Smoke was starting to pour into the landing from downstairs as well as from the bedroom. The whole farmhouse must have been ablaze. Down in the hallway, Chris was crying out frantically, ‘We gotta get out! Oh my God, we gotta get out!’
‘Chris, I need you up here!’ Sam shouted down to him. ‘Ray’s in a bad way! I can’t drag him around on my own!’
But Chris was clawing desperately at the sofa wedged against the front door, trying to haul it aside. Great black billows of smoke rolled over him, illuminated by the deep red and orange of angry flames. He screamed, choked, and screamed again.
‘Chris! We’re supposed to be a team, for God’s sake!’
Sam propped Ray up against a wall. A thick finger of congealed blood oozed slowly from his mouth and nose. There was a bullet hole as round as a saucer in his chest. Sam called to him, but Ray stared blankly past him, unmoving, unblinking.
Fire burst from the bedroom, sending Sam tumbling chaotically down the stairs. The shotgun clattered away and was swallowed up by the suffocating smoke. Pulling his shirt over his nose and mouth in a desperate attempt to filter out the fumes, Sam fought his way blindly down the last few steps into the hall. He encountered an insane mishmash of broken furniture, splintered furniture, and lethal glass shards.
‘Chris! Where are you!’
Holding his shirt over his face with his left hand, Sam groped about with his right. He felt his way along the upended sofa until his fingers reached what was surely the hem of a jacket. Then he felt an arm, a motionless body, an unresponsive face.
‘Chris! Wake up, for God’s sake!’
He shook him, but Chris slithered away, falling amid the wreckage, completely lost to the impenetrable smoke.
Now Sam found himself fighting his way along the hall. He could see nothing except thick black fumes and flashes of hellish orange light.
The furniture – it’s all seventies stuff, packed with synthetics that give off toxins when burnt. This place must be filling up with carbon monoxide and cyanide … It’s a death trap!
He reached the doorway to the living room. It was an inferno. If Gene was still in there, he was dead. Nothing could survive that blistering, poisonous hell.
His head spinning, lungs burning, eyes streaming, Sam tried to get to the kitchen, but his legs gave way beneath him and down he went, sprawling blindly in the thick, black, choking soup of smoke. He could just make out flames shooting up all around him, long tongues of fire that licked and lashed at the ceiling and went spreading away along the walls.
They’re all dead … Sam thought, drawing poison and scorching smoke into his lungs. The team’s gone … And Annie, I’ve lost Annie. I failed her …
Or had he? Maybe Annie had escaped out through the back door. Maybe even now she was tearing away into the night, racing across open ground, making for safety while Gould was distracted; wasted his time killing Gene and Ray and Chris and Sam himself. Even here, amid this hellfire, on the brink of destruction, there was hope!
With every scrap of strength left to him, Sam struggled to get back on his feet, but he could do no more than raise his head from the floor. Fire was blazing on every side, but as it burned through the walls and ceiling, daylight began filtering in through the opening cracks. As sections of wall gave way and collapsed, they started to reveal not the night sky and the black fields surrounding Trencher’s Farm, but drab grey clouds, a washed out afternoon light, glimpses of a colourless, broken landscape.
The farmhouse burned away. The smoke was released up into what was now open sky. Sam dragged himself to his feet and stared about.
I know this place … I’ve been here before … In dreams, I’ve been here before …
It was a bleak terrain of broken buildings and burnt-out cars. From where Sam found himself, at the top of a low hill that was all smashed rubble and pulverized concrete, he glanced for a moment at the pale disc of the sun, then tripped and stumbled his way down into a dead valley where overturned lorries smoked and smouldered. Brick dust kicked up and clogged his nostrils. An icy, acrid wind gusted along the valley, stinging his eyes. Half-blind and choking, Sam sought shelter in the skeletal remains of a building that rose ominously from the wreckage.
I’ve dreamt all this before …
He found himself inside a roofless ruin, all broken walls and empty, gaping windows. And yet, something in the layout of this place stirred up memories. This building had once been familiar to him. It had buzzed and thrived with life. He recalled uniforms … and desks … mountains of paperwork … banter, and bullying, and a rough camaraderie. Had it once been his school?
‘No, not a school,’ he said out loud. ‘Not a school in the regular sense – but I learnt a lot here anyway.’
He pointed, though he knew nobody was watching him.
‘My desk was here. And Chris’s was here. Ray sat somewhere over there, and the Guv’s office was along that wall. And right here –’ he stood on the spot ‘– right here was Annie. Desk, typewriter, filing cabinet, lamp.’
Was that it? Was that all that now remained of her – a set of disjointed memories? An empty space where once she had sat, with her desk and her typewriter, her filing cabinet and her lamp?
Sam sank to his knees.
‘So, I’m dead again, am I?’ he called out. His voice was swallowed up by the ruined shell of CID. ‘Is this where the dead souls come? Is this their little corner of hell?’
And what corner of hell was Annie in? Had she died in the fire, along with the rest of them? Had Gould found her and dragged her back across time and space with him? Or had she escaped?
I have to believe she got away. I have to. I couldn’t bear to think otherwise …
‘She didn’t make it, Sam,’ said the Test Card Girl gently, her voice coming from behind him. The sound of it did not surprise him in the slightest. This, after all, was her manor.
‘He got her?’ he asked, his voice husky and dry.
‘Just like I said he would, Sam.’
‘You’re trying to make me despair again. It’s what you always do.’
‘I told you it was hopeless, Sam. I told you it would all end very badly.’
‘Yes. Yes, you did.’
Sam sank forward until his face pressed against the hard ground. He could smell and taste dry brick dust. He waited for the tears, but they did not come. His heart was so broken that crying was beyond him. He did not know he could feel this desolate, this broken inside. His mind was like the blasted terrain that surrounded him. Empty, shattered, lifeless.
Dimly, through the numbness of devastating grief, he felt the Test Card Girl’s ice-cold hand rest against the back of his neck.
‘No arguments this time, Sam,’ she said gently. ‘No discussions. None of that. You just come with me like a good boy, and I’ll take you somewhere where the pain will go away. You’ll forget. You’ll forget everything. You’ll forget Annie, and your friend Mr Hunt, and all your other little friends. Ray. Chris. Maya. Your mother. Your life. You’ll forget all of it. And you’ll forget yourself. It will be like you never existed. Like you never existed, Sam … wouldn’t that be nice?’
Sam could not move a muscle. His body seemed to be devoid of life, though his heart was still beating, his brain still working. Every limb felt cold and dead.
‘Oblivion, Sam. It’s all you have left. It’s your only escape from how you feel now.’
What was Annie enduring, right at this moment? Where was she? What was Gould doing to her? Sam’s imagination began to torture him with terrible suggestions, and he fought to blot them out.
‘No …’ he murmured. ‘No, no, don’t do it to yourself, Sam. Don’t think. Don’t even imagine!’
‘But you will imagine, Sam,’ the Test Card Girl corrected him softly. ‘You can’t stop yourself. It will drive you mad. You’ll imagine, and you’ll go on imagining, Sam, over and over again, for ever. Because you’re dead now. Properly dead – not like last time. This is the real thing. No going back. You’re dead dead – and to prove it, you get one of these.’
He felt her icy hand brush against his own, gently closing his fingers around something. Opening his eyes, Sam turned his head, and saw that he was holding a piece of string that stretched upwards. It swayed slightly from side to side.
‘Come on, Sam. Let’s get this over and done with. Up you get.’
Sam sat up. The string in his hand was attached to a black helium balloon bobbing three feet above his head. His new badge. His passport to oblivion. The mark of a dead soul.
On his feet now, Sam stood and looked down at the upturned face of the Test Card Girl. Her cheeks were paler than ever, but her eyes were darker and deeper than he had ever seen them, as if each one was a pit that plunged down into cold infinity. The Girl tilted her head to one side. The corner of her mouth curled into a slow, sly smile.
‘All roads led to this point,’ she said. ‘Right from the start, this was where you were headed. I told you. This was always your fate. Annie has gone to her allotted place, and now you must go to yours. It’s all very sad, but that’s the way it is.’
Her smile widened for a moment, and her eyes glittered. There was a dull green light visible in the depths of those eyes that brought to mind the inscrutable stare of a cat.
‘Off we go,’ she said.
The Girl turned and led the way, and Sam followed, the black balloon bouncing sadly on the air above his head. His legs felt numb. His heart seemed to have slowed right down, and every beat was laboured and heavy. He could feel his internal organs sitting stodgily inside him, like vile heaps of frozen offal. When he blinked, his tired lids scraped across the hard, dry surface of his eyes. Every breath was a conscious effort, as if his lungs had forgotten how to do it.
Sam followed the Girl back out through the ruined doorway and along a dust-blown valley strewn with dead cars and shattered masonry. The overcast sky was growing very dark, the grey clouds lit dimly by the dying rays of the sun. A cold wind gusted down through the gulley, whipping up short-lived tornados of dust that writhed for a few seconds before breaking apart and vanishing for good.
Up ahead, a light was flickering. As he drew closer, Sam began to make out the square, round-cornered shape of an old TV screen. The boxy set, with its huge buttons, tuning dial and indoor aerial of circular wire, sat at the far end of the valley, resting on a low, wood-effect coffee table. It was pure seventies, a little slice of George & Mildred transplanted to the crumbling brink of Death.
The image on the screen became clearer as Sam got nearer. He saw figures, many hundreds or even thousands of them, walking away sadly towards a shadowy blackness that swallowed them whole as they stepped into it. Each figure held its own bobbing black balloon, carrying it with them into oblivion. From time to time, one of these dead souls would turn and look directly out of the screen at Sam, and when they did he glimpsed faces that he recognised. He saw Peter Verden, the self-styled leader of the Red Hand Faction, with his cold eyes and Jason King moustache; moments later, his pretty young protégé Carol Waye glanced back and then passed on. He saw Spider the boxer from Stella’s Gym, and the huge, lumbering form of bare-knuckle gypsy brawler Patsy O’Riordan. He saw Mr Fellowes from Friar’s Brook borstal. And he saw others; Brett Cowper, who had used his John Lennon glasses to slash his wrists in the cells, Denzil Obi, the murdered boxer – more, and still more, passing by in an endless parade.
‘Did you know that death had undone so many?’ the Test Card Girl said. ‘Such a crowd of dead souls … But they’re all going to oblivion, Sam. And that’s for the best. Everything will be forgotten – every pain, every regret, every loss. But every love, too, and every happiness, and every hope. It all goes. It’s all wiped away, and nothing remains. Go on, Sam. Join them. Go into nothingness. You’ll forget Annie, you’ll forget the agony she is going through, you’ll forget Mr Hunt and all those others … you’ll forget it all, because you will forget Sam Tyler. You will unexist. You will be nothing. Better that way. Too painful to go on existing, thinking of Annie, knowing what’s happening to her at the hands of Mr Gould – for ever.’
‘I could find her,’ Sam said in a dry, colourless voice. He was staring ahead at the TV screen, zombified with misery.
‘Find her, Sam? You couldn’t possibly do that.’
‘I could try. I could find her and save her.’
‘And where would you start? Where would you look? How would you reach her? You’d never manage it, Sam. And even if you did, what would you do when you got there? You can’t even imagine what that place is like. It’s not nice. And there all sorts of people there … rather horrid people … and they’d not be very welcoming, I can assure you. And they’re all bigger than you.’
‘Maybe …’ muttered Sam. ‘But still … I could try …’
‘No,’ the Girl said softly. ‘You’ve got your little balloon. All you have to do is walk forward. Your life’s over and done with now. Time to go.’
‘Time to go …’ Sam echoed, in a dead voice. And with that, he stepped forward.