The Ellie Chronicles (59 page)

The amazing thing was that no-one appeared from any direction, running or walking, questioning or shouting, no-one with guns and no-one without them. The silence of the district continued unbroken. I heard the car going on down the street and a truck changing gears in the distance, and I heard all the little creaks and rustles that hydrangeas probably always make when someone’s fallen into them and is getting out again, but that was it.

It seemed incredible, but I wasted no more time thinking about it and took full advantage of the second chance I’d been given. Trying to ignore the sore bits all over my body I limped to the darkest corner of the little garden and stood there for a moment trying to work out a new plan.

Despite my certainty about Gavin being close, I still did wonder if I’d come to the right house. Where were the sentries? The place seemed so normal, so quiet, so suburban. But one thing I’d learned in the war, if I hadn’t known it already, was that ultimately people always slip up. I’d done it myself often enough. It doesn’t matter how organised you are or how important the situation is. It didn’t matter that my dad had all the joined ewes so neatly separated from the unjoined ones, and that for year after year nothing had ever gone wrong. Sooner or later some idiot slipped up and left a gate open and you had a big problem. I knew that idiot all too well.

Sooner or later a guard goes to sleep or nicks off to have a cigarette or to visit the toilet. Or you forget to have someone on sentry that night. Or you’ve rented a great DVD and everyone wants to watch it and you agree you’ll go back on guard straight afterwards. Or you’re on the phone or you’re with your girlfriend. Or you’re drunk.

They’d had Gavin for a while now and maybe they were getting casual. No human in the history of the planet has stayed alert and focused 24/7, more like, well, I’d guess, about 3/7.

That didn’t help me formulate a plan though. I couldn’t see any way into the house. It was only out of desperation, and a sort of Monty Python sense that anything lunatic is possible, that I did what I’d thought briefly about before. I snuck over to the front door and turned the handle.

It turned smoothly and easily. That still didn’t prove anything. I turned it to its fullest extent and pushed slightly. The seal that a closed door makes with the doorframe pops like a whisper. I heard it and I felt it and in the dim light I even saw it. I still could hardly believe it. Maybe the door was held by a loose kind of lock that would make itself known in the next few centimetres. I pushed a little, to see. Nothing. No resistance at all.

The aches from simultaneous multiple hydrangea pokes dropped away suddenly. My skin felt so hot I thought it might blister. I hoped the door was as smooth as it felt so far, that it wasn’t going to creak and groan as I squeezed it open. I hoped the person in charge of oiling the front gate wasn’t also in charge of this door. I hoped someone oiled this one frequently, like daily. Most of all I hoped there was no-one waiting for me on the other side. I stopped breathing. The door had become my heart. All my energy was now out of me and in it. I pushed it open.

It did go pretty quietly, that was the good news. I got it open to about sixty degrees, and stared down the corridor. It was long, a sort of pale orange with a square wooden table halfway down, and a dim light showing at the far end. Not very attractive I gotta say. The light was coming from somewhere round the corner; the corridor light itself was off. I could see at least two doors, but there might have been a third one. At the end of the corridor you could either turn right or go up a staircase. The good news was that there were no soldiers standing there. There was no-one at all.

I did the only thing I could and went in, closing the door behind me. Jesus, sometimes as I write this stuff the hair on the back of my head stands up like I just had a crewcut. I won’t go on about it but it was not easy for me to go into that house. The hardest thing though was when I closed the door. I had to do it so no-one in the house would feel a draught blowing through the place and get suspicious, but there was a finality about doing it that had me wondering if I were coming to the end of my journey.

The journey of my life that is.

As I went through the door I pulled out the thing that had been a heavy weight in my pocket since I got it from Toddy. I don’t care what anyone says, there are times when a gun is very comforting to have. There is something cold and sinister and cruel about hand guns, but I didn’t want to go through that house without one.

I was half-a-dozen steps down the corridor before I realised something was leaning against the back of the square wooden table. In a way it was a good thing to see, in another way it was the most horrible of sights. There may have been families who liked to have a couple of firearms lying around in their front corridor for the kiddies to play with, but I didn’t think it was very likely. Not a high-powered automatic rifle, so new it looked like it had just been unpacked.

For a moment I debated whether it was best to leave it there or do something with it. Every second that I wasted in the corridor increased the chances of someone finding me. On the other hand, if this thing was loaded and ready for action, it might be in my best interests in the long term to do something about it. So I crouched, put my own gun on the floor and, with the stealthiest movements I could make, eased out the magazine. From the weight of it I’d say it was jampacked. There was nowhere to hide it, so I shoved it down the front of my jeans.

Picking up Toddy’s handgun I went on my merry way. The doors were closed and there was no light underneath them. It was possible Gavin was in one of these rooms, but for some reason I assumed he was upstairs. For the sake of security, surely that would be where you kept a prisoner.

I reached the end of the corridor still not able to see the source of the light coming from the right-hand side. I assumed there would be a kitchen and probably a dining room out there. But I heard the murmur of voices, and the scrape of a chair, so it seemed like people were awake, even at this hour of the night. I had to take the staircase, even though I was scared to do so. I don’t know what it is about staircases, but they always creak, and I knew it would be impossible for me to get to the top without making some noise. But it seemed better than the alternative, of bursting in on a couple of terrorists as they enjoyed their late-night coffee.

So I started up the stairs. I did it really heavily and slowly, putting all my weight on each step, trying to suffocate any noise the steps were tempted to make. That seemed to work OK. There were creaks, but they were reasonably minimal, and I didn’t think they would bring anyone from the kitchen or the back of the house.

It took me about ten minutes to get up that staircase, or that’s what it seemed like. I knew it was important to go slowly, for the sake of silence, but my problem was to make myself move at all. The higher I got, the slower I went, because it became a mental battle to get up to the next step. I’ve never climbed Everest, and don’t have any immediate plans to, but those stories of people battling their way to the summit, metre by weary metre, as blizzards smack their bodies with snow and hail and ice probably go pretty close to what I was feeling. But with me it was all in the mind. There was no blizzard, just the one in my head, bombarding me with fearful advice. Reaching the summit brought no feelings of pride or delight, just made the fear worse, so that I stood on the top step diseased with it. There were no lights up here, but there were too many choices. Another staircase ahead of me led to the next floor, and a staircase behind seemed to go to a couple of rooms at about the same level. But there was also a corridor to the right, which I thought probably went to the next house, as though they were joined. My instinct was to go further up, as far away from the voices below as I could. Trying to put myself into the minds of these guys, and wondering where they would store an abducted kid, I decided going up further was probably the smart thing to do.

It seemed like the staircase behind me was the less important, the less impressive. It was like it went up to a little out-of-the-way corner. Knowing Gavin I figured that they would want him as out of the way as possible, so I took that staircase.

This one was narrower and it creaked badly. The first step screeched and groaned as though it were playing a song from the flames of hell. I nearly bit my lip with the anxiety of trying to stand on it without any sound. I waited a full minute and then tried the second step. It was even worse. My throat was as dry as Antarctica. I couldn’t believe no-one had burst out of the room brandishing a gun and looking for the intruder. I decided to go for the big one and, stretching my right leg as far as I could, which isn’t very far, managed to skip the next two steps and go straight up to the fifth. Landing on it like that made even more noise, but I hoped one huge noise was not as bad as three big ones. I brought my left leg up as well, and stood there trembling, with sweat pouring off me. If only I could have sweated as much on the inside, then my throat might not have felt so parched, and my tongue might not have been sticking to the roof of my mouth.

Still no-one came, and I took the last two steps in another single movement. Well, a double movement by the time I got my left leg up there as well.

The darkness was pretty severe. There was a shape on my right that felt like a large photocopier, which surprised me a bit. I suppose terrorists have to photocopy stuff. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t a photocopier but a nuclear reactor or a superweapon. I’ve never seen a nuclear reactor, so I wouldn’t know.

On my immediate left was a door, and I thought there were two doors ahead of me, one further up on the left, and one straight in front. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I became more confident about what I was seeing. It was definitely a photocopier.

The difficult part was knowing what to do next. I chose the stupidest way of all, and did ‘eeny meeny, miney mo’. The winner was the door straight in front. So, on tiptoes this time, I went towards it.

I was almost touching the handle when I heard someone coming up the steps. This was another entry on the list of sounds you don’t want to hear. I broke out in a sweat that made my previous efforts seem like a faint mist compared to a torrential downpour. The footsteps were heavy and confident, as though the person had climbed these steps many times and felt right at home. I got down low to my left and squeezed in between the end of the photocopier and the wall, hoping that the person was not planning on running off a few copies of his favourite poem in the middle of the night.

He reached the landing below the one I was on, and paused. I shifted a little, to make myself more comfortable, although that’s a pretty silly word to use, as comfort wasn’t really a factor in my situation. I did want to avoid cramping though.

He turned up the other flight of steps, and as his footsteps started moving away from me, and I realised that I was safe for a few more moments, I peeked out. He opened what was the furthest door from me, although I could not see that until he turned on the light inside the room. From the glimpse I got it looked like a regular bedroom, but with a lot of stuff – just clothes – strewn on the floor. Then he shut the door, and the only light left was the thin ribbon down at carpet level.

I eased myself quietly out from the photocopier and went back to the door behind me. With all the stealth of a burglar I turned the handle, then gently squeezed the door open an inch. Nothing happened, so I pushed it open a little further. The air felt cold and dry. Somehow, although I had never noticed it before or thought about it, the air in a room where someone is sleeping or living or just being is moister. I opened the door further and slipped inside.

Again, the silence and emptiness told me no-one was there. I closed the door behind me, scrabbled for the light switch, turned it on for an instant, then off again. It wasn’t a bedroom at all, but a storage room.

Most storerooms hold, I don’t know, old towels, suitcases, preserved fruit. Piles of paper, your parents’ old tax returns. This one didn’t. What it held got my skin crawling and prickling again. This one held guns, more guns than I’d ever seen in one place. More guns than they’d use in a Hollywood movie even. Most of them in pretty good condition too, I thought, from the quick look I’d allowed myself.

Well, there was no getting away from it now. I’d found the right house. I didn’t know for sure whether Gavin was here, but this was the kind of house where I could expect him to be, and these were the people I needed to interview about him.

At least the knowledge gave me confidence. I went back to the door, eased it open again, and peered down the corridor. Dark and deserted as before. The thin strip of light at the base of the door opposite was no longer there. Either the guy had left the room again or, more likely, he’d gone to bed.

I groped my way to the window and drew the curtains. Then I took off my jacket and laid it along the floor, to block any light going through. Only then did I think it was safe to turn the light back on. There sure were a lot of guns, but I’d been a bit over the top in my first guesses. There were probably forty altogether. More than enough to blow holes in Ellie, Gavin and quite a few others. I wanted to sabotage them in some way but couldn’t think of how to do it. I opened a few cupboards. Ammunition, heaps of that too. It reminded me and I took out the magazine from my jeans and shoved it behind some of the boxes. Then other things, more like you’d expect in a storeroom. Boxes of tinned food. It made me feel very hungry. Slabs of Coke. Coke. A memory came back to me, of putting a tooth in a glass of Coke, years ago, to see if it would rot away like everyone said it would. Then Dad came along and drank the Coke, tooth and all, before I could stop him, so I never found out the result of my experiment. Instead I found myself in a different experiment: observing the effect on your father when you tell him he’s just swallowed one of your baby teeth.