The Other People: A Novel(8)

She hurried up the stairs and into the girl’s room. Everything looked as it always did. The sleeping girl slept. The machines whirred: all readings normal. She walked over to the piano. The keys were coated in dust. Nothing had disturbed them.

She put it down to her imagination. A week later, it happened again. And again. Every few weeks, that single note would ring out from the girl’s room. You never knew when it might happen, day or night.

Some of the staff began to talk about ghosts, poltergeists, telekinesis. Miriam wouldn’t hear of such nonsense. And yet she couldn’t summon up a better explanation. So she continued to do her job and tried not to think about it at all.

Tonight, when the note rang out, she walked wearily to the girl’s room. She checked the piano, the machines. And then she stood over the sleeping girl and stared at her white face, her mass of flaxen hair. Still just the same. She stroked her thin arm and let her hand drop to the bedsheets. She frowned. They felt gritty. But that wasn’t right. They had only just been changed. How could they be dirty?

She ran her hand along the sheets, raised it and rubbed her fingers together.

Not dirt.

Sand.





The pathway was narrow and muddy. Heavy woodland crowded in from either side. It didn’t strike Gabe as a particularly picturesque or pleasant walk, even on a summer’s day, let alone in the pitch black and freezing cold of a February night.

The twisted trunks of the trees pushed over the rickety fencing on either side. In some places, the crooked boughs met overhead, branches entwining with each other like lovers’ fingers, crooked as a fighter’s knuckles.

He fought down a shudder. A curse, sometimes, being a writer. Or ex-writer, he supposed. But then, did you ever stop being a writer? Like an alcoholic, the urge was always there.

When he was a kid he had dreamed of writing books, like his heroes Stephen King and James Herbert. But growing up in a small, run-down seaside resort with no dad and a mum who spent most of her dole money at the pub, that idea had been quickly knocked out of him.

The people where he lived were suspicious of aspiration. Other people’s hard work and success simply reminded them of their own failures and poor choices. Those who tried to claw their way out weren’t encouraged, they were mocked: “Getting a bit lah-di-dah.” “Get you with your posh degree.”

He pretended not to care about school in front of his friends while he spent night after night studying for his exams in his room. He got decent enough grades and, despite almost trashing his dreams before they started in his teens, he was given a second chance. He secured a place at the local polytechnic and then a poorly paid job at a small advertising agency. Just before he started, his mum died. Everyone from their community came to the funeral but no one chipped in a penny to help. Gabe had to pawn what was left of her possessions to help pay for the coffin.

Another three years spent churning out product leaflets for pessaries, and he was offered a job at a big agency in the Midlands. During a pitch, he met a freelance graphic designer called Jenny. They fell in love, got married…and Jenny fell pregnant. Happy ever after.

Except there’s no such thing.

He often used to joke that he got to lie for a living. Haha.

No one knew how close it was to the truth.

I lie for a living. I live a lie.



* * *



—

AHEAD OF HIM, the path was widening and the last of the trees straggled away. Gabe found himself upon a narrow bank. A starved sliver of moon floated on a still expanse of water. A lake.

Not a large lake. Maybe ten meters across, fifteen wide. On the other side, it was hedged in by more trees. Slightly to the right, a high ridge of hill. Secluded. Hidden. Like the wooded walk, it was not pretty. It smelled dank and fetid. The bank dropped away steeply, littered with cans and ancient plastic bags. The surface of the water was covered in brown algae.

And in the middle, half submerged in the filthy water, was a car.

It must have been fully submerged, once. But the weather had been abnormally dry for the last couple of years. The water levels were at a record low. Bit by bit, the lake must have retreated until the car was revealed. That explained the cans and carrier bags stranded on the bank.

Gabe walked down to the edge of the bank. Water crept over the toes of his trainers. The car was rusted and draped in slimy weeds. In the darkness, it looked almost the same color as the lake. But he could still see, just visible in the rear window, illuminated by his flashlight: Ho k if you e orny.

Horn bro en. W tch or ing r.

He took another step, not caring about the dampness seeping through his socks, and then a voice said: “Am I right?”

“Fuck!”

He spun around. The Samaritan stood behind him. He must have stepped out of the trees, or simply emerged in a cloud of smoke. Either, Gabe thought, was feasible.

The Samaritan was tall. And thin. As always, he was dressed in black. Black jeans, long black jacket. His skin was almost as dark. His shaved skull glinted in the moonlight. His teeth were a startling white. One was inlaid with a small iridescent stone, like a pearl. When Gabe asked him once what it was, he had frowned.

“I brought it back, from a place I visited. I keep it with me.”

“Like a souvenir?”

“Yeah. To remind me never to go back.”

The subject was closed. Gabe knew better than to reopen it.