Taken Away (27 page)

‘Are we dead?' I cried. ‘Is this the grey?'

James shook his head, fear widening his eyes despite his denial. ‘We can't be,' he whispered. ‘Why . . . why would Lorry do that to us?'

I thought of the dream that I'd had before waking here – Lorry's memory. I remembered the reason he had turned back: the voice that had called him from the threshold of heaven. ‘He's looking for Fran. He's been looking for him all this time.'

‘But poor Fran isn't here!' cried Shamie. ‘
Lorry
isn't here. Your poor brother isn't even here! What are we meant to do with all this?'

The thought of Dom brought a brief and distant tug of sorrow. It had been so long since I'd lost him. I could barely remember his voice. But I knew that if it had been Dom lost out there, trapped and alone and terrified, I'd have done
anything
to find him. I'd have turned my back on heaven if he'd needed me to. I'd have spent my years searching, and I'd never have given up. The heat pressed down around us, dead and laden, and I knew I had to do something to help Lorry save Francis.

‘FRAN!' I shouted. ‘FRAN! ARE YOU HERE?'

My voice rang out against the brazen sky and beat up from the iron ground. Down in the trench Shamie winced and made a shushing gesture, as if afraid I'd call something down on us. I waited, my eyes fixed on the shimmering horizon. Nothing. No breath of wind. No sigh of dust crossing the lifeless plane.

‘LORRY !' I cried. ‘WHAT THE HELL ARE WE DOING HERE?'

‘Son,' whispered Shamie. ‘Please don't.'

And then, in that breathless place, the sound of creaking came soft and barely audible – the sound of something swinging lightly in a gentle breeze. ‘Can you hear that?' I whispered. Shamie, his fingers pressed to his lips, shook his head. I crouched down low, listening. It was coming from the trench.

‘That creaking noise,' I insisted. ‘Shamie, why can't you hear it?'

Suddenly I flung myself over the side. I didn't even bother with a ladder or footholds; I simply threw myself over the edge, sprawl-legged and loose, out into midair, and let the dream catch me. I should have fallen straight down, ten, maybe twelve feet. But I slid instead, impossibly easy, down the sheer wall of clay. It was as if the sides of the trench swelled out and caught me and eased me to the ground – as if they'd been waiting for me to do this all along. I slithered to a halt at the bottom, lying on my back looking up at Shamie's wide-eyed face.

‘Wow,' I said. ‘That was cool.'

He offered me his hand, and I got to my feet. ‘I think we're meant to be down here,' I said. ‘I could hear a sound up there, real faint, like as if . . . '

But James wasn't listening. He was staring over my shoulder with a reluctant mix of wonder and terror. ‘What in the name of Jesus?' he whispered.

I turned to follow his gaze, and my mouth dropped open.

James gripped my shoulder as if to hold on to himself. His voice was a tiny scratching in my ear. ‘Call me mad, boy, but didn't this trench used to just go on forever, without bend or break?'

‘Yeah,' I said. ‘It did.'

He stepped to my side, and the two of us eyed the trench ahead. It no longer marched relentlessly on towards the horizon. Oh no. It stopped about four or five yards from where we stood. Just came to an end, faced off with a blank wall cut into the clay. The duckboards continued to three or four feet from the base of this wall, then turned right, leading around a sharp corner and disappearing from view. A broken stake jutted from the ground at the corner. A helmet hung from it, swinging gently in a breeze that did not exist, its leather strap creaking softly as if to say
here, here, here
.

A sign hung on the blank yellow face of the clay wall. It pointed to the right, guiding us round the corner. It was just a rough plank-sign; a bit of torn-up duckboard from the looks of it. Someone had scrawled on it in charcoal, and the wood and the letters were tinted the same sulphurous yellow as everything else.

It read: This Way to the Grey.

STEP OVER TO GREY

THE GREY
. James, standing in front of it, was dwarfed by its immensity. For the first time in this sepia-toned world, I noticed the greens of his uniform, and the sandy olive-drab of his hair. Muted and worn as these colours were, James stood out as a technicoloured marvel against the great wall of dirty, shifting nothingness that made the grey. It filled the sky like a universe-sized cinema screen, and cut the trench neatly off at the edges. James, ant-like, craned his neck back and looked up, up, up, trying to see the top.

I backed away, and kept going 'til I stood pressed against the far wall of the trench. I had been out there before, when I was Lorry. I had already felt that terrible silence battering my ears. I had already been buffeted by its malicious turbulence. I didn't want to go back.

The helmet creaked discreetly beside me, and I knew at once that this was Lorry's helmet, the one he'd lost the night he died. I looked from it to the grey. Lorry needed us to go out there. But why? To find him? So that we could help him rescue Francis? Or release him back to heaven? Or what? To do what? To find what? So many questions and no hope of an answer. Not here, anyway.

Not here.

I nodded, took a deep breath and pushed myself from the wall. Charging forward, bull-headed, I passed the sign. I leapt a pile of rope. I passed James. He yelled something to me and reached out. I batted his hand away. The hollow sound of the duckboards beneath my boots gave way to hard, resonance-free ground. Colour left me as if it had never existed, and I crossed over into the grey.

Silence grabbed me, and squeezed my skull so that I had to slap my hands to my ears and grit my teeth. My grief for Dom surged fresh within me. Raw and bloody, it blew a hole right through me, and I couldn't bear it. I couldn't. It was too big for me to survive. I immediately spun, trying to find my way out. The trench lay about fifteen feet away, a wavering door of smoky-orange flame where James stood watching. I staggered towards it, but the door retreated from me, keeping its distance as I stumbled to catch it up. I could see James bobbing just out of my reach, screaming my name, and I put a hand out to reach for him. The silence surged gleefully in, and I had to clap my hands back to my head, hunching over at the pain of it against my eardrums.

Someone grabbed my shoulders. I jerked back in fear, but it was only James, smoky and pale-faced in the ashy light of the grey. He had come in here for me! I grabbed his jacket, so grateful not to be alone. Then my eyes slid past him, and I realised with horror that the door was closing behind him. The grey was shutting down, sealing itself like a hole in mud. James seemed to register the terror in my eyes, and I think he was about to turn, but we didn't have the time; the orange rectangle of light was already half its original size. The trench light was fading as it passed behind the cloudy curtain of the grey.

I didn't think, and I'm sure that's what saved him. I just took my hands from my ears and punched James in the chest. He staggered backwards into the trench, and the door snapped back full-size, its light a vivid fire through the fog once more. James landed on his arse in the dry, yellow clay, a cloud of mud-dust puffing up around him, I held my hand up to stop him coming back for me.

The door continued to drift one step back for every one of my shambling steps forward, and I began to panic. I was stuck.

I ran. My hands glued to my ears, my heart hammering, I ran as fast as I could, but I got nowhere. The door danced and bobbed, always feet ahead of me, James framed within it, a horrified witness to my increasingly desperate flight towards him.

Suddenly he flung his arms up and turned away. At the same time, I tripped and fell flat onto my stomach, my legs flying out behind me. The air pounced on me like a big dog and I curled into a ball, my arms wrapped around my head.
I'm trapped
, I thought,
I'm trapped. I'm trapped.

Then something slapped across my back. Heavy and slithering, it uncurled itself along my backbone and ran along my shoulders to lay a snaky coil across the nape of my neck. Terror jolted me, and I tried to skitter out from under its grasp. As I rolled away, just before the heavy thing slithered from my back, I caught a brief flare of James's voice, loud and clear in my head.

. . . let this work, Hail Mary Mother of God pray for us now and at the hour of our dea—

I flopped onto my belly and groped, wide-eyed, for what I suddenly realised had been a rope. James had thrown me a rope! Without my hands to protect my ears, the silence tried to liquefy my brain – a head-melting
thudDUM
,
thudDUM
. I was just about to slap my hands back into place and roll into a ball once more when my fingers brushed the frayed end of the rope and James's thoughts replaced the agony.

. . . look up! Why don't you look up? YES! Hold on, boy! Our
Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come . . .

James's frantic recitation of the ‘Our Father' continued in my head as I was pulled in jerky fits and starts to the threshold of the grey and then dragged over into the sulphurous calm of the trench.

I stayed curled in a ball, the rope coiled around my arms, my head cradled in my hands. James fell onto his knees beside me, and he wrapped me in too tight a hug. His thoughts were all a jumble in my head, and they blended into a frenzied kind of buzz.

. . . is that what it's like? Don't let me die, don't, I never want to die if that's what it's like. Is he still alive? Can he breathe? Oh. Is that what it's like, though? Forever? God help us. Our Father who art . . .

And his praying started again, which was a relief because the monotonous incantation was much better than his panic.

‘James,' I croaked. He didn't seem to notice, because he just kept rocking me and panting shivery little sobs into my shoulder. ‘James!' I insisted, batting at his shoulder. ‘Leggo.'

He released me, and I pushed the rest of the way out of his arms, gulping in air. ‘Squashing me!' I managed at last.

He hugged his knees to his chest and gave the grey a long, haunted sideways glance.

‘That's not what dying's like, James. I know, 'cause Laurence showed me.'

He gaped at me, horrified.
Can you read my thoughts?

I nodded.
Started off when you threw that rope.

He looked down at the innocent coil at his feet and kicked it away with a look of alarm that almost made me laugh. I sat up and waited for my head to settle a little, then glanced at him again.

‘It's nice,' I promised. ‘Once you've crossed over. It's peaceful and nice. Laurence was happy, even though he'd been terrified the moment before.'

James frowned at me without comprehension.

‘I was Laurence,' I explained. ‘In a dream. I was him when he died.'

He drew away from me in sympathy and horror, and I put my hand on his arm, because there were tears in his eyes.
It was okay, James. Once he'd died. It was really nice. There's no need to be afraid.
And, saying it, I realised the same thing went for Dom; Dom would have gone there, too. I thought about that for a moment; Dom would be in heaven. He'd have gone to that gentle place, the place Laurence had lost. I wasn't sure what to do with this thought, but it comforted me.

‘What's that, then?' James whispered, jerking a thumb in the direction of the murky shadow-wall. I looked into its strange depths and licked my lips.

I think that's what it's like to be a ghost.
Comprehension dawned on him, and he turned to peer into the grey. We sat like that for a moment, watching the shadows race and flow in that silent, hammering void, both of us thinking the same thing.

‘Fran stayed there all that time, looking for Lorry,' whispered James.

And Lorry got lost, looking for Fran.

‘We need to rescue them,' I said, looking into James's eyes. I knew he felt the same way.

A SHINING BRIDGE

IT WAS VERY
strange and comforting to know that no matter how far I walked, I could turn and find James ten feet behind me. We did a few tentative experiments, and discovered three things for certain: firstly, the person in the grey couldn't just walk back through the door – they had to be dragged unresisting across the threshold; secondly, only one of us could be there at a time – well, this was an assumption on our part, and there was no way we would risk testing it again because one shot of that door sealing itself shut was enough for both of us; and thirdly, neither of us could stand being in the grey for very long.

Hard as it was to keep track of time, we figured the longest either of us had lasted was fifteen minutes before we flopped to the ground with our hands clasped to our ears, our eyes turned beseechingly to the door. How Lorry and Francis had survived for so long in that awful place was a mystery to me; but I no longer wondered why both of them were a little cracked in the head.

The landscape within the grey never changed; no figures came out of the fog; no sounds reached us, no message more definite than that palpitating sense of horror. It was a mindless forward slog, with no end. We were getting nowhere. What did Laurence want from us?

We were soon too tired to talk, and even the buzz of our thoughts through the telegraph wire of the rope became nothing but an exhausted drizzle of sound. I had no idea what my thoughts sounded like to James, but I hoped they gave him comfort, because when it was my turn out in the grey his unending rounds of ‘Hail Mary' and ‘Our Father' and ‘Glory Be' kept me going.

During my turns in the relative tranquillity of the trench, holding the lifeline as James trudged on, I tried to think things through. I thought, in a dim, unfocused kind of way, about Lorry and Francis and their seventy-year hunt through the grey. Two terrified ghosts, desperate to find each other. I thought of James and myself, anchored by our living bodies to the world: ghosts but not ghosts, trying to do the same.