Out of Time E-Book

Ruth Boswell

• Herausgeber: Muswell Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Beschreibung

Joe (17) is locked out of his house and pursued by a crowd determined to kill him. He escapes and finds shelter among a group of dissidents fighting a dictator. He is in a parallel world like and unlike his own and here, over a period of two life-changing years, he learns to survive and he falls passionately in love. But will he be returned to his own world?

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty One

Chapter Twenty Two

By the Same Author

Copyright

We may well ask when and where men do live. The answer is that they live in the future and in the past and now, or all at the same time; or, more correctly, that when they live at all they live out of time

The Third City by Borra Bebek

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable

TS Eliot

Chapter One

Girls fancied Joe. He was seventeen, tall, dark haired, grey eyed, handsome though this was difficult to tell. A Gap jumper whose hood permanently covered his head and left his face in shadow served as a useful disguise and allowed him to see out but prevented anyone from seeing in. Torn jeans and trainers conformed to the political correctness current among his peers.

Joe and his mother lived alone in a red brick house in Bantage, an unassuming town in the Cotswold Hills. The odd Tudor front, a covered market in Weymouth Square, a few remaining narrow lanes, bore witness to a more ancient centre, almost obliterated by the usual parade of chain stores, a small shopping mall and civil facilities. Where Joe lived, nearer the outskirts, the thirties planners, or unplanners, had taken over and post-war architects added their indelible mark. Their house, three up, two down, small front garden, larger back, was what might have been called ordinary but served its purpose. It was home.

It was this that Joe was now trying to enter. His key refused to turn the lock and open the front door. He gave it a hard kick. This usually worked. Not this time though, this time the door remained obstinately shut. Typical of the day, he thought bitterly. It had started with a fight in which he beat up a boy weaker than himself for reasons he could no longer remember, it had continued with an argument with his best friend Martin who wanted him to go to Dick’s Cafe after school, and it had almost ended for good with a heavy fall outside the local park gates which had left him unconscious for several minutes and with a pounding headache.

Dick’s Cafe was where groups of friends gathered, hyped themselves up on caffeine, phoned friends and if seriously bored went on to punch a few video games at the local arcade. He suspected Sally would be lying in wait for him. He’d been going out with her in a half hearted kind of way for the past term, the last of a succession of girls with whom he had had vague relationships but who, as he had no inclination for commitment, eventually walked away. Sally was more persistent than the others and he was anxious to avoid her.

He wished his mother were back. It was Monday and she worked late at her secretarial job which she disliked but bore with stoicism. She had had no outside financial support since Joe’s father disappeared and she was too proud and independent to pursue him for maintenance. Joe tried to supplement their income, or at least see to his own immediate needs, by working at the local Sainsbury’s on Saturday mornings.

Mrs Harding’s life was devoted to Joe. This Joe knew but instead of helping their relationship, he was left with a burden of guilt which made him resentful. Dimly aware of how unreasonable this was, he tried to express the genuine love he felt for his mother but failed, thus intensifying his guilt. Mrs Harding for her part, also guilty because Joe was being brought up without a father and the masculine guidance she thought essential for a teenage boy, could not break the cycle of tension that marked their daily life. It was an unsatisfactory situation but neither knew how to alter it.

Joe once again tried to open the door. He inserted the key into the lock and twisted and turned it with increasing frustration. It served him right. The lock had been temperamental for some time and he had promised to install a new one; but hadn’t. He tried the side door leading into the back garden but this too unaccountably failed to open.

The air was hot and still and the street quiet. No one was about, blank-faced windows revealed no sign of life, no doors opened or closed, he could hear no voices, no sounds of children. He wondered where they had all gone in a street normally active at this time of day. He felt dizzy and faint and sat down on the front steps. When was Mum due? He looked at his watch. In four interminable hours. Should he go to friends? The idea repulsed him. He wanted to get indoors, flop down in front of the TV, watch a crap programme and go to his room, the only place in which he felt secure enough to relieve himself of being who he was. His head throbbed.

He dragged himself upright concluding that, befuddled by his fall, he had gone to the wrong house; easy enough to do, in these repetitive streets, after a blow to the head. He picked up his bag and walked back into the street. The gate, swinging half open, revealed two white numbers nailed crookedly to the gatepost. They stared at him with the familiarity of old friends and he stared back, remembering the pottery class at primary school where he had fashioned them, brought them home and laboriously screwed them on. It was a lifetime ago, a period he preferred to forget, a time when the house vibrated with shouted or unspoken confrontation between his parents, when he lay trembling in his bed, his ears sensitive to the slightest sound that could herald a storm breaking out either below or in the bedroom across the landing. This was the prelude to his father leaving home. Joe was given to understand he had gone to live with someone else, some ‘tart’ he heard his indignant grandfather proclaim. This his father denied, tried to explain to a puzzled eight year old that he had fallen in love with someone else whom Joe would like when they met. But they never had. His mother had forbidden the contact and eventually his father and new wife moved to Australia. After a time they heard no more of him.

Dots danced before his eyes and he shook his head to clear them but his vision, when he read the street name, was unclouded. Fairfax Road. That was where Joe lived. Twenty-two Fairfax Road.

His knee hurt. He limped back to the house, sweat starting out in groin, armpit and forehead. He needed tea, something to eat. He had, he suddenly realised, on this unsatisfactory day, dashed out in the morning on only a cup of tea. Should he go to a friend’s house? He automatically reached for his mobile phone. The back panel had split, probably in his fall. The line was dead. He threw it in disgust into the nearest flowerbed.

He would have to get in through the bow windows but these, with safety locks in place, were impossible to open. His only hope was to break a pane and climb through. This seemed a drastic measure but he would square it with Mum, replace it himself if necessary. Joe no longer felt reasonable, his sudden and urgent need to get in the house overriding all other considerations. He picked up a stone from the garden, wrapped it in a dirty handkerchief - no point in raising the alarm with the shattering noise of broken glass - and prepared to throw.

The stone never left his hand because he now saw that, in place of the mirror that normally hung over the sideboard, was a charcoal drawing of a man’s head, heavily framed in black and executed in strong, bold strokes. Joe gazed at it, mesmerised by its extraordinary power, by the dark malevolent eyes staring straight into Joe’s. He drew back in alarm, his only wish to flee; but he had noted with astonishment that the room that he was looking at was not his, was not the one belonging to Joe and his mother, was not the room inside twenty two Fairfax Road. Averting his eyes from the hypnotic stare of the portrait, Joe drew near again and registered foreign furniture, heavy and dark, hessian curtains and, he now noticed, thick, roughly hewn wooden shutters swinging loose either side. How was this possible? He had checked the address. Were there two Fairfax Roads in Bantage? It seemed unlikely; yet there was no mistaking that the right address had brought him to the wrong house. He withdrew to the garden hedge where the portrait’s eyes could not follow and tried to work out logically and calmly a plausible explanation for his predicament. He had no doubt that there was one but for the moment he was too bewildered to work out what it could be.

He was interrupted by a harsh voice.

‘What the hell d’ you think you’re doing?’

He whirled round. Facing him was a small swarthy man, dark featured, heavily bearded, staring at him with hostility. Joe shrank back as the stranger laid a heavy hand on his arm.

‘Take your hands off me!’

He responded by grasping both Joe’s shoulders and giving them a shake.

‘I don’t advise you to be insolent,’ he hissed. He was looking round furtively as though caught in some illicit act. Clearly mad, an escapee from the local hostel. On drugs probably. Joe decided to handle him with care.

‘I am trying,’ he explained, as though addressing a recalcitrant child, ‘to get into my house’.

But it wasn’t, from what he had seen, his house. Someone else’s house, perhaps this man’s.

‘Your house?’ the man whispered. His pushed his face into Joe’s.

‘The key won’t turn in the lock,’ Joe offered in a conciliatory tone. If he kept talking perhaps he could edge him onto the path, back him into the street, find help.

The man gave him a sharp push.

‘Scram!’ he said, ‘before I call out the nets. Run!’

His mouth was pressed against Joe’s ear, the word exploding from him in a tone so low Joe was uncertain he had heard it. The man again looked to either side and then, taking a key from the loose folds of his shirt, opened the front door. Joe watched with astonishment. Pausing, the man whispered again,

‘I warned you,’ and disappeared inside.

Joe stood stupefied.

A bell began to ring, tolling from near at hand. Then another, and another. Looking up Joe saw, outlined against the sky, wooden structures on all the roofs, two uprights and a crossbar from which, their clappers following the rhythm, dark bells swung back and forth. The summer afternoon resounded to their peals. This was not the comforting sound of church bells but threatening, alarming, an imperious summons… to what?

The front door opened and the man came out carrying a long pole with a large net suspended at its end.

‘I told you to run!’

Joe needed no second bidding for the sound of other doors opening, other people shouting, galvanised him into action. He took off down Fairfax Road, turned left at the corner into Sydenham Road and on into Forest Lane. Behind him pounded a gathering momentum of feet, shouts, bells and whistles. More people emerged from their houses. All were holding man-sized nets.

He had had nightmares like this before, intensified after his father left. Always he was being chased by men out to kill him and he running, running but waking at the point of death, sweating and shivering - but safe. He had perfected a technique for dealing with these attacks from his unconscious by realising that he was asleep, knowing that he had only to run long enough and hard enough before waking up in his own bed, in his own room, the normal world solidly around him. Now he waited for the moment of release.

It did not come. Instead a sharp blow caught him on the back of his neck and stunned him. Joe stumbled and then ran on in an agony of bewildered despair. He could see the park railings where so recently he had stood, contemplating the possibility of a cup of tea. Should he run in? He decided against it, fearing to be surrounded. He raced on, uncertain of the direction he was taking.

A warm liquid trickled down his back, sweat ran down his chest and into his eyes, preventing his seeing ahead. Lost in a vortex of sound, of breathlessness and terror, the throbbing in his ears was indistinguishable from the clamour behind him. If only he could wake up. Hate was at his heels.

He zigzagged to avoid the nets and as he did so his body hit wall either side. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the legend ‘Cat Walk’. So that was where he was. The local graveyard for cars lay beyond. As he hurled himself to the end of the passage another blow caught him on the back of the head. He threw himself forward, expecting a net to close over him, and braced himself for a final struggle. There was no need. His pursuers had not followed.

He fell to the ground, into silence and oblivion, a blank, black abyss.

It was dark when he woke, not the dark of his room but the dark of a night sky. He was lying in the open. No stars but a pale moon occasionally obscured by moving clouds cast a thin light. He tried to rise. Movement was agony but he staggered to his feet and looked around. The tall beech trees of a nearby wood rustled in the warm breeze; on the other side of Cat Walk he could make out the pitch outline of houses pressed one against the other, their belfries like gaunt gallows pointing towards the sky. His senses now more attuned to his surroundings, Joe heard a chorus of creaking sounds, moans, thuds, squeaks, rattles, not regular but persistent and alive, like an old house talking at night. He held his breath and waited and then moved a step forward, colliding painfully with something tall. He pushed past it and moved towards the town, preparing to negotiate his way through abandoned cars but, looking closely, was shocked to discover that they no longer existed. The object with which he had collided was a wardrobe leaning crookedly like a drunk, its doors swinging in the wind. The waste ground was the depository for discarded furniture, chairs, tables, benches, planks piled on one another in crazy confusion. This could not be.

Cold and trembling, he wrapped his arms around himself in a futile attempt at comfort. The Gap jumper stuck to his back. Blood. He was wounded, needed help. He had to get home. He stumbled towards Cat Walk but tripped over an obstacle in his path which, he realised with a jolt, was one of the nets, its pole broken in half. Joe kicked it aside and moved cautiously forward until he reached the far end of the passageway. There was neither light, movement nor sound in the town but clearly visible in the moonlit sky were the stark outlines of the belfries, each suspending a now silent bell, the agents of evil that had made him a fugitive.

He walked through the familiar streets, the park to his left, he turned into blessed Fairfax Road, his eyes fixed apprehensively on the houses but they were shut up, silent. He read the nameplate with deliberate care, tracing the letters with his fingers.

Nothing had changed, the front of his house was as he had always known it, squat, undistinguished, home; only the bell was unmistakably on the roof, a malevolent, alien guard. He looked up at his bedroom window and wondered if he was lying in his bed dreaming that he was standing outside, wondering if he was lying in his bed... If he threw a stone would it wake him? Would his mother be inside, asleep, in a house that appeared to belong to a fiercely hostile stranger? Should he wake her, assure her he was all right, had not been drinking or caught up in a fight, though he wondered how to explain his torn clothes or his wounds. Mum could be fierce. He did not relish the idea of confronting her with an absurd explanation of the state he was in.

He put his hand on the gatepost, his pottery numbers reassuringly still there, slipped the latch and pushed it open, bracing himself for the familiar squeak. The gate made no sound, swinging on well oiled hinges. At the front door he took his key out of his pocket but after a moment’s hesitation decided the risk too great. He stepped instead into the flower bed that still held his imprint from the attempt, an eternity ago, to break the window. Closed wooden shutters obscured his view of the interior.

The garden door was now unlocked and he stole into what had once been familiar green space. There were no flower beds now, no lawn and, worst deprivation of all, no old, gnarled apple tree, in earlier years his tree house, his fantasy world, his hiding place. Instead, rows of poled beans, carrots, cabbages, cauliflowers marched in subdued rows towards a garden shed. Inside, an array of garden tools, a scythe and a sickle were dwarfed by two man-sized nets reaching from floor to ceiling. Joe saw them with a shudder and felt his wound. The net so carelessly kicked aside in the waste ground must have been the one that hit him. He picked up a sack from a pile, put it round his shoulders and stepped out.

He looked long at the house, studying its darkened windows, wondering if normal life continued inside. Had he ever got home? He could not remember. He had surely returned from school, eaten a meal, watched TV, gone to bed. And if he had not, had his mother missed him on her return from work, had she wondered where he was, tried to reach him on his mobile, asked round his friends’ houses? He could imagine her anger and anxiety building up as he failed to appear. No light shone from her window, but then if the evidence of his eyes could be believed, it was no longer her window, it was the man’s. Joe resisted an overwhelming temptation to call out in the hope that she was there but to reveal himself was too dangerous. He moved to the back hedge and burrowed through to the lane that ran parallel to the houses. As he walked along it towards the town centre he considered whether to seek help from neighbours. Then he heard footsteps. Perhaps it was someone he knew, perhaps it was Mr Bernard, a large pot-bellied man who worked at the local hospital returning late after his night shift. Perhaps he could explain…

Joe shrank into a wall. Three figures emerged from the end of Fairfax Road, making towards Acacia Avenue, two men dressed in long, straight, black coats, heavy boots on their feet, either side of... whom?

Peering more closely to make sure he was not mistaken Joe saw with astonishment that, between the two guards, for that was clearly what they were, was the man who claimed to own number twenty two, his face stricken, ashen grey. A shirt with sleeves tied tightly back, Joe presumed it was a straitjacket, imprisoned his arms. What had he done, what crime committed to be picked up in the middle of the night and brutally taken away? This, like everything else that had happened to Joe since his fall, seemed evidence of some tangible evil. He watched with apprehension as the men dragged their prisoner away and out of sight, leaving the unlit streets empty and silent. He hesitated. If the man had gone, dared he go inside the house? But what if he had a wife, or someone else lived there? He was not prepared to risk it.

The park gates were locked but at the side two railings, in his own world, were worn thin by countless generations of schoolboys. Now they stood straight and sturdy but Joe found, to his surprise, they still yielded to his pressure, allowing him to slip inside and walk across to what was called The Field though it was no more than a grassy area. It looked wild and forlorn. Joe made his way to the copse on the far side.

It was as he sought the shelter of the trees that he heard steady drumming as though someone were beating the ground. He inched forward, bracing himself for another surreal image. What he saw was hardly surreal, merely inexplicable, laughable in its ordinariness. A small girl of about eight or nine was skipping with frightening intensity. Skip, skip, skip. Her face, he could see even in this dim light, was taut and grey, her body so thin it was almost transparent. Her hair fell in thin strands to her shoulders, now moving with the rhythm of the rope. Skip, skip, skip.

A rustle. To Joe’s alarm a couple emerged from his far right, the man’s face tight with fear, the woman’s hunted, drawn and weary, eyes darting from side to side as though expecting retribution. They approached the girl, took the skipping rope from her, wound it round its handles and moved silently away in single file, the man first, then the child and lastly the mother. Joe followed at a distance, reaching the railings in time to see them go down Rose Avenue and into Jarvis Road. They disappeared inside number fifty six but as he turned away he noticed a twitching curtain in the house next door.

Uncertain what to do next, he retraced his steps to the corner of Fairfax Road and again studied the nameplate with painful longing. He looked back at the familiar streets where he had spent his childhood. He could remember walking as a toddler down the then never ending Fairfax Road, his small hand comfortingly in his mother’s. ‘Then’ was his time of innocence, of hope, of a golden world with mother, father and dog, Ricky a cocker spaniel, now long dead. They had had to put him down because he had contracted leptospirosis, a disease deadly to humans. His murder, as Joe thought of it, coincided with the beginnings of his parents’ breakup and his first taste of the relentless loneliness of misery. Nothing was ever the same again.

He experienced now a similar sense of closure, of terminal alteration to his life. Why this should be he could not understand, knew only that a desolating sense of loss left him unable to move. Fairfax Road, ordinary, pedestrian Fairfax Road seemed like a lost paradise that he could never regain. He looked at it with longing, etching its contours into his memory, then silently retraced his steps to Cat Walk. He stopped only to grab the broken net in the hope that, with it gone, they - the townspeople who had hunted him like an animal - would forget.

Shivering now, Joe clutched the sack round his shoulders, made his way through the sea of furniture and, throwing himself down on an old creaking bed, fell into an uneasy sleep.

Chapter Two

JOE woke to the early morning sun and the improbable vista of an open sky. He searched in vain for familiar sights, for his crumpled duvet half trailing on the floor, for window curtains blowing in the wind, posters staring down from his pock-marked ceiling. He could see only dark stacks of unfamiliar furniture, hear only the call of birds, sounds and images to which he could not connect. He grasped at memories from the previous day and slowly, like phantoms from a dream, the happenings that had brought him to this improbable place came into focus. His aching limbs, the dried blood on his neck, a throbbing headache, bore witness to the reality of his predicament.

Joe’s was not an imagination in which wild fantasies took place; only in dreams and sometimes lying half asleep was he invaded by images with scant connection to his humdrum life as though an alien world, concealed in his unconscious, needed to make its presence known and pull him into its orbit. The sense of dislocation this produced often left him bewildered, unable to pick out threads that would restore reality. So it was now. The alien world had taken over but instead of the changing, disconnected world of his dreams, the place in which he found himself was clearly defined, substantial.

The furniture, now that he saw it in daylight, was weather-beaten, crumbling and old, beetles munching into its heart, he could hear their million jaws. It must have once been imposing for it was dark, solid and occasionally finely carved. What kind of houses had it come from? It resembled no furniture Joe had ever seen, except in Gothic horror films. It had the same exaggerated quality.

He felt exposed, the only human in the absurd panorama of wooden detritus going to waste. He put his hoody over his head and painfully made his way towards the nearby wood. This at least was territory he knew and he climbed over the alien contents of unknown homes towards it. He reached its welcoming shade gratefully and paused a moment to look back. The waste ground looked incongruous, a Stonehenge of ghostly, rotting sculptures. Nearby a staircase climbed into nothingness.

A stream flowed through the wood. One carefree spring weekend he and Martin had traced it to its source, their first independent foray, camping two nights en route. He looked for the well worn footpath. That this too had ceased to exist was all of a piece with what had gone before but he struggled on through tangled thickets and fierce bramble bushes until he reached the stream’s cool waters. He drank, stripped, cleaned his wounds and lay submerged. The throbbing in his body subsided and he rolled onto the bank and lay unmoving as he tried to unravel the fantastic events of the past day and night. They did not yield to logic, nor to any remembered experience. Only in the most outlandish video games did he inhabit places of such wild improbability. Absurdly, he wondered if he was caught inside one, a figure manipulated by electronic impulse. He pulled himself back sharply. That was the stuff of science fiction, yet the game was the same, the challenge to escape, to find a way to take him back to where he rightly belonged. This was not a matter of pushing buttons but of using every mental resource to find an exit point. He searched for a gap in events, a point at which his own volition could empower him but could see none. Circumstances beyond his control were in command and he would have to play their game, follow their signs.

Was he being tested by some unknown, malign god, were these happenings a trial of strength? If so, he had to meet the challenge or else die?

Joe did not favour speculation. It seemed to him a vain and useless waste of mental energy. His solutions to problems were purely practical.

He remembered now that he had been to a school camp at a farm which lay some five miles northwest. The farmer and his wife had been welcoming, they might remember him, might help. He dressed, brushed himself down and set off. He would cut through the wood until he reached the main road; it would be easy going after that. But once under the canopy of trees, without a path to guide him, he lost his sense of direction. The way was barred at almost every step by rioting bushes, fallen tree trunks and branches obscured by thick moss and lichen. He pushed his way angrily through long ivy tendrils that hung in thick, twisted ropes from overhead. The wood, like the townspeople, was attacking him and he was powerless to fight back.

Each step released a volume of sound, twigs snapping, the crunch of rotting wood beneath his feet, quick slithers in the undergrowth. If he stood still the silence was oppressive, relieved only by the chatter of birds high above and the scraping of countless insects below.

Only small plants could thrive in the lush dark of the wood; white wood anemones, sorrel and, here and there, glossy green leaves where earlier bluebells bloomed. He found an anthill, two feet high and poked a stick into its summit. The ants, red, large and fierce, scurried to rebuild. He felt panic rising, alone in this wild wood, and sat down on a nearby tree stump. What had he been taught to combat it? - take a deep breath in and then a long one out. He tried, but it did little to still the pulse beating in his throat. He pushed on.

It was impossible to know where he was heading. Everywhere looked the same, an endless forest of gnarled trees and undisturbed vegetation. He was probably going round in a circle, would stay here forever, never be found. Panic gripped him again as he thrashed through with brute force, tripping and falling constantly. What was once a wood had become a forest, unyielding in its cool, somber light.

Sobbing with frustration, he forced himself to stand still and let his heartbeats settle. He had time, it was still morning, ten o’clock by his watch, and there was surely a way out to the road. ‘Keep calm,’ he told himself, ‘think laterally.’ The obvious answer presented itself almost at once. Grasping the low branch of a nearby oak he hauled himself on and climbed laboriously to the top. He broke through to sunshine and the blue canopy of the sky. Scanning the horizon in every direction he was amazed to see nothing but acres of trees, their undulations in every possible and impossible shade of green; only the distant roofs of Bantage broke through the quivering carpet. Of buildings, roads or cultivated fields there was no sign. Man had left no mark on the landscape. Nature held sway, untroubled.

Joe climbed to the ground no longer able to think or reason or make sense of the insane universe imprisoning him. He wandered, directionless, in numb despair. Later, he found himself again by the stream.

He fell asleep, waking only when the sun lay low. The day was fading and with it came a desperate longing for home. Joe crept to the edge of the waste ground and parted the bushes to get a clearer view, praying to see once again the lost paradise of his youth, the cars’ rusty and jagged edges; but outlined against the sky was the same rotting furniture. In a forlorn desire to touch a familiar object, he made his way to the broken bed on which he had slept, wondering for a wild but hopeless moment if stopping here again for the night would dissolve whatever fantasy he inhabited.

The pole and net that had so nearly caught him lay on the ground beside the purloined sack. He picked them up and slowly made his way back to the wood.

*

In the town a gaggle of men are gathered in a low, oak beamed room. It has no windows and is lit by braziers on the walls and two flickering lamps. The men’s skin is grey, as though rarely exposed to light. One, a tall man of indeterminate age, is sitting at a long refectory table. Ten heads incline towards him. This man, known as Helmuth, exudes a deadly power. No one dares speak as he gives short, sharp orders. Four guards who have been concealed in the shadows come forward, listen and then leave by a central door.

Helmuth nods. The meeting is dismissed. The Councillors rise and with an obsequious bow follow the guards. Helmuth remains seated.

Opposite him, on the wall, his portrait observes him thoughtfully.

*

Joe was hungry. This was real hunger, gnawing hunger that made him feel sick, faint and unsteady. He had seen on television, read in the papers, learned in geography, that millions of people were starving, a statistic that, until this moment, had evoked little beyond a brief stab of pity. Now the images of stick people with swollen bellies grew into sharper focus; but while they died in their barren and desolate landscape here, with abundant nature all around, he ought to be smart enough to survive. He lacked the know-how. Pity, he thought wryly, he had always scorned joining the boy scouts. It might have prepared him for this bizarre and inexplicable ordeal.

A hedgehog and four small young scuttled past. He had once been told that gypsies ate hedgehogs, baking them in clay. He looked at them with interest. Delicious evidently. But where would he get a clay pot? Shocked and amazed at the impracticability of his situation - he had nothing, out here in the wild - he turned out his pockets. They revealed the house keys, a few coins, about £2.75 in all, a calculator, a box of matches, a broken felt-tip pen and an old, two bladed penknife. It had belonged to his father, a tactile contact Joe valued. Crumpled into a tight ball at the bottom of one pocket he found a sheet of glossy paper, a page from an old copy of The Face with an article on what was termed ‘the biggest star of 2001, Andrew WK.’ He could no longer remember why he had kept it so long but shoved it back. He switched his calculator on, played with it for a while and wished again he had his phone, though he doubted that it would have worked in this mast-free wilderness.

The stream was teeming with fish, silver minnows darting in and out of the shallows, now and then larger fish that looked like trout. The net that had so nearly caught him, a neat construction made from thick, wispy rope knotted loosely and attached to a knobbly pole, would now be put to better use. How many people had it captured? Joe brushed the image aside. Without food he would be unable to continue, might lie helpless until ‘they’ found him. He cut off the broken half of the pole and, weighing the net down with a stone, placed it in the stream’s bed. He waited for the ripples to fade and fish to swim into his trap. But they knew better and swam past or straight through. His stomach turning on its juices he finally caught a big, silver grey trout. Joe lifted it out and watched it thrashing inside the net, helpless but with surprising strength. Then it slid through a hole and hit land. The extra purchase gave it lift and it leaped high and forward, teetering at the water’s edge. Joe pounced and, holding the slithering fish with one hand, reached for a stone with the other. The fish flapped its tail in a last helpless gesture as, eyes half closed, Joe bashed its brains out. He picked it up and it lay wet and slimy in his hands. His gorge rose. He was tempted to throw it back.

Having learned from countless Westerns that smoke would reveal his whereabouts, he knew better than to light a fire within limited distance of the town. He placed the fish inside the sack and walked further upstream until he came to a secluded clearing. Here he gathered handfuls of dry grass, small twigs and rotting branches and built them into a pyramid in best boy- scout style. Thankfully he had matches. These he had always hidden from his mother, taking them carefully out of his pockets before the trousers were washed, for he and his friends smoked out of school, in local cafes and in homes that tolerated it. Joints were passed round regularly. This now made him pause. Was he, could he be on a shitty weed? He had taken Ecstasy once or twice and had watched others habitually on harder drugs. Had someone laced his drink? He didn’t quite see how. He had not been to Dick’s and it was not the kind of thing his friends did, making it unlikely that this experience was drug induced; in any case, no matter how bizarre his surroundings, his thinking was too ordered, too logical.

He lit a match impatiently and put it against the dry grass. The fire, smouldering at first, sprang to life. Skewing a twig into the fish, he hung it over the flames and, after an agony of impatience, tore into its flesh, burned and half-raw. He caught another, swiftly dispatched and swiftly eaten. Then another. Satisfied at last, he doused the fire and sat beside its embers, preparing for the next part of his journey. He had to keep going. Death in a dream, if such it was, might spell death in life.

*

Four men and four dogs advance along the stream, dogs straining at the leash. Each man carries a man- sized net. No words are spoken but their determined tread and their cold eyes express an implacable desire to subjugate whoever crosses their path, an uncompromising determination for mastery untouched by pity. They move forward.

*

Clearing away all traces of the fire Joe trekked on. In other circumstances he would have appreciated the wildness of this countryside, untamed by man, so different from the neat fields and bordered woods to which he was accustomed. He remembered now with wistful pleasure a cycle ride some years ago in the Chiltern hills with his mother, one of the many rambles they had enjoyed together in the days of short haircuts and neat clothes, before being uncouth became necessary for survival. They had approached from Hambledon, coming on it by chance and seeing, lying snugly at the foot of a steep incline, a small village of red roofs and curling smoke. As they stopped, looking down, Joe had felt a rush of affinity with this land as though he had inherited its memory, aeons ago from another life. No sense of that now. Here nature was untrammelled, stretching to he knew not where.

Faintly at first, he heard dogs barking. Was he approaching civilisation at last? His heart beat with hope. But not for long. The dogs were behind him, downstream in the direction of Bantage. This could mean only one thing. They were after him. His mind told him he must flee but his body refused to move. He crouched instead in the undergrowth, the hood well over his head and waited to be captured.

A blackbird, disturbed by the noise of the approaching dogs, launched itself from a nearby branch and Joe, released from his trance of terror, sprang forward, falling over branches and dead trees in headlong flight, feet and frayed trouser bottoms caught by long grass, ivy and twisting convolvulus. Out of breath, slowed by a painful stitch in his side, he fell over a tree trunk that blocked the way and plunged into the water, slipping and slithering over wet, mossy stones on which his worn out trainers failed to find purchase. His way was barred by the overhang of a tree growing sideways from the far bank.

Joe hesitated. The baying was moving closer and he was exposed, in the open. He grasped a branch above his head and with his last breath hauled himself up. Crawling on all fours, he reached the tree trunk. Here, huddled into a fork and shaded by leaves, he was for the time being out of sight.

Four men cleared the trees, their dogs, noses to ground, inexorably following his trail. He realised with sudden panic that he had dropped his net and sack in the grass, a clue so telling that he must be discovered. He closed his eyes and waited for the end.

The men stopped at the point at which he had slipped into the stream. Tongues lolling from heat and exhaustion, the dogs lay in the grass. One man and one dog crossed the stream immediately below Joe. Pressing his back against the tree trunk until the hard crusty bark hurt his skin, he saw his pursuer hesitate, shake the short chain on which the dog was leashed and, with low grunts that were clearly commands, walk up and down. The dog looked up at its handler with fear, head down, tail drooping, slinking behind as he was dragged through the wood. On the far side another dog stood alert, pointing towards him, a huge wolf like animal. It seemed impossible that, bathed in a sweat of fear, he could avoid detection.

They waited, three men and a dog, the boy camouflaged in a tree while the wild world went its way. The hunt, the predator, the victim. It was the way.

No one moved until man and dog emerged below him without warning - how close had they been? - recrossed the stream and joined the waiting party. Joe expected them to confer and perhaps fan out, but they moved off, back towards Bantage. Joe watched them go until they disappeared. Unable to believe in his escape he remained in the tree long after they had gone. The chase, for the time being at least, was over.

Later, much later, he unlocked himself, clambered to the end of the branch and jumped. He grazed his knee and all the aches from his initial flight returned. Blood poured from his wound into the water. He waded back across and found, miraculously, the sack and net hidden in the topmost tangle of a bush. He picked them up with relief, plunged once more into the water and stumbled upstream. Progress was slow. Uprooted trees, their leafy branches growing upright from fallen trunks, formed an almost impenetrable barrier. He had to give up, return to the grassy bank and hope his scent was lost. He was intent now only on putting mileage between himself and the town. He urged himself forward.

In the late afternoon he collapsed in the shade of a tree and lay, semi-comatose, until twilight fell. It was quarter to five. Joe studied his watch in amazement and disbelief. Eleven hours only since he had woken that morning. He had lived an eternity and covered, according to his reckoning, some ten miles in this wild country which stretched ahead without a break.

*

The four men return to the town. Their journey has been in vain. They know they will be punished and try to make themselves invisible by keeping close to the wood’s shade but as they emerge from Cat Walk they are seized by rough hands and dragged to a heavily fortified building. A thick wooden door is wrenched open and the four are thrown down stone steps into a dark, dank cellar. They cry in protest but the door is clanged shut and bolted from outside. Their shouts are ignored. The dogs are led away.

In the Council Chamber Helmuth listens disdainfully to what has occurred. What fools these men are, not worth their keep.

He is puzzled by accounts of this boy. He does not appear to be like the usual fugitive, but older, cannier. Helmuth wonders whether it is by chance that he is going in the direction of the community. He suspects not. This suits him well. Its stubborn dissidents are a thorn in his side, the last remnants of his erstwhile enemies. If they are harbouring the boy they will in time be eliminated. But not quite yet. There is a reluctance in Helmuth for this final deed.

*

The moon cast a clear light above the wood. Joe spent the night in a tree, the mysterious pads and rustles, the odd painful cry of an animal, the hoots and screeches of birds, preventing any hope of sleep. A grey owl, sharing his eyrie, brushed his face with outspread wings. Once he thought he heard hounds baying.

With the first light he jumped to the ground, relieved to be on the move. He walked all day, pausing only occasionally to gather berries at the forest’s edge. The ground was rising and the stream changing into a fast flowing torrent, tumbling headlong towards its destination. Broad-leaved trees gradually gave way to darkening conifers, firs and pines. Their tangy resin smell reminded him of other places, other times.

When night fell he tried lighting a fire but the matches were still damp from his plunge into the stream and failed to ignite. Angry and frustrated, he threw them to the ground, unable to combat any longer the misery and fear that overwhelmed him. He sat in the enveloping dark for countless hours while invisible night creatures bustled round, slithering, creeping, flying, an unheeding world at his feet and above his head. Eventually he fell into a light slumber, only to be invaded by nightmares in which he saw his mother’s face loom over him while he lay, pinned to a bed, imprisoned in a straitjacket, trying to explain, to speak, feeling his lips move but knowing that no sound came. He strains to warn her that there is danger, danger but he is gagged and as he struggles against his bonds an unearthly cry, a long, low howl, pulls him back into conscious thought. A tremor starts in the base of his spine, speeds through his body, his eyes bulge, his skin prickles and his hair stands on end. The cry rises again and again, culminating in a long high crescendo like the howl of a banshee, predatory and primeval.

Six pairs of yellow eyes glower through trees. Joe stares at them. Wolves. The leader of the pack crouching low, creeps towards him, growling, tail sweeping the ground, fangs bared. Mesmerised, Joe watches its savage shadow approach. Others in the pack are circling round. He is trapped.

Joe springs to his feet and advances on the wolf. Raising arms and head to the sky he lets out a primordial shriek that reverberates through the forest; then with the pent-up terror of his plight, another and another.

Man and beast are locked in confrontation and, as he has always done, man wins. The wolves turn tail and slink into the forest.

Chapter Three

THE morning found Joe scrambling for his discarded matches. He recovered twenty-three and the box, damp but still intact. Pushing them gratefully into his jeans pocket he set off up the hill. Conifers converged on either bank, somber, impenetrable and threatening. He hurried on along the thin strip of sunlight beside the stream and stopped at midday to rest and allow his matches to dry. He needed urgently to light a fire in the coming night and cook more fish but made do with handfuls of wild raspberries and small, sharp strawberries. It was a sparse meal; he did not want to stop a minute longer than was necessary.

Nothing in Joe’s existence had prepared him for the ordeal he was now experiencing. There had been no premonition, no warning that his ordinary life, spent in a kind of scowling indifference that, he knew well enough, masked other deeper and unrealised feelings, could be disrupted and destroyed. That he was one moment in a normal day, in an activity as tame as going home from school, and the next in this wild improbable country hunted by packs of men, was the stuff of nightmares, part of the confused jumble that haunted him at night. But this time he was not going to be released by waking to his old surroundings because this time he was not asleep.

He trudged on, on automatic pilot. In the late afternoon as the shadows lengthened, the trees, releasing their resinous smell, pressed closer, lines of pine, fir and yew.

The forest filled him with terror. He had never succeeded in banishing its mythological figures, familiar from fairy tales that used to people his imagination. Though their power faded as he grew older, he realised now that they had been lying in wait, ready to take revenge for their dismissal. Here, they had him at their mercy and they taunted him, witches, warlocks, demons, hobgoblins. He kept his head well covered by his hood for if he looked he might see, and if he saw succumb to their power. The impossible had already happened. Anything could follow. He broke into a run, hoping to escape, but the forest stretched as far as he could see, on and on, perhaps forever, perhaps it covered the whole world. Its evil spirits were closing in on him. He felt their hot breath on his neck.

Though he was unaware of it for it had never been put to the test, Joe carried inside him a reservoir of courage. This now came to his rescue. He stopped running, he stood still, he faced the enemy and he sang. He sang every song he could remember, he shouted out the words, he bellowed his defiance, his confidence growing with every note. Joe felt the forest’s inmates shrink before his onslaught, conceal themselves in the darkness to which he had banished them. He walked on steadily, along the thin strip of bank, towards the summit of a hill. His repertoire exhausted and his throat aching, he kept command over his fears by playing mathematical games, number one, double it to two, then four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two. Iteration. He did the same with square roots, pushing them higher and higher until his mind reeled; then primary numbers that stretched to infinity. These he had always relished. Because they went far beyond any calculation made either by computer or by man, they had served to give him a sense of eternity, symbols of the immutability of existence, a safeguard against mortality.

He stopped as the light failed, gathered dry grasses, branches and twigs, lit a fire and flung himself gratefully beside its Promethean flame, his guard against wolves and unholy spirits. Sensing that he was no longer easy prey, they left him alone.

*

There is no moon tonight. The park is dark. Skip, skip, skip. Susie is taking her nightly exercise. Her mother watches anxiously, her father walks the perimeter of the grassy clearing, then nods. The girl stops skipping and the procession, man, child, woman, moves stealthily forward, past the trees and to the park’s railings. Here a small gate is opened. The man looks to right and left and beckons child and woman to follow. Keeping low, they cross Bridge Road, walk stealthily up Rose Avenue and across to number fifty six Jarvis Road.

A face appears briefly at number fifty four but Susie’s parents do not see it. They are desperate to reach their home.

The girl sits on a high stool in the kitchen and eats hungrily from a plate of meat and vegetables. She drinks a mug of milk, eats some fruit.

‘Time to go, Susie,’ her mother says.

The girl shrinks away but the parents, grasping her firmly by the shoulder, march her upstairs to a third floor attic and push her unwilling form through a small door. The mother follows into a windowless room that contains a truckle bed, chair, table, some wooden toys and a doll. Susie lies down on the bed and the mother caresses her forehead but the father gestures impatiently. The mother leaves, closing the door firmly behind her. Susie listens to the familiar sounds of a large cupboard being placed against it.