The boy looked through the window into the room where his body lay. His skin sunk into his half-starved frame making him look more skeleton than boy. His body weighed very little and, though he was fourteen, he looked much younger. Two male nurses lifted his corpse carefully into a black bag, doing it slowly up and moving his wavy fair hair out of the way so it wouldn’t catch in the zip. They placed it on to the lower level of a trolley and covered the whole thing with a clean sheet. Loaded up like leftover dinner, the boy thought, to be wheeled through the corridors without causing any upset. No one would even know the body lay there as the apparently empty trolley rolled through the wards to the mortuary. He watched with curiosity for a moment before realising his companion had walked on.
“Hey, wait up!” the boy called after him.
D’Scover turned and waved his hand. The walls rippled in a wave from his sides all the way to the boy and, before the boy could refocus, he was standing right in front of D’Scover.
“Wow, now that’s cool. How d’you do that?” the boy asked, looking around.
“Practice,” D’Scover replied brusquely. “Do you have a name?”
“I suppose so; I mean, I must have one.” He frowned. “It’s just . . . just I can’t quite catch hold of it. It’s like it’s just out of reach; d’you know what I mean?”
“No one is here to remember your name, so it is not remembered. Do you have a name you wish to use instead?”
“I can’t think of any.” The boy wrinkled his forehead as he tried to recall one. “I’m not really bothered though. I mean, I don’t seem to care.”
“Adam – will that do?” D’Scover suggested.
“OK – Adam, I like it – Adam will do.”
“It is what the nurses put on your admission papers and death certificate; they had to put a name and they chose to name you after where you were found, Adam Street. It is a good enough name and it carried you to death; it seems fitting that it should carry you past it,” D’Scover said.
He turned back to the corridor and began to walk once more. Adam followed at a brisk pace, half running alongside his tall and long-legged companion.
“So what happens now?” the boy continued to babble. “Do I have to do something to get to? Do I have unresolved business – that’s what they have in the scary movies – is that why I’m still around? Or is that just all rubbish? If it is, where will I live?”
“You will not live.” D’Scover strode on. “You are dead; try to hold that thought.”
“No, I know I’m dead, well, I must be. I mean, I saw my body back there so I must be dead, unless someone really looks like me and this is all a set-up. Is it a set-up? No, can’t be, why would anyone bother to set me up?” He continued to flood D’Scover with questions. “I’m just a bit confused about why I’m here, why I’m not just dead and gone. Hold on, is this a dream? Am I imagining all this?” Adam stopped and looked around the corridor. “I mean, this doesn’t even look quite real, does it?”
He was right, it didn’t look quite real: the colours were drained and everything had an almost two-dimensional quality as though they were watching it all on a TV screen.
“That is because it is not quite real; we are currently within the Memoria,” D’Scover explained. “This is a place constructed entirely of your memories and life experiences. The corridors look solid enough until we go beyond that which you have seen. You have never entered any of the rooms off the corridors and so they do not exist because you have no memory of them. In fact, as you were wheeled through the hospital to your room, you only saw the ceiling and because of this the floor does not exist here.”
Adam looked down and the floor was not there. It was not that it was a hole, but it just simply did not exist. It was rather like trying to look at stars: the harder you stared, the fainter the image became. The effect made Adam feel slightly sick.
“Hey, how come I can still feel sick, even though I’m dead?” he asked. “Shouldn’t all that sort of thing stop?”
“You feel sick because you can still remember what feeling sick is like. You know what would have made you feel sick, you remember, and it does make you feel sick. You do not actually feel sick, you just think you do.”
“Easy for you to say,” Adam grimaced, “but I feel like I could make a proper mess of your shoes, real or not. So, what now?”
“Now I have to take you through some of your memories so that you understand yourself and your life.”
“Really? God, that’s a bit depressing, isn’t it? Can’t I just skip on to the next bit?”
“That is rather a rash request,” D’Scover said, “considering you do not know what the next bit is.”
“Ah,” Adam nodded, “now that’s a fair point. OK, lead on, Mr Spooky. Let’s get on with this.”
The corridor began to fade and was replaced with a large open green space surrounded by a blurry green wall. The green began slowly to pull itself into focus and showed itself to be a large park ringed with tall trees. A small brown dog appeared from nowhere and ran off into the trees, hotly pursued by a young girl calling for it to stop. Other details of the park smudged into existence – a set of swings, a slide, a paddling pool full of children – all fulfilled the illusion that the park was real. D’Scover looked around at the environment gradually forming about them both.
“What is this place?” D’Scover asked. “It must be an important memory of yours.”
“It’s the park where I lived last summer when I ran away from that bunch of nutjobs who called themselves my foster parents,” Adam replied incredulously. “It’s so real! Is it real?”
“That all depends on your definition of the word real,” D’Scover replied enigmatically.
“If I can touch it – it’s real,” Adam grinned, pleased with his cocky answer.
“Ah, but if something is out of reach, too high up to touch, does it mean it is not real? A mountain top, the sky, are they not real?”
“Now you’re just messing with my head,” Adam laughed. “No, this place looks too real to be in my imagination, just like it did when I was here last summer. Everything’s the same, the ice-cream van, the kids in the paddling pool, the park keeper telling off the kids for riding on the grass, it’s all the same as it was back then.”
“We have not travelled in time, and so how do you suppose that we can be here last summer?” D’Scover quizzed.
“OK, let me think,” Adam said, walking round the grass in front of the paddling pool. “Well . . . I suppose . . . this is my clearest memory of the park . . . and so that’s how I’ve recreated it in my mind?”
“Excellent, a brilliant supposition and quite accurate.” D’Scover was relieved; the boy did indeed show promise.
“Why are we here?” Adam asked, bending to touch the grass beneath his feet and marvelling as it smudged like wet paint. He watched as it settled and once more became lush green turf.
“This is one of your good memories shown here in the Memoria, but you may have to let it go,” D’Scover answered. “You must listen very carefully to me now. We should sit down; this may be a difficult stage for you.”
He looked around for a bench to sit down, but there were none visible.
“Hey, that’s not right,” Adam grumbled. “There were loads of benches in this park. I should know, I slept on most of them.”
He closed his eyes and screwed up his fists, concentrating hard, and a grey mist began to take shape beside them. The blur struggled in and out of focus for a few seconds before settling into the shape of a shabby bench. It was just about wide enough for two, but