After supper, Daniel went to bed. He lay blinking at the ceiling, unable to sleep, as he thought about his father and Lawson and what Mason had told him he must do. Through some cranky, twisted thinking, Daniel began to wonder if he had actually died underground and never found a way back to the surface at all, his body left stiff on the rock with the water lapping beside it, while the rest of him had slipped into some other place without realizing it until now. A hell maybe? Or some inbetween world?
But the bed felt real enough. And the long, uncomfortable silences during supper with his aunt had seemed authentic too.
The only other solution Daniel could imagine to explain what was happening to him was that he had dropped through a hole in the fabric of one universe into another where everything was familiar, but where his life was not quite the same. He sat up and looked round his bedroom, checking carefully for anything that might seem odd or out of place. But nothing was any different that he could see.
As he slumped back down, he remembered the strange memory that had come to him before his aunt had returned home. It was difficult to recall it entirely, but there were just enough details for him to ponder:
the deep pile of a white carpet on a landing . . .
brown lace-up shoes . . .
his hands covered in blood and a door handle slipping through them.
Daniel wondered if it could be a clue that might prove he had indeed fallen from one universe into another. Closing his eyes, he tried to picture everything he could about that moment and gradually it started coming back to him, and he was
. . . running towards a door, along a landing laid with deep-pile white carpet, the fluffy threads bulging up over the rims of his brown lace-up shoes.
When he gripped the door handle, it slipped through his fingers and pinged back up because his hands were oily with blood.
He got up and inspected the brown shoes in his cupboard again. They were definitely not the same. And then he looked at his hands. They weren’t the ones covered in blood that had reached for the door handle. His own fingers weren’t as slender or as white.
Daniel tried to understand how he could have remembered something that hadn’t even happened to him. Unnerved by the strangeness of it, he lay back on his bed and closed his eyes, replaying the moment over and over, trying to see if he could find out anything else . . .
. . . and then something clicked and he began remembering more . . .
. . . his bloody hands grabbing hold of the door handle a second time and turning it to let himself through into a white tiled bathroom . . .
. . . When he looked in the mirror above the white ceramic sink, he saw Lawson staring back, his bleeding nose cupped in his bloody hands . . .
. . . And then Mason appeared in the doorway behind him, looming like a storm cloud in the mirror over his shoulder . . .
. . . ‘Don’t try that again,’ he grunted, ‘or else I’ll break more than your nose.’