“Are you ready? This is it.” Clio held me by the tops of my arms and gave me a smile which was meant to be strong and almost was.
“What? Clee, what’s going on?”
Bang.
Bang.
I jumped awake, blinking in the electric light. I didn’t know if the noise had been part of some dream I’d been having or a real, external thing. The cat was upright and alert at the end of the bed, staring with huge eyes at the wall. I stayed as quiet as I could, counting off the seconds of silence in my head: One Mississippi … Two Mississippi … Three Mississippi … Four Mississippi … Fi –
Bang.
Ian disappeared in a ginger bounce of nervous energy and I knotted up in shock.
Another bang.
A slam.
A thud. A bang. Another slam.
Chemical instincts flooded through me, numbing fingertips, lips and ears. My stomach dropped slack and sick and every hair on my body pulled upright, an electrical conductor. My biology primed me to run, to escape. But I didn’t run. Some higher logic took control as I sat up carefully, a steady hand taking hold of my strings and turning my actions away from panic and towards – something else. I found myself taking four, five deep breaths then, quietly as I could, getting out of bed and creeping onto the landing.
The banging and slamming, clattering and rattling sounds were coming from behind the locked door, and they were building up, growing more and more aggressive. As I stood there, shaking, controlling my breathing, keeping quiet, I started to realise something about the noise was wrong. It took a few seconds to work out what that something was, and then I got it: the banging and crashing from behind the door seemed to be coming from a distance. From the dimensions of the house, the locked room couldn’t be large, slightly smaller than my bedroom at the biggest, and perhaps only a box room. An impossibility then, but still: the sounds seemed to be bouncing off bare walls, as if travelling from the far end of a huge, empty warehouse.
The violence cranked up even further into an angry thrashing of violent bangs and metal crashes. I leant forward, listening for some clue. My ear brushed the surface of the locked door, gently, barely at all. The instant it happened, the split second my body made contact with the paintwork, the noise, the smashing, banging, slamming, everything, stopped dead.
Shock jerked me backwards like burned fingers. I tried not to move, tried not to breathe, my hand covering my mouth.
Deep thick silence thundered from behind the closed door. Pure. Heavy. Pregnant. The sound of being stared at.
I waited.
I waited for something to happen.
One minute.
Two minutes.
Nothing happened at all.
Ten minutes later I had the hammer out of the toolbox and was searching through the kitchen cupboard full of unopened letters from the First Eric Sanderson. I found the envelope with the card square inside, ripped it open at one end and shook it. The key fell into my hand.
•
“I’m coming in,” I said outside the door, surprised by the clarity and pitch of my voice in the silence. My guts felt like dangling elastic bands. Hot nervous fluid pressed in my bladder. “I’m coming in. I’m unlocking the door.”
The key clicked around in the keyhole. I pushed down the handle and swung the door slowly open. Silence. Holding the hammer up by my right ear, ready to bring it down on anyone or anything that lurched out of the darkness, I edged inside, fumble-reaching at the walls. Eventually I found a switch and clicked on the light.
There was a bright red filing cabinet standing in the middle of the room.
And nothing else.
There was no one there.
The room was smaller than the bedroom, much too tiny to make any sense of those ringing echoes. The single window was locked and undamaged. As far as I could see, there was no way anyone could have got in or out, but I kept the hammer ready.
Four of the five drawers in the filing cabinet were empty. In the fifth drawer, I found a single red cardboard suspension folder with a single sheet of printed paper inside.
I didn’t take out the folder or read the sheet of paper. I didn’t do anything for one, two, three, four seconds. Finally, I closed the drawer, pressed my back against the cabinet and tried a grip on the wrongness of it all. It wasn’t just the noises. From my second day in the world, I’d imagined this room containing all the facts and figures and pictures of my lost self, a paper trail life of the First Eric Sanderson, and photographs – of him, of Clio Aames, and of all the people close to them. Permanent records in colour print and text proving those lives had happened, those people and times and events had been real and once had their place in the working of things. I’d half expected to find this room filled with Clio’s belongings – it would have been a logical explanation for the room being sealed up in the first place. But there was nothing. I checked through the cabinet and the rest of the room again to make sure. Pulling the red folder off its runners and tucking it under my arm, I got myself out of there, clicked off the light and locked the door behind me.
•
I pulled the vodka bottle out of the freezer drawer – I’d got into the habit of having a shot or two with the Friday night video, and maybe the occasional shot with afternoon TV – and poured myself a big half-glass over ice. Ian reappeared in the kitchen, now all brave and never-been-scared-in-my-life, doing his fat cat slink around my legs. I opened a tin of tuna for him and took the vodka and the bottle through to the living room.
Television, the great normaliser. I switched it on and dropped onto the sofa, vodka at my feet, red folder at my side. I drank back a few deep, hot throatfuls to calm my nerves before opening the folder and taking out the piece of paper inside. This is what it said:
Imagine you’re in a rowing boat on a lake.
It’s summer, early morning. That time when the sun hasn’t quite broken free of the landscape and long, projected shadows tigerstripe the light. The rays are warm on your skin as you drift through them, but in the shadows the air is still cold, greyness holding onto undersides and edges wherever it can.
A low clinging breeze comes and goes, racing ripples across the water and gently rocking you and your boat as you float in yin-yang slices of morning. Birds are singing. It’s a sharp, clear sound, clean without the humming backing track of a day well underway. There’s the occasional sound of wind in leaves and the occasional slap-splash of a larger wavelet breaking on the side of your boat, but nothing else.
You reach over the side and feel the shock of the water, the steady bob of the lake’s movement playing up and down your knuckles in a rhythm of cold. You pull your arm back; you enjoy the after-ache in your fingers. Holding out your hand, you close your eyes and feel the tiny physics of gravity and resistance as the liquid finds routes across your skin, builds itself into droplets of the required weight, then falls, each drop ending with an audible tap.
Now, right on that tap – stop. Stop imagining. Here’s the real game. Here’s what’s obvious and wonderful and terrible all at the same time: the lake in my head, the lake I was imagining, has just become the lake in your head. It doesn’t matter if you never know me, or never know anything about me. I could be dead, I could have been dead a hundred years before you were even born and still – think about this carefully, think past the obvious sense of it to the huge and amazing miracle hiding inside – the lake in my head has become