The pendant was a key. I’m not spoiling anything by telling you that. I only know it was a key because she showed me the word in her dictionary later, when she was trying to get me to tell her where I had found it and what had happened to the person I had taken it from. It doesn’t spoil anything because whatever the key was made to open remains a mystery. This story is not about a mysterious journey that ends up opening a wonderful door with a magic key. It’s not that kind of story. I’m writing this on the wrong side of a locked door, has no key and I don’t know if it’s ever going to open.
And I only have her word, I suppose, that it was a key anyway. It didn’t look like any key I’d ever seen. And she was less interested in the fact it was a key than in how I’d got it and who from. I tried to explain I had found it on the top of the tower, but my answer seemed to make her even more angry. She didn’t believe me. She kept asking where the man was. Her finger kept stabbing the words “where man?” And whatever I managed to communicate to her was just wrong—no man—what man?—found key—found key on tower—not know—all the answers seemed to rub salt in some wound I couldn’t see.
She shook me angrily and looked deep in my eyes.
Ay voo? she said. Voo, Griz. Key ay voo?
All I could do was shrug, still bewildered.
I don’t know what you want, I said. But I’m not an enemy.
She tied my hands behind me with more wire, and then she loosened the noose around my neck. It was while she was tying me to the flaking metal holding the seats to the stadium steps that Jip came back, looking suddenly confused as he dropped a rabbit at my feet and then looked at us both, sensing something was wrong. She straightened up and spat some words at me, and then went away, towards the horses.
Jip looked at her and then at me and whined, confused by the fact I hadn’t picked up the rabbit or ruffled the fur between his ears.
We’re in trouble, boy, I said. I pulled against the wire binding my wrists but stopped as it bit into my skin.
Jip saw me wince. He trotted up the steps and looked at my hands, pinioned behind my back. He whined, unsure of what was happening.
It’s okay, I said. It’ll be okay.
He licked my wrists. I scratched his neck with my fingertips. As best I could. Then he moved away and barked.
It’ll be fine, I said. She’ll calm down.
She didn’t. She came back, leading the horses and set them to graze on the overgrown pitch. Then she carried my bag up the steps, past me, and into a doorway where the steps disappeared inside the stadium. The landing made a square concrete-lined cave in the slope of the arena. She made her camp there, lighting a fire and unrolling her bedroll. If I scrunched round, I could sort of see what she was doing.
She was talking to herself, low and angry. She undid my pack and tipped all my possessions on the floor in front of her. Then she painstakingly spread them out and sorted through them. I don’t know what she was looking for, but she didn’t find it. That made her even more angry and she squatted on her haunches and looked at me as if everything in the world was my fault. Her silence and the flintiness of her stare was unnerving. There was no trace of the younger version of herself, the one that she had let out earlier in the day before the light began to fail.
As it got darker, the concrete roof and walls of the landing in which she had set her campfire made a warm square in the surrounding darkness, but all that did was make me feel the chill of the evening coming in. It was colder than it had been, and you didn’t have to have a dog’s nose to smell the rain in the air. Jip walked up the steps and looked at her. She ignored him. He sat down and barked at her. She might as well have been deaf for all the attention she paid him.
She gave me no food, no water and just left me sitting against the seat frames. I tried sawing the wire against the old metal stanchions, but it was too painful and, from what I could feel with my fingers, all I was doing was cleaning the corrosion off them, taking it back to the smooth metal beneath. The wire seemed no closer to breaking and I stopped. If anything was going to get sawed through, it was my wrists. I had no choice but to sit it out. Literally sit, because she didn’t bring me my bedroll or allow me to lie down. I’ve spent uncomfortable nights in strange places, and can sleep almost anywhere if I’m tired enough, but that started out as the worst night of all. Then things went downhill. And then—with the visitors—they fell off a cliff.
To begin with there was the physical discomfort. The longer I sat, the less of me there seemed to be to provide some kind of padding between the cold concrete and my bones. Then there was the awkwardness of sitting with my hands behind me. It made my shoulders and my neck ache, and it made my arms numb. I kept wiggling my fingers to make sure I wasn’t losing circulation. The least uncomfortable position was to let my head lean back until it rested on the plastic seat bottom, which left me staring up into the night sky, but did rest my neck a little.
It didn’t rest my brain though, and it was that as much as the physical discomfort that kept me awake. I tried to keep it calm, but I had no luck with that. It raced away, whirling furiously round and round like a windmill in a high wind. I kept replaying everything that had happened since I encountered John Dark. I had thought we had a sort of trust between us. She had certainly helped me—rescued me even—and I in turn had helped her with her wound. I had imagined we had also found a way to understand each other with our miming and pointing at words in the dictionary.
It had seemed a bit of a cruel joke to meet one of the very few people left in this wide and empty world only to discover we couldn’t talk because we spoke different languages, but we had made the best of it. And the worst of it was that I had liked her. As I have said before, I did not have a lot of other people to compare her with, but she did not seem untrustworthy. She just seemed like herself. She had never tried to make me like or trust her. I had taken her to be what she appeared to be: gruff, tough, definitely rough-edged, but straight. Brand, in retrospect, had been too much of a storyteller for anyone more experienced in the ways of other people than I was to trust. He was putting on a show. I rescued a book once called Modern Coin Magic by J. B. Bobo, and I spent one long winter practising the tricks inside. One of the things that made them work—apart from having nimble fingers—was making the people watching you look at the wrong hand at the right time, and so miss what you were actually doing. That’s what Brand did: his smile and his stories were all showmanship making you look over there while his other hand was picking your pocket over here. John Dark was not like that. And this was the uncomfortable thing that kept whirling around my head. How had I got her so wrong? Had I misunderstood something vital in our halting communications? Why did she seem to suddenly mistrust me as deeply as I mistrusted Brand? The looks she had given me and the way she had spat her words after she had discovered the key round my neck definitely seemed like she felt fooled or betrayed. But by what? What did the key have to do with this Kel Kun Demal? Or had I been wrong from the very beginning, and had she always been dangerous to me? It didn’t feel right, the thought that she’d been baiting a trap for me ever since we met, but maybe she had? Maybe she had just needed a separate pair of hands to sew her up. But that didn’t make sense. None of it made sense. All of it churned round and round in an endless loop in my head, wiping out any chance of sleep or rest.
I’d smelled the rain coming, but I didn’t see it when it finally did arrive because the overhanging cloud had blocked out the stars and the moon. Instead I felt it, full on my upturned face as the first fat drops fell heavily out of the darkness overhead. I blinked and squeezed the unexpected wetness out of my eyes, and then instinctively bowed my head as the rest of the following downpour hammered down after them. In seconds I was half drowned, rain hitting the concrete around me so hard the drops seemed to bounce back up to have a second go at soaking any bits of me they might have missed on the way down.
I heard Jip barking at the downpour, and then I felt hands at my back and heard a lot of what I took to be French curse words as John Dark took pity and freed me enough to drag me up into the dry warmth of her square cave. She refastened my wrists, but in front of me this time which felt a lot better, and then she pushed me down to sit on my own bedroll against the wall on the other side of the fire from her.
Thank you, I said.
She grunted and leaned back, eyes as hard as the concrete she was resting against.
I don’t know what I’ve done wrong, I said.
Door may voo, she said, and mimed closing her eyes and resting her head against her hands. Door may.
Whatever the words meant, it was clear she wanted me to go to sleep. I had no real objection to that plan. I was exhausted by the whole day and the ugly turn that things had taken but—as I said—my brain was whirring too fast to let the rest of me slow down and rest. Her eyes bored into me across the low flames of the fire. That became too uncomfortable to bear, so I slumped down and closed my own eyes so as not to have the added problem of whether to stare back—and so perhaps provoke her further—or to look shifty by avoiding her gaze. Unexpectedly this did help me slow down a little. Unable to see anything, I listened instead, and the regular hiss of the rain slamming the concrete all around was in its own way almost as restful as the sea-noise I was used to falling asleep to, and though my back remained damp, the heat from the fire that I could feel on my front dried me out and made me feel almost comfortably drowsy. Jip came and leant against me, and the warmth of his sleeping body added a bit of comfort and made everything just a little less grim and a lot less lonely. And with all that, pretending to be asleep could so easily have turned into being asleep, if it was not for the one remaining thought that would not stop scratching at the inside of my head every time it went around.
Why did she want me to go to sleep? What was she going to do when I was unconscious? I didn’t think she was going to hurt me. Or kill me. She had had a chance to do both of those things the moment she disabled me with the wire noose around my neck. But then I had not thought Brand would steal from us, and he had not—until he thought we were all asleep. Mistrusting sleep is a horrible thing. Brand had not just stolen from me; he had left his own unpleasant gift in its place, a gift that goes on taking even more from the receiver, because it stops the one thing that you need to rest and re-gather your energy. I read something somewhere about someone “murdering sleep”. That’s what Brand’s deception has done for me. My sleep is not quite murdered. But ever since he stole from us, it has been fitful and getting worse—sometimes too much, never restful enough. I opened my eyes to find she was still looking at me. And now her look seemed to have an air of satisfaction about it, as if she had caught me red-handed in a dirty trick, pretending to sleep.
She pointed a finger at me.
Voo, she said. And then she seemed to speak English. Just two words, but definitely almost English. Freeman voo?
It didn’t quite make sense.
Voo, she said, and this time she held up the key and jabbed it at me. Et voo an Freeman?
This time the two words seemed to slide together into one.
No, I said. I showed her my wrists, wired together. No, I’m not free.
She shook her head as if she didn’t believe me.
Pew-tan, she said. And then she put a couple more bits of wood on the fire and slid a little further down the back wall so that her eyes were hidden by the flames.
The rain didn’t ease up for at least an hour. And when it did, the noise it made receded and let the other sounds it had been masking be heard. The main noise was water rushing down the sloped stairs and walkways of the stadium, and the splattering noise of the run-off dripping all around us. But the best noise was John Dark’s breathing. Although it was more than breathing because breathing alone would not have been loud enough to make itself heard over the wet noise all around us. It was her snoring.
Maybe if it hadn’t started raining so suddenly she would have repacked my bag after she’d searched it. Maybe not. Maybe she would have just swept my things into a big pile against the wall. Out of my reach. But she hadn’t. They were just strewn over the floor. And though the fire had died down to a reddish glow now, there was enough light for me to be able to see the glint of my Leatherman.
Jip woke the moment I moved. I felt his body tense and willed him to keep quiet. I twisted round and put my hands on him, stroking him, letting my touch tell him everything was all right. I didn’t want him making any noise that might stop the regular snoring on the opposite side of the fire. I rolled down onto my side and squirmed round onto my stomach. Then, worming my body along the cold concrete floor, I inched forwards on my elbows and knees, heading for the tool and, I hoped, freedom.
Something brushed past me and I froze, but it was only Jip, walking to the edge of the landing to look out and take a sniff at the night air. The slight clicking of his claws on the hard floor seemed horrifically loud to me, but the snoring didn’t lose a beat, and I relaxed.
If I had not been so focused on reaching the Leatherman, I might have noticed Jip going very still. And I imagine that if there had been more light I would have seen the hackle fur on his back bristle and rise. But although the clouds had moved on and allowed some moonlight back down onto the pitch, I was not looking at him. I was holding my breath and reaching for the multitool. Metal scraped against concrete, again a tiny sound that seemed catastrophically loud, and then I had the familiar heft of the well-used steel in my hands and found I was able to open it quite easily, despite my wrists being bound, turning the thin rectangle of steel into a pair of pliers.
If I had not been so worried about dropping the pliers as I awkwardly reversed them so that they pointed towards my elbows, I might have heard something moving on the field below us. There must have been some noise, however small.
And if I had not been so elated by the ease with which I was able to slide the open jaws of the pliers down the channel between my wrists, far enough to put the wire binding them together into the sharp indented blade of the wire-cutter waiting at the bottom of those jaws, I might have noticed the snoring had stopped.
If I had not been so focused on freeing myself, I might have noticed what was about to happen. But I was, and I didn’t.
I leant forward on my hands, my chin on the damp concrete, putting the whole weight of my body behind my fingers which were squeezing the handles of the Leatherman.
There was a click like a gunshot as the wire-cutter severed the wire. And then the thing that happened happened and what happened was really three things and they all happened at once.
Jip barked and hurtled into the night.
John Dark said pew-tan very angrily.
And a horse screamed in the darkness below.