Mr. Nobody(62)

31


THE MAN


DAY 11—BURIED

That night Matthew has a dream. A dream so real he cannot clear it from his mind on waking. In the dream he is alone in the ward garden. Everything is so real in this dream, the scent of the plants and the malty earth, the soft rain and the rustle of the trees. He somehow knows his memory has returned, though he does not attempt to access it. He sits quietly, contented, in the garden and closes his eyes. He lets the breeze play across his face but slowly he becomes aware of a sound and his eyes flicker open. The new sound is coming to him from deep inside the landscaped bushes and shrubs of the hospital garden; it is constant, a scraping noise. Scraping, scratching.

Scratch, scratch, scratch.

He cannot ignore it. He rises from the stone bench and looks around the garden. There is no one there. He cannot see where the noise is coming from, but it sounds like digging, a creature digging in the mud. The sound makes him shudder.

It seems to be coming from the bushes behind the stone bench. He looks around to see if anyone has come out to the garden and heard it, but as he looks up at the windows surrounding the garden he notices that there is no one anywhere. It’s almost as if the whole hospital were abandoned, with only him remaining. It is just him and the horrible scratching.

    He looks back toward the bushes where the sound is coming from. It grows louder, more insistent, like a rat trapped behind a skirting board.

It scares him to think what it may be, back there, what he’ll see if he looks. But the noise continues and he knows there is only one way to stop it. He steps toward it, going behind the bench and pushing through the fronds of foliage. He pushes on deeper into the dark branches.

And then he sees him.

A man, kneeling half-hidden, digging in the undergrowth. The man does not look up at Matthew. He just keeps digging, head bowed, scrabbling and clawing with bare hands at the mud. He is burying something, something small. Something important. There is something important buried in the garden. The back of the man’s head is dripping with blood. The digging man is so focused on his task he doesn’t seem to have noticed his terrible wound. Matthew knows this because the man is him.

Matthew wakes sweating.

The clock in his room reads 4:39. He sits bolt upright in the dark, his heart pounding, listening for the sounds of the hospital around him.

He’s not sure if the dream means something or if he should just go back to sleep. Was it a memory, distorted by dreams? Or just a nightmare? Dr. Lewis warned him that the memory exercises they worked on might trigger connections. He recalls the noise in the dream, the noise in the darkness between the plants, insistent, and he squeezes his eyes shut.

Moments later he is out of bed, pulling on his shoes and the puffer jacket Rhoda gave him. He slips from the shadows of his room into the brightly lit corridor, makes his way tentatively past the empty nurses’ station and down toward the ward garden. He ducks smoothly into the toilets as an aide passes; he waits a moment and then heads on. The door to the snow-encrusted garden is propped open for night-shift smokers and he slips out easily into the night.

    He is certain now that there will be something there. Hidden in the earth. Answers maybe.

When he reaches the stone bench he stops, shivering, the dizzying feeling from his dream returning. He looks up at the sky, clear and starry above, his breath clouding in the air, and he suddenly doubts himself. He thinks of the progress he’s making, of Emma, beautiful Emma, of how she wants to help him. Of how she held him, how she’s trying to fix him. Perhaps he should go back to bed, curl up in the darkness and the warmth and wait for things to come clear. Every day things seem to be getting clearer. He watches mesmerized as the frost-glittered plant fronds behind the stone bench sway in the night breeze.

It can’t hurt to look behind there, can it?

He pushes his way into the icy foliage, listening carefully for the sounds of anyone approaching from the ward. Just like in the dream, he finds a small clearing behind the bushes.

Kneeling on the ground, hidden from sight, he starts to move the soft dirt aside, scraping at the mud with his fingers.

Perhaps it was just a dream, he decides, perhaps I really am going mad after all. He claws deeper and then his nails hit plastic.

Half a foot down, a Ziploc bag in the soil. He stops abruptly, stunned to have actually found something. He looks around, listening, but there is only the distant bleeping of call buzzers, the breeze in the laden branches. He looks down at the small bag, at the glint of metal inside. He doesn’t know what it means yet, not exactly, or how it got here, but it seems like the first step toward finding out. Someone put this here for him. He pulls it loose from the crumbly soil and slips it into his jacket.





32


ZARA POOLE


DAY 11—AHEAD OF THE GAME

Zara Poole is driving along the coastal road between Wells and Holkham at 7 A.M. on a Saturday morning on her way to doorstop Emma Lewis.

The address Zara was given by her contact at the hospital was odd. A house essentially in the middle of nowhere. She expected Dr. Lewis to be closer to the hospital, that would have seemed more logical, but this address doesn’t. Not to someone who knows the area. But then, something is off about all of this, as far as Zara is concerned.

Her contact at the hospital, a porter she’d been slipping money to, had been pretty accurate so far. He’d informed her prior to anyone else knowing that a new doctor would be coming, although she hadn’t had quite enough time to make any real impact with the knowledge. But the next text she’d received from him three days later had been pure gold. The porter had texted her at 3 A.M. on Thursday, the same night Chris had received that text from Emma. The bright light of Zara’s phone had briefly illuminated their dark bedroom, Chris sleeping peacefully beside her. It said: