Chapter 19 Adam #2
Adam sees a river of auburn hair, the colour of fall leaves.
He reaches for the photograph. Adam last saw him in Leaf’s wallet.
Rick McFadyen’s eyes are so wide that Adam can almost see the image of the photographer reflected, the flash of the camera.
How can a person have so much of their insides laid open to the outside, and still live?
Adam starts to cry. There are other things mounted on the wall – Adam’s mind will not understand them.
So he feels it too late, the movement of air. Arms wrap around him in a strong lover’s embrace. Leaf isn’t holding him hard enough to hurt, not yet.
‘Hi,’ Adam says, quiet. ‘It’s ok, you can let me go.’
He feels Leaf’s indecision. He wants to believe Adam. His arms loosen.
Adam turns. He looks at the beautiful face and his heart does that tap tap tap it always does, even now.
‘I wanted to tell you,’ Leaf says. ‘I want to share everything with you – I didn’t know how.’
‘I understand,’ Adam says. He looks around the room. ‘It’s impressive.’
‘If they do want to live,’ Leaf says, ‘the Foundation helps them. The ones who want to live do what I did. They work and get clean and make a life. But so many of them want to die. That’s why they were on the street in the first place.
They were trying to kill themselves as fast as possible.
In the end, does it really matter whether it’s me or an overdose? ’
‘I don’t know.’ Adam tries to keep his face still, as still as Leaf’s. Inside, his brain spins.
‘I love you, Adam. I never wanted my fingers to itch with you.’
‘I have never felt such love for another person as I did for you,’ Adam says.
‘Good.’ Leaf’s sigh of relief takes up his whole body. ‘I don’t enjoy it,’ he says. ‘Please believe that.’
Adam smiles. ‘It will be ok,’ he tells Leaf.
‘Will it?’
‘Yes.’ Adam nods. ‘We love each other.’ If he makes a mistake, he will become a photograph on the wall.
Leaf starts to speak and then stops. His face twists. ‘You said “did”.’
‘What?’ All of Adam’s skin comes alive.
‘Before. You said, “I have never felt such love for another person as I did for you.”’ Adam sees it now, in the eyes – the thing that looks out from behind Leaf’s face.
Leaf moves like a spider, fast and sudden.
He takes aim at Adam with his tiny gleaming knife.
Adam stumbles, grabs at something mounted on the wall.
It’s pale and graceful and slender. Even as he reaches for it he thinks, what a strange place to put a handle.
It comes free easily from the brackets that held it.
Adam sees that he holds bone. It is an adult human femur, bleached and polished to the sheen of ivory. He grips it in his fist, staring for a moment. Then Adam throws the bone at Leaf’s head.
Adam runs out of the passage, past the jukebox, along the passages and ways of Nowhere, through the high-ceilinged rooms, up into the library.
He slides a hand along the bookshelves, sweeping a couple of books into his arms. When he reaches Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire he reaches behind.
His fingers find the lighter fluid and firelighters he left here earlier.
He had to be sure, he told himself as he did it, he had to prove it.
But Adam realises that he had already been sure.
Adam’s fingers grasp Pride and Prejudice. The staircase door opens without a sound – he had been so proud of that, the utter silence of its passage.
Adam slips into the staircase. The door closes and he flicks the security lock, which means no one can get in through this door.
Adam leans against the secret walls he built, panting. He thinks about Christie and the baby. He cannot lie down and do nothing. He has to try – even if he fails and Christie and his child never know, he has to. What are fathers for – except to try?
Leaf is powerful. Officer Lloyd knows what he is, everyone who works here must know too. No one will do anything against Leaf Winham. The police will not charge him, courts will not convict him.
But if it is all laid bare, if people see the pictures of those young men and boys, see that terrible wall, that room – maybe there is a chance.
Adam knows that as a plan, it’s not great.
The house will burn. Leaf might die. Adam could die too.
But he doesn’t want to live in a world where Leaf walks free.
‘Ok,’ he whispers to himself. Everyone knows that there is one thing that always brings help.
Fire.
Adam tears pages from the books he grabbed from the shelves and makes a pile of kindling.
He layers the firelighters carefully through it all, making sure it will take.
The staircase should function almost like a chimney.
He never treated the wood to make it fireproof.
That’s not like him. Why didn’t he? The spell, Adam thinks, bitter.
But his mind was trying to tell him. It was always working underneath.
Adam lights a match and throws it onto the pyre. The bright yellow flame starts small, a cautious tongue licking. Then it rears higher and higher, hungry for it all.
Adam ducks out of the staircase, closing the bookshelf door quickly behind him. Smoke seeps through the gap at the bottom. Adam can very faintly hear the crackle as the staircase draws up the flame. It’s working just like he hoped.
He doesn’t know where Leaf is. Maybe it doesn’t matter now. But his skin ripples on his flesh anyway.
Adam treads quiet through the house. He goes to the north-west corner of the long gallery.
He drops to his hands and knees, runs his fingers over the smooth boards, searching for a seam.
He finds the release and opens the hatch down into the foundations of the house.
He slips in, and pulls the trap door down behind him.
This is the second secret that the blueprints told him.
Adam goes through the struts and supports and boulders that shore up Nowhere House. The floorboards creak overhead and Adam freezes. It could be the natural conversation of wood at night. It could be Leaf walking through the long gallery.
The earth rises on a gentle slant and the space between the foundations and the ground grows narrower and narrower.
Adam puts the flashlight in his mouth. He bends then crawls.
The house feels like it’s pressing down on his back.
He is flat on his stomach now, edging ahead on his elbows and knees.
Maybe he was wrong. Maybe there is nothing down here but dark.
Adam catches a scent which seems impossible.
It’s October, not the right season. But it’s unmistakable, filling the air with its delicate perfume.
Lilac. Adam gasps and sinks his fingers into the earth, pulling himself forward.
Suddenly the beams and foundations above his head are gone. He rolls out into an open place.
This is the deepest part of the house. It is made of old stone, rock walls which glisten with mica.
A young lilac tree clings to one side. Before the tree, five round stones are circled like some kind of magic.
Adam breathes. He doesn’t like them, those five stone-like things.
And who would plant a lilac tree underground? How does it stay alive down here?
He shines the torch through the heavy blossom and sees it – a glimpse of dark through a lilac.
An opening yawns in the rock wall. Adam takes a deep breath and goes into the night-scented flowers.
He pushes his way through into the dark.
The scent tickles his nostrils, fills the back of his throat.
His flashlight dances on the tunnel walls; they glitter, a million tiny points like stars.
Who made this? Adam touches the tunnel wall with a marvelling hand.
This was already here, as far as he can tell, in the seventeenth-century plans.
He goes through the gleaming passage – the tunnel of stars.
It makes him think of the water reflecting back the sky when he and Leaf swam in the lake that night.
Then it makes Adam think of the beast beneath the lake.
He can’t breathe, suddenly. He stops and bends, hands on his knees.
Adam wonders what Christie has named or will name their child.
He wonders whether, if he lives, she will ever speak to him again.
Thinking of his life before Nowhere is like raising a wrecked ship from the deep.
Is it too late to travel back, between the worlds?
Adam doesn’t know. He is not sure who he has become.
Leaf’s approach is soft-footed, silent; Adam doesn’t hear a thing. The first he knows about it is the knife in his throat, so fast that he doesn’t even feel pain. He does feel the blood coursing hot down his chest, though. Leaf holds Adam close, as if with love.
‘I can’t let you go this time,’ Leaf says sadly. ‘You’re a liar.’ Leaf’s mouth is on Adam’s neck; he kisses near the edge of the wound that stretches across Adam’s throat. Adam thinks through the pain and shock, is he drinking my— But that’s not important.
Adam breathes and slides his hand very slowly into his pocket.
Fingers, Adam commands. Move. They don’t, probably because of shock.
Adam puts everything he has into it, to force his hands into purpose.
He nearly shouts when his fingers twitch.
They graze the corduroy of his pants pocket.
Adam feels with gentle touch. His pocket seems empty; maybe he didn’t take it from the top of the dresser this morning, maybe he left it in the shorts he wore yesterday.
Leaf is still kissing his neck, lips gentle.
He presses his face against Adam’s nape.
His eyes are wet, he must be crying. His mouth is also wet but Adam can’t think about that.
Leaf’s arms hold him like bands of iron.
Adam is almost crying too. He left it on the table this morning, he must have done, and he is going to die.
Adam’s thumb brushes the smooth cylinder of the ballpoint pen. He feels the violent shock of hope. Adam’s fingers fold about the pen in a gradually tightening grasp. His body is trying – it wants to help. All or nothing.
Adam whips the pen from his pocket – backwards, upwards, point first. He’s working blind but his aim is true.
He drives the pen into the cavity of Leaf’s ear.
Adam feels it puncture the eardrum. The sound is worse, like a boot torn from sucking mud.
Leaf’s arms loosen and release. Adam twists out of Leaf’s grasp.
Adam pulls himself upright on the rough stone walls of the tunnel and makes his way clumsily down into the dark, feeling the wall with one hand, clutching his throat with the other, blood trickling hot over his fingers.
His legs and hands seem to be floating away from his body.
Blood from his throat spatters in his wake.
He sinks to the ground. There’s no way to tell how much time passes.
When he comes to, he feels how badly he is hurt. The slash in his neck is terrible.
Adam groans and drags himself a little way along the rough stone floor.
He wants to live, he realises, to see his child.
Maybe he doesn’t deserve it but life is rarely about getting what you deserve.
He forces himself to his feet and half hops, half limps along the rocky floor.
Slowly, with gritted teeth, step by step.
There’s a hint of fresh forest in the air ahead and Adam tries to hurry. He laughs, which is a mistake: it really hurts. He might just live. He might make it home to see his baby.
The tunnel ends in a narrow hole, a steep incline which turns from stone to earth. Above Adam hears leaves rustle, he hears open air and stars – can you hear stars? He thinks in this moment he can. They pulse overhead.
Behind him something stirs in the long dark.
Adam turns and stares down the tunnel, his breath caught like a ball in his throat.
He listens, every nerve straining, but now there is only silence.
The sound of nothing, of the tunnel. Adam makes a rasping sound.
Enough with looking behind. Forward now.
He reaches and pulls himself up towards the open air and the night.
He crawls out of the earth. Another lilac shields the mouth of the tunnel and he pushes his way through, spitting leaves, breathing its mineral scent.
The forest is cool; a nightjar calls nearby.
Adam crawls on, hands clutching at the forest floor, moving on foot by agonising foot.
He doesn’t know how much time passes. But he knows when he won’t make it any further. His body is stopping again.
He finds a friendly tree and props himself up, gasping, against its trunk. He can’t control the noises he’s making. Pain is undignified. The tang of smoke is in the forest air. There’s a glow on the horizon. Adam thinks, good. Burn.
He is not safe, not at all. Adam knows who (what) follows him. He tries to move again, to get further from this place. Leaf will be coming.
The world cants to one side, black bursts and flowers over everything.
When Adam opens his eyes a man is looking back at him.
It is not Leaf. It’s a young firefighter with a kind face.
‘He’s coming down the tunnel,’ Adam tries to tell the man.
He can’t speak, has no wind. Maybe Leaf got his trachea; his breath seems to be coming from his open throat. ‘Have to go. Coming. Murderer.’