she’d seen her daughter and the other woman disappear into the gloom, and she moved fast. She’d been a runner her whole life and her body was ready to go, and keep going. But they weren’t there.
Either the lot went on forever or she kept getting mixed up and turned around. She’d soon had to slow down, too, to avoid repeatedly smacking into concrete pillars, invisible in the darkness. There didn’t seem to be a pattern to them – sticking to one line didn’t help. Wherever she went, whichever direction she tried to go, something was in her way. She couldn’t even seem to find the walls, or any way of judging the extent of this freezing space – she was lost somewhere in the middle.
She called Hannah’s name but heard nothing back. She’d gone. Hannah had walked away and she wasn’t coming back. She’d disappeared into the future with someone else.
Kristen tried again, desperately, her voice breaking.
And this time … heard something.
Hannah raced down into the darkness of the lower level, leaving Vaneclaw behind, heading for where she thought Aunt Zo’s shout had come from.
‘Zo? Where are you?’
‘Shh!’
Hannah changed her direction and ran faster. Now her eyes were starting to adjust she could make out her aunt, thirty feet away, enveloped in the heavy gloom. Zo was standing very still, head cocked on one side, listening hard.
‘What are you doing?’ Hannah asked, taking her aunt’s hand for a moment. ‘We shouldn’t be in this place. We need to look for Mom.’
‘I am. She’s here somewhere.’
‘She can’t be.’
‘She is.’
Hannah shouted for her mom. The sound rebounded off the walls and fell to the ground. ‘She’s not. Or she’d come to us.’
Zo held up her other hand for silence. Hannah was about to get really, really mad – this was dumb and a waste of time and they needed to run back up to the streets and find somewhere else to look for Mom, anywhere else – but then she heard something.
The sound of feet sprinting past behind them. Bare feet.
Hannah and Zo whirled around together.
But there was no one there.
Kristen ran to where she thought the sound had come from. She banged into a pillar once more, hard, and almost fell, but kept going, doubled up against the pain. She called Hannah’s name, again and again. There was no reply.
But she knew what she’d heard.
She’d heard her daughter, shouting her name.
She stopped moving and stood, turning slowly in the darkness. Listening. ‘Call for me,’ she said, trying to sound calm. ‘Call for me again. Please.’
She kept saying it, over and over, not realizing how wet her cheeks were becoming.
Hannah and Zo looked at each other.
‘You heard that, right?’
‘I heard something,’ Zoe said. ‘And I heard her calling your name before, when we were on the street. That’s why I ran over. But she’s not here.’
‘Or … she’s not quite here,’ Hannah said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The Devil said it’s different here for everyone. Maybe she’s close, but can’t find her way to where we are.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘Try again.’
They both shouted, several times. Nothing happened. Hannah was beginning to panic badly now. She knew Mom was near. She could feel her, nearly smell her. She was almost here but she was so far away, and Hannah knew time was running out.
‘Mom,’ she shouted. ‘Come here.’
But then suddenly she had another thought. If everything was individual in the Behind, if it was all about you, then they needed to find a place where their paths overlapped – somewhere that was both of theirs, something that was about them.
‘Mom,’ she said, more quietly this time, picturing her mother in her mind as clearly as she could. ‘Forget that. Don’t come here. Go home, Mom. Go home.’
There was a crashing sound. Kristen turned to see a glow from the elevator doors, now standing open, having appeared – or been revealed – thirty yards away.
She ran over to them and into the elevator, stabbed the button. It was slow this time – very, very slow, and made a clattery, rickety noise, like an old piece of machinery near the end of its life – but eventually the doors opened again.
The same corridor.
She ran along it, convinced that she wouldn’t be able to find her door, that all she’d done was swap one futile search for another. But no, there it was, the nearest thing she had to a base now: the door to her hotel room, a tiny bit ajar, propped against the latch, as she’d left it.
The room looked exactly as it had. The television was still on, showing the same scenes of Santa Cruz.
The phone on the desk rang. Kristen lunged for it, but there was nobody on the other end. She slammed the phone into the cradle to reset and then put it back to her ear, jabbing at the button for reception.
‘Hannah!’ she shouted into it. All she heard was her voice slapping against the walls of the hotel room.
Which … was now half the size.
Kristen slowly put down the phone, looking around. The room had got smaller. The bed was still a couple feet from her shins, but the side walls had closed in. The windows were almost within reach of the bed now.
The ceiling was lower too. It lurched down with a sound like ancient machinery, metal wheels on cracking tracks.
The TV screen went blank.
The ceiling dropped another inch.
Kristen ran back to the door while she could still get there – the area outside the bathroom was narrower now too, barely wider than the door itself. She tugged and pulled and kicked but it wouldn’t move now. It wouldn’t open. She couldn’t get back out into the corridor. She was stuck here.
She threw herself on to the bed, reaching for her iPhone on the nightstand. The foot of the bed was now right up against the desk, buckling the legs of the chair. Her phone’s screen was cracked. How had that happened?
It had no signal.
She screamed at it. There was still no signal.
The walls were only a couple of feet from either side of the bed, inching closer to touch the nightstands. These had been hewn from fashionably chunky wood and looked sturdy enough to resist a lot of pressure, but …
Kristen looked up. The ceiling was now only two feet above her head, and getting closer. There was nothing to stop it coming all the way down to the bed. Nothing but her. Would her body, her muscles, be strong enough to hold it back?
Her bones?
The area by the bathroom had narrowed to less than a foot wide. She wouldn’t be able to get down it even if she’d thought it worth trying the door again. The foot of the bed was now completely under the desk, the mangled remains of the chair crushed against the wall.
The bed was holding. The bed was strong enough.
She had to hope so, anyway.
Clutching her phone to her chest, Kristen rolled to the side of the bed and slipped over the edge on to the floor, just as the ceiling dropped a
nother foot.
She pulled herself under the bed frame, scrambling into the middle of the space. She lay there watching as the walls finally reached the nightstands, and shoved them against the bed frame.
There was a series of tinkling sounds as the bedside lamps broke, but the tables held. She could hear the bed frame creaking as pressure mounted at the head and foot … and then a change as the ceiling came down on to the top of it.
There were thick square legs in each corner.
Would they hold?
A chirping noise. Kristen cried out, not recognizing it, thinking it was the sound of part of the bed frame cracking. Then she realized her phone was vibrating.
She shifted so she could angle the hand holding it up to her ear. ‘Help me!’ she shouted. ‘Help me!’
For a moment she couldn’t hear anything. Then, as if from a very great distance, a quiet, calm voice:
‘Go home, Mom,’ it said. ‘Go home.’
Chapter 44
It took only minutes for the cops to park and come running into the boardwalk. They were stymied by finding the service door to the Giant Dipper locked. The younger officer, Ray, was all for kicking it down. Ray was big on kicking things down. He was good at it, too.
The older cop, a twenty-year veteran called Rick, said no. Time had shown him that kicking things down, unless there was no alternative, had a way of coming back to bite you on the ass.
‘So, what then?’ Ray demanded.
‘Find a security guy. He might have keys.’
‘But—’
‘Look,’ Rick said, pointing up at the rollercoaster track. After a moment the carriages rocketed through their view, spilling noise behind. ‘There’s nobody on there.’
‘So?’
‘So relax, Ray. No one’s in danger. Let’s try to fix this the peaceful, easy way, and not spend the rest of the night filling in ten-page forms. Go, find someone. Shoo.’
Ray trotted away down the promenade. He swept his head back and forth, keeping an eye out for anything out of place. He ran in a tight, boxy style, like the guy he’d seen in an action movie the night before, though sadly Ray wasn’t carrying a pump-action shotgun. He was alert nonetheless, ready for anything.
Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence Page 25