Chapter 19 Adam
Adam pounds up the track. He has run seven miles this morning.
The pool is shaded by lemon trees. There are fluffy towels and a robe already laid out on the sun lounger.
Everyone here knows Adam’s routine by now.
He wonders, uneasy if it’s what Leaf encourages all his guests to do.
The exercise, and the other thing with the breath.
Adam kicks his sneakers off and dives. The water closes over him. It’s so quiet down here. Nothing but cool blue. He’s getting better – he can hold his breath for almost five and a half minutes now. He’ll be ready for Leaf when he reaches six.
They’re in the master bedroom; the moon lights up the treetops through the vast window.
Adam brushes the hair out of Leaf’s eyes.
He worries he’s crowding Leaf but he can’t stop.
It’s strange being close to someone so beautiful.
Adam feels the constant need to check, with glances and small touches and adjustments of Leaf’s collar, that he’s real.
Leaf asks in a neutral tone, ‘How are you doing with holding your breath? Are you ready?’
Adam says, ‘I’m ready.’
If he had any doubts they vanish at the sight of Leaf’s expression. He is almost shaking with excitement.
Adam goes to prepare.
The bathroom is flagged in Italian marble. Adam turns off all the heating and opens the windows. The fall night cools the room quickly. There’s a solid marble table along one wall big enough to lie on.
The bath is filled with cold water. Some ice cubes still float in it.
Adam gets in. The cold is like an assault; he gasps at its ferocity.
As he lies there he breathes quickly and deeply, trying to oxygenate his blood as fully as possible.
He has even brought a white sheet to cover himself.
This was not specified but Adam thinks it will add realistic detail.
Once he is fully chilled, he gets out, quickly dries himself and gets up on the table.
To his cold skin, the marble feels almost warm.
Then he goes utterly still. He even tries to slow his heart rate.
Thanks to months of practice, he can hold his breath like this for up to five minutes.
It has to be perfect. He has to be cold, unmoving.
The rubber balls make uncomfortable lumps in his armpit.
He squeezes them tightly to his body. This is to block the brachial artery, to weaken the pulse in his wrists to almost nothing.
He pulls the white sheet over himself, so he is just a shape on a slab. Adam takes one last deep breath, closes his eyes and calls to Leaf.
Every sound is vivid as he lies in the cold dark. The door handle’s wheezing turn, the quiet hush of feet on marble. He feels rather than hears him approach. The living coming to see the dead.
Leaf’s hands tremble as he pulls back the sheet.
His inhale is long and wondering. Adam feels warm lips on his cold ones.
Leaf begins to cry, Adam hears the wet sound of his breath.
Warm hands stroke his chilled chest. Leaf holds Adam’s pulseless wrist. Adam hadn’t known what to expect, but it wasn’t this.
Leaf lies down gently beside him. He strokes Adam’s cold flesh, nestles his head into the crook of Adam’s shoulder, kisses his still throat.
Adam holds his breath for almost six minutes as Leaf continues to cry.
They lie together in the warm bedroom, radiators on full, Adam wrapped up in an electric blanket. Leaf is solicitous, worried, so caring. Adam feels like he’s bathed in light, the focus of Leaf’s whole attention.
Adam’s fingers grip the soft whorls of chestnut hair at the back of Leaf’s neck. ‘I felt like my soul left my body. Does it feel like that for you?’
‘Maybe it would,’ Leaf says, ‘if I had one.’
Adam unwinds his fingers from where they have been clenched in Leaf’s hair.
‘Time for you to go,’ Leaf says.
Adam should be used to it by now but it still feels like being struck across the face, at the end, when Leaf tells him to go.
In his room Adam trembles. He does not sleep until pink touches the sky.
Adam walks through the woods to the stables.
He goes there to think, sometimes. It’s peaceful when there’s no one but the horses, like right now.
The top doors to the six loose boxes are open.
The horses move leisurely in the dimness.
Adam glimpses shining hide, dark eyes, pricked ears, soft muzzles.
He likes it. The horses don’t care about people business. They carry on with horse things.
His favourite is Daria, a clever chestnut with a bright yellow mane. The mare bows in Adam’s direction over her stall door. She knows him and wants a carrot. He strokes her velvet muzzle. She nudges his pockets, hopeful.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I forgot, today.’ He frowns, shaken by thought. Adam’s finger traces a name over and over again in Daria’s copper hide.
Adam still shakes a little when he thinks about last night. He hadn’t understood what it would be like. He thinks about Leaf’s face hanging over him, grieving over his cold body. Adam felt dead. He saw, with a terrible wave, that Leaf liked him dead.
He thinks about Officer Lloyd. He thinks about a deactivated alarm and rooms that should not have been lit at that time of night.
He thinks about Leaf’s question. ‘Where do you think I was?’
Leaf was in the house that night, Adam is sure. Maybe Adam also knows how to find it, Leaf’s secret place.
Leaf, Leaf, Leaf, he writes on Daria’s sleek coat with his finger. She tosses her head, annoyed, then moves into the depths of her stall.
Adam feels the great give of fear in his heart. He had thought there was nothing more terrible than love, but he is beginning to realise that this is not true.
Adam sits on his bed staring into space. He realises he’s staring at the wardrobe and turns away. He feels that the strangers’ clothes look back at him, even through the wood. He knows he is being watched, not just by the clothes. He feels Leaf behind the wall.
Adam made Nowhere House into a many-eyed monster.
He should not be surprised that it feels monstrous.
Sometimes horror comes on him, a suspicion that there is no person at the peephole but something else, crouching in the walls, breathing gently in its great leathery chest, red eye fixed to the peephole.
He readies himself for bed, giving no sign that he’s aware of Leaf’s presence. Adam crawls under the sheets and turns the light off. He gradually makes his breathing heavy. He lets his body go still. After a time he feels the eye move on to another part of the house – searching, always searching.
Adam stares ahead, wakeful. The trouble with darkness is that it lets your mind roam free.
His child may have been born now – might be out in the world.
Adam has hurt the people he should have loved.
He has thrown away his life. For a moment he can actually see it in his mind’s eye.
A sheet of paper held in his own hand, abruptly crumpled to nothing in a closed fist. Waste.
That doesn’t matter right now, he tells himself. All that matters is the truth. He has been under a spell but the spell is broken.
He waits until the house is quiet and there is only the sound of wood relaxing after the heat of the day. From the forest can be heard the faint call of an owl.
Adam lowers silent feet to the floor.
You could not find them without the three plans for Nowhere House in front of you, without studying them carefully with knowledge – almost with love.
But there are spaces on the blueprints that do not exist, which lie between past and present – which are nowhere.
Few people can read architectural blueprints properly.
It is like a superpower. You can find panic rooms, safes, even bodies buried in drywall – if you know how to read a building.
Adam has studied all the plans of Nowhere.
He knows its bones, its foundations. He probably knows more about Nowhere House than anyone else in the world.
Adam knows where Leaf’s secret place is.
The long gallery is quiet. The jukebox stands against the wall, glowing neon in the night.
There are two things in this house that are not marked on any plans, but their existence is clear, if you know how to look. The way the foundations are structured and arranged don’t make sense – unless these two places exist.
The first one is a room. The second one is a tunnel.
Adam’s first concern is the room. He needs to see the secret heart of Nowhere, the one that Leaf keeps hidden.
He feels gently around the back of the jukebox. There is something, a space, behind this wall that should not be there. Adam’s fingers brush against something on the jukebox and there is a click. The jukebox swings aside to show a doorway, spilling warm light.
Adam goes in quietly, heart thrumming.
The room is clean and clinical-looking. It has the appearance of a mortuary, or maybe an operating room. The walls are shining white tile and the cement floor slopes to a drain at the centre. There is a metal table like a gurney. Metal instruments gleam there, neatly and evenly spaced.
The tile walls are covered with photographs.
Adam looks. His heart stops. He takes another look and then another.
Time and space rearrange. He feels as if it were his own body, what’s happening to the young men in the photographs.
Flesh, bone, wide mouth, a glossy terrified eye.
The person who took the photographs loves eyes.
All the pictures are the same. Red and black and white – teeth parted, mouths stretched wide and screaming. In some of them Leaf’s face is visible. In some of them he holds a little silver knife. Adam knows he should run but he can’t.